incident 00526
bne inprog 1173 roland av
e88 suspected, no capes sighted
shots fired
Victoria pocketed her phone. Not exactly what the doctor ordered. She and Rachel had been running low on funds before tonight, and now they had yet more dogs to care for. That meant they needed more food, more medicine, more toys and beds, and more gas for the generators. Mom had been tapering her allowance enough to matter and beating up gang members didn't pay for supplies the way busting their stash houses and drug ops did. Still, one must carry water and chop wood and all that, and knocking Nazis to the pavement was fulfilling work. She lifted off from the corner where she and Taylor had parted ways and followed a loose course towards the south edge of the city.
Taylor had turned out to be a pleasant surprise, though Victoria wasn't sure if the emphasis there was on 'pleasant' or 'surprise'. She was about as reserved as Rachel and only barely said more, but she could actually keep a conversation going with it and seemed content to let Victoria ramble from time to time. Plus, she'd seen to Rachel's leg while the fighting was still happening, so she either kept a level head or did an admirable job of faking it. And even if she was as resilient as she believed, it said a lot that she'd jumped in to fight Fenrir in the first place.
Victoria wasn't so short-sighted as to miss that the girl was a bundle of issues, though. Most capes were, sure, but if gender complications had been the sum of hers, she wouldn't have reacted to Victoria's aura the way she had. There'd been a particular sort of defiance in her posture up against that warehouse wall, something cold and vindictive undercutting the base terror. Victoria knew that, prior to making the connection between her powers and identity, Taylor's instincts had categorized her as a surrogate tormentor. She'd watched herself do something similar enough times to recognize it.
As the tight urban grid of downtown gave way to imitation suburbia's awkward sprawl beneath her, she hoped for less days worrying about making hidden ends meet and more chances to unwind and do what she did best. A new ally would open up opportunities to take on the scum of the bay, and a new friend could help stave off the weight of loneliness. All she had to do was make sure her own ignorance didn't drive Taylor away.
The west-most houses, those closest to the new industrial areas, were smaller, simpler than the others. Older too, though not so aged as to be called historical. Just enough that they switched hands more by inheritance than by sale. Single-story, faded paint, loose shrubbery, patches of brown here and there on the strips of lawn. Typically, this was one of the quieter parts of Brockton, an easy fly-by on the way to patrol Empire territory.
Not so, tonight.
The sound of a gunshot saved her the trouble of checking house numbers. She closed in on one with a sedan in the driveway and a pickup peeling off the lawn, its flat rear tire slapping the pavement. A middle-aged man in a robe with dark skin and a shotgun strode out the busted-in door and loosed another shot, this time denting the bumper. "Not here!" He shouted, lowering the gun. "Not now, not ever!"
That was all the confirmation she needed. She swooped down to street level and caught up to the truck. With a crushing grip on the bumper she pulled back, arresting its momentum. She caught the eyes of three rattled Empire mooks through the rear window and wished they could see her grin behind the mask. The one driving tried to swerve her off but found he no longer had the speed to. She lifted the back end off the ground and brought the whole thing to a halt. The intact tire spun uselessly while the other flopped to about as much effect.
"So," she called over the engine's growl, "do you want to get out now, or do I have to shake you all out of there like the last racist chips in the bag?"
"Fuck off, cunt," replied the gentleman in the passenger seat. "This's none of your fucking business!"
Happy to oblige their enthusiasm, she yanked the back end higher. The Nazis, having evidently ignored proper road safety considerations in their rush to leave, were thrown forward out of their seats. The driver hit the horn with his torso, and as though cued the three scrambled out of the front end. One made a run for it, clutching a broken arm. Another tried, though his limp hindered his success.
The driver, though, he got brave. He whipped a pistol out from his military surplus jacket and managed to fit one pull of the trigger in the span between her dropping the truck and her careening fist-first into his jaw. The shot shattered her forcefield so she had to manage the punch on her own cultivated strength. His teeth skinned her knuckles. She bit back a grunt at the sting and caught his gun arm before he could attempt a close-quarters shot. Her forcefield returned and, with a flight-assisted toss, she threw him into the limping guy. The two collapsed into a heap.
The handgun clattered onto the street. She scooped it up, engaged the safety and wedged it into the back of her jeans. A temporary solution.
She turned her sights on piece of shit number three, who was hobbling around a street corner. A moment of flight undid all his efforts in fleeing and she knocked him to the sidewalk. He tried to break his fall but yelped in pain from his injured arm, crumpling and rolling onto his back.
She stood over him, lowering to the ground so that, from his angle, the streetlight above and behind her shone just over her head. Satisfaction swelled in her chest as his eyes widened. Even without her aura at her disposal she still knew how to inspire awe.
