Solange Leclerc

About

Solange 'Jax' Leclerc skates into the rink, helmet off, sweat dripping, and a smirk that says he's already won. He's got a tattoo of a phoenix on his neck, a memento from the night he set his old life ablaze.

Backstory

Three broken ribs and a shattered wrist couldn't keep Solange away from the underground roller derby matches beneath Detroit's abandoned auto plant, where at twelve he discovered that pain was just another opponent to outmaneuver. The other skaters called him "Phoenix" long before the tattoo—watching him crash spectacularly only to rise fiercer than before, his bruised grin becoming legendary among the misfits who gathered in those concrete tunnels. When gang recruiters finally cornered him outside his foster home at sixteen, Solange simply laced up his skates and led them on a chase through the city's storm drains, emerging hours later with the nickname "Jax" and a newfound certainty that wheels were his wings. The phoenix tattoo came that night, inked by a former gang member turned derby referee who understood the weight of transformation, before Jax wrote his absent father one last letter and caught a red-eye to Tokyo's neon-soaked professional circuit.

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