Don't Look Too Close

In the Beginning

Darkness. Silence. Fear. Hate. Pain. Words that Scarlet knew the meaning of more than a doctor knows the word blood. More than a bird knows the word sky, more than the ocean knows the word wet. From the day her mother died when she was four, Scarlet discovered that these words were going to follow her for the rest of her life.

She could not escape their hold on her, even when she sliced the throat of the man who first introduced them to her, her father.

Cynthia Black. Scarlet's mother. She was a beautiful person with a pure soul, who spread life and happiness to everything she touched. Her smile was like a warm summer day, her laugh like the light breeze blowing across the treetops.

Scarlet loved her mother, more than anything in the world. Her father did too, and when Cynthia died at the young age of 27 due to cancer, he snapped.

His anger did not build up, nor did it slow down. Two days after her mother died, he locked Scarlet in a dark cellar for six days, leaving her with nothing but the water that had pooled on the floor to survive.

When he returned, the first thing he did was shove Scarlet in the back of a beat up old pickup and drove them as far away from Central City as he could get. They settled in a small town until she was seven, when he moved them again.

After that, they would move every few months, Scarlet receiving beating after beating in the meantime.

When she was 11, she was locked in her basement for four days and escaped as soon as she could. She wandered the surrounding towns for a while, and realized that she had an amazing gift: she could steal anything, get away with lies and deception, and no one ever noticed.

Her father found her again when she was 14, and realized what he had found. He had a pet that was excellent at fetch, one that was too afraid of him not to obey his every whim.

He would send his daughter out by herself to steal things for him and made millions in the first few months, so naturally, he couldn't let her go.

Scarlet was doomed to be trapped in the clutches of evil, so she decided to accept it. She trained herself to fight, to kill, and to ignore any and all pain, knowing that if she let herself feel, she would break.

From what she could remember of her mom, she knew that she needed to be good, but she couldn't quite find out how. Instead, she turned to stealing from the rich and punishing the guilty, trying as hard as she could to keep a light on in the dark. Being around her father, however, made this task very difficult. He taught her to hate, to destroy, and she often had a hard time trying to stay on the right path.

Try as hard as she did, she still ended up disappointing herself. She couldn't stay in the light, so she decided to walk in the shadows.

Her life consists of charges of theft, breaking and entering, grand theft auto, assault and battery, armed robbery, and a few cases of manslaughter.

She had never been caught, and the only person who knew The Phoenix's true identity was resting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Her father, the orchestrator of all her suffering, had gone a step too far when she was 18, and it cost him his head.

Every few years Scarlet goes back to Central City, her hometown, to visit her mother's grave, and her last trip changed her life.

She had been standing by her mother's headstone, fiddling with her favorite knife, when she heard a loud commotion. She looked up, and as soon as she did, everything went black.

A few days later, she woke up with a furious headache and soon discovered that she had the ability to control weapons. She also heard rumors of the explosion and found out that a "particle accelerator" had failed in a nearby lab, and had apparently given those in its path unique abilities.

With her new found power, Scarlet left the city she called home and continued on her Robin Hood like quest to fill the hole her father had torn in her soul, and became known as one of the most feared and cunning thieves in the world.

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So this is the first chapter, a lot of back story, but don't worry I'll get to the main plot soon enough. Vote, comment and follow if you like it, and feel free to point out any spelling or grammar mistakes you see! Anyone who wants to can make suggestions or covers, come up with names/outfits for characters etc.