Author's note: Hello, all :o) I hope I find you well, and that people are still interested in this story :P Anyway, Mirror Master's chapter eluded me for a while, but then I remembered I wanted to expand on the little mention of the Central City underground's reaction to the Thanagarian invasion in Villains. Throw in a little "occupied country" vibe (because here in France we have a vastly different experience of WW2 from the US – not worse, not better, just vastly different, and some of it shows in the collective unconscious) and … well. You have this chapter :o)
Disclaimer: Let me check … no, I still don't own these characters, except for Bruiser Bob, Mildly Dangerous Dennis and Fred (who doesn't have a nickname), two of which already made a cameo in Villains. I like 'em :o)
Everybody Comes To Harry's
OBJECTS IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR
"Don't let him go!"
Sam threw the mightiest punch he could and finally twisted and weaselled his way out of the death grip on his throat. The very next second, he instinctively ducked for cover as shots were fired his way. He really didn't want to stick around to find out exactly what those hawk people used for guns.
And then what felt like a red-hot iron burned through his left side, and he was thrown on the cold, slippery pavement. Gritting his teeth so hard his jaw hurt and screwing up his eyes to chase the blinking white dots, he picked himself up from the ground and scrambled down the darkened street, throwing himself in the nearest back alley behind a couple of cardboard boxes.
No mirror gun, no fancy tricks. It was all down to brains for him now – that, or sheer dumb luck.
Fortunately, he still had his emergency duplicating device, the one that could bend light to create a double of himself (one only, since he had designed it as a last resort). Sam activated it from his poor hiding-place, hoping and almost praying that it was dark enough for the hawks to fail to see him and run after his mirror double. Which was tenuous wishful thinking at best, if those people's eyesight was as good as their Earth bird namesakes.
"He went that way!"
"I got him, I know I did –"
Samuel Joseph Scudder was up the creek and desperately searching for a paddle.
And all of this for one little sapphire. A sweet little 200-carat beauty.
He couldn't believe he was this close to dying for 200 carats. Surely Mirror Master's life must be worth more than that.
Heavy-booted feet ran past him, mere inches from his hidey-hole, and he found himself holding his breath. It wasn't easy when your whole chest seemed to have caught fire and spread it to your guts and stomach. Not to mention the pain from the gun wound, so hot it was beginning to feel ice-cold. Warm, sticky blood was seeping down along his side, and he hoped hard that it would be inconspicuous enough not to betray his presence.
When he was sure the boots were gone, Sam stood up unsteadily, and looked around for a mirror – a window – any reflective surface. He only found darkness. Martial law meant more than just hawks patrolling the street armed to the teeth and bullying people – it also meant all streetlights had be switched off from eleven PM to four AM.
Sam did not want to know what those damn hawks did to people they caught when the lights went down. Although he did have an idea about that by now.
An ominous sound made him start, and through the pain and the fear, hatred flashed in his mind. Sam Scudder did not get scared of anyone. He got angry, and he got revenge.
Fact was, it was real easy to get scared when getting the crap beat out of you and shot at point-blank was the nicer option.
Not for the first time in thirty-six hours, he wondered where the others were.
Then he shook himself out of it as he recognised the street beyond the alley. If he could get to that particular door, he'd be saved. Maybe.
Putting one foot in front of the other was surprisingly difficult. Those hawks – Thanagarians, they'd said on the news the other day – must have hit harder than he thought when they caught him. But Sam doggedly stayed on his feet, even if that meant leaning on the wall for support for a while as he peeked round the corner.
No sign of wings or heavy hawk armour. So far, so good.
Sam limped across the street, turned right there, ran down the small flight of steps and made what must have been – judging by the looks on the few faces that gaped up at him – one hell of an entrance.
"Mirror," he gasped, only stopping to wipe the blood trickling down into his right eye from a cut under his mask. "Need a mirror, Harry. Now."
Harry almost dropped the glass of draft beer he was holding. He recovered admirably fast, however, and said sharply, "Bathroom."
Sam thanked him as he ran past the bar and into the small and relatively clean bathroom, with the two taps that worked and the one that didn't, the tile floor, the cubicles and the big mirror above the row of sinks. Sam activated his mirror-dimension device and plunged into it.
