"Not. A. Word," Bakuda growled in her tinny supervillain voice.

She carried three gallon Ziploc bags in one gloved hand and what appeared to be a grenade launcher in the other. The rest of her costume was splattered in gore. Her red goggles were flecked with a darker red, and her bodysuit was crusted in that same red, as well as a palette of other streaks.

The grenade launcher was deposited on her kitchen counter with a clunk. Bakuda dropped the bags on the desk next to Weld.

"What the fuck did you do?" Weld asked, when he finally got over his shock.

His mind raced through a million gruesome possibilities. Bakuda wasn't the type to mow through civilians, was she? He didn't think so. Which meant she probably fought other capes.

Was it the Protectorate? Had more of his Wards gotten caught in the crossfire? What if she had gone after civilians? It wasn't hard to provoke her into a rage, as Weld had learned after a few hours with her.

"Don't get your panties in a twist," she answered, doing nothing to assuage Weld's fears. She punctuated the statement by hiking up her bomb-laden belt. The motion only elicited a wince of discomfort. "Fuck, I got to go. Blasto is one motherfucker, I can tell you that. Who would've thought a pussy like him…"

She trailed off as she disappeared into her bedroom. Her bloody leggings and shirt were hurled out of the open doorway a few minutes later.

Weld sighed in relief. Blasto wasn't a bad guy, but he was a better target than any of the heroes. He never participated in fights himself, preferring to send monsters and mutants to do his bidding. If he did die in a conflict with Bakuda...Weld frowned. Blasto was a criminal, but he was a human being. He didn't deserve that.

Weld and Gigi had argued that point too many times. The last argument was more memorable than most, considering it was the only time they had truly fought. Gigi had started the argument by hurling a table across the Wards' common room. Things had only escalated from there.

"I'm going to fucking kill him!"

The table crashed against the wall with enough force to split it in half. Gigi stomped over to the couch and kicked it with her boot. On the first try, her foot rebounded off a cushion. With the next blow, it was sent skidding across the floor.

Weld, just entering the room, caught the sofa before it could hit the wall. He pushed it out of his way, more so Gigi could see the disapproval writ across his metal body than because it posed any obstacle to him.

Without any other furniture nearby to vent her frustrations on, Gigi turned on Weld.

"Not a word," she snarled at him. "You don't get to say a fucking word! Because he got away, and you didn't do a fucking thing!"

"Gigi," Weld said. "We can't interrupt due process. If the judge saw fit to let him walk—"

"Fuck the judge!" Gigi spat. "Fuck the process. Fuck all of that. That same process got the poor girl into his filthy hands in the first place!"

"I know this was important to you—"

"You don't know shit, Weld," Gigi told him. "Okay? You don't get to say that. You got Armstrong. You got the PRT. You got justice, don't you get how rare that is? That girl, the poor fucking girl, she got the goddamn foster system. No one's paying her a wage and a college fund and a fucking pension, okay?"

She hurled the belt from her costume to the floor.

"No one is holding her hand and patting her back. So shut the fuck up about what you know and don't know. Maybe you weren't born yesterday but it sure as hell wasn't long ago, and you don't know shit."

Weld kept his gaze fixed on Gigi. His voice was hard. "You're upset. I get that. I know this whole case seems too close to home, but not everyone is like that, okay?"

"Fuck off, Weld!" Gigi crossed the room in two bounds, aiming to kick a hole through the comms console.

Weld caught her by the wrist, swinging her around into his chest so her momentum hit him full force instead. He grabbed her other wrist and pinned her there. It only took half a second for her to recover from the shock. Then she nailed him in the gut with her elbow, full force. Her arm bounced off with a clang.

"Gigi, let it go," Weld growled in her ear.

"No, you let go!" Her power charged through her voice.

Before Weld could even think it through, he complied, pushing her away from him to land on her knees. He didn't feel any pain, but he did feel strangely empty in that moment.

Gigi was back on her feet in a heartbeat. "Stop fucking with me, Weld. Stop bossing me the fuck around. You can't be the leader and the lovestruck idiot, so just fucking stop!"

Weld floundered, and Gigi dashed toward him. She rammed him with her shoulder, but he weighed over six hundred pounds. For all her strength, she barely ranked as a Brute like him. He slid back an inch, maybe, before stopping.

But she was fast too. Weld hadn't even seen her grab the extension cord, but he saw it as it flew around him like a lasso. The metal plug fused to the side of his neck. Then Gigi dashed in the opposite direction. Weld wasn't a physics buff, but he was pretty sure that if Gigi couldn't even push him, she probably couldn't pull him.

In this case, he underestimated just exactly how her powers worked. "Scaling momentum" was what the PRT file said, but that did not do them justice. It wasn't just the combined strength and speed of an A-List cape hauling on him; it felt like gravity was working against him too, pulling him to his knees.

Then Gigi was coming at him again. Her first blow almost dented his torso. Her second was a roundhouse kick to the face.

The metal tip of her boot caught on Weld's cheekbone, and it was all over. Gigi's only choices were to dangle helplessly from his face or to embrace him and make her way down.

She chose the latter. Any other Ward might have a hard time clambering up and back down Weld's six foot figure, but not Gigi. Weld wrapped his arms around her as she pried her boot free, preventing her from falling.

Before he knew it, their foreheads were touching, and her hot breaths were flushing his cheeks with condensation. Her legs wrapped around his waist like they belonged there.

They did, to an extent. He'd molded his body to hers on more than one occasion.

"Gigi," Weld began, breaking the heavy silence between them.

"Shut the fuck up, Weld," Gigi breathed, and then she was kissing him.

