Thank you to everyone who has been reading this story! I did not expect such a positive response :)
RenkonNairu: Thank you for your review! I can understand your view on the Will/Layla ship. I felt they worked well for the purposes of this story, though I don't have strong feelings either way on the two of them. I hope you enjoy this chapter!
Disclaimer: Still no ownership of Sky High for me. Just Mira and my plot :)
She doesn't really admit that she loves him until she gets a phone call in the middle of March, and she can hear him panting as he says,
"Mira, I'm going to be late for dinner, I have to save -" and then all she can hear is an ugly squelching sound, and a scream, and a clatter as the phone falls, and someone laughs, and she's blinked before she even knows what she's doing.
It takes her five hours to find out where Warren is, and to bike there, since she can't use the television to figure out where the latest villain attack is. They're usually downtown, so that's where she tries first. It's not until she sees the smoke frozen in the sky that she realizes he was going to dive into a burning building to save someone. It's a good trap for a hero who can light himself on fire. It's also something that she can't help with.
Fire is still fire, whether stopped in time or not.
Her mother can run so fast time slows down for her, but she can jump through flames without being burnt because of how fast she is going. She can even run on water, if she concentrates hard enough.
Mira can't do any of that.
But she can find her boyfriend, and pull out her gun, and shoot the laughing, costumed megalomaniac in both his shoulders and his knees. She can drag Warren to safety and triage his wounds - he'll have a nasty bruise tomorrow on his shoulder and his wrist, but it looks like nothing was broken, and his arm protected his head from the worst of the bat-swing. The phone is nearly shattered there on the pavement, though, and there are shards of glass imbedded in the skin of Warren's face. It lights a cold fury in Mira, and she ends the moment only so she can see the pain on the villain's face as he realizes he's just been shot four times.
She takes Warren into the next moment, barely a second later, and the villain is still in the process of collapsing onto the pavement.
Her boyfriend groans, but does not hesitate to get up and change into his suit - she sighs, but helps him when his arm seizes up.
"Thanks, Mira," he says, giving her a bone-crushing hug. He doesn't comment on the bat-wielding villain, or on the gun in her hand. He does look at the building, calculating how many civilians are still in there, and how many he can get out before it collapses on top of him.
"I can hold it," she says, shrugging. "Go save them all. Just be careful - the flames won't be doing any damage, but your feet will."
He doesn't say anything, but she can see him smile underneath his mask. She breathes his non-burnt scent in deep, then lets him go.
She watches him walk into the burning building, and deliberately turns away, busying herself by digging the bullets out of the villain's body and washing them off, walking them to four different trash cans at least three blocks from each other. She also pulls off the villain's mask and ties him to his own bat, hand and foot, and only then throws away her surgical gloves.
She hates him more than she ever hated anyone, even Speed, even her stepfather, even the man who assaulted her. He made her listen as he tried to kill her boyfriend - and this is when she realizes, oh shit, she loves him.
Deflated, she sits on a curb and watches Warren line the citizens up outside the building, gently putting them on the ground like sleeping children. Shit.
She loves him.
She forgets the villain, forgets the gun in her hand, forgets the blood on the ground and the phone that was destroyed. She just watches him save people, one by one by one, slowly, methodically, immune to the heat and the smoke and the flames. He gets them all out, even the animals, even a bowl of panicked fish.
And then he takes a step back, looks at his handiwork, and sighs. He takes his mask off and she doesn't close the moment until he's just another victim, curled up on the ground, clutching his phone, and she's just a spectator taking a shortcut through a blind alley.
They're a good team, she thinks, as she watches him give a statement to the police. They're saying it was supers - how could it not be, when this clown of a villain is glaring at the paramedics like it's going out of style?
The news doesn't know who it was, though, to shoot Killer Klown in the knees and save fifty two people from a burning building within a split second. It might have been the Black Dragon, they say, he's the only one in the area who can walk into a burning building and come out unscathed - or it might have been someone else.