His fist crashed down, smashing bone beneath it, and he took deep, obscene pleasure it the sound that it made. It was indescribable. Kind of like a sick thump laid over top of a wet cracking, like when you snapped a green twig in half. Blood splattered across the pavement, ejected forcefully from his victim's mouth and nose.

Midnighter paused a moment, surveyed the damage.  Broken cheek, broken nose, both eyes blacked, lips split so many times that they looked like raw hamburger.  The guy had swallowed a few teeth and spat out a few more.  His limbs were all intact, more or less.  There were maybe a few broken fingers, definitely a sprained shoulder.  He licked his lips thoughtfully, then reached down, gripped the guy's jaw, and yanked hard.  It dislocated with a sickening pop and the man screamed.

"Disappointing," Midnighter sighed.  "You were much louder before.  Running out of steam?"

Midnighter, contrary to what he'd intended, found himself staring out the window again.

It was hard not to look when the Carrier moved through the Bleed and into another dimension. The colors alone were enough to make you think you were going completely insane, but it was the landscape that caught Midnighter's attention over and over. He couldn't have identified it (but if he'd asked Jenny or Angie they would have been able to tell him that they were currently cruising through the resonance of the hunting dreams of every housecat on Earth) but that didn't particularly concern him. He just watched, feet propped up on the Carrier's bulkhead, productivity temporarily ruined once again.

Because we're bored!


Pick a Midnighter and I'll write a fic or a drabble based on him and your muse. You can pick your top three and I'll write at least one.


1. Playful!Midnighter
2. Murderous!Midnighter
3. Flailing!Midnighter
4. Incarcerated!Midnighter
5. Deviant!Midnighter
6. Ill!Midnighter
7. Intoxicated!Midnighter
8. Wildly Inappropriate!Midnighter
9. Eloquent!Midnighter
10. Cooking!Midnighter
11. Naked!Midnighter
12. Bitchy!Midnighter
13. Inexperienced!Midnighter
14. Young!Midnighter
15. Long-winded!Midnighter
16. Bedtime!Midnighter
17. Jealous!Midnighter
18. Inquisitive!Midnighter
19. Confused!Midnighter
20. Arrogant!Midnighter
21. Angry!Midnighter
22. Loving!Midnighter
23. Working!Midnighter
24. Needs-a-Hug!Midnighter
25. Choose-your-own!Midnighter

Morning.

He padded through the apartment, naked except for a tattered pair of shorts and his mask. If he felt strange pacing down the hallway in what would be regarded in more ordinary circles as extremely outlandish get-up, he showed no evidence of it. He'd grabbed the mask as soon as he'd awakened, pulling it over his head with a practiced grace before his feet had even hit the floor. There had been a time when he'd worn it to sleep, though Apollo had effectively broken him of that habit. He considered this a reasonable compromise. One of the last things Bendix had told him - that he recalled anyhow - was that there would be a period of adjustment to his new personality. He considered his dependency on the mask just part of that adjustment.

( Read the rest... )

OOC: This takes place between the time when Midnighter and Apollo's Stormwatch team was killed and the time when they joined The Authority.

Justice delayed, is justice denied. -William Gladstone


Justice is a funny concept.

It's what we fight for, but sometimes I wonder if any of us really know what it means. Yeah, there's the dictionary definition and all, but if it was as clear-cut as all that the world wouldn't really need people like us around. (And do they need us around? Do they really need us? If we weren't here, they probably would have destroyed themselves or each other a thousand times over by now, or else some extraterrestrial menace or madman with too much time and money on his hands would have done the job for them, but honestly, if they can't take care of themselves and act like civilized humans - which I'm forced to presume is what they are - then do they really deserve to be saved? Sparks would kill me if she read that...)

In spite of my doubts about the relative worthiness of the human race, I do believe that sometimes bad things happen to good people, and that those people deserve what justice we can give them. Not the kind of justice that you get in the courts, the kind that drags on and on and never really seems to go anywhere but in circles. That's not justice, that's torture.

Call me old fashioned, but I believe in the old "eye for an eye" definition of justice. You get what you give, and I know that some people say that karma will take care of it all in the end, but sometimes you just have to make your own karma. Did he take your eye? Here, have one of his. It doesn't fix the problem, naturally, but damned if it doesn't satisfy that nasty little chattery voice that lives way down deep in every human heart.

We do it on a grand scale now. Instead of picking off murderers and drug dealers, we go after megalomaniacal supervillains and crackpot dictators hell bent on genocide.  It is the same principle, though.  By delivering swift, brutal justice we even things out a little, stop the problem immediately, and discourage other idiots from pulling the same crap.

