Far from the city, a young woman hunches over in a river, watching and waiting. Her hair is white and wild, and she wears little in the way of clothing - scraps of old and tattered rags that might have once been a tank top and underwear. A pair of ragged jeans hangs on a branch nearby.
She is alone.
The canopy above her head is thick enough to block the majority of the sunlight, though beams still find their way through cracks and holes to the river's surface. I won't go back. I won't. Her mind feels as fuzzy as the sun does on her nose, and she sniffs, recognising the smells of damp and fungi.
The woman snaps her head up when the trees rustle, but it's just a bird flying away, undisturbed by the woman observing it. She chooses not to pursue it; her eyes are on the water, and she steps forward. The current rushes against her thin legs. To her thighs, now, the water rises and rushes against her. She isn't budging an inch, but her steps are careful and practiced.
She has done this before, but the slightest mistake would wash her - and her chance for a meal - away entirely. On a full stomach, this would be little issue. Her powers would be in full functionality and capturing fish would be easy. She wouldn't go for a fish, but deer or rabbit.
This is not the case at the moment. It's precarious; it's dangerous when she's as hungry as this. But it is one of the reliable ways of obtaining food she has experienced as far in the wild as she is. Deer are scarce around here, and though rabbits make a nice meal, the river is closer.
The young woman's stomach rumbles, growls angrily in the otherwise peaceful forest, and she wills for it to quieten. There are no fish here now, but she waits. They will come. She will eat. And then she will move on.
Her eyes are on the water, and she focuses on being still, standing in wait. Her breathing is slow, slow enough to seem as if she isn't alive, that she isn't the predator that she is. Watching, waiting. She has to be quiet and still; so still that the fish might mistake her as a part of the river.
The shadows are holding her firm in the water, to the rocks. She isn't afraid. She has no room for that, because this is her doing. This is her will. To fail is not an option.
Rushing water, the faint sound of birds wings. Footsteps - not her own. She hears the living creatures, though they are distant. They're unlikely to see her, so she pays them little mind. Hunger wins over common sense and caution for the time being.
Instead, she focuses on the water around her - and the fish starting to swim downstream. It glides close, unaware until it seals its own fate. Her hand slices through the water and clasps around it in a vice grip, and she yanks it out, wasting no time in shooting out of the water as well. Shadows unfurl and she lands on her feet, legs bent.
The fish squirms in her hand, drowning on the oxygen, but the woman wastes no time in returning to the bank. Success. Her shadows are beginning to melt back to their original positions, latching and unlatching with nothing but whispers and extra rustles in the leaves above.
She's careful in gutting her meal with her shadow claws first - fish guts aren't lucky - and then lets the shadows retreat back into her hands. Eat. Conserve energy. Outlast the pursuers. Maybe they're not on her trail now, so she sets her eyes on the fish.
Food. She wouldn't go hungry tonight. She looks over her shoulder, looks ahead. It's still. Quiet. Maybe she's wrong. Maybe they've started to catch up. If that's the case, she can't stay here. She knows this. But she's hungry.
She feels the eyes on her, first, the hairs on her neck rising. Someone here. Run. Run.
She's in motion instantly, moving when the first bullet fires. The tree behind her scatters splinters as the metal projectiles fly. What's important is that it misses her by an arm's width, allowing her those few milliseconds to start running. She leaves her jeans behind to flee into the trees, dodging a second flurry of noise. The man curses, reloads, and crashes after her through the undergrowth.
"C'mere, you zombie bitch!"
She shrieks in response, wordless and angry. She bats low hanging branches out of the way, and her wet feet aren't getting the ideal grip on the soil and grass beneath her. The woman slips, though she barely regains her balance.
She doesn't understand, her legs are starting to burn as she sprints furiously. Trying to get away like this proves difficult. There is no charted path she takes, and zigzagging through the trees isn't going to work forever.
And as she thinks this, she hooks her foot through a tree root, thudding to the floor with enough force to smash her head into the floor. She's still dazed, still shaking off the fuzziness in her head when he catches up to her not even ten seconds later, red eyes wide and gruesome mouth snarling.
The woman meets with the nasty end of a blasting weapon, black barrel pointing at her. The smoke coils upward in not-quite circles. Gun. She growls and tries to right herself, trying to shoot back up and withdraw her claws when -
BANG.
She isn't as lucky this time. The pain is sudden, blossoming in the back of her shoulder, and the force knocks her back to the floor with a resounding crack. She screams again, primal and inhuman. It hurts it hurts it hurts. She drops the remains of the fish.
Blood is escaping, but the man advances on her, kicking her back to the floor. Pinning her down with one booted foot. She looks to the side, at the blood pooling on the grass in front of her face. At the monster holding her down. She sees him admire his handiwork, staring with a half smile, crooked and yellow. The damp red circle spilling blood into the open air and the hot metal lodged in torn skin and tissue and muscle.
She's shaking, in pain and anger and maybe the stirring of fear, and the man stares. Drinks the vision of her in like a cold beverage in the middle of a desert before he looks at the faded word on her arm like a new trophy.
"Revenant," He reads, echoes from what he sees, and smiles, "So you really are a zombie, then. Can't say I'm disappointed."
She doesn't reply, but she listens with her teeth bared. If he wasn't as cautious, she would have pushed him over and attacked by this point. Teeth to the jugular. She'll remember his face. Dark skin and dreadlocks pulled away from his face, eyes as dark as war and chiselled features.
