God I love crocs and their entire family tree so much. These are animals that have remained virtually the same for millions of years-pretty much as close to “perfect” as you can get in nature-and this highly optimized body plan is just. A fat sausage with a mouth at one end and chubby baby arms.
The little face she remembered was gone, replaced by a skull with markings of pale blue, silver and purple; her eyes traced the swirling patterns, paused on the tiny silver dots under his eyes – those amber brown eyes, so much like her own, staring at her from beneath thick black hair she’s stroked and brushed so many times. After thirteen years, she was looking at her son.
A/N: Set a few years after Down to Dust. I started this… months ago, and only just finished it. I really wanted to get it done at long last. I mean, we all knew Cheque’s mother would die at some point.
***
With precisely nothing in her life having ever gone according to plan – not that she’d ever had a plan, she’d just kind of drifted through existence – Celia del Rio found some comfort in the fact that her death had, at least, been perfectly straightforward.
Sepsis. Septic shock. Catastrophic organ failure.
It had been a logic, predictable chain of events. It didn’t have to happen, she knew. If she’d walked into a hospital the moment she’d begun feeling sick, the sepsis would have been treated and she’d maybe have lived to turn forty-seven. Only that she’d missed all the signs, because when you fuck over your body in every possible for your entire life, feeling sick is not something noteworthy. She’d assumed it would pass, and by the time she had known something was wrong, it was too late: she was already slipping into septic shock.
The doctors had done their best, she had to give them that, but it would have been a lost battle even if her body had been healthy enough to take it in the first place. And so things had progressed to the last link of the chain, the one she’d heard someone muttering through her semi-comatose state, the last words her mind could grasp in the Land of the Living.
Catastrophic organ failure.
“So, your name is Celia del Rio. Age at the time of death?”
“Forty-six.”
“Occupation?”
Full time addict, part-time dealer, part-time prostitute. The good news is, I haven’t felt the need for a fix since I breathed my last. The bad one is that my only other skill is useless since we all lack the relevant bits. Or at least I think it is, but asking would be awkward.
“Batman has more than one son,“ I say into the mic.
The crowd boos. I begin to walk off in shame, when a voice speaks and commands silence from the room.
“She’s right,” I hear. I look around for the owner of the voice. There in the fifth row, he stands: Bruce Wayne himself.
“What does he know about Batman” the crowd replies and resumes booing. Bruce Wayne discreetly leaves the room. In an unrelated turn of events, a voice speaks from above. “She’s right,” I hear. There crashing through the skylight: Batman.
At first I thought adrenaline. Girl just sang and danced with security and a murderer (who she pwned 3x, you go girl) in front of thousands of people. Who wouldn’t get high?
But it wouldn’t explain how it transpired from this: