Chapter 2: 1001 Nights (part I)

Thanks for reading Chapter 2 of Disambiguation. I'm glad to get such good responses to the first chapter!  I especially love concrit but welcome any and all feedback, and am currently looking for a beta to help me with this piece. Thanks very much for reading!

x x x x x

"You can't win," Richie said, and his voice was a little hoarse. It was their fifth round of poker that evening; their bottles were empty, the sun had set outside and the room was lit with the dim light of one lamp in Richie's apartment. "You should fold."

"Make me." Virgil's eyes didn't leave his.

Richie reached across the table and started pulling on Virgil's cards. Virgil held on so tightly that he crushed the cards in his grip, and Richie tried grabbing again, but his hands went flying. With both hands he reached for Virgil's hands and pushed them on the table.

Virgil's cards scattered.

Richie ended up on Virgil's side of the table. There was the sound of fabric ripping. Virgil grabbed the back of his head as Richie grabbed his, and they didn't so much kiss as devour each other. Tongues in throats, chewing of lips, teeth scraping—

Now Virgil was out of his chair, and to hold him back Richie pressed him against the table. Richie tried to push him back across the top, so Virgil would be spread out before him, but Virgil resisted. He put all his weight into his stance and clutched Richie's arms to throw him back, and Richie's head knocked against the table with a sharp thud. They broke the kiss, and the look in Virgil's eyes was feral and hungry as he dug his fingers into Richie's skin, grasping at the collar of his shirt.

Richie clamped his hands down on Virgil's hips and half-lifted, half-shoved until his ass was on the table. Richie accidentally kneed Virgil, landing a couple on his stomach, as Virgil slid between his thighs. Wrapping his legs around Virgil, Richie arched and pushed against Virgil's chest, Virgil pushed Richie forward into the table. Richie kissed him again, not as rough this time, but still insistent, still hungry. Virgil's hands stopped pushing and started rubbing Richie's chest in circles.

They drew apart from the kiss, and Virgil looked at Richie: breathing hard, hair messed and sticking up, glasses askew, lips red and swollen from kissing. Richie's fingers ran up and down Virgil's chest, his thighs squeezed Virgil's hips. Richie could feel Virgil's dick, throbbing, beating against his pants, straining the fabric. Virgil nudged Richie's hands, positioned them over his dick, and leaned forward to whisper in Richie's ear.

"Unzip me."

Richie eyes shot open, sheets soaked with perspiration and pushed to the edge of his bed, his hands clamped down on his stomach and his dick half-hard in his boxers. Richie looked over at his clock. 3:18am, it blinked.

He reached for his glasses on the nightstand and got up, turned on his computer. He waited it for it to boot up. He remembered the dream, and then he didn't. Then he checked his e-mail, read a little bit of the news. Another suicide bomber in the Middle East. Featured recipes for spring rolls. Trouble in Gotham, Batman uncovers underground drug ring. The ten most outrageous spring break stories. The FDA approved a new heart disease drug. His computer clock read 3:49am when he finished, and he went to the bathroom and took a piss.

He flushed the toilet and headed back to bed, fanning himself with his shirt, cranking open a window to let some fresh air in.

Richie wondered what had woken him up.

x x x x x

There was a rumor at Dakota Union High that if you stepped on the cracked cement tile back by the last row of bungalows out by the football field, you wouldn't get laid on prom night. Some said that you would flunk all your classes and wouldn't graduate or that the soda machines would always eat your dollar bills. Others predicted that stepping on the tile would get you the moldy locker next to the men's bathroom the next semester. It was all a matter of priority.

Richie remembered Virgil stepping on the crack back during his freshman year. They were just on his way out of statistics class with Ms. Mammoth Roberts (nicknamed "Mammoth" for her girth) when some of the senior football players had bowled him over on their way to practice. Virgil had dropped his books, fallen over, and crushed the sandwich in his backpack. Richie had helped him up when he realized that he was somehow sitting right on the Crack of High School Doom. Neither Virgil nor Richie thought much of it at the time, but when he was assigned the moldy locker next to the men's bathroom sophomore year and the soda machines mysteriously began to eat his one dollar bills, Virgil began to sense that something much more sinister was at play.

