Supermax, Round 1: Level Five (max)
Jun. 30th, 2008 11:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luchiaSo, apparently the first part is eleven pages. I'm starting to kind of hate having to listen to my brain going "noooo, it doesn't read riiight" and messing everything up. BUT, it really does read strangely if I separate it somewhere other than here. SO! Round 1, FAITO.
Title: Supermax (Or, How Cain Learned The Joy Of Pain)
Rating: R for this part.
Warnings: Murder, mass-murder, superpowers, prison!fic, attempted rape, disturbing imagery, violence, profanity, and slash.
Summary: Wyatt Cain was a superhero, until he messed up and was sent to the deadly prison that holds super-people. People like Glitch - an enigma of a man guilty as sin and just as damning.
This round: Tin Man vs The BSIA. And then inmates. And then his conscience.
TIN MAN JAILED; TWO DIE
CENTRAL CITY, OZ – It is a common scene to see Central
City’s beloved hero with the police. It is an entirely
different thing to see the authorities taking the superhero
into custody and detaining him for what BSIA (Bureau of
Superpowered Individuals Affairs) Agent Lacey Vodka,
ex-superhero Black Velvet, said could be “a very long time.
When a superhero chooses to use a weapon other than what the
gods have given them or what they can find in a fight, that’s
when the BSIA has to step in, for both the good of the
superpowered individual and the people in general.”
According to a psychologist who wished to remain anonymous,
“when a superhero brings a gun to a fight, it doesn’t matter
if they’re fighting their arch-nemesis or saving the world.
That’s when they start to think of themselves as normal.
They’re not.” The psychologist continued on to speculate
that Tin Man’s detainment will be largely related to
reestablishing the border between the hero and the human.
The fight claimed two lives –Rikita Lavonne, killed by Zero
while on duty in Central City General. Before being taken away,
Tin Man made a statement that the nurse made a brave stand
against his nemesis to protect her patient, Adora Cain,
“even if she was dead the moment Miss Lavonne walked into the
room.” Lavonne leaves behind a girlfriend of five years (see
Tin Man Freedom Petition, p A9).
The circumstances of Cain’s death are widely suspected to be
the actual reason behind Tin Man’s detainment. While Zero is
known to occasionally carry weaponry, the already bed-ridden
woman (from the 5 November Tin Man – Zero conflict) was shot
through the heart. Sources at Central City’s forensics
department point to the bullet being from the gun Tin Man
brought to the fight.
The situation leaves Central City in a land of disquiet and
disillusionment. Was Tin Man a superhero, or just super?
Round 1:
Level Five (max)
Wyatt Cain wasn’t a supervillain, he was a superhero. He hadn’t done anything villainous since he got his powers at fifteen, and had been the epitome of an upstanding citizen until…well, now. Honestly, he still felt like this was all wrong. All wrong, all messed up, this entire affair nothing but loopholes they could use to catch him with.
He hunched in the chair they’d set him in after scuttling out of the room to somehow negate his powers. Arms on the clay table in front of him, eyes staring at the two-way mirror straight in front of him. They still hadn’t given him shoes, and honestly Cain was starting to wonder if they ever would. He had white boxers, white pants, a white tank top, and a white shirt over that. They hadn’t even given him socks, but then again the floor was plenty warm, even if it was concrete.
His name, obviously, wasn’t on the shirt. In Here (it didn’t have a name – outside, it was There, inside it was Here), he didn’t get either identity. Didn’t get to see his four-year-old son, didn’t get to be outside for more than a few hours, didn’t get anything but time to think about Doing The Right Thing. Cain knew about the lectures they got Here, the lectures and classes and desperate attempts at rehabilitation for the actual supervillains and not the idiots like him who had been angry, grieving, and holding a massive grudge.
Almost on cue, an intercom crackled into life above the mirror. “Wyatt Cain, also known as Tin Man, you have been sentenced to five months in Here for carrying a lethal weapon on your person. There is no bail, and you will be released in three months in the event of exceedingly good behavior. Do you fully understand the charges?”
“Is my son okay?” Cain shouted back.
Another crackle. “Jeb Cain is currently attending classes with other likely future superheroes.” Just enough acid on the edge of that sentence to burn him. “Do you understand the charges.”
“I understand,” Cain nodded, and then something leapt out of the chair and bit him at the nape of his neck. The world went fuzzy, Cain was bleeding for the first time since Zero, and his head slammed against the table while he thought very un-heroic thoughts about Here.
---
He didn’t know how long it had been since they’d taken his powers. It felt like he couldn’t breathe – he’d been trapped in his cell’s bunk with an IV drip for who knew how long, unable to stay awake for more than a few hours at a time. When he was able to stay awake long enough to try and walk around, two of the black-clad guards released some sort of knock-out gas into the airtight cell (Cain guessed that they’d probably missed a few powers once upon a time and weren’t about to take that sort of chance again), and when he’d woken up he’d been in a completely different cell.
He was still weak, still wearing nothing but white and white and white, his cell just like any other jail cell he’d seen non-Supers in aside from how he had one all to himself. A few others were as weak as he was. Even more of them weren’t.
Naturally, it turned into hell, particularly since Cain had sent a few of the criminals There in the first place.
He’d been sitting down watching some of the mindless daytime TV the first time. Cain was still relatively new, still had trouble walking for longer than fifteen minutes, and was slowly relearning how to survive without being invulnerable. Feeling physical pain for the first time since he was fifteen was humbling, and terrifying, and worst of all it made him cautious, and a cautious Cain was an edgy Cain. An edgy Cain wasn’t particularly conductive to good behavior in Here either.
The man’s name had been Antoine DeMilo. He’d had another name too, of course, but it was harder and harder to remember things outside of Here, excluding emotions. DeMilo brought some of those emotions up, mostly disgust and justice. Cain was having a hard time remembering what those meant, too, but he got impressions.
