💣 CHERRY BOMB . TWELVE / DC [fin - cb]

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Short fuse, lit match, wrong place, and wrong time.

The string of expletives that leave his lips is something fierce, drenched in red and venom and violence. He knows it's useless, is smart enough to realize the gravity of his own situation has half-buried him already, but that doesn't stop him. It's only when he strikes a desperate nerve, something about the guys mother and the mother before that, that he feels the butt of a gun lace his temple, feels the floor meet his cheek and his own tooth spit out into his vision. 

It's amazing what brains gets you in a place like Twelve, amazing what it takes away. Breeding the worst in people, written in the folds of The Seam and in the flashes of sunlight when the smog breaks. He's had his wires crossed since the day he was born, since the day he was forgotten, claiming the streets as his own and learning what it meant to live in rebellion. He remembers the day they found him with a homemade bomb and a rusty knife tucked into his backpack, headed towards the stairs of the Justice Building in some brazen path of glory, remembers it all tumbling down against the pavement, gun to temple and life flashing before eyes, struggling to fight back, losing.

They recognize intellect but not intent, potential but not the lethality that comes with it. It's why he watches what is left of his home slip into the distance when they ship him off to the Detention Center, intent on breaking a spirit that was never anything but fragments to begin with.

The floor cuts skin like ice, even as he's pulled up to his feet and marched back towards the containment cells, crosse wires and all.

Brains or brawn, he still doesn't know which he prefers, which is a curse.