"Chill out, man." Richie reassured him one day at the Gas Station, when Richie's particle accelerator schematics on the wall were replaced by Virgil's drawings for the dimensions of a casket and a funeral guest list. "You're not going to die."

"Just watch me, Rich." Virgil was parked in front of the computer on some florist's website, deciding whether he wanted to have white lilies or chrysanthemums for his post-funeral dinner table centerpieces. "The whole reason I'm a meta-human is because I stepped on the Crack. My electrical powers are probably being accompanied by the growth of a gigantic malignant brain tumor. I'm going to die before I can graduate."

"It wouldn't be a brain tumor," Richie said evenly. "That would require a brain in the first place."

"And if I die before I graduate," Virgil's eyes lit up in terror, ignoring Richie's comment, "then that really means that I won't get laid prom night! I don't even stand a chance!"

"I had no idea that kind of thing mattered to you, bro," Richie intoned dryly. "Been watching reruns of American Pie again?"

"There's no way to fight it, dude." Virgil murmured sotto voce. "I'm doomed. I might as well not go to prom at all. No point in asking a girl out and spend all that money if I'm just going to die."

"And if you don't die, then what?" Richie cocked an eyebrow.

"Then," Virgil threw out his arms with a flourish, "I won't have to pay my credit card bills for the corsage, the prom tickets, the limo ride, the tux rental—I'll be getting a bill. The best kind of bill. A bill of clean health."

"Okay, so you've been watching Family Guy instead of American Pie," Richie said. "You definitely did not come up with that pun on your own." He paused. "Virgil, you don't even have a credit card!"

"Mm," Virgil nodded, "so I'll have to pay with cash. Even worse. Plus, somebody needs to be out on patrol that night. Can't let Dakota just go to ruins because we're out having fun."

"Since when has that ever stopped you?" Richie crossed his arms. "Look, bro, I know you're nervous about getting a date—"

"I am not nervous about getting a date, Rich," Virgil huffed. "I just—don't see the point."

"It'll be fun for you," Richie said. "Come on, V."

Richie's eyes grew wide. "Have you even heard what some of the guys in our grade are doing? Wade planned a month-long scavenger hunt for his date that ended with a few dozen exploding basketballs at last week's big game and nearly got him kicked out of school! I can't pull off something like that."

"You can put on a romantic light show, or literally sweep her off her, or something." Richie shook his head. "V, these kinds of things are less elaborate than the battle plans in your head when Ebon challenges you to a showdown."

Virgil buried his face in his hands. "I don't even have anybody I like."

Richie felt his eyes bug out a little. "Hello? Frieda? Daisy?"

Virgil took a moment out of his self-pity to glare at Richie. "Bro, that's all old news."

"Frieda was your first crush here," Richie said, not without an edge in his voice. "You don't forget your firsts so easily."

Virgil held his gaze for a moment before breaking it off. "I'm going to ask Daisy."

Richie's hands curled at his sides. "Well, that's good." He turned around, heading to his lab bench. "At least you made up your mind."

He felt himself cool down—why was he so mad in the first place?—as he pulled out his power drill and set to work on his latest project—a modified Z Machine, the same kind as the one operated by Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. Richie had been losing a little sleep lately over the construction of the X-ray generator and desperately wished for a better lab so that he could test materials in conditions of extreme temperature and pressure, as opposed to in a highly volatile, decrepit abandoned gas station—but at the rate he was going, once he was finished, Virgil would have a new way of harnessing power altogether. The Z Machine in Albuquerque was used to gather data to aid in computer modeling of nuclear weapons, and could fire lasers from 20 million ampere discharges, producing plasmas with temperatures hotter than 2 billion Kelvins, but Richie was aiming to tweak the laser x-ray gun for a modest 20,000V wattage and a 30,000K temperature range. Not to mention it could provide a backup supply source for V if he shorted out during battle.