Gigi's mouth sealed over his own. Weld's tongue brushed against her lips once, twice, and then he was probing the inside of her mouth. Gigi squealed with delight. She loved that. She'd claimed that his cold and ever so flexible tongue was the closest they could get to tentacle play.

Her hand clapped over the rigid outline of his dick. Weld grunted, but it was out of surprise rather than pain. Gigi's fingers moved a mile a minute, strumming over his tented crotch like a rock star.

He dug his hands into her ass in return. It was firm, testament to years of hard exercise, but it still jiggled tantalizingly. His metal fingers flexed, then stretched, extending just a bit so he could take her whole ass in his hands.

Gigi groaned, pulling away from the kiss. "Fuck me, Weld. I need it now, please."

"We're in the common room," he told her, scandalized. "Anyone could walk in. Anyone could look in with barely any warning."

"I'm fast," Gigi purred. "Where's your sense of adventure, hunk? I knew you've got one somewhere…"

Her fingers trailed up the length of his cock, straining against pants that were supposed to be baggy. He shivered, not from her touch, but from her voice. It was dripping with desire.

Weld spun around and tossed her on the displaced couch. Gigi let out a squeak before Weld pressed his mouth against hers. His fingertips narrowed, jabbed into the front of her shirt like scalpels, and then pried it open with a tear of fabric.

"Weld!"

"Like you said, we do it fast," he said. He smirked down at her. "Besides, we're right by the door, thanks to you."

"You bastard," she hissed.

Weld caught her nipples between his fingers, pinching and caressing them until they stood on end. She moaned, voice rising in volume as he touched her.

"You bastard. Come on and fuck me already."

Weld savaged her shirt, leaving the shreds to hang from the tight waistband of her leggings. He gazed at her perfect breasts. They were perky, her light brown skin flushed red with lust.

His eyes trailed up, taking in her slender neck, delicate chin, pouty lips, dizzy eyes. Her hair was always a bit wild, but it was a total fucking mess right now. Weld liked that.

He kissed his way down her heaving breasts, past her smooth belly and her waspish waist, over the dewy landing strip of her mound. He stopped at her clit.

"Please, Weld, please," Gigi begged. "Fucking do it to me."

Weld rose from his position at her dripping pussy. He towered over her, and when he released his cock from the confines of his pants, it seemed that much bigger.

The shaft was like burnished steel, its smoothness broken by criss-crossing veins. As Gigi watched, the veins became even more defined, to the point of exaggeration. Even he was done, his cock looked more like a dildo than a penis, eight perfect inches of promise.

Gigi almost went cross-eyed when she saw it.

"God, you're so fucking sexy," she cooed. She sat up to take him in her hands, but Weld pushed her back down. Gigi only giggled at the rough play. "What's the hold up, captain?"

"Stay," he growled. Then, "good girl."

He moved slowly, as if they hadn't done this a hundred times already, rubbing his cock along her folds. Gigi mewled with pleasure. Weld had pressed his head against her hot, needy entrance, slowly pushing his way in…

"Well aren't you quite the fucking hero," Bakuda interrupted.

Weld shot her a glare. She looked over at him innocently, blue eyes peering over the large lenses of her reading glasses.

"What's the matter? Credit where it's due, right? And man, you've got the whole package. Don't eat, don't sleep. Biological and chemical agents don't seem to work on you…"

Bakuda held up a half-empty spray bottle and gave it a little shake. Weld blinked. Where had that come from?

"I would kill for some of the shit on your profile," Bakuda told him. She jabbed a finger at her notes. "And what do you do? You spend all your time running the Protectorate's errands. Yes sir, no sir. For fuck's sake."

"And you think that's a waste of time?" Weld asked, bitterness creeping into his voice.

Bakuda tossed her notebook across the desk. "I think it's fucking lame, Painless Steel. I think you're a goddamn idiot for doing it. And yeah, I guess I'd have to say that it's a waste of fucking time too."

"And you?" Weld shot back. "You beat me, seemingly without trying. You've evaded the Protectorate for days after capturing one of their own. You beat Blasto, apparently, maybe even killed him. Clearly, you're good at this. And yet all of this effort, all these resources, all this time and energy...for what? Who does it help? What's the benefit? What's the point?"

"First of all, for exactly what you just said," Bakuda replied. She shot to her feet, tipping her chair over in her haste. "You think I'm good? I'm the goddamn best. I'm so much better than the best they'll have to make new words to describe me."

She paced, growing angrier as she spoke.

"But I'm also a fucking dropout nobody in one of the most populous cape cities in the world. The only people who seem to get it are me and maybe you. So all this effort, all this bullshit—" she gave Weld's cage a kick, "—the cell and the bombs and the fights? I'd do it to every single person in this city to get the respect I deserve. Until all of them look me in the eyes like you and admit that, yeah, I'm just that fucking good."

"And the people? They don't matter to you, aside from existing as another voice to praise you?" Weld said.

Bakuda sneered. "Who gives a fuck about people? I'm a goddamn nuclear warhead. I was raised from birth to be a weapon, capiche? Maybe not to kill or to fight, but to take down and strategically eliminate anyone who got in my way."

She jabbed a finger at the wall to Weld's right. He had studied it a bit yesterday. Trophies, plaques, awards for all kinds of academic excellence. He'd assumed it belonged to whatever poor saps lived here before Bakuda waltzed in.

"I'm smart," Bakuda said, her voice steely. "I work hard. I bust my fucking ass. If the people don't get that, then they're just in the way."

Weld shook his head. "And that's that? That's all there is to it? Just a bloody road to personal glory?"

"No," Bakuda replied smugly. She reached into her desk and raised a small plastic baggie. "Second of all, I scored a metric fuckton of weed from the mother of all treehuggers."

She propped her chair back up, seated herself, and resumed her frenzied tinkering.