Gatsby.

I awake to blackness.

Impenetrable blackness, so deep and dark it stays put no matter how hard I blink. Cold seeps through my muscles and clothes, my knees curled to my chest, my entire body racked with tremors.

I close my eyes and groan, rolling my head back to the click of a perpetual crick in my neck. I can't remember what happened exactly, but I had dreams. They weren't mine, I don't think, foggy and drenched in blood as they were. They're all faded now, all but a man's wail, so terrible, so shaky and loud and trembling with grief even now tears sting the back of my eyes. "Kill me. Kill me if you must, but let her go. We have children..."

Children.

Murder.

Torture.

Children.

I'm a part of it, at least, my parents probably are. It's enough to make my head spin, and my head already hurts. It's all there. This terrible history, buried just between the lines. Just out of thought. When us kids played superhero on the street, dreaming of arch nemeses and dying deaths of glory, to save Starlight, to save the world, I never thought about how their deaths happened, or why. Now I want to kick child me in the face.

I run my fingers through my hair, strands of it firm with caked-on blood. I touch the raised ridge on my face, where the blood flakes and a sort of grease oozes onto my claws. I recoil. I want a shower to wash off all the filth and decay. Maybe I'd be able to think better if I weren't lying here bloody in my own stench.

I lift my head and—pow!—smack it on a low ceiling. Yelping, I duck back down. "Owl?" I steady my voice, willing it not to shake. I used to be good at this, hiding how I feel.  Blood trickles down my lip, a stream pooling into my hands, sticky and hot. The pain is something I hardly feel or think about as I reach out and touch metal. It's smooth under my hands, rounded. I stretch and my toes touch something cold.

I don't know where I am, but I'm beginning to have a terrible hunch.

"Owl!" There's a knot in my stomach that grows bigger and bigger as I grab a fistful of cloth. It scratches my skin like old lace, itchy and rough. My knuckles knock against metal. "This isn't funny." Beads of sweat tremble on my brow, my face so hot I can feel my pulse beat behind my skin. I yank the sheet back in fistfuls, black cotton balled up and spilling over my fingers. Light bursts through the bars with an almost blinding radiance. I blink, eyes squeezed shut for long seconds. I drop the sheet. Call me a wimp, a wuss, but I don't want to see where Owl put me, or more appropriately, what Owl put me in. The woman is terrible. A no good, very bad person who likes to torture me—though 'torture' is almost disrespectfully harsh in this context, considering the screams on loop in the back of my head.

Children. We have children.

No, the heroes are the tortured ones, not me. I'm just dramatic. I gulp, my throat so dry I almost choke. As if the light itself will blind me if I take in too much at once, I pry each eye open as slowly as one can open their eyes without gouging them out first.

I look out between steel bars. "You..." I don't know who I'm talking to since Owl isn't here. Maybe I'm just talking to say something, to end the screaming and begs for mercy playing on endless loop in the back of my head, just out of reach of the off switch. "You're terrible. Awful. What do you even do, Owl? Why did you do this to me, to my friends, to all those superheroes?"

And in a horrible turn of events, I start to laugh. 

She caged me. Like an animal, she put me in a cage. I try to sit up again and my forehead smacks into the ceiling again. She thinks I'm an animal. It makes sense to throw me in here.

The cage is cramped, maybe big enough for a Golden Retriever if said Golden Retriever curled into a ball with its snout on its paws and didn't mind whacking its head against the ceiling once or twice. I stretch out on my forearms, claws still sunk into the black cloth. A glow brushes through the bars, lighting my trembling hands in white light that makes them look aflame. Below me, just outside the cage, is a sea of beige carpet. I reach out and touch it, just to feel something outside the bars. It's as rough and scratchy as the sheet.

My muscles groan. The air smells clean, like it was just sprayed with linen-scented Glade. Not that I can make out much from my box, but I seem to be in someone's living quarters. There's a bed pushed against a wall. A little one, smaller than mine at home. with faded blue sheets and fluffed up pillows. It even has a headboard, white wood with small little flower carvings. Nothing ornate, but better than something you'd find in a cell. There's a window, but the blinds are drawn. On the opposite wall is a matching desk with a blue-cushioned stool for a chair. I smile weakly. "Owl has a talent for hiding the extraordinary in the ordinary."  Yeah, a kid in a cage. You wouldn't think to find that in a girl's bedroom, would you, hypothetical audience?

There's even a little kitchenette with a dirty stove, the white parts smothered in grease.

I start laughing again. My stomach rumbles and my neck hurts and when I touch my cheek it's moist and I can't remember crying, but I start dry sobbing, gasping and choking and clenching the bars, all wanting to scream and strangle someone and comfort that guy who lost everything, his wife and his children and his life, and all at once I want curl into a ball and sleep and shut out the world. Everyone has his breaking point. I thought mine came three years ago when I shook Storm Fibbs' hand and told him my name was Gatsby. Gatsby Blackwell, but you can call me anything you like, as long as it isn't 'late for dinner.' Heh heh. And he eyed me with that 'you're-lying-I-have-papers-and-that-isn't -your-name' look, which I got a lot. And I eyed him back with 'yeah-see-if-I-care' one. He shrugged and said nothing of it.

I thought I had broken, wiping away an entire identity, replacing it with one of faux composure and cool, luxuries in my old life. I re-broke my life like doctors breaking shattered limbs over again that had healed the wrong ways. I was fixing myself in the most painful way possible, no anesthesia provided.