The slime had just sat next to him. Simply sat there, looked him over as Cain looked at Tom and Morrison having a heated debate in East Creek, Soap Opera Land. Then DeMilo had leaned over, hand pushing onto Cain’s hip and sliding downwards, mouth going for Cain’s jaw line, and Cain had simply moved, still half watching East Creek, mind blanking out on what restraint and mercy meant. One punch to Antoine DeMilo’s stomach, and then his numb body had moved onward and pulled the man off the couch, twisting the stunned man’s neck and hearing the muted snap of a powerless scumbag’s neck breaking.
Guards came in. Strangely enough, they just walked in casually, a glaring black against all the white and white and white. Three picked DeMilo’s body up and carried him out, the two left in the room simply looking at Cain.
“Oh, right. You never had super strength,” one of them said, snapping and pointing to Cain with a smile. “Always forget that. You were one of my favorites, you know. You were practically a fucking justice-dishing masochist-”
“Mason,” the other said, her voice aggravated and her gun in hand. Mason The Guard had the good sense to look embarrassed before nodding, pulling his own gun out, and then pistol-whipped Cain, leaving him to break even more on the rec room’s floor.
“Right then! Up a level,” Mason said cheerily, and there was the jolt of a stun baton hitting him on the back. Electricity swarmed in front of his eyes, and Cain was gone, absolutely gone.
---
When he’d been There for five months, he was at Level Four and had killed three other prisoners after DeMilo – two more for trying to make him his bitch, and one for being a repeated annoyance that had been slowly driving him insane. Cain was fairly certain he was going insane. At the five month meeting, they’d informed him of his son’s status, how well he was doing in kindergarten, how his temporary parents – both Supers – were treating him very well and thought of him like their own child while still reminding Jeb that his father would be out and about in no time and come home for him.
Cain hadn’t even remembered he had a son. He’d known he’d loved someone deeply, and that they were gone, outside of Here and dead and never coming back. He’d thought Jeb was dead along with Adora.
He’d thought there was nothing left to lose.
After the meeting, he tried to steer clear of any trouble. If you manage five more months with good behavior, you could be released. He wrote BE GOOD over everything he could find, looking insane while he did it. But his son was out there, his son needed him, and everyone forgot things in Here. He didn’t talk to many people, but he’d learned enough about what losing your powers did to some people. Apparently some never made it past that little room he’d started in – it was practically murder for telekinetics.
People didn’t pick fights with him normally, but then again, this was Level Four. Every hall was filled with a darker shade of white-clad people, and every room had a man or woman in it who had undeniably killed someone. This was the final level before the big leagues, before Level Five, mockingly called Supermax. If he’d put away some of the people on Level One? He practically owned half of Level Four.
“Hey Tin Man, how’s prison treating you?”
“I’m going to get out of here, and I’m going to kill you, Tin Man.”
“When I get outta here, no more puddle crimes for me, Tin Man. I’m climbing into the big ocean, and I’m a fucking shark, you hear me?”
For three months he managed to be good. And when he did end up killing again, it was four of them at once, all ganged up on him in the showers while the ever-neglectful guards chatted amongst themselves.
Tin Man hadn’t had super strength. He’d been invulnerable, he’d been mildly empathic, he’d had enhanced senses, but aside from that it had all been Cain. Hours and days and years of training himself to fight in the ‘big leagues’ like everyone Here seemed to call it. He was strong because he worked to be, he was fast because he’d worked to be, and now Cain was tougher than any of them had ever been, with their reliance on powers they didn’t have any more.
It was a fight that lasted a minute and a half. Guards came strolling in at two minutes, chatting amongst each other while they worked on pulling the four bodies out of the showers, Mason The Guard staying around to chat with him.
“You know, we were all pretty impressed with how you were dealing with Level Four,” Mason had beamed at him. “All that taunting and you weren’t killing anyone out of self defense or anything.” He paused. “But Felicity won the betting pool. I seriously need to stop the hero worship with you, man, I said you’d make it the whole five months.”
Cain didn’t talk much. Over eight months with the ability to feel pain, he really had become something of a masochist, but not to the point where lethal fights sounded fun. Now he knew the feeling of the crush of bone, the pain of a fist landing on his nose, the burn of knuckles ripping apart. It was different. It was something he’d never felt before his powers kicked in.
He felt like he should be horrified at how much he liked getting to feel that sort of pain, to feel pain while others did, but it was another thing he’d forgotten, just like justice and Jeb.
He didn’t talk much, but he found himself wiping one of his bloody hands on his equally bloody pants, sighing lightly. “You should never worship someone,” Cain said simply.
Mason The Guard blinked up at him. “You’re telling me there was never someone you looked up to? Never had a hero?”
Cain tried to think about that, even while he watched Mason take out the stun baton. He couldn’t remember much, nobody in Here could, but he knew this part for a fact. “I never had a hero. That’s why I wanted to be one.”
Mason snorted, looking pointedly at the mess of murder they stood on, powering the baton up casually. “Well fuck. Doing a great job there, buddy,” he said wryly, and the jolt came, sending Cain to the floor in a bloody, jerking heap.
---
When he woke up it was with a gasp, lurching up from the surprisingly comfortable bed they’d put him in. But it wasn’t the comfortable mattress that had him about ready to vomit himself to death, it wasn’t the new red band on every article of clothing he could see as he stood up, it was the fact that Cain could actually think. For the first time since he’d been in Here – and gods he wasn’t even sure how long that had been – he wasn’t drifting along in a numb daze. The thought was almost as disgusting as remembering that he’d killed people.
Cain was a superhero. People like him didn’t go around killing people for being annoying.
And they definitely, definitely didn’t enjoy it.
He was practically hyperventilating, on his knees next to the bed, staring at the red dot that had been tattooed onto his wrist. Gods, he was in Supermax. He’d never see Jeb again, he’d never manage to avenge his wife or any of the other people Zero had taken out.