"L-listen," he said, holding up his good hand as if it'd stop anything, "I don't, I didn't want to do this, okay? Please- I just need the money! My family's broke, you know? What was I supposed to do?"
Looming over him now, she could see the youth in his features, contextualize the cracks in his voice. He was closer to her age than the rest, a year or two younger, with thin brown hair and an attempt at a goatee that was shitty even for a teenager. Had he picked any other path, maybe even if he'd joined the Chosen instead, she might have pitied him.
Her foot pinned his bad arm to the ground, eliciting a cry. "Not this."
"Wait!" he begged. He looked to his downed buddies up the street, then lowered his voice to a hiss. "I can tell you things! I-" He bit his lip and writhed a bit. "Fuck! They won't tell me much yet but- but I know there's something going down next week! Thursday!"
"I know," she lied, pressing down a little harder. "Now tell me something I don't or we find out how much pain you can take before passing out."
He choked on a scream. "Ghh! Ah! Purity! She's gonna be there, and Crusader too, and that uh, that guy, the one with the radio show?"
She frowned. Radio show? "Which one?"
"The one, man! The-" He snapped his fingers. "Clint! Clint something, starts with a B. You know!"
She didn't, but he'd given her enough to find out on her own. Asking for more would probably give away that she didn't actually have access to insider info. "Alright. Anything else?"
He hesitated.
She shrugged and leaned over to pick him up by the armpits. "Then we're done here."
He panicked - "Wait, no! I heard from a guy, uh, my… brother?" - but shut up when all she did was ziptie his wrists and ankles together. He whimpered when she tightened the one binding his injured arm but screwed his lips tighter as she dragged him over to his half-conscious friends.
As she tied up the other two she heard footsteps approach. When she'd finished she looked up, first at all the neighbors catching sly peeks through their blinds, then at the man in a robe and slippers walking up to her. He had his shotgun lowered by his hip, swinging with his arm as he went, eyes on the bound Nazis even as she met him halfway.
"That all you gonna do with 'em?" His voice was scratchy, though not quite rough.
She looked back to them. "Yeah. Someone already called this in. The police will take it from here."
He clucked his tongue. "And you believe that, when you say it?"
She didn't. The police presence in Brockton had been ineffectual at best for as long as she could remember. Longer than that, too, she was sure; the villain rush of the late eighties, early nineties proved as much. She didn't share Rachel's outright disdain for them but her baseline expectations were still pretty low. "This is as much as anyone can do without getting into trouble themselves. The rest isn't up to me, or you."
"Fifty-fifty chance for each one they get out in a day. BBPD's full of 'em, rats and sympathizers. Kid with the break's got an even better shot, going to the hospital for that arm. Home free by tonight, no doubt, no doubt…" He petered out into a mutter.
She didn't have a response.
His grip on the gun tightened. "There'll be more, you know. It's numbers that let them do how they do. More'll come, try to drive me out."
"Is moving an option?" she ventured.
He grit his teeth, face screwed up like she'd offered him a warm glass of sewage. "My father worked half his life away to buy that home. I spent most my life living in it. My kids grew up there. My wife died, there." The shotgun's barrel made a clicking noise as he tapped the end on the ground. "No, it's not an option."
The man's pride in his sense of family was sturdy. She wished she could empathize. "If they send more while I'm on patrol and someone calls it in, I'll come as fast as I can. That's all I can promise."
He worked the inside of his cheek between his teeth, then shook his head and started back toward his home.
She watched him step over the prone corpse of his front door before propping it up in a semblance of security. She sighed, then lifted into the air, drifting towards the heart of the bay.
It was a fortunate thing that she could still cape, but she missed being able to feel the wind in her hair.
While the world went by beneath her she turned what she'd learned over in her mind. Purity, at least one of her lieutenants… and a radio show host? That wasn't exactly a combination that spelled 'coordinated strikes' but she also doubted they were planning a simple racists' brunch. A strategy meeting, then? A recruitment drive, or maybe a rally?
Whatever the event itself might be, though, it was the timing that most unsettled her. Next Thursday was the fifteenth of September, a date recognized nationwide - if not worldwide - as an annual period of armistice among capes. It'd been over a decade now since Behemoth and Leviathan ceased their campaign of devastation. Since Scion, the first parahuman, disappeared, never to be seen again. And by next Thursday?
Eleven years to the day since the murder of Eidolon.
Breaking that truce would be tantamount to flaunting the unwritten rules. Best-case scenario, the Empire were planning to take advantage of it to bolster their image when no one was allowed to interfere. Worst-case, they meant to shatter the precedent for a territory grab or a fight with added advantage, which would inevitably bring war down on their heads and turn her home into a battleground.
