To Butterfly: I like Barkk. Barkk is a good doggy.
To StarDaPanda225: It's amazing what happens when you actually make human connections!
To yellow 14: The character relationships get to be very dynamic in this story, particularly with Bri and Felix. Hopefully those changes always feel natural!
To Lyger 0: Honestly, that's probably exactly how the conversation went! And knowing Adrien/Marinette, their answer was probably something along the lines of "Take what you need – and would you like a couple hundred croissants for the road?"
"How is the tea, dear?"
"It's fine."
"Can I get you something more for breakfast? Eggs? Yogurt?"
"No. Thank you, though."
"How is your head feeling?"
"It's still sore, but it doesn't ache the way it did. I think the painkillers finally kicked in."
Felix took another sip of his coffee, the bacon and eggs forgotten on his plate. Iron Maiden continued to eat slowly, mechanically, staring at the plate in front of her and its dwindling pile of croissants. With the way she was eating them, he supposed it was good that he had brought back so many. She stopped mid-bite, her hand drifting up to brush her bandaged cheek. The monster had bitten her. Surely that hadn't been part of his modus operandi months ago when Felix first encountered him, had it?
When he had found Iron Maiden the night before, she had been covered in blood, shivering in the chill air, and he had felt an overwhelming surge of protectiveness toward his friend. When she had told him what had happened, he had expected to feel rage at the monster who had done something like this to his partner. On finding out who the monster was, however, the only emotion he had felt was guilt – a feeling that had yet to go away even now, nearly twelve hours later.
But sitting at the table wasn't about to change that feeling. He had to do something. He finally downed the last dregs of his now-lukewarm coffee. With a glance at his watch, he let out a resigned sigh, scooped up Barkk, deposited her into his breast pocket, and rose from the table. "I'm going for a run," he announced to no one in particular.
"Be careful, dear!" his mother called too-cheerfully. Iron Maiden didn't raise her eyes from the dwindling number of croissants in front of her, though her shoulders tensed. She shrank down into her new sweatshirt, closing herself off.
"Always," Felix replied emotionlessly.
The moment they were out of the dining room, Barkk flitted back out of his pocket to hover in front of his face, staring at him. "You didn't think this would happen," the Kwami pointed out quietly, fixing her large eyes on Felix.
It always shocked him how perceptive she could be. "No, I didn't," he agreed bitterly as he made his way to their Hero Study. "So what kind of moron does that make me? I should have realised that something like this would happen if he escaped. I mean, he's a serial-killing rapist; did I think he would just call it quits and crawl back into his hole, count himself lucky that I hadn't thrown him in jail and thrown away the key?"
"You were inexperienced," Barkk reminded him calmly. "You didn't know what you were doing. All my holders have struggled at times. Do you think the Hound was a war hero right off the bat? He suffered defeats. He lost friends. He had moments when he doubted. He almost gave up right at the outset of the Blitz when his fiancée was killed by a collapsing building."
Felix placed his thumb on the door-mounted reader and the lock clicked open. A settee sat against the far wall alongside the desk with his mother's computer and a police radio. A street map of London and the surrounding area covered half the wall. The wall opposite the map held two portal rings. The larger of the two connected to the main Heroes of Paris portal network and would take him to their Headquarters. The smaller and newer portal ring was paired with the collapsing ring in Felix's Eton dorm room and the ring in Iron Maiden's workshop – Pegasus' first trial run of rings without a single hub. An empty space showed where the couch had been, though they had removed it last night after it had gotten stained with Iron Maiden's blood.
Felix's mouth set in a thin line. He could still see the rivulets of blood running down Iron Maiden's sides, pooling in the cushions. With each cut that his mother had bandaged, it seemed that another one had made itself known. The wound on the back of Iron Maiden's head had gotten stuck to the pillow before they realized it was even there. It had taken time to peel it off so they could bandage her scalp. The cuts around her chest had drawn his attention over and over with how precise they appeared – not random, but intentional. But why? It was yet another mystery to pair with all the others surrounding this monster. Felix placed his hand on the palm reader next to the smaller ring and selected his destination. The portal activated, and Felix stepped through into Iron Maiden's workshop.
The sunlight filtering through the window near the ceiling revealed a pristine working surface, all of the tools hung in their designated spots on the corkboard behind the workbench. The Iron Maiden suit in the middle of the room gleamed brightly in the light. Barkk hid in Felix's pocket as he unlocked the side door and slipped out. The alleyway was deserted as he made his way down to the Strand. At the sight of the small patch of blood in the centre of the alley, meters from the Strand, his stomach turned over and he clenched his jaw in anger. The edge of the alley was unpaved, so he kicked some gravel over the bloodstain to hide it. With that out of the way, he stepped around the pockmark where Iron Maiden had melted the pavement and merged into the midmorning foot traffic.
Partway down the street he came to a newsstand and, on a whim, stopped to look at the headlines. He was just about to walk away when a headline near the fold on the Times caught his interest. "'Ripper attack'?"
The vendor gave him a surprised look. "Oh, yeah, happened last night, and a brutal thing it was, too. Girl from one of the colleges; poor thing was barely recognisable after the monster was through with her. Happened a few blocks from here, down by the river."