Cain had killed people. Killed people, liked feeling the kill, liked feeling pain, liked causing them to feel pain just like he could now-
Someone slid a bucket in front of him just in time for Cain to throw up more than he’d eaten in the past month, or at least he thought so. The past was blurry, all the parts that weren’t screaming at his conscience simply a white backdrop to the blood, the red, the feeling of bone and sinew and muscles snapping beneath him-
“Wow, glad I gave you that thing,” a man said lightly from his left, and Cain turned his head to see a man standing there in the white tank top and pants, all with the red stripe of Supermax on them. Curly dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, a pale face with nothing but a bland sort of amusement on it, and a gaze that said much more than ‘you amuse me’. Cain knew that look. It meant he was being judged. “What’s your body count?”
He simply swallowed, looking away while the guilt and horror stabbed at him. “Too many.”
“So you’re an ex-defender, then,” the man said, nodding to himself and crouching down on the floor to look Cain in the face. The guy was good-looking, maybe even pretty. Okay, very pretty.
“I’m a superhero,” Cain said numbly. “Sometimes I was on offense too.”
The man shrugged. “Heroism is relative. Whatever you were before, you aren’t anymore. We’re in Supermax; the only things you have to worry about are Fridays and staying alive. Ignore your social platform and survive.”
Cain couldn’t help but stare at the man, head resting on the side of the bucket. “What’s your body count, then?”
He’d thought the smile would be all the answer he’d get, but the man surprised him by saying “not quite enough” and then walking out the door.
Cain never got the man’s name. But, for some reason, he didn’t need the bucket after that. He crawled back into the comfortable bed, eyes wide open, and tried to figure out how the hell he’d be able to get back to not only his son but the real world.
He was a superhero. He was in here for being stupid enough to carry a gun, not for killing people. Yes, he’d killed now, yes, he’d even enjoyed it (the thought nearly had him going for the bucket again), but the man had made a very good point.
Survive.
And now, Cain thought to himself as he let himself drift off to sleep, he simply had to figure out a way to do that without killing anyone else.
---
He’d been in his cell for less than a day when he was jerked awake to music, someone in a nearby cell screaming at the sound. The entirety of Supermax seemed to have woken up, some whooping in excitement, others screaming for help, and in the cell parallel and just a little ways further up the hall than his own, the man he’d first seen had moved to sit on the concrete floor, slouching backwards and obviously attempting to control his breathing as the noise grew and grew and grew.
The cells in Supermax were some sort of unbreakable plexiglass instead of bars on the front, and stone on the other five planes of your own personal cube of hell. There was obviously some sort of magic going on with the clear glass, since one moment it didn’t even have a seam in it and the next a piece of it slid up and into the ceiling, leaving a clear exit for him. It had happened to the other man too, while the woman adjacent to him remained cooped up. Since the other man was walking out of his cell, Cain figured he was supposed to too, and did.
A few other inmates had been let out, some of them whooping and running around screaming along with those who remained locked up. One of the more exuberant women wrapped an arm around Cain’s shoulders. “Hey, you’re new, right?”
Cain nodded, and she laughed. It was a vicious, cruel laugh, and for some reason it was hard to restrain himself from wrapping his hands around that slender neck and squeezing, feel the ache in his wrists from it-
Jeb. Getting out. He ignored her, even when she slapped him on the ass. “I’ll try to make it fast for you then, Sweetcheeks.” Then she was running off and hopping on top of another man, getting a piggyback as they all filed down the hall and into a door at the end of the corridor.
“Ignore your morals and survive,” a voice said quietly, so close he could feel breath tickle the back of his scalp, and Cain’s head whipped around just in time to see the man who seemed to be everywhere slinking away. Everyone was giving him a wide empty area to walk in, even more of them giving him wary looks that spoke of downright fear.
Walking through the door ended up with Cain, again, seeing the man, this time when the guards shoved him into the same cage as they’d just shoved Cain into.
“What’s going on?” Cain finally asked. The man’s eyes were closed, breath slow and obviously controlled.
“It’s Friday,” the man said simply, opening his eyes just slightly. “Fight Night. It’s your first time, so just try to survive and don’t pass out when you get them back. We’re a team tonight, but we’re going to be against two other teams. You’re probably going to be on your own for two minutes. Don’t die.”
Cain frowned. “What?”
The man wasn’t talking, though, was too busy breathing, clenching and unclenching his hands and then spreading his fingers wide, dancing them across his white-clad thighs and then clenching his hands one more time.
Two other cages were suddenly rattling, and Cain stared while the roof opened up and the four people were cranked upwards. He could feel some sort of hum from whatever was up there, and it made him shudder.
“Don’t pass out when they come back,” the man hissed, eyes still closed.
Cain still didn’t have a clue what was going on, but his body at least knew how to react to a situation like this. It was like walking into a fight with an unknown enemy, facing down some new evil that he didn’t have a clue about fixing.
The two cages came back down a couple minutes later – three dead bodies in one, the woman who’d grabbed his ass smiling and bloody in the other.
Oh gods, Cain thought, and their cage along with two others jerked, the ceiling opening above them. Fight Night.
The ascent burned as soon as they went through the ceiling. The roar of the crowd was overpoweringly loud. Smells were overwhelming. He could feel things he hadn’t felt since he got here – could hear the other man’s heartbeat going steady behind him. Cain had to grab onto the bars and breathe, and then gasped when he realized that, jagged as the bars were, it didn’t hurt. Pain was gone. He couldn’t feel pain anymore, and when he bit his lip hard enough to make it bleed, nothing happened. Just a feeling of pressure, neither unpleasant nor remarkable.
“I’m not going to pass out,” Cain said quietly, finally letting his once-again enhanced senses take over, more controlled than before. 20/1 vision let him see they were in an indoor arena, every person inside of it dressed like a millionaire. He couldn’t see into the other two cages, until there was a garbled noise from above, and one of the other cage’s doors opened up, two blurry characters coming out of it and quickly moving around and behind their cage, feet stomping loudly on the sandy wooden floor. Another garbled noise, and the other cage opened, the two inside doing the same.