Now he could finally collapse, and gladly took the opportunity to do so. For a few seconds he remained slumped there, pressing a hand to his wounded side and panting, aware of not much except for the pain, his own heavy breathing and the tang of blood in his mouth, too exhausted to attempt another mirror jump.
After a while, though, his vision cleared and he spotted Dorothy – the heavy-set forty-something waitress who did the night shift – on the other side of the mirror, cursorily cleaning the small smear of blood and the shoe mark he had left on the sink before he leaped.
He saw her raise her eyes to the mirror with a nervous, but determined look on her face.
"Make yourself scarce," she whispered, and loud and clear he heard the door open and the sound of boots gradually drowning the quiet music and the low conversation. "We'll sort it out."
Sam let her see his reflection and flashed her a look of gratitude before retreating to the safety of his mirror world, where everything was flipped over and populated by people's reflections, none of which ever noticed him, let alone bothered him. He had actually freaked out a bit the first time he had set foot in there, wondering if he had stepped into a world full of ghosts or whether he was the one who died. However, he had quickly found out that neither was true and come to appreciate the comfort of solitude, as well as the thrill of being the only one in the room who was real. A guy could get high on that feeling.
The mirror bathroom had the usual slightly dream-like quality as Sam walked across it and opened the door, almost pushing it the wrong way out of habit. The bruises and the gun wound did not hurt as much there, the pain a reflection of what he would be experiencing in the real world. It played merry hell with his perception, however. Everything was slightly warped and weird, some of the lines, shapes and colours a little off, and if he hadn't gotten used to it long ago he knew he would have been on his knees, throwing up the contents of his stomach.
The labels on the bottles behind the bar were all backwards, of course, and in other circumstances Sam would probably have played his little game of deciphering them. It was a neat, though pretty useless trick that he seemed to be the only one to master – or to give a damn about, really.
Everything was reversed, but in its place, and the five hawk soldiers near the door were one hell of an exception.
"We are looking for a hu – for a man. He may have come in here to hide. Have you seen someone enter recently?"
This Thanagarian's armour had more things that could pass for trimmings or decorations than the other hawks', so Sam suspected he was the leader. The voice reached Sam's ears subtly distorted and slightly too low or high as he went to sit on an empty seat in a far corner, trying to brush off the dizziness and focus on the scene in front of him.
The only three customers – Bruiser Bob, Mildly Dangerous Dennis and Fred (who didn't have a nickname) – were frozen in place as effectively as though Len's cold gun had done the trick. Dorothy stood near the billiard table with her arms crossed and a stony expression, pursing her lips as two hawks walked past her to search the whole of the bar.
Harry ran the glass he was cleaning under the tap, and calmly looked up at the invaders.
"Is he among my current patrons, sir?"
The Thanagarian leader took a few steps into the room, his bulky wings brushing against the bar on one side and the tables on the other, and stared down at the three recovering, but still round-eyed men.
"No," he said curtly after a short while. "The man we were trying to apprehend resisted arrest – he should have a distinctive bruise or two by now. Besides, he was wearing this… peculiar costume by human standards –"
"Who're you calling 'peculiar', ya big winged freak," Sam muttered between his teeth, wishing his normally strange but steady world would stop spinning.
"– And it's not likely he would have time to change into inconspicuous clothing. Has any of you gentlemen seen something… or someone… out of place in the last ten minutes?"
"Besides you, ya mean?" Mildly Dangerous Dennis quipped, his face carefully deadpan. Bruiser Bob took a gulp from his beer without a word, his eyes not leaving the hawk's face.
It was hard to see with that bird mask helmet thing he had on, but Sam was sure his eyes narrowed.
When he abruptly turned around to face the bar – and Harry – his wings swept away No Nickname Fred's glass, which fell to the ground and shattered. Fred gave an outcry in protest.
"Hey, that was my beer, you bast –"
Almost instantly – not the Flash kind of 'instantly', but still moving pretty quick for such mass – the two remaining Thanagarian soldiers appeared behind their leader, one training a lethal-looking spear at Fred's throat and the other one of their guns. Sam's hand instinctively clasped his bleeding side tighter.
