Let Me Be the Cowboy

By: Demonic Psycho

Disclaimer: The League belongs to their respected owners, including but not limited to Alan Moore, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde. More importantly, Tom Sawyer doesn't belong to me, but to Mark Twain. However, besides the character, this had nothing to do with the canon of LXG or any of Mark Twain's books. Cheers.

When I was younger, I would always want to hold the plastic toy guns, to pull the trigger with a loud click, pretending it was a deafening bang. Then when it was lowered, the shiny silver plastic gleaming in the sunlight, either Huckleberry Finn or Joe Harper wide-eyed with a pretence of shock, staring at where a bloody bullet wound would've been before gaping at me and falling down, "dead." Then I'd "shoot" the other, then he would stare at me with the same, stunned death stare before toppling down like London Bridge or a diseased prostitute. I've seen many of those since I came to London.

Whenever we played cowboys, I always wanted to be the gun-toting outlaw, the roguish gunslinger that the ladies pined for, lusting for just a single, rare flash of pearly white teeth. When Huck or Joe asked me why I always was the villain, I would say that it was because I wanted to be the bastard, the outcast that was mad with fury. Instead it was because I secretly craved power over other people's lives because I had no power over my own. My aunt pushed me around, and Sid told on me. There was no freedom. That was the single, steady lie I told my friends, but otherwise I was honest with them. When I had come home late and was not allowed to leave the house for a week because of it, they asked me why. I told them the truth. Becky Thatcher and I had just had sex. It was the frank truth, straightforward and blunt and bold. Huck had congratulated me while Joe had just shrugged.

I wish I could show Mina the true me, the Tom Sawyer that she would lust over, would tear off her clothes for, and tease her, tantalise her with it.

I won't, though, because then the League would shun me, she would shun me, because I am in truth too much like the traitor Dorian Gray.

"Mr. Q would have been proud of you," she told me softly one day. We were out on the windy deck of the Nautilus. I had just finished my practice, and I hadn't missed a single target. All of them had shattered into shards of bright scarlet, reduced from bobbing round balls to splintered carmine fragments, every single one of them. "He was something of a gun fanatic."

I smirked inwardly but put on a sad but somewhat cheered up façade. She had no idea what a "gun fanatic" was, not this posh, proper Victorian Englishwoman. She probably knew, even understood, my bloodlust, though, but she wouldn't understand it from me, the sweet, American Tom Sawyer. No, it was safer to keep it under this empty shell of iron.

"He was. Bet he could've lived longer if we'd been in Africa," I replied to her in a sad voice as fake as my optimism. "But who knows? He could be waiting to pop up out of his grave like a daisy when we least expect it."

I heard her chuckle darkly and dryly, her sarcastic pessimism something I could share with her if I'd had a choice. I didn't, though, so I didn't share it with her. Besides, women are easy to fool when they're young and inexperienced. I proved that with Becky Thatcher, whispering in her ear empty lies of love and forever that she believed and fancied were true, from the core of her first lover. But this woman was disillusioned and older, far too experienced to fool easily, without even the least bit of concentration. Even a stupid, brash American like me knew that.

"He could be," Mina repeated dully, the left corner of her full, bloodstained mouth lifting up in a cynical half-smile while the other stayed in place. "We should go inside. It's getting chilly, and I'm sure that's Captain Nemo I hear."

I nodded. I could hear his deep, apathetic voice that was also touched with a sadness I couldn't place. It wasn't just the loss of Quatermain, though. That just barely scratched the surface. It was something that clawed much deeper than that.

"Yeah, we should go in," I concurred, opening the door like a chivalrous knight, the person who I was pretending to be.

But I wasn't that chivalrous knight in shining armour. I was the villainous, gun-toting outlaw, coming to kidnap the ladies and make them swoon with a single baring of the teeth.

I wanted to be the cowboy again, like I had been in my childhood.