F L A M E B I R D
[ ◈ ] N A M E
James Alfred Grayson
[ ◈ ] A L I A S E S
Flamebird
[ ◈ ] A G E
Mid twenties
[ ◈ ] B I R T H P L A C E
Gotham City
[ ◈ ] A L L E G I A N C E
Justice League
[ ◈ ] P O S I T I O N
Commando/covert operative/soldier/spy
[ ◈ ] A P P E A R A N C E
I’m not describing myself. Why? Because I'm not a douchebag, that's why. Just look at the photo up top. What? I can’t remember where it was taken, some Wayne Foundation charity gala probably. Those things are a dime a dozen. Ironically.
What does the Flamebird suit look like? Not much to tell, really. It’s a dark crimson body suit with a crimson domino mask and a giant gold phoenix emblazoned on the chest. Exciting, I know. Imagine a colour-swapped Nightwing costume, and you’ve just about got it.
[ ◈ ] A B I L I T I E S // S K I L L S // E Q U I P M E N T
Wow, you really want me to list them all? Skills, and equipment? How much time have you got? Because if you’ve got anywhere to be in, oh I don’t know, the next week, you don’t have enough. And that’s not me being arrogant, or at least not intentionally.
See, you’ve got to bear in mind that I’m a bat-brat. Second generation, sure, but we all go to the same Bat-cave prep school. We’re the swiss army knives of vigilantes, what we don’t know isn’t worth knowing. The family's been doing this for a few decades now, and we've got the training regime down to a fine art. Ideal results, every time. Bonafide peak human/borderline super-people, or your money back. We’re taught martial arts, investigation skills, stealth techniques, advanced sciences, advanced driving, advanced catering - ok, that one was all Alfred, but still, surprisingly useful. Our unspoken motto is to prepare for everything, and brother, we take it seriously. If we didn’t what right would we have to stand alongside the Supermen and Wonder Women of our world? None, is the succinct answer.
So yeah, lets you and I save some time, and have you just assume that any skill that jumps to mind when you think ‘I bet a regular guy would need to know how to do this to just have a hope of hanging with the Legion of Doom when they start getting world conquer-y’, I know.
As for equipment, picture the best that money can buy. That’s the kind of stuff I carry. The best armour, the coolest gadgets, the sharpest weaponry. Again, not trying to sound arrogant, but I’m the freaking James Bond of superheroes, so you better believe I’ve got an exploding pen or two hidden up my sleeves. Along with several throwing knives, a grapple gun, smoke bombs, shark repellent ...
Seriously, we've got all the wonderful toys.
[ ◈ ] L I M I T A T I O N S // W E A K N E S S E S
Bullets. Knives. Poisons. Gluten … look, is this necessary, because it feels pretty freaking morbid. I’m just a regular dude, most things kill me. Use your imagination, God damn.
[ ◈ ] B I O G R A P H Y
Richard Grayson. Barbara Gordon. Better known to the world at large as Nightwing and Batgirl. You know the names, you know who they are. We all do. Well what you might not know is that Nightwing and Batgirl fell for one another – perhaps not all that surprising considering that when they first met they were just kids, and you know what happens when you couple a teenager’s raging hormones with intense, high octane situations like getting shot at and fighting colourful super criminals.
So followed a long and storied on-again, off-again romance. There were a few bumps in the road for the couple – including, but not limited to Dick getting involved with a smoking hot alien princess that resulted in a Tamarian/human hybrid love child – but the two bat-brats were fighters through and through, and they never fought harder than when they were fighting for one another.
Eventually they managed to force the pieces to fall in to place, which resulted in the kind of storybook wedding you can only read about in pulp fiction novels and comic books (Seriously, Poison Ivy transformed the bouquet into a flower golem and made it attack the wedding guests, while the Joker masqueraded as a catholic priest to marry the happy couple. I’ve seen the wedding videos. It was crazy.) Not half a year later the Grayson’s embarked upon what they would later describe as their greatest and most challenging adventure: Parenthood.
That’s where I come in … I just realised, I forgot to introduce myself, didn’t I? Well, no time like the present, I guess. James Alfred Grayson’s the name. James, not Jim. Let’s be very clear on that.