Mildly Dangerous Dennis plunged a hand in his jacket as Bruiser Bob slowly began unfolding his six-foot-two frame, but No Nickname Fred threw his hands in the air (carefully, because of the spear to his throat) and stammered, "Okay, okay, hey, back down – it's only beer, right? I mean, yeah, finer stuff you won't find in Central, but it ain't worth gettin' all worked up for, now, awright?" He threw a side glance at Dennis and Bob, who was halfway up. "Siddown, fellas."
Something passed between the three, and the big guy sat back down. The Thanagarians lowered their weapons.
The leader eyed them with a mixture of suspicion and interest Sam decided he didn't like one bit.
"So. You didn't see anything?"
"Didn' see nothin' unusual," came Bruiser Bob's low, gentle voice – always a surprise for those who heard him speak for the first time. He, Dennis and Fred stared up at the hawk soldier in the When-is-he-gonna-leave expectant kind of way.
"Tano, Lak – found anything?" he called, glancing over to the stairs that lead to the cellars, which the two scouts were walking back up.
"No-one, sir," they said, and Sam thought he saw both Harry and Dorothy imperceptibly sag in relief.
The real nasty surprise came when two other Thanagarians came in through the emergency exit. They had known about the back door, Sam realised with a nasty jolt. They had probably been posted there first in case anybody had tried to slip out back.
There was always supposed to be a back door. Didn't those damn hawks know anything about the rules of the game?
"Nobody got out that way, sir," one of them said, and the leader nodded.
"Thank you, Corporal."
The leader turned again to the bar, this time keeping his wings tucked in tighter, and looked at Harry straight in the eye.
"The man we caught, who escaped – he broke into a museum and tried to steal a valuable diamond. Not only was he in complete violation of martial law, but he was committing a felony. Now, you at least seem like a law-abiding citizen, and I'm sure you understand that our current… presence here is for the greater good. Why, then, do I get the impression that there is something you aren't telling us?"
Harry finished drying the beer mug he had in his hands, unflappable as ever, and returned the stare calmly.
"I don't know what on Earth gave you that impression, sir."
A few seconds ticked away while each of them held their ground, the Thanagarian bristling with cold anger and the barkeep still and serenely calm. Woody Guthrie played softly in the background, always a favourite for the quiet closing hours.
Sam couldn't help holding his breath, no matter how painful it was.
The Thanagarian soldier broke the stand-off first. He turned his back on Harry, his face a mask of cold detachment.
"I've had it with the lowlifes of this planet," he said to the company at large, both hawk and humans, before focusing on the latter. "We came here to protect you from the Gordanian menace – we try to keep things under control while your so-called 'Justice League' is being detained for interrogation, we do. Well, if this is how you thank us, then orders be damned – if we catch a human breaking the law now, any law – you'll see just how swift justice in wartime is like on Thanagar."
He made quite the very dramatic exit, armour clinking and wings spread out larger than what was necessary, and the six others followed suit. Sam waited a couple of minutes in case they came back without a warning. When Dorothy turned away from the window where she had been keeping watch, he stood up carefully, still trying to blink away the white dots that had come back with lots of little friends, and made his way to the bathroom, where the mirror shone like a beacon.
Sam had never had more difficulty getting through a mirror before. Worse still – all the pain he hadn't really felt while in the mirror dimension came crashing back at once, sending him to the tile floor, wheezing, his eyes screwed up and his fists clenched so tight he almost bruised the leather on his knuckles.
Then someone carefully helped him back on his feet.
"Well, aren't you popular with our guests from outer space," he heard Harry mutter. "Easy there. They banged you up good, didn't they?"
"Fought back," Sam mumbled, struggling to clear his vision. "Socked a couple of the bastards. Did it show?"
"Yeah, Scudder, they were a bloody mess all over," came the sarcastic voice of No Nickname Fred as he took his other arm and slung it across his shoulder. "Bet they were really sorry they ran into you."
"Wiseass."
He only got a snort in reply.
Harry crouched behind the bar and knocked a couple of times on the floor.
"Open up, people, you got another roomie."