It's a good job.  It's a good life.

Things That I Know:

-I've forgotten everything I knew previous to donning the mask and becoming the Midnighter.

-Even when you forget everything you know, you retain essential knowledge, so that if you were able to perform a task previous to the memory loss, you will still recall how to perform it, you just won't remember where you learned the skill.

-With that in mind, I can conclusively state that I am and have always been hopelessly homosexual.

-Love is a good thing to fight for.

-Right is a better thing to fight for.

-Justice is the only thing to fight for.

-I dye my hair blond because a guy named Midnighter should not have red hair, but if I dyed it black I'd never get laid again because my boyfriend would be too busy laughing at me.

-It doesn't really matter what color my hair is because I never take my mask off.

-I don't like it when people ask me about the mask.

-I've retained enough sense memory to know that I used to smoke, and that my costume contains a lot of leather because the smell turns me on.

WARNING!!!  Comments may contain adult material!  Read at your own risk!


Midnighter had never realized until now how much he took Doors for granted.  Sure, they were insanely useful in a fight, or when <i>getting</i> to a fight, but he was fairly certain now that the best thing about them was that there was no uncomfortable silence on the ride home.  The walk back to their room was another story, but that he could handle.  Just... walk a few feet behind Apollo, hands in his pockets, eyes fixed firmly on Apollo's ass.

<i>We'll probably fight now, but that's okay.  It's okay because he's got a great ass.  It's okay because the make-up sex is great.  It's okay because....</i>

He couldn't think of any other reasons, so he just ducked into their suite of rooms and resisted the urge to snatch his mask up off the table and pull it over his head like some kind of security blanket.  Fingers twitching, he threw himself into a chair and arched an eyebrow.

"Well?"

In the future, I have a kid.

She's adopted.  Someone had to take care of her, I guess, and yeah.  All right.  If it's confession time, here's mine: I like kids.  I like babies because they're probably the most irritating things on the face of the planet but somehow you just can't bring yourself to drop kick them out of a window.  I like little kids cause they're refreshingly, brutally honest.  Let's not kid ourselves here, folks; no matter how tough and truthful you think you are, you have some sort of social filter on that flapping hunk of meat you call a tongue.  Hell, there's some things even I won't say.  Kids, though... kids'll say it all.

On top of that I suppose there's the fact that I don't recall my childhood and thus feel compelled to live vicariously through someone else's, but that borders on creepy so we won't go there.

The point I'm trying to make here is that it's not entirely impossible that I should decide to (and subsequently bully Apollo into) adopting a kid.  Here's where it gets weird.  She's the incarnation of the 21st century.  Jenny Quantum.  The reborn soul of my current boss and best friend (but don't tell the bitch I said that) Jenny Sparks.  It's twisted shit, don't try to wrap your head around it.

How do I know all this?

Little Miss Quantum decided to experiment with time travel and wound up here.  With us.  In a time she doesn't belong to.  Strange, but stranger things have happened.  Sparks seems happy enough to see her, so I'm not gonna fight the current.  She's a good kid from what I can tell so I guess we did a good job with her.  That's a bizarre thought to have.  The worst part?

She keeps calling me Daddy.

Sacrosanct.

Big word for a big concept.  What is so sacred, so inviolable, that it's above criticism?  What is it that, no matter what, you can never give up?  It's a hefty question for a guy like me; I was made to break things.  Big things, small things.  Human things.  I don't know my name, but I know what you're going to do before you do it.  I don't remember where I'm from, but I can predict the outcome of an encounter before you can so much as blink.  I have healed a broken back with no medical attention.  It took me a couple of days.  I have been called Night's Bringer Of War by the Doctor who is all of the Doctors.  So what's sacred to me?

Life?  No.  Honor?  Hardly.  The betterment of the human condition?  It's something I believe in, but I'd hardly call it sacrosanct.  Maybe love, but that's a stretch.  Love fades and changes and is entirely too fluid a concept to hold to with any sort of certainty.  So what does that leave?

Loyalty.  Simple to say, hard as fuck to hold on to, but you're nothing without it.  To know that there is someone out there watching your back, that there is someone defending you from those that would attack you, that there is someone that will be there when you crawl in bed at night and when you wake up in the morning... that's the only thing in this world that matters.  To know all that, and to know that you're doing the same for them.  It's almost like being a kid again; there's that same overwhelming security, the eminently sane knowledge that there is someone out there in the world that will die so that you may live.  It is the only thing in the world that matters.

And sometimes, it's the only thing in the world that you have.