One more garbled noise turned into a guttural announcement of “IIINNNNN MAAAANN!”, the crowd roaring as something shoved them out of the little cage. Cain was following everyone else’s lead and starting to round the woven metal box, but the other man was on his knees, teeth grinding together as he crouched on the ground.
“Hey,” Cain said over the ruckus, grabbing the other man around the shoulders. “Come on, you can’t-”
Before he could get another word out, years of reflexes came back and he was standing in front of the man as a blast of something he didn’t wait to look at headed straight for them, burning through his shirt and tank-top while the other man shuddered, eyes twitching. What had the man said? Something about being on his own for two minutes?
Cain found himself smirking for some reason. He wasn’t a smirking sort of man, but the thought of only having to last two minutes while protecting his teammate was-
Caution caution fear fear fear terror terror terror cowardice-
Before Cain could even really register what was going on, he had the projecting empath – a very surprised-looking black man – by the throat. Somehow he’d moved through the onslaught of emotions.
“I fight when I’m scared,” Cain explained, and the man got out a squeak before Tin Man squeezed a bit harder and crushed his windpipe. There was a strange automated noise from somewhere in the stadium, and the crowd was on its feet as Cain dropped the man and headed back towards his partner, who seemed to be muttering under his breath. He barely got there in time to deflect another blast of whatever that angry blue stuff was.
“- iron iron iron fuck you carbon iron damn it not him not him YES-”
The other three men started screaming, and the crowd was on its feet, stomping and hollering as they started a countdown and Cain’s teammate finally stood up, eyes still closed as he let out a contented sigh. One hand came up almost lazily, and Cain recognized the movement of his hand. Fingers dancing through the air, and the three twitched and thrashed. There was a half-hearted burst of blue that only made it halfway towards their position.
“Carbon,” the man practically purred out, hand clenching into a fist before he spread his fingers out, and the screams stopped, the other three simply crumbling onto the floor, and the countdown stopped at twenty-five with a roar louder than any other before it.
He opened his eyes, and Cain was staring at nothing but silver, the man himself staring at nothing, finally letting his arm fall back to his side. A set of normal brown eyes flickered briefly, but then the man’s hands were open and pointing at the floor, lips set in a snarl. Cain heard something crack, heard some people scream, and then something had flung them back into the cage, the thing falling back down under the floor.
And then it was gone, making Cain suck in a breath. His back was freezing, everything was dimmend, he felt blind, and the man who had killed three people by saying carbon was slouched unconscious on the floor of the cage, sweating hard.
For some reason, Mason The Guard was waiting for them. There wasn’t a stun baton, just a wooden wheelchair, and he collected the man off the ground, grinning up at Cain. “I bet five hundred on you, man. At this rate I’ll be able to quit in a fucking week. Keep the good work up, seriously. First time I’ve ever seen someone actually manage to cover Ambrose, too.” He tied the man – Ambrose, apparently – into the chair with leather straps, and nudged another one of the guards. “See what I was talking about, Larry? My man over here, he’s Tin Man. Why the fuck would you bet against a guy who took down Hat Trick while being mindfucked? I saw Hat Trick take down Deitel with that just two weeks ago, and my man over here just murdered the shit out of him.”
“Because he hadn’t done it yet when I was betting, Mason,” Larry sighed, and apparently he was the one with the stun baton this time.
---
When Cain woke up (in a new shirt and tank top), the man…he couldn’t remember his name, but the guards had said it, he knew it. He’d dreamed about the man, seen him hunched over, eyes still flickering from brown to endless silver as metal danced with his fingers as they tapped over his thigh, tired and empty and somehow Cain could see symbols formed with the metal - GUILTY, DEAD, HELP, YOU – and they circled and circled and circled. It had felt strange, like every word had fifty meanings and Cain couldn’t even clutch at more than one.
He was in his cell. The other man wasn’t in his. It looked like the guards had intentionally left it a mess, so that everyone else would know not to follow his example, whatever it had been.
“Hey,” Cain shouted, and surprisingly enough there was Mason The Guard, all smiles and bouncing up and down. “What…where is he?”
Mason blinked at him, finally realizing who Cain meant after a few seconds. “Ohhh, right. Yeah, Glitch nearly ripped the scoreboard down again and managed to take out ten seats. Only seven had people in ‘em though, so it’s not too bad. They’re making him fix the board before letting him sleep.”
Cain was still gaping when Mason gave him a jaunty wave and walked off.
---
Glitch didn’t come back until two days later, and he looked ready to kill another seven people with whatever he could find when he was shoved back into his cell. He didn’t look at Cain, just slid into his bunk and stared at the ceiling.
Cain stared.
He killed ten people in front of me, Cain thought, but couldn’t muster up the righteous need to lock him up and get him out of the world that he’d felt before. Instead he found himself wondering what the hell the bastards were paying to watch superpowered people kill each other.
He bit his lip. It bled. For some reason, it made Cain feel almost peaceful to wipe his own blood onto the back of his hand.
---
Five hours later Glitch said “You did good for your first time.”
It was pretty damn surprising to see the man standing outside the glass wall. It wasn’t a Friday, everyone else was asleep, and four guards were circling Glitch.
“Just wanted to say we make a good team,” Glitch said, and hesitated before nodding and walking down the hall, straight into the door that led to the cages and the arena.
Cain could barely hear the roar of the crowd above them before the door swung shut behind Glitch and the guards.
“Just survive,” Cain muttered, and punched the wall. Pain jolted up into his shoulder, his knuckles screaming at him, and he shuddered. YOU. HELP. DEAD. GUILTY. Just survive.
It probably wasn’t very superhero of him to want to kill people imprisoning a murderer he barely knew, but then again, Glitch had been right. Heroism was relative. It depended on nothing but who you were trying to save and popular opinion.
---
Glitch turned up again two days later. It was Wednesday, and he had a black eye. Glitch was trapped in his own head, just like he had been the last time.