Hatred clenches her lungs. If it's the pain, she can't tell, but she lets him keep on talking while the gears in her head turn. The man points the gun at her face as he continues. Sweat covers the handle. Used.
"I'll take you back with me, you know, and you won't be getting out this time."
Monster of a man.
»»-¤-««
"Three years since your funeral, huh."
Victor's in his room again, holding a framed photo. It's always sudden in his mind. Busy life aside, he always remembers, but it isn't until he rolls off of his charging table to his calendar when he realizes it this time.
In the photo, he and his best friend stand side by side at the beach. Already, Victor's starting to grow taller than her, and his arm's slung around her heavily freckled shoulder. They were nine at the time. It was a few months before her tenth birthday, and they both look as happy as they could be. Andrea's grin is genuine and gap-toothed. She'd lost a tooth a few days before hand, one of her front teeth, and it had added to her childish charm.
His best friend never did have a precise time of death. She had died months before they found her body. It was only the cast on the arm that had identified her. It had rotted away, had slashes in several places, but it was unmistakeably hers because of the messages covering it.
He'd never seen her body – his parents wouldn't allow it. He'd been thirteen at the time, young in their eyes, and too young to see something like that. After the funeral, he goes home and...
He pushes it aside to start sorting through cleaning products. He shares the bathroom with three others; so there's face masks, hair gel, tic tacs - even a handful of disposable razors. He shifts these to the side. This is his bathroom, for crying out loud.
He wonders how Andy would have reacted to his new... enhancements. She had said he'd suit any hair style, and he runs his finger through the stubble starting to grow. He'll need to shave it off again. It doesn't look great versus the robotic side of his head. Electric razor – there it is. He sets to work neatening himself up, and the hair goes first.
Chrome Dome. Beast Boy hadn't been the first to call him that – it had been Andrea when he'd gotten his head shaved for the first time at six. She'd been chatting away happily to him from the bathroom counter, little legs bouncing against the white wood, and over ten years later, Beast Boy takes her place in his apartment. Neither the six-year-old Andrea nor teenaged Beast Boy had legs long enough to hit the floor from their perches.
Andrea had said it because it rhymed, and BB had taken the meaning... literally, considering that half of Victor's head was now metal. Which is precisely why Cyborg takes the 'new nickname' in stride, familiar with it before it leaves his teammate's lips, and fires back a remark; about him being a grass stain. Both memories were good ones, and he only realizes he's flashing a smile when he catches himself in the mirror.
»»-¤-««
The members of their unnamed team have yet to set themselves up in Victor's apartment. There's only the four of them - Beast Boy, Raven, Robin, and Cyborg - at the minute, anyway. Raven has a few basic things here and there, claiming that moving her books here would be a disaster. If she had as many as Cyborg was thinking, there wouldn't be enough room for anyone to enter in the first place.
Raven has her own place on the other side of the city. To say Robin lived there as well wasn't entirely accurate, either. Beast Boy's had enough half scares waking up to Robin suddenly climbing through the window, and Cyborg wonders how much their green team mate's heart can take. Beast Boy had unsubtly moved in, claiming one of Cyborg's guest beds as his own. Not that anyone could see it under his clothes.
This morning, Cyborg can't find Robin. He simply isn't anywhere to be seen - likely training somewhere in the city - and Beast Boy is still in bed. Raven, on the other hand, is already awake when Cyborg leaves his bedroom. She barely acknowledges him from the kitchen bar as he passes, only nods and returns to her tea, but for Cyborg it's about as much as he'd expect from her. She isn't much of a talker.
He's fine with that. He knows Raven isn't a social butterfly, and he isn't planning on staying here for much longer today, anyway. He takes his breakfast burrito to the sofa to eat it, and then goes to pull on a hood and some pants. It's about as incognito as he can get right now, now that they're all out of prototype holo-rings. He just needs to see some open air without drawing in danger like a magnet.
"Don't let BB throw out my ribs," Cyborg says to Raven on his way out, with a half hearted wave. She just rolls her eyes in response as the door closes behind him, and her fingers trail over a singular paper rose.
The breeze is gentle on the human side of Victor's face, and he pulls up his hood. Time to get busy.
»»-¤-««
She won't go back, not while she exists. Not like this, not like this. Not at all.
She lets the power surge back into her. What little fish she had eaten wasn't helping that much. It's all adrenaline - all that's powering her as she kicks out. It jolts her wound until she sees stars, but she channels as much force as she can from her own shadow.
They smash into his front with the force of a flying truck.
It's the last thing he expects, prideful in the wake of his supposedly successful capture. He's sent flying towards the tree. She doesn't let up, lets her shadows keep forcing him at the tree until- a sickening crack as his ribcage caves in.
Good. She breathes heavily, on her knees, and lets herself rise as his body falls. Her shoulder is hurting like a bitch, still gushing blood, and she shifts back. The bullet pings out of her shadow with an agonising pop, landing in the grass, and the blood escapes faster and freely. The front of her top is ruined now, red with blood and green from grass stains.
Bastard.
It turns out that removing the bullet is a bad, bad, bad idea. She shoves her hand over the gaping wound and promptly takes off the guy's pants with her free hand. He won't need them - he's a little dead at the minute, red leaking from his caved in chest, from his face - and she dons them for herself.
They're a little too baggy, but she pulls the cord. They'll have to do.
She shuffles back into the woods, vision dulling with every step she takes.