The words Waylon Jones heard most often growing up were freak and crawler.
A lot of people used them. He'd gotten used to it early—the green scales that kept appearing no matter how often they were scraped away, the nails and teeth that sharpened past the point where anyone could pretend they were normal. The other kids in the neighborhood didn't play with him. Teachers at school kept their distance. He was lonely and withdrawn and had no friends, but he didn't turn criminal. Not yet.
The first step came from his aunt.
She was his only family—his mother had died delivering him, his father had wanted nothing to do with what came out. His aunt took him in, and her two favorite words for him were freak and crawler, used most often while drunk, used most often while pressing a jagged stone into his hand and telling him to scrape the scales off.
"If you want to survive to adulthood in Gotham, make yourself look human."
Every time the stone caught the edge of a scale and tore it free, it felt like being filleted. Bright red would seep from the raw places underneath, and he would scream, and she wouldn't stop until he fought back physically—at which point she'd hurl the stone at him and leave. That was the pattern. That was home.
She never asked herself what the long-term consequences might be: extended abuse of a teenager who was already isolated, already abandoned by every social system that was supposed to catch people, already carrying something inside him that was not entirely gentle.
She found out eventually.
"The first person he killed was his aunt," Two-Face said.
"Harvey." Killer Croc's golden vertical pupils tracked slowly to him. The look was not warm.
"I'm the former district attorney of Gotham City. I've read your file, the Joker's, the Riddler's, all of yours. The GCPD isn't smart, but I was." Harvey flipped the coin once, caught it. "It was ruled accidental. A push during an argument, and she went through the window. Nobody proved intent." He paused. "I didn't expose you. I couldn't save you either. If you want to hate me for that, I understand."
A silence that had weight to it.
Killer Croc raised one clawed hand and pointed it at Two-Face—slowly, the tips of the claws stopping an inch from his forehead. "If you're really as smart as you say—why didn't you save the others who needed saving?"
"The circus owner?" Two-Face said. "The punishment you gave him was excessive. He wasn't exactly innocent either."
"Wait." Jude looked up. "You killed the circus owner? I thought the circus was where you worked."
Killer Croc lowered his hand and glanced at Jude with mild irritation. "He's not dead. I bit off one of his arms." A beat. "As I said—I've tasted human blood."
"Did you eat the arm?"
"…No."
"So why—"
"Why do you ask so many questions?"
Jude reached under his robe and produced another leg of lamb.
"How," Two-Face said, staring at it, "do you fit all of this inside that robe?"
"Don't ask. Just keep talking." Jude handed the lamb leg over.
Killer Croc took it. The teeth went through bone without effort.
"That was before I turned eighteen," he said, chewing. "After my aunt died, I was on my own. No one was going to adopt a child who looked like me, and the school had already decided I wasn't their problem. I had to find a way to survive."
"And then the circus," Jude said.
"And then the circus."
He walked a few steps in silence.
"Think about it this way: if I got into a boxing ring—any ring in Gotham, above ground or below—who was going to go more than one round with me?"
Jude looked at the body beside him. The scales over muscle over frame, the tail moving with each step, the jaw that had just worked through a lamb shank like paper. He shook his head.
"I think you'd kill someone by accident."
"That was the consensus. Underground circuits, legitimate circuits, it didn't matter. Nobody would fight me. So the circus used me a different way." His tone stayed flat—the tone of someone describing events from a considerable distance. "A display. A curiosity. The Living Crocodile Man. Not a person. A freak, again, but at least a freak that got fed."
He paused.
"Then I did the thing I hated most."
Jude waited.
"I wanted to live like a person. So I made myself bleed. Tore the scales off. Pulled the claws down. Sharpened the fangs to points so they'd look more like teeth. Cut as much of the tail as I could reach." He said it the way you describe weather. "Everything my aunt used to do to me, but more completely. I don't know if it hurt. Maybe it did. Maybe I just stopped feeling it. I went to sleep hoping I'd wake up with round eyes and normal skin."
He let out a short sound that was probably a laugh.
"I should have known. My healing came in with the scales. Every scale she scraped off as a child grew back the next week. What made me think I could outrun it when I was grown?"
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