After the reckless anger that swelled up in him at the sight of nothing but a bruise around his eye, the way he could picture hurting people and feeling their pain and wanting to hurt, both them and himself, he went pale.
Cain decided he wasn’t a superhero anymore.
Title: Supermax (Or, How Cain Learned The Joy Of Pain)
Rating: R for this part.
Warnings: Murder, mass-murder, superpowers, prison!fic, attempted rape, disturbing imagery, violence, profanity, and slash.
Summary: Wyatt Cain was a superhero, until he messed up and was sent to the deadly prison that holds super-people. People like Glitch - an enigma of a man guilty as sin and just as damning.
This round: Tin Man vs The BSIA. And then inmates. And then his conscience.
CENTRAL CITY, OZ – It is a common scene to see Central
City’s beloved hero with the police. It is an entirely
different thing to see the authorities taking the superhero
into custody and detaining him for what BSIA (Bureau of
Superpowered Individuals Affairs) Agent Lacey Vodka,
ex-superhero Black Velvet, said could be “a very long time.
When a superhero chooses to use a weapon other than what the
gods have given them or what they can find in a fight, that’s
when the BSIA has to step in, for both the good of the
superpowered individual and the people in general.”
According to a psychologist who wished to remain anonymous,
“when a superhero brings a gun to a fight, it doesn’t matter
if they’re fighting their arch-nemesis or saving the world.
That’s when they start to think of themselves as normal.
They’re not.” The psychologist continued on to speculate
that Tin Man’s detainment will be largely related to
reestablishing the border between the hero and the human.
The fight claimed two lives –Rikita Lavonne, killed by Zero
while on duty in Central City General. Before being taken away,
Tin Man made a statement that the nurse made a brave stand
against his nemesis to protect her patient, Adora Cain,
“even if she was dead the moment Miss Lavonne walked into the
room.” Lavonne leaves behind a girlfriend of five years (see
Tin Man Freedom Petition, p A9).
The circumstances of Cain’s death are widely suspected to be
the actual reason behind Tin Man’s detainment. While Zero is
known to occasionally carry weaponry, the already bed-ridden
woman (from the 5 November Tin Man – Zero conflict) was shot
through the heart. Sources at Central City’s forensics
department point to the bullet being from the gun Tin Man
brought to the fight.
The situation leaves Central City in a land of disquiet and
disillusionment. Was Tin Man a superhero, or just super?
Round 1:
Level Five (max)
Wyatt Cain wasn’t a supervillain, he was a superhero. He hadn’t done anything villainous since he got his powers at fifteen, and had been the epitome of an upstanding citizen until…well, now. Honestly, he still felt like this was all wrong. All wrong, all messed up, this entire affair nothing but loopholes they could use to catch him with.
He hunched in the chair they’d set him in after scuttling out of the room to somehow negate his powers. Arms on the clay table in front of him, eyes staring at the two-way mirror straight in front of him. They still hadn’t given him shoes, and honestly Cain was starting to wonder if they ever would. He had white boxers, white pants, a white tank top, and a white shirt over that. They hadn’t even given him socks, but then again the floor was plenty warm, even if it was concrete.
His name, obviously, wasn’t on the shirt. In Here (it didn’t have a name – outside, it was There, inside it was Here), he didn’t get either identity. Didn’t get to see his four-year-old son, didn’t get to be outside for more than a few hours, didn’t get anything but time to think about Doing The Right Thing. Cain knew about the lectures they got Here, the lectures and classes and desperate attempts at rehabilitation for the actual supervillains and not the idiots like him who had been angry, grieving, and holding a massive grudge.
Almost on cue, an intercom crackled into life above the mirror. “Wyatt Cain, also known as Tin Man, you have been sentenced to five months in Here for carrying a lethal weapon on your person. There is no bail, and you will be released in three months in the event of exceedingly good behavior. Do you fully understand the charges?”
“Is my son okay?” Cain shouted back.
Another crackle. “Jeb Cain is currently attending classes with other likely future superheroes.” Just enough acid on the edge of that sentence to burn him. “Do you understand the charges.”
“I understand,” Cain nodded, and then something leapt out of the chair and bit him at the nape of his neck. The world went fuzzy, Cain was bleeding for the first time since Zero, and his head slammed against the table while he thought very un-heroic thoughts about Here.
He didn’t know how long it had been since they’d taken his powers. It felt like he couldn’t breathe – he’d been trapped in his cell’s bunk with an IV drip for who knew how long, unable to stay awake for more than a few hours at a time. When he was able to stay awake long enough to try and walk around, two of the black-clad guards released some sort of knock-out gas into the airtight cell (Cain guessed that they’d probably missed a few powers once upon a time and weren’t about to take that sort of chance again), and when he’d woken up he’d been in a completely different cell.
He was still weak, still wearing nothing but white and white and white, his cell just like any other jail cell he’d seen non-Supers in aside from how he had one all to himself. A few others were as weak as he was. Even more of them weren’t.
Naturally, it turned into hell, particularly since Cain had sent a few of the criminals There in the first place.
He’d been sitting down watching some of the mindless daytime TV the first time. Cain was still relatively new, still had trouble walking for longer than fifteen minutes, and was slowly relearning how to survive without being invulnerable. Feeling physical pain for the first time since he was fifteen was humbling, and terrifying, and worst of all it made him cautious, and a cautious Cain was an edgy Cain. An edgy Cain wasn’t particularly conductive to good behavior in Here either.
The man’s name had been Antoine DeMilo. He’d had another name too, of course, but it was harder and harder to remember things outside of Here, excluding emotions. DeMilo brought some of those emotions up, mostly disgust and justice. Cain was having a hard time remembering what those meant, too, but he got impressions.