"Richie," Virgil said, and the blond snapped out of his reverie. "What about you?"

Richie sighed, slightly irritated with the interruption. "What about me?"

"Are you going to prom?"

Richie froze momentarily, feeling the blood rush out of his face. Shit, he really hadn't thought about this at all; he was so worried about Virgil's melodrama that he hadn't even considered his own. Prom unsettled him: the tradition of it, the uselessness, the stigma, the hedonism. He really didn't feel like going; there was no reason for him to go. Plus, like Virgil said—somebody did need to be on patrol that night… that person might as well be Gear. Plus, then he could finish up drawing up the plans for the modified Z Machine—

Virgil in a tux, his brain suggested.

Richie gulped, and the blood returned to his face. Perhaps a little more than necessary.

"Don't worry, V," he said, regaining his composure. "Of course I'm going."

x x x x x

Prom was going to be held at the Monte Carlo Hotel and Resort, smack in the middle of the ritzy tourist area by the beach. Transportation was going to be a hassle especially if over four hundred students were attending (and possibly more; not all students were taking dates from Dakota Union High) but the five-star hotel was really the prime location for Dakota's senior class to get their party on. The theme was 1001 Nights, from Scherezade's Tales; the Arabian Night-themed prom was going to feature belly dancing, cushioned lounges, lush decorations, Middle Eastern hor douvres and as rumors had it, a fully stocked hookah bar out on the patio balconies.

Richie was very aware of prom, and that it was coming up, and that it was going to themed extravagantly, not in the usual, cheesy vein of A Night to Remember or Magical Memories or something as obvious as Prom Committee is Busting Its Nuts to Bring This To You Guys So You'd BETTER DAMN WELL Remember this Night, but something classy, old school, and come on, there was going to be hookah! And it was prom!

And Richie could see that, pardon the nerdiness, that the event really was going to be ten kinds of awesome but he didn't appreciate the fact that Daisy had taken it upon herself to advertise the thing to him fifteen times today now, and now was approaching the final stage of her marketing plan: convincing Richie to buy tickets.

"You should really buy your tickets now," Daisy said to Richie one afternoon after their last class ended. The two of them had both been too busy and the classroom had been much too stuffy and hot to pay any attention to what their literature teacher was saying about Mrs. Dalloway—Richie had been surreptitiously computing the algorithms for the Z Machine programs, and Daisy had been doodling hearts and flowers and stars in the margin of her composition book. "They're going to sell out, Richie."

Richie sighed. "Daisy, I'll buy them later. I promise. And they're not going to be sold out—that's just what you guys say every year to make people nervous."

Daisy crossed her arms. "Fine. They might not be 'sold out,' but I can guarantee you that you'll be regretting the price increase when you decide to buy them 'later.'"

"What's the price increase?" Richie raised an eyebrow. "Fifty cents?"

"Fifty cents is a lot of money," Daisy exclaimed. "You save fifty cents here, fifty cents there, then you have one dollar! Then you go to the dollar store—"

Richie groaned. "I don't need Russell Peters to tell me how to manage my portfolio and stock options, much less my spending habits."

"You—" Daisy shook her head. "Okay, Richie. Who are you asking?"

"What?" Richie looked around nervously. "Oh, I just remembered—I have to run errands for my mom right after school, gotta go—"

"Hold it right there, Richard Foley." Daisy grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. "Girls are taking bets here, hot stuff. We all wanna know who you're planning on going with!"

"What are you talking about?" Richie was genuinely curious now, still a little apprehensive, but curious nonetheless. "The girls have... bets on me?"

"Well, on who you're going to ask out." Daisy shrugged. "Now I know it's not going to be me, so I'm safe—"

"Oh, I wouldn't be too sure about that," Richie wiggled his eyebrows at her. "You know, V and me have pretty similar tastes and all—"

Oops.

Daisy raised an eyebrow, even as a blush colored her cheeks. "Really."

