CHAPTER TWO:
It's
a violent reaction
The mixtape in your heart
The answer you should know
How we complicate, a simple mistake
It's the face you make when I go
- City Noise, Scarling, 2005.
The following few days passed her in a blur. She barely noted what
happened to her. Stopping several small-time crimes, going on a couple of
talk-shows.
Regular.
Simple.
It felt the world just continued turning, despite what had happened. The
rest of the Seven barely registered the Deep’s death, more concerned with who
would potentially replace A-Train and how long they would still be the Six.
A-Train’s replacement choice seemed to be as pedestrian as it was obvious, the
third fastest Speedster in the United States, Shockwave and A-Train’s bitter
rival. The solution was probably already predetermined before Homelander
approved it, born out of the collective minds of the board of Directors and
Ashley’s little psychotic PR - brain. A-Train would be written out during that
bland, carbon-cut movie they were filming, “the Dawn of the Seven.”, unless his
heart managed to fully heal beforehand.
Which Annie doubted.
As for who would take up the remaining spot, there were rumors of a reality
show coming in a month or so, contestants from all over the U.S competing to
get into the Seven.
Typical. Everything a race to the top. Be
better than the other guy.
To keep up appearances, the Seven were called upon to deal with a hostage
situation. It was rather simple, as far as robberies went. Six idiots convinced
that holding up a Goldman and Sachs office was the best way to go and get some
extra dough.
It was also when Annie January took her
second life.
They arrived quickly, Maeve and Homelander bursting through the front door, in
full view of the hostage takers. They were the stars of the show, and their
entrance was loud, and glamorous, and even beautiful, in its own way. Annie
heard the screams of the bank-robbers and the oh-so-unmistakable sound of laser
vision tearing through something, probably a gun. One of the men flew through
the wall, thrown around as a ragdoll by Maeve, probably dead or at least
paralyzed for life.
Good for the news, a nice video for the
7’o clock on the Vought News Network.
Stormfront and Starlight arrived at a much more subdued pace, and their targets
were strictly secondary. Starlight had to apprehend a subject on the fourth
floor, his rifle normally barely a threat to her superhuman abilities.
And this is where it all went wrong.
Annie should know how to do this. She had been trained to do this since she was old enough to fight crooks. And
still, she froze when she saw the robber, looking at him from behind the
corner. When she saw his gun. When she saw the terror-stricken office workers
in front of her.
She could not move because a part of her, a part of her she wanted to repress,
asked, no, begged her to end his
life. The same disgusting snake twisted inside the depths of her system that
teased her the day she killed the Deep, reminding her how long she sought
positive comments from Stormfront.
If he didn’t live, why was this piece
of shit better?
Looking him into his cold, disgusting, uncaring eyes, Starlight
seemed to only get angrier. She remembered the Deep – smelling of the deep sea,
covered in animal viscera. He looked ready.
This man, however, didn’t seem to have thought this through, betting on the
hero’s requirement to have minimal casualties.
She jumped out; arm outstretched. The automatic rifle in his possession wasn’t
a match for her powers – in minutes the room smelled of molten plastic and
iron. Horrified, the man grabbed one of the women in front of him by her
collar, pulling her up, pressing a secondary gun against her head.
“Make one more move and she dies!”
His voice gave him away – trembling, syllables barely forming into words, let
alone a sentence. Even despite Starlight’s, fairly, ridiculous, appearance –
white leotard, golden gloves, boots with high heels, long hair cascading down
her back in curled, product-soaked, waves – her powers had seeded fear within
the man’s soul.
The snake inside her stretched out, expanding, filling every part of her body,
taking over her soul, ecstatic at this development.
“Oh-la-la. See who’s the Master Chef now.” She heard Stormfront’s disgustingly
sweet voice coming from a mile away. “You like your crooks raw, medium or well-done, sweetheart?”
Starlight looked at her slowly strutting towards her, grinning like a cat.
Her gaze then returned to the horrified face of the robber before her, gun
cocked, pressed against the temple of some innocent bank worker. But his hands
were shivering, lips quivering, on the verge of tears. He was scared.
The light inside her collected itself, strands combining from various parts of
her body, every little bit focused on what she was about to do. Her anger, her need for attention, tying themselves together, forming streams of
burning bright. It scorched her body, flowing together into rivers of pain,
coiling into one singular whole, breaking itself free, forcing, demanding her to
release it.
She thought of the Deep, standing there, without any emotions on
his face. If she killed him, who was this piece of shit to beg for mercy? He
was prepared to shoot that innocent woman to escape. He barely deserved to walk
upon this earth.
She felt ready.