The slime had just sat next to him. Simply sat there, looked him over as Cain looked at Tom and Morrison having a heated debate in East Creek, Soap Opera Land. Then DeMilo had leaned over, hand pushing onto Cain’s hip and sliding downwards, mouth going for Cain’s jaw line, and Cain had simply moved, still half watching East Creek, mind blanking out on what restraint and mercy meant. One punch to Antoine DeMilo’s stomach, and then his numb body had moved onward and pulled the man off the couch, twisting the stunned man’s neck and hearing the muted snap of a powerless scumbag’s neck breaking.
Guards came in. Strangely enough, they just walked in casually, a glaring black against all the white and white and white. Three picked DeMilo’s body up and carried him out, the two left in the room simply looking at Cain.
“Oh, right. You never had super strength,” one of them said, snapping and pointing to Cain with a smile. “Always forget that. You were one of my favorites, you know. You were practically a fucking justice-dishing masochist-”
“Mason,” the other said, her voice aggravated and her gun in hand. Mason The Guard had the good sense to look embarrassed before nodding, pulling his own gun out, and then pistol-whipped Cain, leaving him to break even more on the rec room’s floor.
“Right then! Up a level,” Mason said cheerily, and there was the jolt of a stun baton hitting him on the back. Electricity swarmed in front of his eyes, and Cain was gone, absolutely gone.
When he’d been There for five months, he was at Level Four and had killed three other prisoners after DeMilo – two more for trying to make him his bitch, and one for being a repeated annoyance that had been slowly driving him insane. Cain was fairly certain he was going insane. At the five month meeting, they’d informed him of his son’s status, how well he was doing in kindergarten, how his temporary parents – both Supers – were treating him very well and thought of him like their own child while still reminding Jeb that his father would be out and about in no time and come home for him.
Cain hadn’t even remembered he had a son. He’d known he’d loved someone deeply, and that they were gone, outside of Here and dead and never coming back. He’d thought Jeb was dead along with Adora.
He’d thought there was nothing left to lose.
After the meeting, he tried to steer clear of any trouble. If you manage five more months with good behavior, you could be released. He wrote BE GOOD over everything he could find, looking insane while he did it. But his son was out there, his son needed him, and everyone forgot things in Here. He didn’t talk to many people, but he’d learned enough about what losing your powers did to some people. Apparently some never made it past that little room he’d started in – it was practically murder for telekinetics.
People didn’t pick fights with him normally, but then again, this was Level Four. Every hall was filled with a darker shade of white-clad people, and every room had a man or woman in it who had undeniably killed someone. This was the final level before the big leagues, before Level Five, mockingly called Supermax. If he’d put away some of the people on Level One? He practically owned half of Level Four.
“Hey Tin Man, how’s prison treating you?”
“I’m going to get out of here, and I’m going to kill you, Tin Man.”
“When I get outta here, no more puddle crimes for me, Tin Man. I’m climbing into the big ocean, and I’m a fucking shark, you hear me?”
For three months he managed to be good. And when he did end up killing again, it was four of them at once, all ganged up on him in the showers while the ever-neglectful guards chatted amongst themselves.
Tin Man hadn’t had super strength. He’d been invulnerable, he’d been mildly empathic, he’d had enhanced senses, but aside from that it had all been Cain. Hours and days and years of training himself to fight in the ‘big leagues’ like everyone Here seemed to call it. He was strong because he worked to be, he was fast because he’d worked to be, and now Cain was tougher than any of them had ever been, with their reliance on powers they didn’t have any more.
It was a fight that lasted a minute and a half. Guards came strolling in at two minutes, chatting amongst each other while they worked on pulling the four bodies out of the showers, Mason The Guard staying around to chat with him.
“You know, we were all pretty impressed with how you were dealing with Level Four,” Mason had beamed at him. “All that taunting and you weren’t killing anyone out of self defense or anything.” He paused. “But Felicity won the betting pool. I seriously need to stop the hero worship with you, man, I said you’d make it the whole five months.”
Cain didn’t talk much. Over eight months with the ability to feel pain, he really had become something of a masochist, but not to the point where lethal fights sounded fun. Now he knew the feeling of the crush of bone, the pain of a fist landing on his nose, the burn of knuckles ripping apart. It was different. It was something he’d never felt before his powers kicked in.
He felt like he should be horrified at how much he liked getting to feel that sort of pain, to feel pain while others did, but it was another thing he’d forgotten, just like justice and Jeb.
He didn’t talk much, but he found himself wiping one of his bloody hands on his equally bloody pants, sighing lightly. “You should never worship someone,” Cain said simply.
Mason The Guard blinked up at him. “You’re telling me there was never someone you looked up to? Never had a hero?”
Cain tried to think about that, even while he watched Mason take out the stun baton. He couldn’t remember much, nobody in Here could, but he knew this part for a fact. “I never had a hero. That’s why I wanted to be one.”
Mason snorted, looking pointedly at the mess of murder they stood on, powering the baton up casually. “Well fuck. Doing a great job there, buddy,” he said wryly, and the jolt came, sending Cain to the floor in a bloody, jerking heap.
When he woke up it was with a gasp, lurching up from the surprisingly comfortable bed they’d put him in. But it wasn’t the comfortable mattress that had him about ready to vomit himself to death, it wasn’t the new red band on every article of clothing he could see as he stood up, it was the fact that Cain could actually think. For the first time since he’d been in Here – and gods he wasn’t even sure how long that had been – he wasn’t drifting along in a numb daze. The thought was almost as disgusting as remembering that he’d killed people.
Cain was a superhero. People like him didn’t go around killing people for being annoying.
And they definitely, definitely didn’t enjoy it.
He was practically hyperventilating, on his knees next to the bed, staring at the red dot that had been tattooed onto his wrist. Gods, he was in Supermax. He’d never see Jeb again, he’d never manage to avenge his wife or any of the other people Zero had taken out.