"No no no, forget I said anything!" Richie waved his hands in front of him. "No further comment. Hey, uh," Richie made a show of looking at his watch. "I have to go. Errands, you know. But I'll catch you later!"

With Daisy distracted, Richie managed to slip away.

x x x x x

Two hours later, after Richie had taken care of all the "errands" that he'd needed to run for the day, Static and Gear were on patrol, both perched on the ledge of the clock tower overlooking the west area of town. And Gear was rediscovering his fear of heights. Sort of.

"You what?" Static had him suspended a couple hundred feet over heavy downtown traffic in a very, very tenuous electrical field.

"I, uh." Richie shrugged helplessly. "I couldn't help it, dude! She was cornering me!"

"Tell me another one."

"I'm serious. I just wanted to distract her so I could get out of there!"

"And so you betrayed my confidence. Oh, the indignity!" Virgil let the electrical field weaken even more, and Richie felt himself plummet a couple of feet. Of course he was safe, given that he had his rocket boots on, but still, this was a bit like playing with fire…

"Don't worry about it." Richie said as calmly as he could. "She seemed pretty enthused about it. She was getting all blushy and everything."

"That's the problem, man." Virgil deflated, and levitated his friend back onto the ledge. "I just see her as a friend. It took me a few years to catch on, but that's all I'll ever want from her." He grumbled, little sparks of electricity flying from his head. "Now, if Daisy had gotten blushy a year ago, things might have turned out differently…"

"Tell me another one," Richie mimicked Virgil from just another moment ago. "You're kidding, right? You've been hot for her the moment you set eyes on her at Van Moor."

"Old news, dude. I've been telling you that for a while now." Static sighed, and then looked up at Richie curiously. "Why do you keep asking me about it?"

You never forget your firsts, V." Richie muttered. "It's just how it is."

Virgil cast him a sideways smirk. "Sounds like you're speaking from experience, bro. Is there something you're not telling me?" Brown eyes widened in concern. "It's not Timezone, is it?"

"Wha—" Richie laughed, caught off guard. "No, it's not Timezone. That'd be a lost cause either way."

The other boy shook his head, dreadlocks falling in his face. "Well, if you want to get technical, Daisy's not my first. Remember? Frieda was."

As far as Richie was concerned, all of Virgil's crushes and girlfriends were his firsts; he'd never stayed with any of them long enough to cement his feelings for them, and as a result, he was just as emotionally attached to the fifth as he was to the second, to the twentieth as to the sixteenth.

"Daisy was your first homegirl, and Frieda was your first Jewish habibi," Richie crossed his arms.

"Hey now," Virgil's tone was light. "You know I don't discriminate on any basis. I am an equal opportunity lover. All races."

"Try telling that to Frieda's parents," Richie retorted. "Jewish father-in-laws would be even worse than the Irish ones."

"Irish…" Virgil frowned. "Huh?"

The other boy didn't get it. Well, on a second thought, Richie didn't get it either. No, Richie didn't get it at all. It was like a Freudian slip or something, except it wasn't, it was just a stupid thing to say, because Richie was losing his touch on humor. Growing a bigger brain meant losing street wit, and here Richie was, cracking bad jokes, and…

Virgil took a deep breath. "Rich—"

An explosion went off by the industrial district on the south side of town, smoke rising ominously into the air. Gear shot off in a flash, not looking back at the clock tower to see if Static would follow.

Gear pressed a button on the side of his helmet, and the police alert report began scrolling through his visor screen. One lone Bang Baby, down by an old car factory, abilities exhibited: invisibility and average strength. Gear narrowed his eyes. It wouldn't be so hard to fight this one, as long as they were dumb like the rest of the Bang Babies; those with strength tended toward the thick, and those with the powers of invisibility were overly cocky and slipped up.

He could see the police lights flashing on the cars and the yellow tape that sectioned off the factory yard. He landed down next to one of the officers, who gave a start and almost fired his gun. Gear held up his hands apologetically.