For now though, it was standing, as intact as it'd ever been. Info gathering would have to wait until tomorrow; the fatigue of a long day was creeping over her, gumming up her muscles and thoughts. Her knuckles still stung, reminding her she'd have to clean up the cuts by the morning if she didn't want to give everyone at school another reason to be afraid of her.
She was far above the city now, losing herself in the calm of the sky. When she was this high up, there were no gangs to be seen, no PRT squads harassing independents, no strangers gawking at her until she looked their way. If she unfocused her eyes and let go of up and down she could see the night sky reflected in the city, its dark spread punctuated by artificial stars. She could turn slow, like a lazy gyroscope, and lose track of which was which until there was no ground left to fall to. It was what she thought peace must be like.
Eventually, the blood rush to her head got to be too much and she had to right herself, recovering her sense of axes. Her phone case had a cinching wrist strap attached to it and she made sure it was secure before pulling her phone all the way out of her jacket pocket, the one she didn't keep zipties in. Two more texts from her ex's secondary number.
incident 00527
gang conflict at ryder and crenshaw
chosen v runners, duneyrr sighted
shots fired, powers used
00527 resolved
Notifications from whatever system Dean had set up for her were a small, bittersweet comfort. They were well and broken up, had been for the better part of a year, but he still cared enough to keep this going. It was almost like getting an actual message from him.
She checked for anything from a new number. Nothing yet. She didn't think much of it. Taylor was probably still on her way home, or would hit her up in the morning.
Her bookmarked news sites wouldn't update until the morning so she opened PHO. One new thread speculating on which mundane celebrity was secretly a cape. Another breaking down every little difference between Aegis' costume as a Ward and his new one as a member of the Protectorate. A poster bumping a bunch of threads about Case 53's, mining for any info. And one-
One thread on proposed legislation further restricting rogues, with a few vocal anti-cape posters from some new movement clogging discussion. Her finger hovered over the link, already constructing her arguments.
No. Today had been a good day, for once. She wouldn't be the one to ruin it right at the end. Her phone returned to her pocket, wrist strap and all, and she zipped it closed. She started towards the ocean, starless and void in contrast to the rest of the night.
The handgun she'd confiscated found its way into her grip, let its safety switch off, aimed its barrel at the border on the horizon between night and nothing. It wanted to fire, itched to bring the hammer down just to do it.
She tossed it away. It fell past view and was gone.
Her thoughts were tepid as she flew home, preferable to what she could have been thinking about.
The lights were on in the living room when she arrived, giving the windows a faint glow around the curtains. Disappointing, but not unexpected. She hovered around the side to her bedroom window.
Locked. She swore. Mom could be so petty sometimes. She lowered her hood and removed her mask, placing it on the lip of the roof to be collected after she got inside, then went back around to the front door.
Mom was at the coffee table, sipping tea from a mug and marking her way through a stack of legal documentation with a pen from her office. She didn't even look up as Victoria entered. "It's late."
"Yeah." She trod over to the kitchen area, grabbing a glass from a cupboard.
"It's not healthy for you to stay out like this on a school night. I don't want you coming up with excuses if your grades suffer for it."
The ice dispenser in the fridge was taking too long. She opted to take her chances with merely cool water. "They won't."
She had to turn back towards Mom to get to the stairs and made eye contact with her. She almost looked like she was going to say something. Victoria wished she would.
Mom went back to her papers. "Good. Get some rest, Victoria."
She climbed the stairs without her powers. She didn't feel much like flying anymore.
Mom knew what Victoria was going out to do. Little moments like these proved it, where she'd poke around the topic or force it to come up somehow, but she never did anything about it. Victoria felt like she was trying to fall asleep but someone kept tapping her on the shoulder whenever her head dipped. The comparison described much of her current relationship with her mother, now that she thought of it.
She locked her bedroom door and slumped against it, sipping her water. She knew she wasn't helping matters, maintaining her end of this tug-of-war. But how could she do anything else, when the house she'd spent her life in had become a shell? Of course they were at odds with each other, they were the only two left. There was no one there to mitigate their spats anymore, no one to help Victoria see things from a new perspective, no one to wrap her in a bear hug when she needed to calm down.
The most gut-wrenching thing about it all was how little it seemed to affect Mom. Victoria would never forget that she hadn't cried at the funeral, that every rare visit to his grave after seemed a chore in her eyes.
She'd never forget that, when she'd been beating her father's killer comatose, Mom hadn't lifted a finger to help her do it.