Cain had killed people. Killed people, liked feeling the kill, liked feeling pain, liked causing them to feel pain just like he could now-
Someone slid a bucket in front of him just in time for Cain to throw up more than he’d eaten in the past month, or at least he thought so. The past was blurry, all the parts that weren’t screaming at his conscience simply a white backdrop to the blood, the red, the feeling of bone and sinew and muscles snapping beneath him-
“Wow, glad I gave you that thing,” a man said lightly from his left, and Cain turned his head to see a man standing there in the white tank top and pants, all with the red stripe of Supermax on them. Curly dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, a pale face with nothing but a bland sort of amusement on it, and a gaze that said much more than ‘you amuse me’. Cain knew that look. It meant he was being judged. “What’s your body count?”
He simply swallowed, looking away while the guilt and horror stabbed at him. “Too many.”
“So you’re an ex-defender, then,” the man said, nodding to himself and crouching down on the floor to look Cain in the face. The guy was good-looking, maybe even pretty. Okay, very pretty.
“I’m a superhero,” Cain said numbly. “Sometimes I was on offense too.”
The man shrugged. “Heroism is relative. Whatever you were before, you aren’t anymore. We’re in Supermax; the only things you have to worry about are Fridays and staying alive. Ignore your social platform and survive.”
Cain couldn’t help but stare at the man, head resting on the side of the bucket. “What’s your body count, then?”
He’d thought the smile would be all the answer he’d get, but the man surprised him by saying “not quite enough” and then walking out the door.
Cain never got the man’s name. But, for some reason, he didn’t need the bucket after that. He crawled back into the comfortable bed, eyes wide open, and tried to figure out how the hell he’d be able to get back to not only his son but the real world.
He was a superhero. He was in here for being stupid enough to carry a gun, not for killing people. Yes, he’d killed now, yes, he’d even enjoyed it (the thought nearly had him going for the bucket again), but the man had made a very good point.
Survive.
And now, Cain thought to himself as he let himself drift off to sleep, he simply had to figure out a way to do that without killing anyone else.
He’d been in his cell for less than a day when he was jerked awake to music, someone in a nearby cell screaming at the sound. The entirety of Supermax seemed to have woken up, some whooping in excitement, others screaming for help, and in the cell parallel and just a little ways further up the hall than his own, the man he’d first seen had moved to sit on the concrete floor, slouching backwards and obviously attempting to control his breathing as the noise grew and grew and grew.
The cells in Supermax were some sort of unbreakable plexiglass instead of bars on the front, and stone on the other five planes of your own personal cube of hell. There was obviously some sort of magic going on with the clear glass, since one moment it didn’t even have a seam in it and the next a piece of it slid up and into the ceiling, leaving a clear exit for him. It had happened to the other man too, while the woman adjacent to him remained cooped up. Since the other man was walking out of his cell, Cain figured he was supposed to too, and did.
A few other inmates had been let out, some of them whooping and running around screaming along with those who remained locked up. One of the more exuberant women wrapped an arm around Cain’s shoulders. “Hey, you’re new, right?”
Cain nodded, and she laughed. It was a vicious, cruel laugh, and for some reason it was hard to restrain himself from wrapping his hands around that slender neck and squeezing, feel the ache in his wrists from it-
Jeb. Getting out. He ignored her, even when she slapped him on the ass. “I’ll try to make it fast for you then, Sweetcheeks.” Then she was running off and hopping on top of another man, getting a piggyback as they all filed down the hall and into a door at the end of the corridor.
“Ignore your morals and survive,” a voice said quietly, so close he could feel breath tickle the back of his scalp, and Cain’s head whipped around just in time to see the man who seemed to be everywhere slinking away. Everyone was giving him a wide empty area to walk in, even more of them giving him wary looks that spoke of downright fear.
Walking through the door ended up with Cain, again, seeing the man, this time when the guards shoved him into the same cage as they’d just shoved Cain into.
“What’s going on?” Cain finally asked. The man’s eyes were closed, breath slow and obviously controlled.
“It’s Friday,” the man said simply, opening his eyes just slightly. “Fight Night. It’s your first time, so just try to survive and don’t pass out when you get them back. We’re a team tonight, but we’re going to be against two other teams. You’re probably going to be on your own for two minutes. Don’t die.”
Cain frowned. “What?”
The man wasn’t talking, though, was too busy breathing, clenching and unclenching his hands and then spreading his fingers wide, dancing them across his white-clad thighs and then clenching his hands one more time.
Two other cages were suddenly rattling, and Cain stared while the roof opened up and the four people were cranked upwards. He could feel some sort of hum from whatever was up there, and it made him shudder.
“Don’t pass out when they come back,” the man hissed, eyes still closed.
Cain still didn’t have a clue what was going on, but his body at least knew how to react to a situation like this. It was like walking into a fight with an unknown enemy, facing down some new evil that he didn’t have a clue about fixing.
The two cages came back down a couple minutes later – three dead bodies in one, the woman who’d grabbed his ass smiling and bloody in the other.
Oh gods, Cain thought, and their cage along with two others jerked, the ceiling opening above them. Fight Night.
The ascent burned as soon as they went through the ceiling. The roar of the crowd was overpoweringly loud. Smells were overwhelming. He could feel things he hadn’t felt since he got here – could hear the other man’s heartbeat going steady behind him. Cain had to grab onto the bars and breathe, and then gasped when he realized that, jagged as the bars were, it didn’t hurt. Pain was gone. He couldn’t feel pain anymore, and when he bit his lip hard enough to make it bleed, nothing happened. Just a feeling of pressure, neither unpleasant nor remarkable.
“I’m not going to pass out,” Cain said quietly, finally letting his once-again enhanced senses take over, more controlled than before. 20/1 vision let him see they were in an indoor arena, every person inside of it dressed like a millionaire. He couldn’t see into the other two cages, until there was a garbled noise from above, and one of the other cage’s doors opened up, two blurry characters coming out of it and quickly moving around and behind their cage, feet stomping loudly on the sandy wooden floor. Another garbled noise, and the other cage opened, the two inside doing the same.
One more garbled noise turned into a guttural announcement of “IIINNNNN MAAAANN!”, the crowd roaring as something shoved them out of the little cage. Cain was following everyone else’s lead and starting to round the woven metal box, but the other man was on his knees, teeth grinding together as he crouched on the ground.