"Gear!" The policeman smiled in relief once he realized who it was. "We weren't expecting you guys—" He looked behind Gear. "Where's your buddy, by the way?"

"He's on his way." Gear looked over his shoulder. Static was nowhere to be seen, and he mentally cursed himself; without Gear providing the specific coordinates, Static would probably have to scour the area more thoroughly. Well, what was a minute or two? Gear could work out a strategy while waiting for Static. "What's the problem, officer?"

"The guy seems to be invisible," the officer explained. "We're not sure if it's an effect of the Bang or if he's another Alva employee with some technogizmo, but whatever it is, he seems to be fairly normal. He's not able to phase through walls or anything, so we've been able to corner him into this building… he's somewhere in there. He hasn't materialized so far, so we can't give you a description, but I think—"

"Thanks." Gear ducked under the yellow tape and headed for the factory, passing a decrepit car and a few rotten shrubberies that lined the entrance to the building. Ducking through the dismantled front entrance, he set his rocket boots to the 'hover' dial and crept silently through the dust-ridden foyer. The counter of the reception desk, the floor, the overhead lights were all covered with a thin, fine layer of white dust; Richie could make out footprints strewn here and there, all roughly the same size. There wasn't any indication of the Bang Baby's current tracks, though—there were too many tracks to count. But it was obvious; this had been the Bang Baby's hideout for quite a while.

Gear made a mental note of how the building had appeared from the outside. This place was huge, and if there wasn't some indication of where the Bang Baby was, this might take a few hours.

"Backpack," his voice was low. "Give me a blueprint of the old car factory on 34 Hillhouse Avenue, Dakota industrial park."

It beeped and buzzed as it hacked through the city's blueprint library, and Backpack pulled up the schematic. Gear whistled as the information flew past his visor. There were five levels in total including the basement, and the building was divided up into two components; the factory component and the administrative side. The administrative side was appropriately banal—rows and rows of offices and hallways with ninety-degree turns. There were four factory rooms and the basement housed the generator and a miniature electrical plant. Useful for Static, if he somehow ran out of power during the fight.

Gear honestly didn't have the time to silently go through each and every floor of the building to locate this Bang Baby, especially when said Bang Baby could slip past his guard, unnoticed and invisible.

Oh, duh.

Activating his heat vision, Gear silently cursed himself for his mental sluggishness. This Bang Baby was just invisible. Whether he was invisible because he managed to warp the light around him in some sort of localized illusion or because he somehow managed to infuse some sort of transparent optic fiber into the extracellular matrix of his skin cells… the possibilities were endless. But Gear was willing to bet that underneath it all, he still exuded body heat.

The problem now was to lure him out of his hiding place.

"Hey, ugly!" It was the standard adjective when addressing Bang Babies; usually they were ugly, or if they themselves weren't ugly, at least their costumes were hideous. How this applied to an invisible enemy, though… well, Gear didn't really care.

"Hey, ugly!" Gear floated into the assembly room. Rows and rows of dead conveyor belts stretched across the room, hooks and grapples hung in the air, moving slightly at the disturbance in the air. A faint scent of iron and ash hung in the room, and sunlight filtered in through the windows at the opposite end of the room from tiny windows, illuminating the heavy dust that hung in the air. "I want to talk!"

Without warning, a wrench flew past his ear.

"Whoa!" Gear jumped back with a start as the wrench clattered noisily to the floor. He spun in the direction the wrench had come from, and caught something out of the corner of his heat sensor as a dart of red and orange skipped out of the room. "You've got bad aim, buddy," Gear smirked, chasing after the blur, his rocket boots on full blast. "Try again, why don't you?"

He was back in the main lobby again, the invisible Bang Baby nowhere to be seen. Gear closed his eyes for a minute, trying to listen to any sounds that would give away the other's location. He made out the sounds of the police sirens whooping and the excited chatter of police officers out in front.

Shut up, shut up… Gear bit his lip. "Backpack, sound filter."

