Swallowing The Spider

[After Transition]

Life after getting pushed of a building by a crack head only got weirder, well to me it got weirder, I guess it's subjection like they always say beauty is in the eye of the beholder but in this case it's strangeness and I guess you could substitute any word in for beauty and it would still work. Anyway after getting up out of my own puddle of blood (not that I knew that at the time) and walking back to the orphanage the matron took one look at me drenched in dried blood and came to her own conclusions, I told her what I saw as the truth at the time.

I fell into a big puddle of sticky red water, at least that was what I believed and what I told the matron when I got back to the orphanage. She grumbled for a moment about having to wash my clothes but apart from that she wasn't really that bothered and looking back on it I can see why, we lived in Gotham and it would be weird if you didn't see a puddle of blood or two every few blocks and if you lived in an area where there were no puddles of blood? Well that just means your in even greater danger because that means you have criminals that leave no evidence behind and they don't like loose ends so you can only hope you don't happen upon a crime in those neighbourhoods because they'll end up cleaning your blood up as well.

Life as a drug mule continued on from there for me, I'd go deliver drugs (which would slowly go up in class as I got older) to certain spots and sometimes there would be someone who seems me doing it who would like those drugs for themselves and would take me out of the equation just to get them. Those kinds of incident happened a lot so I eventually wised up and figured out that I couldn't die and once when I was shot and left to bleed out I watched my bullet wound heal back up and make it look like I was never shot. I could regenerate super fast, even from fatal injuries like bullets to the head (had quite a few of those in my times, even got beheaded once).

The matron would be quite angry whenever I tell her that I lost the drugs and she would take her anger out on me but I would heal right back up the next day not that she noticed, but a few of the other kids did and eventually the matron would as well. Afraid that they would discover my ability I tried to make the bruises, burns and lashes stay on me and eventually after years of being a drug mule (and getting countless injuries, wounds and definitely fatal blows) I would get the control of ability down to such a fine control that I would be able to make my wounds stay on the surface but be fully healed underneath and I could heal insanely fast but it would make me really tired.

My ability and my fine control of it proved to be a great boon during my time as a drug mule as it kept me alive in many a perilous situations but eventually I got tired of dying, sure I would get right back up but the pain was still there and damn was the pain a butch so much so that I would sometimes see this ability as a curse. I evolved and adapted to my situation, I became the best ever drug mule that there ever was because I learned how to be constantly aware of my surroundings, to notice everything around me, to profile and analyse all those that surround me to check for threats, to read people as I ran into cops more than once (cops caught me quite a few times but it was always just a single officer and when they weren't looking I would steal their gun and blow my brains out. The cop would just leave me there as letting a kid steal your gun and blow his own head of is career ending, I did this for a reason of course as I learned that those caught by the cops would be killed by dirty cops while in lockup, now I might not die but they would find out about my ability which could prove to be an even worse situation).

I learned so much to survive on the treacherous streets of Gotham and I even learned to hone my instincts and fight, when those guys I met on my drug mulling adventures corned me and I knew that there was no way out but to die and then come back, well I wasn't going to go down easy and I'm proud to say that whenever I came upon those situation nearing the end of my drug mule career I would always make sure to kill the bastard while taking fatal injuries (but they weren't really fatal for me). Of course I would try to take them down with me as the bastards were trying to kill me and obviously I never manage to kill one of the bastards without taking fatal injuries myself no matter how non fatal they were to me because even though I have this ability I'm still just a child less than 10 years old.

I was the best drug mule in the biz and they kept giving me a lot of work to do because of my good results and eventually they even had me dropping of handguns and weaponry and other such illegal things (which sometimes I used when the deal didn't work out and I began to practice with them), I was truly the best and it showed in my results though the matron still used to beat and torture me whenever I made the smallest mistake. Eventually it had been 5 years since my fifth birthday and the day I became a drug mule, it was my tenth birthday and I had a five year long career as a drug mule and I had managed to survive longer than any of the other children that became drug mules.

I still remember when I first became a drug mule on my fifth birthday (though I didn't know that that was what I was going to be doing) and the matron told me that when I got to my tenth birthday I would be taken to a rich family in reward for all my hard work but I now knew that was probably a lie and that they would probably send me to some orphanage in metropolis and get rid of me. I thought that I was one of the ones in Gotham who knew how it worked, how to play the game and come out on top but after this day I would know that I was still underestimating Gotham and all its inhabitants, how naive I was.

The day started with me going down to the cafeteria and having my big breakfast in comparison to the other orphans meals and enjoying the envious looks they were giving me, I was top dog around here and all of them knew it and even the older kids learned not to mess with my after I beat the shit out of them when they tried to hustle me. After breakfast the matron told everyone that I would be leaving to go live with a rich family and as they all looked at my with jealous eyes I knew that the matron was lying, I just didn't know at the time how far away the lie was from the truth of what would be happening later today.

The matron took me out of the building without delay, I asked about my belongings (no matter how little of my belongings there were) and she told me that she would send them to me later. Looking across the street I saw a white van parked up on the side of the road and in the driver seat was a very familiar man, the man that had stood at the street light for the last five years and given me the packages to deliver was in the driver seat of the van and was getting ready to drive me towards my new home.

Walking across the street the matron pulled open the back of the van doors and practically chucked me in promptly slamming the door shut afterwards and I heard the distinct click of a locked I sat there in the pitch black back of the van.

I sat there in complete darkness and complete silence before I heard the Rev of an engine and felt the van begin to move.

I don't know why but I feel like this day is going to end drastically different from how I thought it would...

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<AN> I now have a Pa treon up and running and when a chapter is ready it will go up on Pa treon first so please take a look. Some support from you guys would be appreciated and motivate me.

(pa treon.com/GutsyRipper)

A special thank you to my patrons Tim Brown, Stormrall, Leonidas Simon, Turtle and heller8284. Thank you for the support.