“Hey,” Cain said over the ruckus, grabbing the other man around the shoulders. “Come on, you can’t-”
Before he could get another word out, years of reflexes came back and he was standing in front of the man as a blast of something he didn’t wait to look at headed straight for them, burning through his shirt and tank-top while the other man shuddered, eyes twitching. What had the man said? Something about being on his own for two minutes?
Cain found himself smirking for some reason. He wasn’t a smirking sort of man, but the thought of only having to last two minutes while protecting his teammate was-
Caution caution fear fear fear terror terror terror cowardice-
Before Cain could even really register what was going on, he had the projecting empath – a very surprised-looking black man – by the throat. Somehow he’d moved through the onslaught of emotions.
“I fight when I’m scared,” Cain explained, and the man got out a squeak before Tin Man squeezed a bit harder and crushed his windpipe. There was a strange automated noise from somewhere in the stadium, and the crowd was on its feet as Cain dropped the man and headed back towards his partner, who seemed to be muttering under his breath. He barely got there in time to deflect another blast of whatever that angry blue stuff was.
“- iron iron iron fuck you carbon iron damn it not him not him YES-”
The other three men started screaming, and the crowd was on its feet, stomping and hollering as they started a countdown and Cain’s teammate finally stood up, eyes still closed as he let out a contented sigh. One hand came up almost lazily, and Cain recognized the movement of his hand. Fingers dancing through the air, and the three twitched and thrashed. There was a half-hearted burst of blue that only made it halfway towards their position.
“Carbon,” the man practically purred out, hand clenching into a fist before he spread his fingers out, and the screams stopped, the other three simply crumbling onto the floor, and the countdown stopped at twenty-five with a roar louder than any other before it.
He opened his eyes, and Cain was staring at nothing but silver, the man himself staring at nothing, finally letting his arm fall back to his side. A set of normal brown eyes flickered briefly, but then the man’s hands were open and pointing at the floor, lips set in a snarl. Cain heard something crack, heard some people scream, and then something had flung them back into the cage, the thing falling back down under the floor.
And then it was gone, making Cain suck in a breath. His back was freezing, everything was dimmend, he felt blind, and the man who had killed three people by saying carbon was slouched unconscious on the floor of the cage, sweating hard.
For some reason, Mason The Guard was waiting for them. There wasn’t a stun baton, just a wooden wheelchair, and he collected the man off the ground, grinning up at Cain. “I bet five hundred on you, man. At this rate I’ll be able to quit in a fucking week. Keep the good work up, seriously. First time I’ve ever seen someone actually manage to cover Ambrose, too.” He tied the man – Ambrose, apparently – into the chair with leather straps, and nudged another one of the guards. “See what I was talking about, Larry? My man over here, he’s Tin Man. Why the fuck would you bet against a guy who took down Hat Trick while being mindfucked? I saw Hat Trick take down Deitel with that just two weeks ago, and my man over here just murdered the shit out of him.”
“Because he hadn’t done it yet when I was betting, Mason,” Larry sighed, and apparently he was the one with the stun baton this time.
When Cain woke up (in a new shirt and tank top), the man…he couldn’t remember his name, but the guards had said it, he knew it. He’d dreamed about the man, seen him hunched over, eyes still flickering from brown to endless silver as metal danced with his fingers as they tapped over his thigh, tired and empty and somehow Cain could see symbols formed with the metal - GUILTY, DEAD, HELP, YOU – and they circled and circled and circled. It had felt strange, like every word had fifty meanings and Cain couldn’t even clutch at more than one.
He was in his cell. The other man wasn’t in his. It looked like the guards had intentionally left it a mess, so that everyone else would know not to follow his example, whatever it had been.
“Hey,” Cain shouted, and surprisingly enough there was Mason The Guard, all smiles and bouncing up and down. “What…where is he?”
Mason blinked at him, finally realizing who Cain meant after a few seconds. “Ohhh, right. Yeah, Glitch nearly ripped the scoreboard down again and managed to take out ten seats. Only seven had people in ‘em though, so it’s not too bad. They’re making him fix the board before letting him sleep.”
Cain was still gaping when Mason gave him a jaunty wave and walked off.
Glitch didn’t come back until two days later, and he looked ready to kill another seven people with whatever he could find when he was shoved back into his cell. He didn’t look at Cain, just slid into his bunk and stared at the ceiling.
Cain stared.
He killed ten people in front of me, Cain thought, but couldn’t muster up the righteous need to lock him up and get him out of the world that he’d felt before. Instead he found himself wondering what the hell the bastards were paying to watch superpowered people kill each other.
He bit his lip. It bled. For some reason, it made Cain feel almost peaceful to wipe his own blood onto the back of his hand.
Five hours later Glitch said “You did good for your first time.”
It was pretty damn surprising to see the man standing outside the glass wall. It wasn’t a Friday, everyone else was asleep, and four guards were circling Glitch.
“Just wanted to say we make a good team,” Glitch said, and hesitated before nodding and walking down the hall, straight into the door that led to the cages and the arena.
Cain could barely hear the roar of the crowd above them before the door swung shut behind Glitch and the guards.
“Just survive,” Cain muttered, and punched the wall. Pain jolted up into his shoulder, his knuckles screaming at him, and he shuddered. YOU. HELP. DEAD. GUILTY. Just survive.
It probably wasn’t very superhero of him to want to kill people imprisoning a murderer he barely knew, but then again, Glitch had been right. Heroism was relative. It depended on nothing but who you were trying to save and popular opinion.
Glitch turned up again two days later. It was Wednesday, and he had a black eye. Glitch was trapped in his own head, just like he had been the last time.
After the reckless anger that swelled up in him at the sight of nothing but a bruise around his eye, the way he could picture hurting people and feeling their pain and wanting to hurt, both them and himself, he went pale.
Cain decided he wasn’t a superhero anymore.
