I am going to die, Jason Todd thought to himself. His hand pushed at the locked door, the broken fingers a sharp pain that didn't matter in the face of the agony of the rest of his body.
He could feel parts of his insides torn and bruised. There were bones grating against each other, where bones should be single pieces. He remembered the time he had dropped an overripe peach on Alfred's kitchen floor. It had splatter across the floor in the same way his blood had.
He turned towards the middle of the room, where the bomb was counting down.
He couldn't open the door. There was no lock to pick, at least not on this side, and nothing for him to pick it with and no way his hands could hold a pick steady enough to even try.
He couldn't get to the bomb. He had a twisted knee and a broken ankle and the bruising everywhere else meant that he'd used the last of his willpower to get himself to the door. He couldn't make it to the bomb. Not in time to try to dismantle it. And with his broken, bound hands . . . he ran into the same problems he had with picking the lock.
There were windows. But they were skylights in the middle of the roof or so high up on the warehouse walls that it would take some intensive acrobatics and rearranging of furniture to get close to them. If he were at a hundred percent . . . But he wasn't at a hundred percent. And the windows were even further away than the bomb.
The only thing close by was Sheila's body.
He turned to look at the woman who had given birth to him, abandoned him, and found him again only to sell him to the monster who was blackmailing her. He wondered, in a bitter little thought that he couldn't stop, which of those moments he hated her most for.
Her chest rose and fell.
She was still alive, Jason realized. He'd thought that when the Joker had shot her, she'd been killed instantly. She'd certainly been quiet when the Joker had been beating him unconscious. Then again, staying quiet might be the only reason she was still alive. He kind of wished he'd learned that kind of detachment from her. Learned to stay away and not help people. It might have let him stay alive longer. After all, he was dying at the age of fifteen. And she had made it to the ripe old age of thirty three.
The bomb said one minute left.
Well, Jason thought. No reason that they shouldn't try to get one of them out of this alive. He started to crawl towards her. He could get between her and the blast. His costume- the Robin outfit, had some pretty sweet kevlar. And the cloak was fire resistant. He'd put himself and that cloth between her and the bomb. Maybe she'd get lucky.
Even if the bomb didn't go off, Jason wasn't surviving this. He could feel it in every wet cough as he moved towards her. He knew it in the way he couldn't breathe deeply at all. He could tell, as the room blurred and darkened at an inconsistent rate, death was coming.
He was a few feet away from her when he realized she was speaking.
"Oh Lord God," She whimpered. "Please- I'm trapped- don't deserve this. Please. Help."
She was praying.
Jason felt nothing but pity for this woman. It was kind of her own fault they were there, after all. And now all she does is ask for help that isn't coming.
He lays himself down by her. He turns his back to her. He will not beg the universe to save him. He's known he was going to die young since that first month he spent living in the streets of gotham without any more shelter than a sweatshirt and a full dumpster to keep off the cold and the rain. And he's known, since the first time he watched Batman get beat up bad enough to not get up again, how his death would come. Jason is Robin, the boy wonder. Jason will die fighting.
Jason stares at the bomb. He can't fight this. But he can face it head on. He counts down with it. Twenty, nineteen, eighteen. . .
"Help," Sheila's voice is louder. Panting from the effort, her very last pleads ring out for mercy from a voiceless god, sounding out in the empty warehouse. "Please! If not for me then for my son. This is my fault. Not his. He doesn't deserve to die. Please."
Six. Five. Fou-
The wall of the warehouse bursts open.
Jason's first thought is "Superman?" as he registers that the hole is human size.
Jason's second is ouch, as he is lifted and suddenly in the sunlight.
Jason's third thought, as his eyes struggle to adjust to the sunlight, is, embarrassingly enough, Angles are Hot. Even with malfunctioning eyes he's pretty sure he catches sight of the most perfect woman he's ever seen. And she's carrying him.
And then the warehouse explodes. And his last conscious thought is 'Hot!' before the world goes dark.
Emmett and Rosalie are hunting in Ethiopia when their lives change forever.
They're passing for a young couple on their honeymoon, so dramatically in love that the locals and group they are touring with just laugh when they spend their time 'sleeping in' at the hotel and sneaking off during the sunlight hours. In fact, they've only ever appear for dinner or breakfast with their tour group but no one has suspected a thing.