Anyway, as you might guess I didn’t quite have the typical childhood. My grandad was freaking Batman after all. Don’t get me wrong, I was a happy enough lil guy, and there’s nothing quite like getting a katana for Christmas from uncle Damian, but I was always very aware that mine wasn’t the standard experience. Mom and dad were always very up front with me with who they were, and while Mom slowed down the vigilantism - taking on a backseat role as the resident computer wizard for the bat-family and Justice League so as to have more time to spend with her little guy - they would both still disappear for weeks, sometimes months at a time with very little explanation, fighting off outer-dimensional incursions or cosmic tyrants.
Don’t even get me started on all the birthdays they missed because of Infinite Crises.
As I grew older I started to become aware that there were certain ‘expectations’ of me that didn’t seem to apply to my peers. For example, most pre-teens have to cut the lawn and take out the trash to earn their allowance. I had to learn the twenty-three most effective ways to disarm an armed assailant, and the best ways to escape from standard issue handcuffs … while underwater.
Those extra-curricular activities seemed to get more and more comprehensive until one day, without really realising that it had happened, I was wearing a cape and mask, a yellow ‘R’ on my chest, and spending a lot more time brooding on rooftops than is probably healthy for a sixteen-year-old. Hey, I’m not saying it wasn’t interesting, most kids would have killed to be in my pixie boots, but it’s a lot to put on a kid, the weight of the world on their scrawny shoulders, when they should still be chasing girls and squeezing pimples.
All that said, I think I turned out alright. I mean, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if I was the first member of the bat-family to wind up in therapy, but all things considered, I think I’m doing fine. (In case you’re wondering, I am, of course, joking. Us cape and cowl types aren’t allowed to visit shrinks. It makes us seem too human. Nobody want’s their superhero to be, y’know, a flawed human being. It kills the power fantasy. Besides, the shrink always turns out to be some Hugo Strange-style super-villain, and just uses the opportunity to try and brainwash us into becoming their own personal attack dog. Every. Freaking. Time.)
Eventually I upgraded from the chainmail speedos to tights and an alter-ego of my very own, one that wasn’t just a hand me down from dear old dad. And with that Firebird was born. I picked an inauspicious time to graduate to my big boy pants though, as the very next month the Legion made their big play for world domination. I was still a Titan back then – a real one, I mean, not one of those kids they churn through the Academies nowadays – and spent the first two days fighting alongside my team. Wonder Girl, Kid Flash, Vulkan, Damage, Spitfire, Bloom, Blue Paladin. Nightstar – my half-sister – had recently left the team to join the Justice League proper, which had left yours truly in charge. Something about being a part of the Bat-family always seems to automatically propel you into a leadership position whenever the super-teams get together, regardless of whether you’ve earned the spot or not.
We … We lost a lot of good people. Too many, seems like now.
I struggle to remember all the details now. I look back, and all I get are fragments. Sharp, jagged, shards of memory. I go back to them now and then, and if I’m not careful they cut me. Funny that, don’t you think? You’d imagine memories like that would get less painful with time, that if you handle them enough you’d eventually start to round-over all those sharp corners. Never works like that though. If anything, I’ve just sharpened them, honed the edges until they’re razor.
…
Look, I’m going to move on, ok? Ok.
When things started to settle down I could have really used a vacation from the superhero biz. I mean, I deserved one, right? I’d just been fighting on the frontlines of World War Three, only instead of jackbooted teenagers with pip-pip machineguns I was fighting power-ring wielding Yellow Lanterns and dudes who could lift buses over their head while blowing lighting out their noses. Stressful doesn’t even begin to cover it. Well, the battle might have been over, but the war was just beginning, so unfortunately for Ol’ James here any and all time off had been cancelled for the foreseeable future. There was just too much to do, and not enough time to do it in.
Not enough people to do it, either, as it turned out. All that fighting had left the League’s ranks with more holes to fill than a good Swiss cheese, so I suddenly found myself thrust into the big Leagues. For a while I went wherever I was needed (which felt like everywhere at the time). Like I mentioned earlier being a part of the Bat-family, even as junior a part as me, lends you an authority that people automatically respect, and seeing as gramps was getting a touch long in the tooth to be personally handling every Legion related disturbance that cropped up, it came down to the rest of us young’uns to handle the day to day shenanigans, so he and the other big-heads could deal with the major stuff.
