Author's Note: I'm bad, and I don't update often. Thank you to JRK, who kindly let me know I need to get my ass back in gear. Sorry folks, summer just drains so much of the creative energy out of me.
C.5
Her current read is one of the older Batman comics: she treats it carefully, and in her mind she is carried far beyond the story that the bright yellows and reds and blues would give away. The sun dapples her long, somewhat unruly dark hair and her skin through the leaves. Hope is so absorbed that she does not realize a small group of her peers walking towards her: exactly the ones that find nothing more amusing than annoying her, and even go as far as to try to pick fights.
She smells the smoke first, and then sees the flames eating at the middle of her comic, devouring the story so that Hope is momentarily afraid that she'll be caught inside. Quickly she drops the text, which then stops burning, but is obviously ruined. Gritting her teeth at the sound of snickers and giggles, Hope looks over to the children—there are four, three boys and a girl.
The ringleader, of course, is a kid named Tommy: he is also the fire-starter. Hope feels like she can see right through him, and feels like she knows exactly what makes him tick (she does have a certain way with doing that). This boy, with his strange tallness and knobby knees—not to mention self-dyed bright red hair—feels like he needs to harass her in order to prove himself, because his parents aren't old-line superheroes. Both his mother and father had certain abilities, but they were also born during the meta-human 'boom', making them rather un-unique. He feels like he has to make up for that.
"Oh, I'm sorry, were you reading that?" Tommy mocks, his pale face twisted in an ugly expression of false sympathy. "Must be because you'll never do any of those things!" Hope smiles to herself, thinks of the day in the hospital when Bruce died: No Tommy, not me, she thinks.
"Leave me alone."
"Leave her alooone, hear that? You're such a crybaby, you'd never know your father was Superman," This time it isn't Tommy but his friend, another boy named Matt. Matt, unlike Tommy, can claim some old-line heritage: his grand-father was Oliver Queen, his grand-mother Dinah Lance.
"Well maybe he really isn't, right?" This input comes from Sarah, a girl with strange, unattractive gray hair (as far as Hope knows, she has some limited—very limited—telekinetic abilities). Even while the girl, whose face is sort of mouse-like, implies such a thing about Hope's family, she looks over her shoulder, obviously afraid that she'd be caught at it. They all laughed timid, nervous laughs, making sure that their parents wouldn't hear them. Hope rolls her eyes climbs out of the tree, making sure to do so even slower and more carefully that a regular human would, because it irritates them that she doesn't use her powers—they think that in doing so, she's trying to make out that she's better than them.
And while I am, she thinks to herself, that's not why.
"Batman?" Tommy sneers, and before she can snatch up what remains of her comic, the boy has sprung out in front of her, brandishing the burnt thing in front of her eyes. "What a joke!" Though she knows it's what he wants, what each of them wants (even Elliot, the quiet one at the furthest end of their pack), Hope feels her hands tighten in anger. Though he may not be too clever, Tommy's eyes are sharp—they pick out the tension in her body even as she fights to release it.
"Give me the comic, Tommy." She does not look at him yet, feels the words hiss out from between her clamped jaws. Give her a few years, and she will have the tone down, the Don't-Fuck-With-Me command under her belt with along with a million others. Now, however, the boy Tommy and his friends laugh, and he dances another step out of reach, though Hope hasn't moved a muscle. She knows, by this point, that she's lost.
"I mean, it's pretty funny, really. How everyone used to treat him like he was something really great, someone really powerful, and all he ever was, was just another human in a world of humans." Matt laughs, jittery and nervous—the other two are too afraid to even do that.
"That's pretty tough talk, Tommy." Hope snickers, laughing in a dark way that causes the boys voice to falter. Because that's all this is: talk. And none of you would dare say this around the adults, because you know the respect your parents have for him, Hope thinks to herself, knowing that it would be best to just walk away. Very suddenly, however, she finds that she can't just walk away, doesn't want to leave without at least shaming them. "Your mother know you speak like that?"
"Don't you talk about my mother," He chokes out, fists clenched. Hope can see that they are smoking,
Hope knows that his taunts are based on his own insecurity, and she doesn't care. Why should I have to care? She asks herself. There is a moment where she is captured by the lure of self-pity: that she should always be forced to act more responsible than her peers, that she has always been treated older than she is, expected to be more than her age. I'm tired of being the prodigal-freaking-child! She knows that it would be better, more mature, for her to forgive Tommy his fault—but that is now the last thing that she wants to do.
What Hope wants to do, is to cut him as deeply as she can.
She tries her hand at wrenching the raw nerves of the boy's emotions.
"I guess you would feel like you have to settle scores with a man who's served the Justice League longer than both your parents combined," Hope isn't quite sure if this is true, but relishes the look of astonished hate on the boys face. "I mean, I just suppose that it goes with being a part of, well, your kind." The three of Tommy's friends stand stock still, unsure of what has just happened, knowing that Hope has turned the tables, and not knowing what to do about it. They watch their appointed leader, Tommy the pyrokinetic, with their mouths ajar.
"Take it back," He grunts, and Hope smiles, looks up at him for the first time. From under her wild dark hair two pale, chilling eyes peer out, her mouth twisted into a terrible smirk.
"No."
There is a pause, and then Tommy bolts at her—predictable, the way a bull would charge. Hope does not use her powers, but merely steps out of the way; while she does this, her hands come up quick and sharp, catching the boy's wrists and wrenching them up towards his shoulder blades. With a sharp cry of pain and confusion, the extra momentum carries him to the ground, with Hope quickly following, pulling his arms so far up that she wonders how much farther it would take to break them. Tommy hits the ground with enough force to knock the wind out of himself, and writhes there, trying to lessen the pain in his arms and shoulders.
