Author's note: Sorry to leave this sitting for so long. Other stuff in real life came up and distracted me. From now on, each chapter will contain only one ficlet unless they're both really short. Like with last chapter's stuff, this ficlet is set during the early chapters of Second Chances.

These Are Days

The Sum of Their Reactions

When the little delinquents invaded their lives and home, all of the Dreadnoks set out to study the newcomers with mild to moderate interest. Zarana in particular began filing away every behavioral quirk away for future analysis, but even a quick read over the information she accumulated was rather depressing and disturbing.

Half of them were jumpy, the kind of jumpy that results from being around large scary people who beat the holy hell out of you day in and day out. Sharra had a deeply-ingrained flinch response that would likely take months to break him of. Wyngarde looked around every corner and every doorway before she entered a room. Creed shuddered every time one of the male Dreadnoks touched her outside of sparring practice. And though she didn't do it as often as the other three, Mortisson would occasionally jump out of her skin when an unexpected loud noise sounded through the base. The Dukes brothers tended to be more laid back and non-responsive, but every now and again, something would cause Golem to shut down around everyone but his brother. They hadn't figured out what triggered that response yet, so there was no way to work around it. Made training sessions more difficult than perhaps they should have been, but when dealing with a bunch of kids willing to sign themselves over to Cobra and the Dreadnoks, of all people, hang-ups were to be expected.

The beatings theory was re-enforced by the scars. The two brothers looked normal and wounds didn't stick around with Mortisson long enough to leave a scar, but the other three had obviously been through some serious situations together. There were some ugly marks that somewhat resembled surgical incisions across Sharra's torso, and some fading marks on his wrists where something tight had been clamped on long enough for him to have rubbed the skin under it loose trying to either move or get out of it. Some faded slash marks decorated Regan's arms and legs in addition to the remnants of a nasty wound to her head. It was nearly all healed up now, but there was still a faint depression in her fair skin from where the jagged gash used to be. Oh, she was very good at styling her hair to cover it up, but in the month and a half the kids had stayed with them, Zarana had seen them at their worst.

And then there was Creed, who had obviously made it a habit to piss some very violent people off. She never wore backless clothing if she could help it, and with good reason. It was only because the kids had no real clothes to speak of and the irregular laundry cycle of the adults (in which she'd run out of shirts and grumpily waited around in a sports bra until one of Bryan's came through the wash) that lead anyone to notice the marks at all. At some point, somebody had carved up her bad enough to tear through the muscle and, possibly, down to the bone in a strange pattern. She also had quite a collection of slash marks and hideous surgical scarring, along with marks around her wrists and neck that strongly resembled burn scars. Suppression collar and metal cuff-restraints, maybe? The cuffs would certainly fit the marks on Sharra's arms.

Also, most of the kids looked entirely too thin for her liking. And from the way all of them devoured (some with better table manners than others) whatever was set in front of them at mealtime, she suspected that they were used to not knowing when they would get their next meal. It was a common behavior for street kids, and after all the time she and her brothers spent living on the streets as teenagers, she understood every bit of the logic behind it. Obviously the folks at S.H.I.E.L.D. didn't feel that proper nutrition was important for their employees; heck, S.H.I.E.L.D. hadn't even believed in giving the kids proper training or housing. She'd have to talk to Zartan about rectifying that. And take the kids out shopping for properly-fitting clothes…

When did she start feeling all maternal over a group of street kids, and where the hell did those instincts come from in the first place?