The sounds of the police outside drifted away, and somewhere far away, Gear heard the faint ding of an elevator reaching its destination.

"I can't believe this place has still got working elevators—" Gear eyed the rusty door of the lobby elevator skeptically. "I'm taking the stairs. Backpack, where was that elevator headed?"

His computer gave a quizzical beep. There was no active computer in the building that controlled the elevators or any of the security cameras; they had all been dismantled sometime ago. Gear cursed, and walked over to the elevator door. "Backpack, metal cutter."

Backpack sliced through the elevator doors with its laser cutter and Gear peeked inside the inky darkness of the elevator shaft. Turning Backpack's flashlight upwards, eh saw that the elevator was currently suspended approximately three to four floors above. Gear didn't want to bring the elevator back down—there were four other elevators located in various parts of the factory, and he didn't want to chase the Bang Baby through elevators through the rest of the afternoon. Best let him think that he'd gotten away for now; Gear decided to take the stairs.

Jetting himself to the fourth floor, Gear hung out in the stairwell for a minute and resisted the urge to cough and give away his position; the dust hung perpetually thick everywhere up here, and Gear could barely see through the haze. He cracked open the door a hint; this was one of the office areas; cubicles arranged sporadically, old computers laying around on empty desks and various papers strewn around on the floor. Gear squinted—there seemed to be some kind of a little house constructed behind the glass walls of the corner office on the far end of the room.

"Night vision." Sure enough, he could make out a faint blur of red and orange at the far end of room, situated in the little house. The only problem was that with night vision on, he couldn't discern the layout of the room, couldn't make out where the cubicles and the desks were. The only things that radiated heat in the room were him, the Backpack, and the Bang Baby.

The faint sounds of music stirred from the corner office; Gear could make out the chorus to some popular rock song. The Bang Baby seemed to be humming along, oblivious that Gear was watching from the stair hall.

He was going to rush the Bang Baby, Gear decided. He readied two zap caps and a smoke grenade.

"Backpack, heat laser." Ignoring the high-pitched whine of the laser, Gear shut the stairwell door behind him and melted the doorknob and fused the edges of the door to the wall, blocking off the Bang Baby's chance of escape by stair. The red and orange blob in the corner office didn't seem to notice that Gear had entered the office floor. Gear crept over to the elevator and stuck a proximity mine to it and set it for a range of ten feet. If the Bang Baby even so much as tried to get close, the bomb would go off, blowing up the elevator with it.

Gear navigated the maze of cubicles and crept up to the corner office, opening the door without a sound, zap caps in hand. The cubicle house was shoddily constructed and looked unstable; it was held together with duct tape and the hinge of the "front door" basically more duct tape; a small light emanated from the inside, and Gear could hear the strains of rock music—angry, suicide-toting, scream-o rock music, coming from the inside. Through his night vision, he could make out the red and orange heat composite of the Bang Baby bobbing his head back and forth to the music.

But what was this—? Gear turned his night vision off for a minute as he surveyed the corner office with a speculative eye. Jewelry lay in piles on the corner office desk and DVDs lined the bookshelves. A few game systems were heaped up in one of the corners, and there was an expensive-looking leather chair with opulent zebra and leopard print accents behind the desk that Gear decided was not a part of traditional office décor.

And Clothes littered the ground—all beautiful clothes, and Gear saw that many of the price tags were still attached. The most haute couture dresses, skirts, and flimsy tops, high stilettos, lacy brassieres, and designer bags. Gear picked up one of the dresses. It was ripped—right around the chest area, and around the hips. Size 22.

Gear realized that Bang Baby wasn't a "he" around the same time that the Bang Baby realized she wasn't alone.

"Is that Gear again?" She snarled, a formless voice. The door fell open and clattered to the ground, but Gear couldn't see anything, just the shadows of the cubicle house. The faint rays of sunlight coming in through the window gave way to more shadows, didn't illuminate anything. "You think you're such hot shit, don't you? You guys need to learn to just leave me alone! I don't want your fucking help!"

