NOW
Darkness descends deliberately. A spotlight slices through black space. In its beam, a dancer materialises, fair-skinned and pure.
Let me tell you a story.
Most of Gwen's time passes like this, in darkness, in her head, in the reality carved out of time and space where only a moment within this string of seconds exists. Inhale, exhale. Her eyes snap open.
There was once a simple girl who lived on her knees, scrubbing floors for a dime.
She builds the shoes first. Black satin swirls outward from under her fingers, ribbons of darkness slipping like water over her bare feet, her bare and broken feet, bruised and mangled from all her time dancing on her toes. She fastens the ribbon at her ankle. Ballet shoes. She's done this so many times it takes only seconds, and when the darkness sets, they look so real Gwen aches to run her hands over the silken shell, but knows that if she does, she threatens the integrity of the illusion.
And there was once a cruel man who lived in a house of marble and ivory, and his floors were always gleaming. You already know how this goes. Let me tell you another.
Thread by thread, she builds the tutu next. In her mind's eye, her clothes slough off her body like snow, and around her the shadows bleed up her skin, over the crests of her muscles. She imagines the wings, dark lines painted down her arms, across her back.
There were once two little girls who lived in a house of dust and broken windows. Though they wore the same face, one was made of light, and the other of shadows. Their mother loved one, and despised the other. Despised—and feared.
Hands running up her midriff, Gwen stitches the body of her dream from the dark. Then the feathers, the texture of the body piece, the dark glimmer between the smoky shades. Brushing her fingers out, flaring like a brushstroke, she weaves the skirt. Between her hands, the darkness seethes, forges, and she brings the headpiece to the crown of her head. I am the Black Swan, Gwen thinks, I am the dark side of the moon, the shadow under the crown, the dark impulse beneath the perfect veneer.
"You have your father's eyes," she said to the shadowed girl, once.
"But I have your face," the girl responded, not understanding. "And I look just like my sister."
"You have your father's darkness," said her mother, her lips twisted in disdain. "And you are just as terrible as he."
Lastly, at the helm of her centrifuge, she builds her stage. Shadows cut into shapes, penumbras. Like a carpet unfurling, the darkness flared outward, sprawling across the floor. Rows of seats, a crowd, an orchestra at her feet.
There was once a house of marble and ivory. It sits high on a hill, surrounded by the sun, and though I'm told that I'm my father's daughter, its iron gates have never opened for me.
A singular spotlight lights the centre stage. There exists a moment where the shadow lets you know where the sun is streaming in, an odd limbo where light and dark often meet. You see it because one can't exist without the other. You see it because without one or the other, you are blind. At its core, Gwen teeters on the precipice, watching the cryogenic dust fall into the yolk of the moment.
Now, I'll admit. I'm not exactly the picture-perfect representation of sanity. Look around you. Look around me.
For that moment, that one breathless moment, she lets herself take it all in. Wishbone arms outstretched at her sides, a bird poised to take flight. This pocket of time, this liminal space, this dark, shadow world she's built for herself. Her stage. Her spotlight. It's the only place she knows nothing bad would happen.
For starters, I'm talking to you.
A breath. A rise and fall of porcelain shoulders. The world has gone so still Gwen can feel the silence echoing. As she gazes out into the faint ripple of her shadow audience, the shadow people swarming the night-dark theatre, she raises her arms. A dark mass swirls in the space beside her, like sand sifting in an hourglass, the body of a man begins to form. Strong arms billow out à la Seconde. A surge of power roils through her, so potently, so malevolently, bleeding through the fabric of the air, she can taste its coppery tang, the blood in her veins roaring as if she were performing in front of a true audience. With a flick of her fingers, the shadow orchestra begins to play.
I don't even know who you are.
The coda from the Black Swan's Pas de Deux fills the air, a beguiling, beckoning vision. Almost immediately her muscles tense and relax, and like a knee-jerk reflex, Gwen settles into her starting position. Lifting her chin, Gwen regards the audience. The Black Swan's feathers rustle over her arms. When she turns into the first pirouette, the blood comes rushing to her head.
I was great, once. A vast universe of promise and potential. And then I lost everything.
Thirty-two fouettes. Gwen whips into each one with the force of a storm. In her mind's eye, she holds her shadow audience captive in the vortex of her darkness, a vivid scene, something fierce and striking, power suffused in every movement. The high register of the violin crescendos, a saccharine melody that cleaves through the moment, pulling something deep and visceral from her burning core. With each turn she spins her scene, her leg snapping out, gaining momentum, and the space beside her stirs. Despite the pain tearing through her feet, the searing agony blazing up her calf, the Black Swan enthrals and bewitches. She does not fall.
Every story is a tragedy in motion, the narrative traps the protagonist in a time loop.
Behind her, her endarkened prince follows, dark and supple sinew and corded muscle rippling in the harsh light. Adrenaline pulses through her as she spins, cutting across the stage like a dark arrow. In periphery, her shadow partner follows, hands clamped firm around her waist, lifting her with effortless grace. Gwen throws her head back, teeth bared in a triumphant grin.
The protagonist cannot help her fate. The Swan Queen will lose Siegfried to her wicked shadow, and her fate is doomed to the lake, as is her eternal love.
As the tempo builds, Gwen seizes the tune by its throat, commanding the tide of music with every advancing movement. The Pas de Deux bleeds through the air like the first rumbles of thunder. Wisps of shadow wick off the tulle skirt as she spins with the intent of a hurricane, feverish and furious, taking the stage by storm.
The story is always doomed to end.
Boldly, coyly, she courts the shadow prince, luring him into her abyss. He chases after her in rapture. In the skin of her past self, she is magnetic and powerful, and no one in the world can touch her.