It all suited me fine really. I’ve since come to terms with the fact that I’m not comfortable making the big decisions. Having so many people dependent on you, on the choices you make, that’s just too much responsibility for me. Batman has to be in charge, Nightwing was born to fly, but me, James Grayson, I prefer having my boots on the ground. I guess I get that from the Grandpa Jim. Sure, he’s mayor of Gotham city now, but I think in his heart he’ll always be a beat-cop, a regular guy who does what he knows in his heart is right. It might surprise you to know that in my darkest moments I ask myself “what would Jim do” long before I start wondering how Batman would handle the situation.
See, that's the thing no one tells you growing up in this family. When you're a kid, you want to be the hero. You want to wear the cape and punch the badguys, to swing through the window, save the day, then get the girl. You want to be Batman. God, you want it so much that sometimes it keeps you up at nights. But then you get older, and as you get older what matters to you, what's most important to you, changes. Slowly, but inexorably you begin to realize that being the hero, it sucks. People die when you play the hero. You're the one getting shot at, but it's always those standing next to you that seem to catch the bullets. Eventually you realize that Batman doesn't exist, or at least not the Batman you knew as a child. The Caped Crusader, he's an impossible ideal, a rabbit hole that leads to madness, or more likely crippling depression. And that's when you become conscious of the fact that you don't want to be the hero anymore. You'd just settle for being a good man. And isn't that enough?
Shouldn't it be?
*sigh*
Anyway, where was I.
I became the League’s go-to operative. The guy they called when they needed a scalpel rather than a mallet. Want someone to sneak into Khandaq and extract a VIP? You called Flamebird. Need a HIVE schools training programmes sabotaged? Call Flamebird. Want a rival agent seduced and brought over to the whitehats? You better believe you call Flamebird. (hey, I inherited the Grayson charm, alright. I can honeypot with the best of them.) Sure, I would still be there for those big-League operations when they run into one of those ‘all hands-on board’ situations, but that wasn’t where my strengths lay. I was a spy, for lack of a better term, and a damn good one at that.
Or at least I was, up until the day I died.
‘Whoa’, you must be saying to yourself, ‘What an incredible, and definitely not overplayed, twist’. Well thank you, I’m quite proud of it myself, but please stop interrupting, or I’ll never get this story finished.
During what was supposed to be a routine operation in China, picking up info left for us by one of the Leagues covert agents at a dead drop, I was ambushed by Deathstroke the Terminator and his granddaughter, Ravager. Now if you know Deathstroke then you know that guy doesn’t play around. If you end up in his sights, you're almost certainly going to die. I was lucky, and I mean jackpot-lottery-win-the-same-day-you-find-out-you're-secret-royalty-kind-of-luck, to make it away from that encounter in one piece. My luck ran out shortly afterwards though, when I missed my extraction. Things went from bad to worse when the Terminator picked up my trail, and so began a game of cat and mouse that seen me leading the most dangerous mercenary alive on a merry chase across Asia, Siberia, and finally Poland. I almost made it out too, but Ravager cornered me in Warshaw, and slowed me down long enough for Slade to catch up.
I fought them as hard as I could, but Deathstroke is good. Really good. Even in his prime, Batman wouldn’t face him unless he really had to, not alone, and definitely not without stacking the deck heavily in his favour beforehand. I, on the other hand, was alone, wounded, tired, and facing Deathstroke and Lady Deathstroke Junior together. I wasn’t getting out alive. That much was clear.
So, I faked my death.
I won’t bore you with the details – you probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you – but I fooled Slade into thinking that he got the better of me. Unfortunately, I actually did get hurt pretty bad, and ended up out of commission for these last six months, six long months that I couldn’t even contact my parents, or any one else in the League to let them know I’m still alive. See, I now know something that the Legion wouldn’t want me to know. Something which means that I can’t use the old channels to contact my allies. Deathstroke didn’t find me by accident. Somebody leaked my whereabouts, and the only people that could have possible known where I was going to be are supposed to be the good guys. Which means the League has itself a mole.
A mole I intend on exterminating.
My name is James Grayson, and my story is just beginning.
[ ◈ ] N O T E S[hr ]None at the moment.
[ ◈ ] S O U R C E[hr ]N/A