To Sam's amazement, a trapdoor of sorts opened, and a familiar face popped up. Mick Rory pushed up his goggles off a pair of alarmed – especially for him – eyes. "Christ, Sam, what the hell happened to you?"
"Run-in with the Thanagarians," Harry explained, helping Sam through the trapdoor and down the few steps. "Same ones I warned you about ten minutes ago. Careful, now."
In all of the years he'd known the bar, Sam had never even suspected the existence of this little room. It looked like a low, large cellar, mainly used to store maintenance equipment and barrels and casks of various alcoholic contents. Dust and fluff filled the far corners, but it was well-lit and mostly clean. Probably a leftover from the Prohibition.
But Sam was ready to bet anything that some of the stuff here didn't come with the original package. Especially the rubber chicken. Those generally came with a Trickster attached.
Uncharacteristically, when he spotted the trademark bright colours, James Jesse was white and silent.
"Get him on the couch," said a voice behind him, pretty quiet but carrying underlying tones of anger – and possibly a little bit of worry – so hot it sounded cold. Sure enough, once Sam was lying on the couch (an old, battered thing that had probably seen better decades but felt damn comfortable) doing his best to brush off the world of hurt he was in, Captain Cold peered at him with narrowed brown eyes.
"What did they shoot you with?"
"Dunno, didn't stop to ask," Sam muttered, taking his cowl off gingerly and wincing at the amount of congealed blood on the inside. "'S'not that bad, though."
Len and Mick exchanged looks. Great. Almost all the old crowd was there, as though this wasn't already embarrassing enough. (At least Harry had gone back up the steps and closed the trapdoor behind him.) All it took for a full Rogues reunion now would be Mark (who was in jail in Metropolis), Digger (nobody knew where he was half the time) and…
"Bullshit," said a low voice.
Sam almost fell off the couch in shock, and even Len and Mick looked startled. With reason.
Hartley Rathaway – aka the Pied Piper – almost never swore. In the five or six years they'd known him, anyway, he must have uttered one curse. Or possibly two. But the occurrence was certainly exceptional enough to unsettle all of them.
Sam knew for a fact that it took a lot to make him depart from the usual friendly politeness that could rapidly turn to cold irony if need be. He must be pretty shaken, then. More than he'd been last month, when Mark had fallen from a height and ended up blacking out for six long minutes, at any rate –
No. Wait. Something else was unnerving the kid. Something bigger than just a bunch of hawks shooting first and asking questions later. That wasn't all of it, at any rate. Piper might be a bleeding heart wannabe Robin Hood sometimes, and sure, he was gay, but that didn't make him soft. The opposite, even.
"What're you all doin' here?" he asked quietly, unsure whether shifting the subject away from himself was actually such a good idea, judging by the looks on the others' faces.
Mick appeared next to the couch with scissors and a bottle of surgical spirit, and Sam knew for certain his current costume had reached the end of its life. Damn. Another one bites the dust.
Thing was, Mick had this grim expression on his face – his whole face, since he had discarded the goggles and pushed back the cowl, sweat shining on his bald head – that Sam had never seen on him before. Not even when both of them had gotten on the bad side of Jack Monteleone that one time – spectacular mistake – with only Trickster around to patch them up.
Maybe this was more worrying than the rest.
"The Thanagarians have been rounding up everyone in a costume these past couple of days. Male and female, human or otherwise, heroes and villains, indiscriminately."
Sam tried to pay extra attention to what Mick was saying, because it beat by far paying attention to the smell – and later distinctive burn – of disinfectant. Tried, because it turned out he had lost quite a bit of blood after all and that made it difficult to completely focus on something. Damn hawks.
"What? Why?"
"Word on the street is that the Justice League escaped a few hours ago, and they might know something big," said Len, handing Mick a hefty pile of sterile gauze and Sam an ice pack that he gratefully put on his other side, which he was willing to bet was every existing shade of black and blue now. "Guess they figured they were better off safe than sorry putting away every guy in a suit, super-powered or not, no matter which side he's on." His expression darkened, suddenly alarmingly chilling. "God-damned hawks kicked down our front door at three in the morning."
"I heard they got Firefly, Copperhead and possibly Livewire just yesterday," Hartley said quietly, absently playing with his flute. "Rumour has it that the Shade gave them the slip, though."
