Red lips black cape (red_lips) wrote in valarcomm, @ 2014-07-04 01:08:00 |
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Entry tags: | !trigger warning, kate kane (batwoman) |
Kate scribbles a hasty letter to her father, spurned on by memories of her dreams and a similar letter, and a recent conversation on the valarnet. It ends up crumbled on the floor next to the trashcan. She suits up, kisses a sleeping Elsa on the cheek, then sneaks out the window. She feels the need to do something good, tonight.
It's easy to imagine that I left Gotham as Kate Kane, and came back as Batwoman. But that's just oversimplfying it all. To this day I still wonder if you knew exactly where you were sending me. What they would do.
Your 'murder of crows' you called them. The men you worked alongside for years, doing god knows what in every hellhold around the globe. You trusted them with your life, so why not mine? But more than once, I questioned whether or not they had gone off the reservation.
The first two years were an adventure. Leaping across buildings in Tokyo, ripping along a swiss mountain-side in a glider suit, weaving through London traffic at a hundred miles an hour on a motor-cycle.
But those last twelve months held the hardest lessons, and they nearly killed me. I left Gotham thinking I had already suffered so much, that I knew pain. But I didn't know anything.
In a torture chamber beneath Paris I had all that ignorance stripped away.
I learned what if felt like to run thirty-six miles with four broken ribs and lungs burned by tear gas. To climb si stories with a dislocated arm and a ruptured achilles. To endure seven days of nonstop electro-interrogation and sleep deprivation and water boarding.
I left Gotham thinking I knew how to hold my own in a fight. In a boxing ring in Serbia I had that overconfidence beaten out of me. I learned how to fight wth a concussion, blind and deaf, even standing in a puddle of my own blood.
I left Gotham a soldier, believing I knew how to survive. And then I crossed the Sahara on foot, living off insects and snakes and a teaspoon of morning dew.
I left Gotham believing I knew depravity, as if watching the nightly news or trolling true crime blogs could somehow tell me all I needed to know about inhumanity.
And then I sent two weeks in a basement in Prague, surrounded by crime scene photos, listening to audio tapes of kidnapped runaways being tortured by psychopaths who slipped through the system again and again, watching webcam footage that no one will admit exists, directed and starring a half-dozen serial killers and their victims...
I didn't know the game plan. I didn't have a schedule of classes to follow. I was just going along with wherever you sent me next, trying to hold on. Then I found myself somewhere in Africa, learning how to administer vaccines and teach gangrene and feed starving kids without killing them.
A month in I demanded to know when we'd be hunting down the warlords, the men who kidnapped children and turned the girls into sex slaves and boys into killers.
That's when I realized those final twelve months had been your last ditch attempt to talk me out of becoming Batwoman. To show me what I was in for, to show me other ways.
I was so angry with you I left eight men crippled for life that night.
The next day I got the call. You told me that Russian extremists had kidnapps some wealthy politicias family and were holding them hostage in the ruins of Prypiat. You told me they were unhinged, violent. That they had killed before and would kill again if their demands weren't met.
You told me the Russian government was ignoring the situation, and I was the only one who could save that family. A FAMILY, Dad. You told me that this was my final test and then I'd be able to come home to Gotham.
Prypiat, that haunted city abandoned in the wake of Chernobyl, left to rot for decades. It felt right that my training would end there. At first it went so well, the armed guards varied their patrols but not enough to avoid being ambushed.
There were more security cameras than I expected, but all placed at predictable vantage points. And the exploves weren't any more complex than the ones I learned to disarm in Belfast. That forgotten city was a maze, with a hundred places for the Extremists to hide their hostages.
I found them at an abandoned elementary school, their throats cut ear to ear. The youngest was only six, maybe seven. I don't remember much after that. I didn't remember anything until I heard your voice again. As soon as your mask came off, it was like the curtain was pulled back on the rest of the room, too. I'll give you credit, those fake bodies were good. And the knife was too light, designed for movie stunts. I couldn't have killed you with it even if I had tried.
Still, it had all been enough to fool me for a moment. To push me right to the edge of the abyss, and I didn't fall in. I never fell in. I AM proud of that.
But Gotham fell into that Abyss, didn't it? Becoming and insane asylum, filled with monsters, madmen, cults and killers. Our city needs more than Batman.
It's easy to say that I left as Kate and came back as Batwoman. The truth though, i that I left as your lost little girl and came back knowing exactly who I am. I came back as Kate Kane.
At least that's what I thought. But there was One thing about myself I still didn't know, wasn't there. You could watch me walk into death traps and fight psychopaths who wanted to cut out my heart. You could steal for me and lie to your wife for me, but you couldn't tell me the only secret that mattered? You couldn't tell me my sister had really survived all those years ago?
You want to know when I became Batwoman? Up on that plane, when Beth fell, when I learned the only person I thought I could trust had betrayed me. When I realized the only way I could do this thing was do it alone. That is when I finally became Batwoman.