"Damn," Felix muttered, tossing a couple coins to the vendor and taking the paper. Stepping out of the way of the passersby, he leaned against the newsstand, flicked the paper open, and proceeded to read. Sure enough, there was a picture of a girl with sandy blonde hair just below the fold – a recent picture from her social media; according to the caption the police had refused to share any crime scene photos because of the grisly nature of the attack. But according to an eyewitness the reporter revelled in quoting, the girl's face had been caved in, her chest cut open, and her breasts entirely removed. Felix hurriedly skimmed the rest of the article, his eyes widening and jaw falling open in horror as he read, before he crumpled the newspaper in one fist. His walk entirely forgotten, Felix raced pell-mell back down the alley to the workshop, nearly skidding on new the gravel patch he had created. In moments he was back at the Manor and rocketing up the stairs to his own room.
"What's wrong?" demanded Barkk, phasing out of his pocket and flying full-out next to him to keep up.
"Fuck me!" Felix cursed as he grabbed his tablet and pulled a notebook out of a desk drawer. "Has the Ripper ever made two attacks in a night before?" he demanded.
The Kwami furrowed her brows and tapped her chin with one paw before shaking her head. "I don't think so," she admitted. "But normally his attacks are successful."
"But not always," Felix pointed out, opening the program that Iron Maiden had written months ago to track Stripper Ripper attacks. The opening image was a map of London covered in red dots to show the locations of his attacks. They still hadn't figured out a pattern to the attacks; while the first several had happened in Whitechapel, the Ripper had quickly expanded beyond the original Jack the Ripper's hunting ground to target London as a whole. Even the clusters of attacks within the same neighbourhood couldn't give them a pattern; as often as not those attacks were weeks apart, separated by other attacks in other districts. Every time he had thought he might be onto something, an outlier had appeared. And despite the Heroes of Paris' police contact having convinced the London Police Department to give them access to all of the police's information on the Ripper, they were no closer to finding a pattern.
Not until now.
Felix switched the view to a table with the chronological list of Ripper attacks. They had begun slow, separated by several weeks, before the first time he had made two attacks in a week. Then he had gone to ground for two weeks before resuming his attacks. He tapped on the third attack, one that the police had kept out of the papers. "See this one?" he asked Barkk, making a notation in his notebook. "Rose Kelly was attacked leaving a club by an unknown assailant matching the Ripper's description, but she escaped when a club patron stepped into the alleyway to take a piss." He went back to the other list. "But the next attack didn't happen until three days later."
"Maybe that attack wasn't the Ripper," pointed out Barkk, raising an eyebrow. "It could have just been mixed in with the others by coincidence."
"Maybe," Felix mused, scrolling down further and making a few more notes. "But the Fay Millwood attack was absolutely the Ripper. And the next Ripper attack didn't happen until two weeks later."
"You did sprain his ankle that night," Barkk noted. "He probably wasn't in any shape to make another attack."
"But from what our Maiden said, she gave the Ripper a hell of a fight to drive him away last night, too, every bit as severe as anything we did to him," Felix argued. "He can't have been in a very good shape to carry out another attack so soon after Iron Maiden zapped him. Yet he still went out and found another victim." Felix sighed heavily. "Something about making a successful attack last night was important to him."
After another two hours of searching, checking and rechecking his information, Felix finally had what he was looking for. His jaw set in distaste, he grabbed his now-full notebook and trudged down the stairs. He found his mother sitting in the main sitting room off the entryway and reading a book. She looked up and smiled when he entered, though with some strain around her lips. She set her book aside and clasped her hands in her lap. "What's wrong, dear?"
He looked around the room in some surprise. "Where is Iron Maiden?"
"She went back to bed after you left," his mother explained. "I thought it best to let her rest for as long as she needs."
Felix nodded, sighing heavily. "Probably wise… with what I found."
Her eyes widened. "What did you find?"
"There's a pattern," he explained, the words leaving a sour taste in his mouth. Just saying them out loud made the reality of his failure more present, more real. "Not for the earlier attacks," he added quickly. "Or at least not that I can find. It's just the recent ones, starting about six weeks ago. Between the times and the locations, he has adopted a definite pattern now." He placed the notebook on the table and opened it to a map he'd sketched out. "Before then he was attacking once or twice a week. He raped the victim, killed her, and then eviscerated her post-mortem. Since then, however his attacks have changed. He still carries out the same actions, but in the opposite order. The attacks have become more regular, two to four days apart. The location has narrowed down: they've all been in the same area, either in the City of London west of St. Paul's or within a kilometre or so west of Chancery. The alley where I found Iron Maiden last night was almost the farthest west that he's struck in that time frame."
"Are you certain of this?" his mother wondered, furrowing her brows suspiciously. "How could the police have missed a pattern like this?"
Felix closed his eyes. "Because we've all been considering every attack together, not looking for a change in his pattern. As far as the police are concerned, nothing really changed: he went on a spree for a few weeks, took a few weeks off, and picked up again where he'd left off, only with even greater brutality. He's gone this long in a particular area before moving on in the past, so why make note of it when each one could be his last in this area? They had no reason to think his modus operandi had changed, or that there was a specific cause for the change."
His mother cocked her head in confusion.
"His last hiatus coincided with the last time he had a failed attack," he explained bitterly. "It was only after I fought him and allowed him to escape that he changed tactics. That was when he became so much more brutal, when his area narrowed down, all of it. It's all my fault. Because I went to fight Mecha-Man instead of finishing the job with the Ripper."
A gasp came from the doorway behind him. Felix spun around to find Iron Maiden staring at him in wide-eyed shock.
