Disclaimer: Syndrome and The Incredibles are the property of Disney and Pixar, and I am not affiliated with them. All recognisable characters and settings are being used for non-profit fanfic purposes only.
He dreamt of being dragged helplessly into a gaping mouth of whirling blades, glinting viciously as they sliced into him, his blood coating the walls like a layer of thick red paint…
Syndrome woke up with a start and hit his already aching head on the roof of his makeshift shelter.
Groaning and clasping a white-gloved hand to his forehead, Syndrome glanced around. The sky was dark, though a nearby line of streetlights provided some illumination.
It was the night after the day of Syndrome's defeat, and the grisly death that he had so narrowly avoided regularly came back to haunt him during his fitful slumber.
There he was, scrambling for his life as the force of the spinning jet engine dragged greedily at his cape, and dragging him along with it. Fear had consumed him in that instant, and raw instinct had taken over. Syndrome may not have had super-powers, but he had been blessed with quick reflexes, and as he felt himself abruptly slide back into the waiting blades, he had automatically done what he had rigorously trained himself to do in the event of danger – he had deployed his immobilizer-ray. The powerful beam had caught the propellers in the nick of time, freezing them in their tracks, but this in turn had caused the rest of the plane's inner workings to jam, and so the whole aircraft had exploded.
Miraculously, the sheer force of the blast had thrown Syndrome clear before the fires of the explosion could consume him. After that, still functioning on pure instinct, Syndrome had saved himself from plummeting to the ground by deploying one half of a pair of rocket-boots – one jet-pack having been torn away earlier by that raging, shape-shifting infant. Unable to control his erratic flight path, Syndrome had ended up crash-landing in a copse of trees in the middle of a small park.
Most of the debris from the exploded aircraft had fallen directly onto the houses below, but some of it had shot far across the suburbs, some of it ending up in the trees along with Syndrome. One piece of wreckage, a large sheet of metal, had ended up becoming Syndrome's hiding-place – already bent into a crude tent shape, the defeated villain had crawled underneath it, and there he stayed, dazed and exhausted.
As these events turned over and over in Syndrome's mind, he stared down forlornly at what remained of his once illustrious black cape. Half of it was gone – chewed up in the engine, and what remained was in tatters. The rest of his costume was not much better, and his body was riddled with cuts and bruises. It was a small price to pay for still being in one piece, but Syndrome gave little thanks for the fact that he was still alive – his raging mind was still consumed by terrible hatred for the Supers who had made his life a misery.
With dreams of revenge and triumph filling his thoughts and blocking out the worst of the nightmares, Syndrome fell into an uneasy sleep, as the dawn began to creep up over the horizon.