Subject: [OTL]: HellsX 36 Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 17:55:44 -0700 (PDT) From: D Benway HellsX [36:45] Bruce Wayne Produced by Benway. See notes for disclaimers. _______________________________________________________________________________ We were watching Zorro when National Security came for my mother and father. I was only eight. I thought they'd come because Father had taped it off the TV the night before. I remember telling the soldier that they'd set to guard me, that I would accept any responsibility for their actions, as it was my birthday. He beat me unconscious. This probably saved my life. It all happened two years after The Captain had first been elected. The War on Terror hadn't started yet, but my parents' trial was part of the excuse for it. They were accused of harboring monsters, convicted on national television, and sentenced to death. Our butler, Alfred, was sent to the camps, and died in Alaska eight years later. They televised the execution. I've been told that my parents were the Rosenbergs of our time. I could care less. They were my mother and father, and they were taken from me and destroyed. The law had not yet been bent to the extent that it is today, and I was able to inherit most of the estate. The businesses ran on quite profitably under the executors, as their main market was supplying National Security. I learned very quickly that by playing the child betrayed by his parents, I could obtain a great deal of what I thought I wanted. It wasn't until I was accepted into the Outer Circle of the Hellfire Club that I realized how empty it all was. As a reward for my commitment, they had found a pair of identical twins of perhaps sixteen years of age who had, or could simulate, a mad passion for each other. I suppose that I'd said something during the initiation ritual, and they believed, as Alfred would have said, that they were being kind. I could do nothing but weep. I decided that night that I would kill myself. I thought about many different ways of doing this, and I was not discreet. One evening in February, while I was recovering from an overdose, she appeared at my hospital window. I knew what she was immediately, and I invited her into my room. She got a big laugh out of that. She took me to a safe house, and showed me what the War on Terror was really about, and the role that my investments had played in it. She made me a proposition, and I accepted it. We redesigned the underground along the lines promoted by Mao Tse-Tung and Baden-Powell. I run the whole show with eight people, all of whom I would trust with my life, and I must trust them with my life for if anyone speaks out, then I am dead. I don't do it for my parents, not really. I never had any idea of what they did, beyond what was documented in the trials, and I'm certain that much of that was fabricated. I don't do it for the rush, like Selina, or out of Tim's bitter determination to do right at all costs. I do it for her, my beautiful dark lady of ancient evenings, my Cassandra whose prophecies I listen to, and obey. She's lying on the bed now, in a room lit by a thousand candles. She's still in her leather battle suit, unzipped all the way, revealing that golden ankh she wears around her neck. I cannot help myself. I am in thrall to her beauty and to her wisdom and to what she is. I will take her in every way that she lets me, and I will accept all of her punishments, which I know, in my heart, that I deserve. [Next: Cul de Sac]