Gear blindly threw the zap cap at the Bang Baby. It missed, snagging the side wall of the cubicle house and winding itself around it, bringing the house down. The Bang Baby screamed, the sound much too close for comfort, and Gear backed against the door so she couldn't get behind him, pressing a hand to his helmet.

"You bastards, you're all fucking dead!" The sound was almost right in his ears. "Leave me alone, leave me the fuck alone!"

"Backpack, night vision," Gear yelled, and immediately his world was plunged into green, inky darkness. He looked around wildly, to his right, to his left—

Gear was thinking, I'm sorry. To the Bang Baby, to Static, to Virgil—he didn't know.

The last thing he saw was a hideously large red and orange blob no more than two inches in front of him, a red and orange fist-shaped blob coming right at his face.

x x x x x

His head hurt. His neck hurt. His legs sort of hurt, too, and he felt like he had a lungful of ash and a mouthful of cotton.

"It's cool, Pops. I'll be home soon. Just give me another hour, okay? Yeah, he's fine—just happened to—" A sigh. "I wasn't there, I know—I wasn't—geez, Pops, give us a break, we're—" Another sigh. "Yeah, I get it, Pops… okay. Love you too. Bye."

Richie made his breathing as even as he could, kept his eyes neutrally closed. So they were back in the gas station, lying on the squeaky couch, and he couldn't remember anything about this afternoon apart from the fat that he had gotten his ass kicked by a plus-sized, invisible Bang Baby. And he had been predictably saved. At the last minute. Of course.

He could hear footsteps approaching, and then stop.

"Give it up, Rich." Virgil sounded irritated, and Richie's reluctantly opened his eyes, focusing on a dark stain on the ceiling.

"I'm sorry, Virgil." He didn't want to move, he didn't want to look at the other boy.

"You're sorry, I know you're sorry." Virgil said. "You just ran off without a word! I couldn't even locate the Bang Baby, I had to look around—turns out the explosion had nothing to do with the Bang Baby!" I was there at the explosion site for fifteen minutes with the other cops trying to figure out what was going on and where you were before I realized you were at some other location."

"I'm—"

"And you just busted in there without knowing all the facts, without waiting for my backup—" Virgil plunked down on the couch next to Richie and buried his face in his hands. "I was in the building looking for you guys for five minutes before I heard the bomb go off on the elevator. And I got up there, and—"

Richie made an effort to turn onto his side, and realized that he had a busted lip, and that his arm was wrapped up in bandages and his fingers were black and blue. His ribs hurt, and he coughed. Richie swore he could see a puff of ash escape his lips.

"That place was closed down because of a fire ten years ago." Virgil swung around, glaring at Richie. "The fire ate up the basement and the ash is still floating around in the building. You were wandering around without doing your whole analytical thing beforehand—Rich. What the hell was the matter with you?"

"I thought it was dust," he said weakly. "I really did. I saw the blueprint of the basement, though—the generator was intact—"

"Blueprint, Richie." Virgil stood up abruptly, his body wired, tense. "Did you bother to check the city records? Newspaper reports?"

"I didn't know, Virgil!" Richie threw himself back down on the couch in frustration, wincing as he felt something crack in his back. "Okay? Are you happy? I didn't research everything before I entered the building. I didn't run a perimeter check, I didn't do a background check, I didn't write a fucking twenty-page mission briefing on it. So what do you want to do about it? What's done is done."

"I went back outside and saw the smoke coming from the building, and I got up there, and—" Virgil wavered, and then slumped back down on the couch. "Damn it, Rich."

Richie saw Virgil's shoulders shaking, and looked back at the spot on the ceiling again. No, Virgil couldn't be crying, he was probably laughing at what a dumbass Richie had been. Yeah, Richie had been pretty dumb about the whole thing. Barging in like that, planning a rush without an exit strategy. Richie wanted to laugh at himself, except his ribs hurt too much already.

"What happened to her?" He asked, quietly.