I had a dream, once, that I was in my mother's womb. Primal and naked, suspended in stasis, floating, the darkness like a fist closed around my body. I am made of flesh and bone and nothing more. And the world was quiet. I could feel my mother's heartbeat in tandem with my own.
She might've loved me once, before she knew me.
An alarm blares, shattering the darkness, scattering the dream in real time. As the shadows fall away, the illusion drops, slinking back to the dark corners from which she'd called them, and Gwen is plunged back into the stark white of her cell, the reality of her situation. The reality of what she is. There is no spotlight, no stage, no standing ovation here. What she has within these walls is her shame.
I wouldn't know. My mother died last year.
Bathed in the red lights flashing overhead, a warning to the inmates, Gwen backs up against the glass wall and puts her hands up beside her head, knowing the protocol of a smooth interaction with a Belle Reve officer.
"Lunch, 387," the guard grunts, sliding a tray of food through the fibreglass hatch. He stands on a long catwalk bisecting the upper levels of the block, holding his stun gun at the ready, as if she would lunge through the glass and drag him down at any moment. "Try not to beat it up."
It glides across the floor and bumps against the far wall, metallic laughter rattling in the hollow of her cell. Ever since she'd demanded solitary—well, more like took the necessary measures by assaulting a couple of her fellow inmates, left them broken in three different places, so that they'd deem her too much of a menace to keep in Gen-pop and sequester her—she'd been spending her mealtimes alone. Which is how she likes it, usually. Even before the orange jumpsuits, before the gaggle of collared and subdued villains—some of which she'd helped put behind bars, way back in a previous life—and the shivvings. She'd always been a solitary creature.
It's only when she crouches down to sit that she notices the blood slicking the floor, welling in the crevices of her toes, and, of course, the broken nail. It wouldn't be the first time she'd danced through something like this.
Lunch today consists of a soggy pile of mash, a few rubbery slices of chicken slicked with preservatives, and a spoonful of bland corn. A year of incarceration, and Gwen's started to warm to the idea of never seeing a single familiar face again, the prospect of her own space, the lack of material possessions, but growing up in the simmering crux of Gotham City Chinatown, where the air was always basted in the pungent aroma of fried Yu Char Kway and herbal stews and marinating seafood, the food in prison pales in comparison.
That's the main drawback of prison, Gwen thinks, as she grudgingly digs her spoon into the starchy excuse of mashed potatoes, wrinkling her nose as the gelatinous film of what she supposes is congealed gravy slops over the rim of her tray. The food here sucks.
But she eats, anyway, because there's nothing else. One tentative bite turns into two, then three, then another, and another. You can't be picky in Belle Reve. You've handed over the reins to someone else, your body is no longer yours.
Sitting cross-legged on the cold linoleum floor, Gwen chews slowly, and looks out into the cell-block. The pit gapes back at her, dozens of cubic cells spiralling in Brownian motion below.
The floating power-containment solitary cells of Belle Reve are designed in such a way that everyone has a front-row seat to the stewing mania of their next-door neighbour. A tattooed inmate laying sprawled across his bunk catches her eye inadvertently. He bares his blackened and rotting teeth at her in a lewd grin and scratches his crotch pointedly. Gwen presses her middle finger against the glass and stares him down until his cell drifts out of sight.
Each cell hangs suspended in the air by some gravity-defiant forcefield that cycles the cells in a rotation no one can quite figure out. One day her cell could be next to the infamous Killer Frost, the next moment, she could be staring down some nameless pyrokinetic with a penchant for smoking up his cell. The walls are solid glass, bulletproof but not protective against prying eyes. Privacy is a privilege that none of the inmates are allowed, which is why Gwen lives in her spun world of darkness, makeshift curtains that allow her some sliver of humanity. At least until a guard bangs on her cell.
Most of the time, though, they leave her alone.
They know her.
They know who she was before all this.
From time to time Gwen wonders how much you have to bleed to be forgiven for your sins. Or if there's ever such a concept as absolution. Perhaps you live with them forever, you carry the scars that grow their own scars, branded by your own mistakes, and you bury the ugliness in good deeds like a salve.
Still, it's never going to be enough.
And so she creates her own theatre, her own spotlight, her own space away from space, her own reality apart from reality.
Outside of her cell, she'll be made to wear a power suppressor, but within these walls, Gwen still has access to the dark. These walls are designed to contain, rather than suppress. She'd come to understand this, after watching a knock-off speedster run himself into the walls over and over and over again, a frenzied atomic collision of madness, rage and desperation rebounding over and over and over again. Granted, all Gwen needs to know is that she can still fabricate her own world, keep those dark walls up. That's enough. Freedom, she hardly ever thought about anymore.
Where would she have gone, anyway? Everyone she'd ever had ties with, she'd jettisoned out of her life. Both Gabriel and her mother were dead. Her childhood home and all her belongings had been reduced to rubble. And Guinevere was gone.
That thought presses on a tender spot in the rot of her heart. Around her, the shadows beneath her bunk undulate, dark tendrils creeping across the floor toward her in search of an anchor. Gwen sets her tray down, and squeezes her eyes shut, inhaling sharply to stave off the burning pressure between her eyes. The ache pulses through her, echoing like a seismic wave through her body to the place in her core where something had been severed. A phantom limb itching with memory.
When she opens her eyes, a single command is perched on the precipice of her mind.
Again.
And she's plunged into darkness once more.
The music starts again.
AUTHOR'S NOTE.
short one! but at least this is written!!!!! everyone cheered!!!!!! 🦗🦗🦗
so. i obviously took some creative liberties with the design of the cells in Belle Reve. for clarification, it's only the solitary confinement cells that are as described in this fic. gen pop is as per usual.