Sam smirked, mostly to hide a wince. "Heh. Gotta get up early in the morning to get the drop on old Dickie Swift. The guy's sharp."
"Try not go to sleep at all," Mick corrected with the ghost of a thin, satisfied smile. "They were pissed enough at the business with that Green Arrow guy in Star City, but they're livid now. Figured they'd gotten us all quaking in our boots or something."
"I hate boots," muttered the Trickster in the ensuing silence, earning three completely nonplussed stares and one intrigued look from Piper. He looked down at that, shuffled a bit and kept playing with his yo-yo. Sam decided to leave the out-of-the-blue remark aside and looked up at Len.
"Where's the missus, then?" he asked, keeping his voice carefully neutral.
"Blue Mills. She's staying there till the heat goes down."
"On her own?"
"Gave her one of my cold guns. Usually she doesn't go for guns, but after last night she's in one hell of a mood. If those Thanagarians try anything funny…" A little pride showed – barely, but it did – in his slight smug grin. "I almost pity the poor bastards who do."
Something popped in Mick's back when he stood up and stretched. "There ya go, Sam – all patched up and ready to go. Well, patched up, at any rate."
Sam hated to, but he had to agree. The pain was less sharp than it had been when he'd come limping in Harry's, but he felt as though he had gone nine rounds with Gorilla Grodd. It was incredibly frustrating, because he really itched to get back at those damn hawks a hundred times over, if only because they'd smashed his mirror gun and made him run for his very life. Not to mention the jabs.
'Peculiar costume'… I'll give you 'peculiar', you dirty son of a –
"So, what exactly did you plan to do and when were you gonna let me in on it?" he asked the four of them, trying to shift to a less uncomfortable position and failing. Len drew up a three-legged stool and handed a couple of beers around.
"Tomorrow morning, actually. No, not you, Sam – not till you're sure you don't have anything nasty going on with your head. Anyway, it's not so easy getting past them at night, but for people who bothered to look up our names –"
"Not all of us are in the phone book, Len," Hartley pointed out with just that little hint of irony that meant he was not really serious. Len threw him a half-hearted dirty glare, then went on as if there had been no interruptions.
"– It's amazing how they don't actually look behind the masks and the goggles and whatnot. Found you can get off pretty easy with forged papers as long as they look official. What were your plans for tomorrow?"
"I never make plans that far ahead," said Sam matter-of-factly. "Especially when there's alien invaders involved." He paused, wanting to ask the question but already not liking the answer. "What do you think they do with people they catch? I mean… They wouldn't…?"
Len opened his mouth to answer, but was cut off by an unexpectedly grim voice.
"They will."
Once again four heads turned to the Trickster, who was staring ahead with a strange mix of vague fear and anger on his face, plus something that Sam couldn't decipher, and that made him frown.
"When they don't know what to do with us. When their prisons are full. When they get tired of running after us." He gave a shiver. "You'll hear boots, and it'll mean they're coming for ya. My dad was shipped away to America when he was a little kid while the Nazis killed his mum and her parents for bein' Jewish. Told me about the sound of boots and what it meant back then. And now… different people. Same boots."
The silence that followed Trickster's low, broken speech was heavy, and as much as Sam disliked to admit it, unnerving. Except for a natural tendency to get sentimental and reminiscing when he had had a pint or ten too many, Sam wasn't really one for disclosing personal stuff. He must not come off as the greatest confidant, either, because aside from work-related stories and a few late night conversations in front of Harry's best whiskey, the others hadn't told him much about themselves. Private, family stuff generally wasn't something you just up and shared with everybody just like that anyway.
Of course, there always were exceptions to a rule.
But apart from a one-time casual mention that his birth name was actually Giovanni Giuseppe and that he'd been an aerialist as a kid, Trickster had never told Sam anything remotely personal about himself.
Or maybe he had, and Sam just hadn't registered.
Guilt crept in, fuelled by the unpleasantly faraway look on James' face. The guy usually had an incredible range of expressions, from ecstatic glee to gloomy pout, but this… this was different.
