Suicide Risk #11

"Seven Walls and a Pit Trap," Part 1 (of 3)
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

And so, we meet Requiem.  What once had been a dark, powerful voice in Leo's head and the shades of another man's memory have now emerged, pushing Leo into the mute recesses of his newly awoken brain.  He's stoic and a little ruthless when provoked, but Requiem is refreshingly not an unreasonable man, especially under the circumstances.  He may be callous in revealing Leo's affair to his wife, but he's also sympathetic to the possibility that she may also be a victim in his incarceration, at least before his paranoia gets the better of his judgment.

This, after all, is not his world.  It's familiar, but only more foreign in its familiarity, a grotesque mockery of the world he knows.  And now Leo's a constant, irritating voice of defiance in his head, a man with memories Requiem can only partially account for.  And his powers are fighting him.

"Christina, I have to get home.  My powers are almost useless here.  Everything resists me.  Even small applications of power come hard.  Wider ones are impossible."  (Suicide Risk #11: 13)

It's a rather unexpected turn.  Perhaps it's because Requiem is accustomed to so much more control and so much greater mastery, or perhaps by belonging to this world, Leo possesses an easier, more intuitive control of their shared powers.  Here, at least.

Even now, it's difficult to tease out just which pieces of Leo's life belonged once to Requiem, what are entirely his own, and what they share.  They share a likeness, but do they share a body?  Is Leo's daughter Tracey also Requiem's daughter Terza?  Was she, like Requiem, trapped in a foreign world or born into Leo's?  She, after all, looks very like her mother, and she shows no evidence of a dual personality.  Requiem may have distanced himself from his peers as a superpowered figure, but it seems he may very well be surpassed by his daughter.

Meanwhile, Dr. Maybe escapes, and he's very interested in Leo.  And now, thanks to shady eavesdropping on Tracey and Danny Winters, he also now knows that she can rip through worlds.