Chapter 14:

Jump City

November 16, 2011 21:00

The team was out on one final mission, two nights before the mission. Unknown to them, I had followed, yearning for adventure, but ordered to not get involved in the mission, despite all that my heart tell me.

While on the rooftops, watching Robin's silhouette dip and dive through the air in fantastic springs and flips, while the camouflaged bio-ship and Stealth-Teched Kid Flash chase after him, I noticed a girl, walking in the shadows.

A light brown haired girl with blonde streaks and champagne colored eyes wandered the streets against the walls of the buildings, her hands clutching her upper arms tightly and eyes catching everyone in sight. Whenever a snap of gum sounded or a pebble was kicked, the girl would spin tightly, wound up tight and ready to snap. Or scream. Or run.

No, this was no doubt a girl that was a run away, rather than the villain that most of the other side kicks would have inferred, for the fact that she walk on the opposite side of the street in the same direction as the Team. But I knew that look, as well as the gut jerking feeling that it was off, that she was being followed. And she was, by a dark, gaunt man in black. His eyes were glued to her back, and she would glance over her shoulder every now and then, to check the distance between them.

There were three of them. All wearing black hoodies and mischievous grins. Tears were blinding the girl's eyes, but though she backed away slowly from her predators, her fists were clenched. They never noticed.

The man followed faster after her, finally catching up and pinning her against the wall, drawing a look of fear into her eyes.

I gripped the edges of my cape. The length was long enough for gliding, but I'd never tested it before, to see if it would hold my weight. I'd made even special handles built into the inside of the cape to glide with, to grab onto when I flew, but I wasn't sure if it was work. I was about to test it the night Batman approached me with the Team's mission.

But the girl's eyes remained frightened, and the dark man lean in, causing the girl to scream. She tried to pull away from him, but the man grabbed the girl's midnight locks in frustration, causing for another scream, but she stopped fighting.

With that, I slipped my gloved fingers into the small pockets in the jacket, gripped the inner handles, and jumped.

The blonde sprung out of nowhere, strutting into the light in front of the girl. Fishnet stockings, black boots and jacket and a collar on her throat, the blonde flipped her hair, tugged at her jacket with her gloved hands and degrading tone, but it wasn't enough to put off the boys.

I was gliding, if only for a few seconds, towards the ground. The angle was steep, the speed fast, and the fabric not at all thick enough to make the landing graceful or even feet first, so I twisted my shoulders to aim closer to the man, and jabbed my shoulder into his own, knocking him away from the girl.

It was a blur. The girl couldn't keep track of every kick and punch, even with her calculating amber eyes, as her savior knocked one of the boys unconscious and broke the nose of the other and bruising the last, leaving the two conscious to run off whimpering.

Immediately, she took off running, but not before glancing at me with sad brown eyes. I gave her a slight nod, and ran off in the opposite direction, the same direction as the team.

Her savior took her to a different alley, one beside an apartment. She told the girl help was on the way. Not long after the woman had disappeared, another woman had looked out from her window above the alleyway, and noticed the girl clutching her torn jacket against her tightly in the alley. She was ushered inside in seconds.

Glancing back, I saw the girl still sprinting down the street, her black hair streaming behind her. The man I had knocked over was still struggling to get up. The girl ran into a woman, pointed behind her at a man, and the woman ushered her with her, looking at the man suspiciously.

Figuring it out had taken longer than she realized, but it was when she had been brushing her teeth, recalling one her new classmate's shiny, white, straight teeth. The girl had somewhat crooked teeth, and her teeth were dull and not quite as white as the classmate's. Within seconds of this wishing, her teeth became whiter, and straighter. Maybe it had been dormant in her all along, passed from generations of family, dormant their entire lives until then. Nobody knew, nobody cared.

Grabbing onto the nearest fire escape, I swung myself back up onto the rooftops, six stories above the ground, and resumed following the team, disappearing into the moonless night.

A month after the woman had taken her in, she had confessed to having been her savior the month before. Shocked, yet pleased, the girl begged to help her savior. After being denied, the girl presented her newfound powers to the woman, in hopes of joining her. For the price of obeying all orders, it would be done, but discreetly. The League must never know.

The team wasn't far ahead of me, but the bio-ship had been emptied, and I stayed behind as soon as I saw Superboy slip out of the air onto the roofs, making a THUMP! sound as he landed, probably waking the people who lived in the apartments below. They approached the masked robber, who had appeared anywhere from Denver to Chicago to Gotham City, with him being finally tracked to Jump City.

Because the League had only had suspicion that he had some sort of power or genetic mutation that played to his advantage in crime, they sent the little sidekicks in to deal with the problem.

Poor kids.

Plenty of fights had commenced on the streets. It was always Us and Them, and Us always won. The girl in the black leotard and skirt, and the woman in the corset and jacket with the collar. The cry, and the face changing girl.

I changed my usual blue, gray, and black outfit to my favorite black leotard and skirt, with gray tights, pulling at the binoculars strapped to the outside of my boots, and watched the team surround the robber.

Her final fight. Who knew who the guy was, but it was the outcome that changed the girl forever.

In a desperate attempt, the robber charged Artemis. Wally, on instinct, sprinted at him, and tackled him.

Unfortunately, Kid Flash overestimated his speed, and he and the robber went flying off the side.

"Get out of here, Jay." The woman had yelled when the battle was falling. Pride and instinct won out over orders, however. They hadn't lost a fight yet, and they weren't about to lose one now.

"Wally!" Megan screamed in my head, making me wince.

Robin was the first to respond, and dove over the side of the building as well. After thirty seconds, Wally, Robin, and the robber, all climbed back up the side, no doubt Robin having used a grappling gun to recover from the fall in the heat of the moment.

The girl lunged for the head guy, but only fifty feet from the woman. He was in charge, and the one that drove the others to defending their boss when they hit the ground.

With their teammate safe, and the robber in hand, the bio-ship lands beside them, and they load in. I watch them with a wry smile, before turning myself and heading the way I came.

The woman's cry rang out in the night, a shrill, deafening screech.

I still could hear Megan's scream echoing in my mental ears, slowly, slowly drowning out.

"You disobeyed my orders, Jay." The woman had yelled at the top of her lungs, but it came to the girl in a soft whisper. Her luck may have been up that night, but not all of her luck. By chance, a man had moved between Canary and Bluejay, just before the Canary Cry had been let loose into the night. It had saved Bluejay's life, but at the price of another's.

I watched as the faint outline of the ship take off into the direction of Gotham in front of me, and I slide down the fire escape, into the world below that was ignorant to the near deaths that had almost taken place just outside their doorstep.

"I don't want you out with me anymore."

"Because of that one time, you're kicking me out?"

"I'm not kicking you out, Jaci. I'm just not letting you be Bluejay any longer."

"You can't stop me from being who I am."

"Watch me."

I caught a glimpse of the raven haired girl being hugged by the woman who had run into her, and a police officer stood nearby, the lanky man being shoved into a police car with flashing red and blue lights by another officer.

Slipping the backpack over her shoulder, Bluejay grabbed the last knotted sheet and checked it with a final yank, before throwing it outside the three story window, watching the makeshift rope fall to the ground. In the bag lay the black leotard and skirt, and a picture of the woman who had taken her in. With one final glance back at her bedroom door- which led to Dinah Lance's apartment hallway and bedroom- Jacellyn grabbed her sheets, and lowered herself out of the window.