Carlisle is far too much of a worry wart. As long as Emmett and Rosalie don't spend more than six months in a sunlit city they've never had a problem being recognized. Their beauty is always noticeable. But no one has ever hunted them down thinking that they're vampires.
It helps that they leave any town immediately when Emmett has had an . . . accident.
No one thinks vampires, until a human turns up drained of blood.
So Emmett and Rosalie are playing human in the daytime and enjoying the empty wildernesses of Ethiopia in the night time. They'll only be there a week before the tour moves them back to the relative safety of egypt. In the middle of the mess the United Nations are suffering (some american criminal has been declared an ambassador), almost all international tours in the area have been canceled. It's a true miracle that this one is happening at all.
It's a hot Thursday in January, when Emmett talks Rosalie into leaving the safety of their hotel room to sneak out to eat. They ate before they entered the country, knowing they would have a limited diet while they visited and that what wild animals were available wouldn't be very appetizing. But, just to be careful, they had located a small lake a few miles outside of the city, mostly muddy since it's the dry season, that had some signs that a deer or elk creature had been visiting it.
"Want to go out to eat?" Emmett asked, rolling over in the bed. His dark hair is damp from a shower and curls around his ears. He looks like innocent sin. He looks like a good reason for a new wife to keep him inside all day long.
Rosalie flips her long blond hair over her shoulder and tucks a neat bookmark into her textbook on building engines. "It's still daylight, someone could see us."
"Today's our last day!" Emmett complained. "Let's spend the day walking as far away as we can and see what we can find. We're going to be stuck in a boat tomorrow. Stuck for days! With all those humans around. . ." He glanced to the side. His eyes are a dark gold. He wouldn't say he was worried he'd have an accident on the boat. Self control is a constant battle for him. It's ironic in the worst way that he ended up with Rose, who's never killed a human on accident nor tasted human blood.
Rose doesn't make him say that he's worried. She's never poked at his weak points. She's very open about her own. She smiles when he jokes about his lack of self control or mountain man personality. But she has never complained about him. She never makes him feel like he's less than she is.
And he has never made her feel dirtier or more evil than he is. Not even those times she comes back from walks smelling like death. He always trusts that the men she murders leave behind a safer family or an unharmed woman. Carlisle, their 'father' in the vampire sense, was a very moral man and would have been so disappointed if he knew about Rosalie's . . . hobby.
So Rosalie is quick to smile and agree with Emmett's plan. They wrap up in order to hide from the sun. Emmett is especially careful. When the light catches Rosalie, people simply assume that the glimpse of sparkling stone they catch is her jewelry, not skin. And she is quick enough to cover up again when she slips up.
They leave just before noon.
"This is the only time I miss Edward," Rosalie mentions to Emmett.
"He is a useful radar," Emmett agrees, following her thoughts easily. "I wouldn't say no to Alice showing up unexpectedly either."
"Yes," Rosalie agrees.
She is quite pleased with the way she looks. But sometimes she wishes that she had a gift like her brother's or sister's. Mind reading and future seeing are often more trouble than they're worth, but they are incredibly useful when you need to go on a suprise hunt in the middle of foreign land.
"Rose," Emmett mutters, "Do you see that?"
Rosalie follows his gaze to the sky in the east. That way lies distantly spaced out warehouses and some factories. A helicopter is rising up. Rosalie narrows her eyes and focus and can just begin to see that there are two men, one flying and one making exaggerated motions with his arms. His skin is very pale and his hair looks like it has been dyed green.
"Emmett?" she asks. It's a very nice helicopter. But his tone had implied something different than 'Look a cool engine, Rose.'
"The man on the news," Emmett muttered. "The american criminal who is now an ambassador? That looks like him."
"Oh?" Rosalie says, looking upwards until she's at risk of leaving the shadow of her hat and sparkling in the sunlight. Unfortunately, she knows her husband's first thought in this matter isn't wonder at the political situation.
"I want to see what he was doing." And there it is, Emmett's inability to back down from a challenge. Even one that's not given but simply a mystery he hasn't solved.
"We could get seen," Rosalie notes. "He's in the news quite a lot. Very public."
"He's well known for using bombs and threatening large scale destruction," Emmett says. He knows his wife just as well as she knows him.
"I suppose it wouldn't hurt to check it out." Rose agrees.
Even as they spoke, they knew the end result of the conversation and were well on their way towards the place the Helicopter had risen from.