We would be so happy, you and me
No one there to tell us what to do
I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus' garden with you...
--The Beatles
When everyone first gets together you can't help but think of an aquarium, of tropical fish. The colors of you all are so bright: everyone's scheme patterned after some invisible template, a warped and idealistic sort of heraldry, and individually you all look very fine and heroic. But together you all look like a bunch of fish in someone's tank, luridly artificial and not like anything that's real.
You learn what's real very quickly. Pain is the currency of the street: pain, and power. And fear, though if pain and power are what the currency is, fear is what it's made of. It's the only language that criminals understand, you reassure each other, and after awhile you find out that it's the only language any of you can speak anymore. Things like roses and a kiss on the cheek feel vague and foreign, like an idea someone else had, long ago. It's all pain, and fear, and power, written at night, written in the dark like neon against the dirty pavement.
You're growing crueler, you think, you know: you're all like that now. Like fish over deep water, sinking a little deeper each year, each morning, a little farther from the sun and the incomprehensible surface.
There's an ashtray on a table back at headquarters and it's full of broken teeth, other people's teeth, these sharp, dirty little shards all mixed in with ash. You've seen the Silhouette and the Comedian leaning over them just the other day, arguing if one chip counted because it was from a shark. The Silhouette thought it didn't, because sharks were animals, and the Comedian thought it counted double, because punching a shark's teeth loose had to be twice as hard as punching just some thug.
They both appealed to you because the Comedian had procured the tooth in question and was obviously biased, but you were fair and everyone knew it. All you could do was think of fish (going deeper, getting darker) and laugh, and that was just it: there was an ashtray and it was full of teeth, and no one thought it was horrible. You laughed until you cried.
At night sometimes you try to ask Hooded Justice to hold you, just hold you, but the words stick in your throat and come out all wrong, and you end up having angry sex instead. Just to feel something. Anything.
The Comedian sat with you while you cried, and his hand on your shoulder felt like some strange signal, as queer and unintelligible as those dreams where everyone doesn't make any sound when they talk and you are lost. When Hooded Justice returned from patrol to see you two together he picked up the Comedian and threw him against the wall, and just like that the world made sense again. Pain and power, and the Comedian slunk away to lick his wounds while Hooded Justice grabbed your cape and towed you to the locker room. Pain, and strong angry hands in the dark.
When you take a deep sea fish up to the surface, it doesn't just die: it dissolves. It loses coherency because part of what it is-- the larger part-- is the crushing darkness that is all it has ever known. It's like that with heroes, you all find out. After a while the only thing keeping you together is the pressure and the pain in the dark, and you even stop wondering what you have become.