Stormfront’s body pressed against her back, her cool cheek against Starlight’s,
crooning in her ears and her warm breath on her skin. “He’s a pathetic waste of space.
Why should you give him anything but just desserts? Trust me” voice delicate, quiet as a whisper “it is the best feeling in the world.”
Watching her hesitation, Stormfront slowly marched over to the terrified
man, grabbing his head with cool, leathered, hands, still smiling.
“Maybe I should do it, if you’re too scared.”
And then, it seemed as if Annie woke up from a slumber. She looked at how amused
Stormfront was, her hands wrapped around the man’s head in an iron grasp. Her
gaze followed those leather gloves down, looking at a mask of sheer fright.
Jesus, Annie. You are not like this. You
do not kill a scared human being. You don’t have that right. Stormfront doesn’t
either.
Annie grunted, energy shooting out of her hands, but instead of the man, she
focused on Stormfront, with her flying backwards into the wall behind them. The man
dropped his hostage and ran, Annie in pursuit, until his back was pressed
against a huge window. Pulling out his tertiary weapon, hands shaking, barely
able to hold it, he pointed it at Annie.
Looking at the terrified man, she tried desperately to calm him down.
First there was a gunshot.
Then, there was light.
Finally, there was the sound of shattering glass.
Annie was standing there, her brain seemingly purposefully slow on the uptake,
only letting the terror of what just happened sink in minutes after she had
done it.
She barely saw him, looking down, a tiny ant, lying on some poor passerby’s
car, body weirdly contorted, dripping red fluid on the pavement.
She could’ve saved him.
Hard, leather, boots, echoed of the floor, getting louder and louder.
Turning around, she saw Stormfront, grinning, looking at Annie’s shell-shocked
face.
“Well, it is not exactly what I
wanted, but…” and with these words she wrapped an arm around Starlight’s
shoulders, as if consoling her, in her own twisted way” …the results are still beautiful.”
And then she was gone, leaving Annie alone with her thoughts.
During the press-conference, Annie was mostly silent, letting the other members
speak for her, only replying when asked. The answers she gave were all
extremely false, prerecorded phrases custom-made to look good in journals, her
just trying to escape the reverbing sound of shattering glass piercing her
eardrums and nesting in her mind.
“Do you think you could’ve done anything else?” She barely noticed Cameron
Coleman sitting there, in the front row, as he always did.
The bastard knew how hard it was for her.
Ashley probably told him.
“No, it was an accident. I could not have done anything else.”
This was, somehow, the perfect moment for her brain to regurgitate a piece from
a song that Annie had thought she had long forgotten, Bruise Violet.
The hammering drums, beating in her ears. The fuzzy, grating, guitar on repeat.
And the lyrics, not even sung, calmly repeating one singular word.
Liar. Liaar. Liaaaar.
Annie rarely dreamt, or at least dreams she could remember the morning
afterwards. This night was different. It was a strange vision, seemingly raking
through the deepest confines of her mental space, trying to find something to
hook on to.
She imagined her 16-year-old self, edgy teen Starlight, standing on a Capes for
Christ podium, hugging her boyfriend, Hughie, who somehow was also a teenager.
He did not look that much different, only clean shaven and with a slightly less
matured face.
All the people around her though were the repeating faces of the Deep and the
robber, dripping with blood.
Looking to the side, she saw Stormfront backstage, winking to her.
The brunette raised her gloved hand to the sky and the roof of the venue became
clouded and gray, the heavens collecting themselves, ready to burst. One godly finger, a giant bolt, struck the
middle of the room, sending chairs flying everywhere.
Looking over at Hughie Annie screamed, seeing how he fell apart in a rain of gray
mist, fried to a crisp, the dust flying everywhere, her desperately trying to
hold on to it.
She stood, looking Stormfront in the black holes where her eyes should be. The
brunette ripped off her costume and underneath she was dressed in the suit that
her prom date, Drummer Boy, wore. Instead of the Des Moines Civic Centre she
stood in the doors of her old High School.
Annie walked over, and hand in hand, they entered the blinding golden light.
And for the first time since she talked to Hughie in that café, she felt happy.
One more kiss
Before
we die
Face
to face
And
dream of flying
A/N: Nightmares, every cheap author’s excuse to show the conflict within a
character’s soul, what gives.
But yeah, I had some difficulty deciding certain elements of the bank robbery,
especially the particulars of the death scene. A friend of mine suggested it
would be more in line with the general tone of the Boys if it was framed more
as an accident, so here we are.
As for the Babes in Toyland reference – it an authorial pet peeve. I doubt that
Annie would listen to grrrl-rock or grunge, she really does not seem to be the
kind of person to rebel like that against her parents.
Points: 154686
Reviews: 1488
Donate