Hartley silently stepped away from the wall he'd been leaning against and went to sit on the beer casks beside Trickster. He didn't say a word or offer any gesture of comfort – he didn't even look at the guy, per se – but the distant stare began to fade into something more Trickster-like.
"Not gonna happen, James," said Len, and it was a mark of how uncharacteristically quiet his voice sounded that nobody gave a start. There was something rough in it too, like sandpaper, and Sam couldn't figure whether it was a remnant of anger, the Nobody-Messes-With-The-Team protective captain thing that occasionally reared its head, or something else entirely. "No way we're letting that happen. No way."
"But we are!" Hartley snapped. "We have. They were distinguished guests, remember? They're supposed to protect us from some other alien threat – that was their excuse for the mass landing last week, anyway – they were right there and we still never saw them coming. We just watched."
Sam saw Len distinctively shift gears to captain mode. He didn't even need to put on the visor.
"Then I'd say we're done watching."
Trickster looked up from the ground in hopeful interest. Mick narrowed his eyes. Hartley's expression remained neutral, expectation barely showing.
Sam propped himself up on an elbow, the other hand still clamping the now tepid icepack to his bruised side, and listened hard.
Len carried on, his low, level voice belying the hard and determined look in his eyes. "They're here – maybe to stay, maybe not. But I'm not waiting for so-called heroes to wake up and do their damn job. Not while the bastards lay down the law here, make people just disappear, decide who's gonna live or die, and take on one of us seven to one. We don't take that kinda crap around here, and from now on, they're gonna know it.
"Yeah, the Justice League will probably kick their collective asses back to their home planet at some point, and they'll leave with their tails between their legs. But till they do…" He paused, his eyes hardening. "We give 'em hell."
His words hung in the air for a few seconds while everyone in the room turned them over in his head. They smacked of a particularly satisfying taste of revenge for Sam, who grinned widely despite the pain and the lack of beer to make up for it.
"Well said. I'm in."
"Now you're talking," Mick deadpanned, crossing his arms and looking as supremely satisfied as his tight little smirk let on.
Trickster had an odd expression, a sort of fierce, cheerful determination. "Gonna need a bigger rubber chicken."
"That means yes, and count me in too," Piper translated, with something in his eyes that suggested the principles he usually hung on to so stubbornly – the reluctance to hurt people, or mess with their brains with his flute – might not quite apply in this case. This was just as promising as it was ominous. For all that Piper was… well, Piper (ie. the kind of guy who gave half his loot to soup kitchens and shelters for gay kids), Sam knew how dangerous and efficient the kid could be if he put his mind to it.
Like any Rogue when pushed into a corner, in fact.
They discussed guerilla warfare tactics and plans well into the night, and Sam eventually drifted to sleep, exhaustion finally winning the upper hand, one tenuous certainty keeping his little grim buoy of optimism afloat.
They were not heroes – the word was practically an insult. Stupid, heroic grand last stands were not allowed, since everybody – well, the Rogues, anyway – knew it was damn difficult to fight when you're dead.
But they would fight. Hell yeah.
And hopefully, said a weak but stubborn little voice at the back of Sam's head just before he blacked out, they would all stay alive and see the world not end.
This one was hard to wrap up, but Len"s little "give 'em hell" moment just popped up and made itself so obvious that I couldn't ignore it :D
Now, I like to bring up references to musics and musicians that I feel fit the mood for the scene, but Woody Guthrie also had the considerable advantage of having the awesomest guitar customising ever – a label that said "This machine kills fascists." Given the context, I couldn't possibly resist :o)
Sam generally calling Len and Mick by their first names and Hartley and especially James by their code names I think comes from the fact that the first three are from more or less the same generation. Also, possibly, because he finds it hard to view James as anything but the Trickster.
Speaking of Trickster … It's established that his parents were Italian, and I took it to mean they were immigrants. From this point to imagining his dad managed to get away from Italy as a little child after the Germans invaded the surrendered country in 1943 (because James' grandmother was Jewish, or possibly an anti-Nazi activist) … the step was too small for me not to take it. What do you think? Over the top? Fits/doesn't fit? Your call :o\
Hope you liked! :o)
Next up: The Trickster is sitting on the top of a building, thinking of trying out his air-walker shoes for the first time, and the Flash stops by for a chat.