The others, for all their talk, do nothing at first.
Then a terrible, ear-splitting noise seems to rise in the air around then, and Hope's grip loosens. She turns only in time to see Matt's mouth open, and his arms pull her away from his friend. Damn your mother and damn hers and hers, she has time to think, but cannot defend herself—the noise was too disorientating, and for a moment she thought she may pass out. Matt stopped, and lifted her away from Tommy, holding her firm.
If you use your powers, you can be out of this, Hope tells herself. But she won't use them, tells herself that she won't. If Bruce Wayne never needed them to be Batman, then why should she need them? She knows, however, that this is perhaps skewed logic, not a road she wants to go down.
Tommy cusses as he stands, wiping blood away from a cut lip. The harsh words sound comical coming from his young mouth, and his bright eyes flash when he sees her. Hope can tell that none of them are really sure of what to do: they had not expected this, had not expected her to retaliate—thought that she'd just take there taunts for another day and that they'd be back eating cake and drinking fruit punch in no time.
"So when is Batman going to just give up and kick it, huh?" Again, Hope feels her anger rising, knows that she should just laugh in Tommy's face, and can't. You can't control what pushes your buttons, Hope, she tries to console herself. But that doesn't mean that she shouldn't try, does it? Still, she knows that she can't fight that anger because, honestly, she doesn't want to. For one of the few times in her life she is angry at something that she can deal with, and with that kind of focus, her anger is stronger, a force that is hard to deny. "The man must be nearly a hundred by now."
Hope knows that the kid doesn't know what he is saying, doesn't understand that weight of it, but she can't bring herself to forgive him his words. Images of Bruce Wayne on a hospital bed, Bruce Wayne struggling for breath, Bruce Wayne dead, a shell—it is impossible for her to forgive that. She elbows Matt's gut hard and fast, finds it difficult to dumb her powers down, increasingly harder to stay at a human level. The boy is holding her tight, and though her hit hurts him, it isn't enough to make him let go.
"You're pathetic, you're nothing!" Hope snarls at the boy in front of her. Tommy still has blood dripping down his chin, and his teeth are stained red when he smiles, a sharks grin.
"Really though, someone should just put the old man out of his misery," Tommy hisses. Hope can feel Matt's stomach clench, hears his heart beating faster: the others are scared now, know that this has gone beyond just a children's game.
"Come on Tom, maybe we should just lay off this. It's stupid, someone's going to get hurt," Matt says, and his arms loosen around Hope.
"So what? Then I'll be known as the one who beat Superman's kid-"
"You can't believe that Tommy. You can't be serious." Matt's voice is shocked, worried. He lets go of Hope completely, as if to say that he will have no more part in it.
"You heard him," Hope growls, her lips pulled back in a fierce smile. "Tommy really just wants a piece of Superman. Little boy wants to prove himself." Tommy dives for her, and again she moves just in time, feeling the air sizzle as he passes. "For all that talk about Batman, he's gotten closer to that mark than you certainly ever will."
Hope watches Tommy's lanky body spin, watches his hands come up, engulfed in flames. Without thinking, as fire swallows her body, the girl shields herself. The reaction is unconscious, a self-preserving instinct, and it does indeed save her from being burned. The other children scream at Tommy, unable to comprehend that their leader of sorts is actually out for blood this time. In that moment, they see Hope (shining brilliant and bathed in flames) for what she is: the prodigal child, possibly the most powerful being to be born here on home-team Earth. Her body is protected by a glowing, a shield made from life itself as the sunlight (and nearby, less-rooted plants) each bend towards her, around her, impenetrable. The flames burn at nothing but air around her, licking and grasping at her limbs without success.
Elliot and Sarah turn without hesitation, run (Hope later finds that they were unable to tell the adults what had happened for fear of Tommy). Matt is paralyzed, cannot intervene and cannot run and follow his other companions. Hope sees the world through a curtain of fire, making everything look rinsed orange. Her hair rises, as if weightless, tossed by non-existent wind. She smiles, shakes her head, and walks towards Tommy. Perhaps he realizes what he is doing, or perhaps he just realizes how ineffective it is; the flames die. Hope's hands find the collar of his T-shirt, and lift the boy effortlessly; close-up, he is hardly taller than she is, and when she isn't busy acting human, she is much stronger. Without really thinking, without trying, she is pulling the life out of him slowly—the boy feels like his chest is collapsing in on itself.
"Don't joke about death," Hope whispers to him, the way a lover might whisper to her partner, but underneath the feigned sweetness of it is plenty sickened, stomach-twisting bitterness—the muscles of her preteen body glisten, and her skin is full of light. She releases him (maybe realizing herself that this is not a road that she wants to start down) and he falls on his skinny knees before her. With pale hands his grasps the ground, digging his pale fingers into the singed earth, concentrating on breathing. "Batman was saving lives before you were even thought of, and he will still be here long after you're gone, I promise you."
And it is a promise that she makes to him.
She promises this also to herself.
Images come to her then, and whether they are the products of imagination or some kind of premonition, she does now know. Hope sees herself older, stronger, wild—Bruce Wayne is human, only human, and if she wants to bestow her life unto him, he is little more than powerless to stop her. She sees Bruce struggling, being made to accept youth, kept from aging—from ever growing old. Her stomach wrenches at the thought of forcing him into anything, and hot tears bite at the corners of her eyes, though she does not cry.
Bruce
Wayne will not die.
I
will make sure of it.