"What?" Virgil turned around, his eyes dry, but his face pale, washed out. Richie wondered how long he had been out, how long Virgil had been pacing back and forth in the gas station, trying to explain to Mr. H what had happened, how long he had been watching over Richie.

He gulped past the lump in his throat. "What happened to the Bang Baby?"

Virgil's lips thinned. "She didn't have any control over her invisibility; she'd been like that since the Bang. When I found you guys—I borrowed your helmet after I got you out of there—she was knocked out by the elevator. You—" his voice caught in his throat. "She was this big, bloody mess. I didn't even need night vision to see her."

Richie closed his eyes. "Jesus."

"She was okay," Virgil continued. "But she couldn't breathe—she was choking on her own blood, and the doctors couldn't get the tube down her throat because—because she was invisible. Her airway was shutting down because of the blood. The surgeon borrowed your helmet and the rest of the residents had to be fitted with night vision goggles to do it but they got the best surgeon on the job—they did an emergency tracheotomy and cut open her throat and got the oxygen in. It worked."

"I see," Richie felt nauseous. He had almost killed a girl, a relatively innocent Bang Baby, one who was only guilty of shoplifting; Richie hadn't even thought about it. What was worth more, in the end: the Bang Baby's life, or the material goods that she had stolen? And he'd gotten away with—

"You're fine." Virgil rubbed the back of his head. "I checked you out—it seemed like she beat you up pretty badly at the time, but you've just got some bruises. That's all."

Richie rolled up the sleeves of his hoodie and checked out his bandages—a little bit of the blood had seeped through, but not much. There was some medical tape over his cheek and across his lip—he resisted the urge to lick at it. He ran his hand down his calf and felt through his cargo pants the thickness of bandages there, and his socks—

He was in his street clothes.

Richie flushed slowly as he realized what this meant. It would have been Static who had brought him back to the gas station right after the fight, changed him, and rushed Richie Foley to the hospital—or it had been Static who had brought Gear to the hospital right after the fight and changed him afterwards. Either way, it was Virgil who had… handled him, and even though it wasn't as if they hadn't done it before, when rushing each other to the emergency rooms, for some reason, it felt different.

"Yeah, um." Virgil seemed to notice that Richie was looking at his clothes with a puzzled, flushed expression on his face. "I had to get you out of the Gear suit so we could get out to the hospital—they couldn't do the bandages without taking off the outfit, you know, and I didn't want them to know your identity, so…" Virgil's voice trailed off, uncertain and embarrassed. Richie made a noncommittal sound, not giving any indication that he had really heard what Virgil was saying.

The sounds settled around them; the slow, lazy whirl of the ceiling fan, the passage of the traffic outside, the creaks and groans of the gas station as the building swayed on its foundations.

"Richie."

Virgil's voice was soft, tender, almost. Richie closed his eyes, an act of self-preservation, and tried not to think everything that had happened.

"Why'd you run off like that, bro?"

"I—" Richie said, and sat up as much as he could, so he could look Virgil in the eye.

And once, he might have been able to be upfront about it—say it unflinchingly, unapologetically, that what was done was done, and it had happened, so there was no use thinking about it now.

Bro, I didn't mean what I said, you know about the Irish in-laws and the things and I know, Virg, that you might get the wrong idea but the truth is, I mean, really, the truth is that I—

But these weren't the days that things were simple, that you could just say whatever and get away with it, call your mother stupid and mean and be forgiven within the hour, talk to your friends in class and be let off with a slight reprimand from the teacher; no, they were both eighteen and were supposed to be responsible citizens.

And even if Dakota could trust Gear to protect the city, and even if the nation could trust Richie to vote for the next President, Richie couldn't trust himself to say what he really wanted to say.

"I had some things on my mind, Virg," Richie shrugged lightly, but the tone of his words deliberately betrayed a weight, a warning.

Don't go there, Virgil.

And Virgil nodded wordlessly, crossing his arms, staring at Richie, fire and discontent in his eyes as Richie pretended not to notice, as Richie curled up into a ball and pretended to doze off.

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