"Gatsby," Angelos Michael Fibbs, Storm and Juniper Fibbs' adopted son, marveled as he dragged the duffle bag he insisted on carrying into "my" new room, "that's a really cool name, even if the guy died. But you get a cool quote to put on your wall." He smiled and pointed above the headboard, plopping my navy blue duffle bag—and all my possessions in the world—onto the bed. "'Gatsby turned out alright in the end, it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men' and all." He turned to me and smiled, his wide brown eyes blazing with pride. I gawked.

Then the acting part of me, the part that had changed my name to Gatsby, smirked and said, "If I didn't know any better I'd say you were flirting with me."

He laughed, his cheeks flushed and suddenly a little rosy. "Not bad, Gats."

"Gats?" I crinkled my nose. "I don't like that very much. It rhymes with 'gnats.'"

"What's wrong with gnats?" His shoulders shook, and I realized he was laughing. Laughing at me, but it seemed all wrong. It didn't seem mean, I guess. And I didn't know what to say.

I blinked at him, trying not to blush. "What's wrong with gnats? What type of question is that?"

He seemed to flounce out of the room, a bit of a bounce in his step. Weird kid. But he was alright, nice enough. Unthreatening even if he did tower over me. He tossed his head back and smiled again. He used to do that a lot, smile, I mean. He doesn't anymore.

"I don't know." He shrugged. "It just felt like something to say. Anyway, Gatsby—gosh, that's such a cool name—if you ever need anything, let me know. There are some cookies above the fridge. Jupes and Storm put them up there to keep them away from me, but I guess I've grown too much for them to hide anything for long. I'll put them on the counter for you." He paused for a second, looking over my head. "I just wanna be friends."

Man, we were such dopey kids.

My shoulders jerk, body quaking with convulsions, all from the laughter. Laughing, laughing, laughing until my stomach heaves and I almost throw up, my gut achy and all twisted up inside. Tears roll down my face. "Did you know, Angel?" I collapse on my side in the cage, all the muscles in my thighs and arms cramping up. 

"I was so jealous. Yeah, jealous. 'Cause you had Storm and Juniper and even Heaven, and gosh, you and her were such pals. She was really cute. Still is. And I guess I was kind of scared of you, too. I mean, you were a little scrawny, you know? But I was still scared you were gonna break into my room in the middle of the night and throw me around like a ragdoll. Kill me." My laugh breaks into choky sobs, and finally, mrows. "Now, I almost wish you did." So I'm being a little overdramatic, a little morbid, but I'm in a cage. Alone, with nothing and no one. So I curl up under the black blanket and poke at a bit of chain wrapped around two bars keeping the door shut. A padlock dangles off the big links, rusty at the edges. We have children.

I lower my head to the floor and drift into an uneasy sleep.

Children.

Children.

We have children.

"What did you do, Owl?" I moan when I wake up, maybe an hour later, maybe less. The tears have dried, leaving blotchy trails on my cheeks. Blood, sweat, and tears. My face has become a Nike campaign. My stomach rumbles, louder this time, and Owl must've left me here like she did on that bed. To writhe in my own misery. To "reflect."

This is how she's gonna do it. This is how she's gonna break me.

Well, I won't let her.

More time passes.

I peer through the bars, my throat dry, my stomach growling for food. At last, there comes a click. I jerk into a sitting position, legs crossed underneath me, hands cupped in my lap. My head smacks the ceiling, but that's okay. As it is, my pain cuts deep enough that another layer on top doesn't add to it so much.  "Owl?"

Keys jiggle. The door slams shut. I see her boots before I see her, and in a daze, I realize she's changed. Brown suede boots with ripped seams and faded toes. Jeans, a deep blue. I waft in a breath and she smells heavenly (the place, not the girl). Like food. Like flour and raisins and... "Cookies? Tell me you kept your side of the bargain and brought me food."

She leans down and crouches in front of the cage. I wonder if she's tired. I can't tell. Her face is too blank, too perfect. To my dismay, she does not carry a tray of cookies. She carries a cardboard box. A small one, with 'Weight-Watchers' printed on the front. The diet stuff is barely food, but it's edible. Technically. I grip the bars and lean forward. Amuse her. She sees me as an animal, I know this now. I have to get on her good side, make her trust me. But I'm hungry and thirsty and cramped and she did terrible, terrible things that I can just vaguely remember from Jupiter's memories that make me want to punch her in the face.

"Comfy?" she asks. I see a hint of a smirk on her lips, but I'm not so sure if it's actually there or if I just want it to be.

I blink a few times and shake my head. "Really, Owl? A cage? What a stock supervillain move. I thought you were unique. Can I eat now?"

She smiles, and this, this I know is real. "Well, I thought you'd be more comfortable in one, as a project, I mean."

I lean back against the bars. "Can I eat now?" She's taunting me, about being an experiment. Well, I have a lot of things to be ashamed of, but that isn't one of them. 

Owl laces her hands behind her head. And it occurs to me how relaxed she is, sitting, smiling. A trickle of fear crawls down my neck.

"Depends," she says, and light shines off her eye patch. "If you can answer a few questions."

"Fire away, lady."

She shakes the box, and all I can think about is food. My mouth waters. I try to hide the desperation ratcheting up inside me, but she knows. It's clear she knows. That's probably why she left me here, to starve. Her smile tightens into a wicked little smirk, and then, she speaks.

"What do you know about a girl named Heaven Brooks?"