Chapter Seven – Supremacy

When his father died three years after being chased off Billy's porch, Theodore refused to leave prison to attend the funeral. Jimmy visited him the next day and tried to talk about it but Theodore didn't want the details. His father had died to him long ago; he felt nothing now that he was dead to the rest of the world too. Jimmy bade him a sad farewell. He still blamed himself for not stepping up and confessing to the cop attack despite having had nothing to do with it. Theodore had given up trying to convince him that he had done the right thing, he had even got to the point when sometimes, in the dead of night, when the weight of imprisonment threatened to crush the air from his lungs, he hated Jimmy for having a life outside. For Billy's protection had been short-lived. He had been able to chase off one persecutor but the next lot had guns of their own. Theodore was arrested for the attempted murder of Gary Lowman, a senior police officer who remained in hospital for almost six months. There was evidence, there were even witnesses, his so-called friends looking to reduce their own sentences, providing Theodore with another lesson in the pointlessness of trust, and of course there was Gary Lowman's testimony. All in all, it was a pretty easy case for the prosecution who sought and received the maximum sentence. Seven years in Donaldson maximum security with possibility of parole after five. This possibility was immediately revoked following an incident in the prison cafeteria involving Theodore, a black inmate and a modified food tray. There were plenty of witnesses for that too.

Donaldson was a different breed of incarceration facility to the ones Theodore had grown used to. For a start some of the men around him had no hope of ever stepping outside the walls. Youth and innocence had given way to fury, frustration and the ever present threat of violence. New inmates were all too often subjected to all manners of initiation but not Theodore. His reputation travelled with him and secured him a position within the resident Alliance for Purity gang, the most powerful faction within the prison walls, a position that changed into leadership within a year. No one could touch him. Theodore found that he was uniquely gifted in the arts of recruitment and loyalty assurance. Every time Jimmy came to visit, something he did with touching regularity, he saw a little more of his friend had been replaced by a darkness he could not understand. Theodore's manner, previously so taciturn and distant, became seductively menacing, his words designed to ensnare and enslave. The violence that had required something significant to release it was now barely contained beneath the surface. Sitting across from him Jimmy sometimes caught a look passing between Theodore and another inmate that made his insides freeze. Jimmy may not have liked the changes he saw in Theodore but he could not deny that his friend was thriving in his new environment just as Jimmy, in turn, was thriving in his.

"I got an announcement," he said proudly three years into Theodore's sentence. Theodore had been jumped by a suicidal group of black inmates a couple of weeks back and was still sporting several nasty looking bruises. Three of the perpetrators had not survived the retaliation.

"Me and Katie…we're getting married!"

Theodore laughed.

"Is she pregnant?"

Jimmy's ears began to burn.

"We're waiting until the wedding."

Theodore laughed even harder.

"Hypocritical whore."

"W-what did you just say?"

"I called your girl a whore." Theodore drew out the last word, his soulless eyes fixed on his friend's face as it twisted in pain. Jimmy vowed never to visit again until Theodore apologised. Theodore did not apologise and after three months Jimmy was back. He never mentioned Katie again.

Supremacy became all important to Theodore. He wanted everyone to fear the Alliance and their twisted, fearless leader. There were the odd incidents, like the one mentioned previously, but opposition was crushed so ruthlessly that Theodore soon became the most powerful man within the prison. His rule even threatened the guards who hated and feared him in equal measure. They knew that one wrong move, one step too close to his cell, one mistake, could get them killed. Theodore was no stranger to murder now. Three bodies could be attributed to him (though strangely no one was willing to act as a witness to bring charges down upon him) and countless more people had died on his orders. Searches of his cell guaranteed the confiscation of at least one blade, which his cellmate would invariably take responsibility for whatever the punishment. The guards couldn't touch him.

Theodore began to see people as objects, things to be used then discarded. There were a few fellow Alliance members whose opinion he sought but most of them could burn in hell as far as he was concerned, something they were bound to do sooner or later. He knew how to cultivate a strong sense of allegiance and that to him was more valuable than friendship. After all, his friends had ratted him out and left him here. It didn't take long for Theodore's obsession with supremacy to take a sexual turn. It was a game to him. He would pick one, sometimes the lost one standing alone, sometimes the one who thought he could survive without help, sometimes he went for a member of another gang just for the challenge of it, but not one of them escaped him. Once they were chosen, if they were part of a gang, they usually found that their friends of yesterday willingly abandoned him when it became clear T-Bag was on the prowl. If they weren't part of a gang it was simply a matter of breaking their spirit, something Theodore enjoyed as much as much, if not more, than the sex. Spirit broken, they were used to do his bidding or take the flak when things went south, either way none of them lasted more than a couple of months. Some of them even grew attached to him, convincing themselves that they enjoyed being enslaved. Theodore found these pathetic creatures amusing and useful, they could be counted on to throw themselves in front of the shot to save him. Not until his arrival in Fox River would Theodore ever become even slightly attached to one of his chosen victims.

Seven years passed and a barely recognisable Theodore Bagwell found himself on the other side of the prison gates. Behind him was his kingdom, outside he had nothing. Jimmy came to collect him. Seven years had changed him too. Katie had committed suicide almost two years ago. Shotgun in the mouth, very messy. Jimmy, who really had loved her, refused to let anyone talk him out of taking the blame. He had lost most of his hair in the year after her death, misery etching lines onto his face.

"'course you can live with us," Jimmy assured Theodore, meaning him and Billy "Y'all probably don't want to go back home."

It occurred to Theodore then and only then that he had no idea what had become of his mother.

"Oh, they took her," said Jimmy, shooting a hesitant glance over at his passenger, "She's in some kind of a hospital. I visit her every now and then but she don't say nothing. It's like she ain't there no more."

It should be said that Theodore never made a serious attempt at integrating him back into society. The rules that had kept him alive in prison were no longer permitted and the freedom of Billy and Jimmy's rundown house didn't feel much like freedom at all. And then there was the whispering. People who he had grown up with him avoided him, intimidated by his reputation. Friends of his parents (who seemed to have grown in number now that one was dead and the other incapacitated) blamed him for the fact his father died alone and his mother no longer spoke. Theodore found it difficult to suppress the red lights that threatened to blind him every time he saw someone he recognised. He wanted to kill them all, every last one of them, until his whole history was erased along with them.

Jimmy tried his best to help. He got Theodore a job at the same factory where he worked, he tried to ensure that his friend kept to any court appointments, he even offered to move across state with him so that they'd have a chance for a fresh start but Theodore could not be won over by the good intentions of his cousin. There was a part of him that still valued Jimmy's friendship but it was so buried beneath the barbed wire that chained his heart that the only thing he could do was leave his cousin to live his own life. He left in the middle of the night, taking Billy's car and the money the two of them kept in a jar at the back of the cupboard. The next time they saw him he would be on the news.