NOW COMPLETE! The Perils of Valora 4: Superheroinas al borde de un ataque de nervios

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Damselbinder

Good day all. Immediately following this post, I will be posting the first part of the newest part of Valora's adventure. However, before I do so, I wish to give a dramatis personae to help new readers. Since this is a jumping on sort of thing, I will be spoiling events from Valora 1 to Valora 3, so if you want to read those first without being spoiled, go do so!

Valora: Real name 'Valerie Orville', in the year our story is set (2006) she is twenty-one years old. A beautiful, voluptuous blonde, Valerie is one of the most powerful superhumans in the world, possessed of titanic physical strength, and immense durability. She is a dour, serious, and angry young woman. Briefly recruited into the 'Bombshells' a super-team designed as a PR exercise for the U.S. military, Valora was swiftly drummed out after her rage made her assault an officer (though he assaulted her first). Effectively exiled from California, where it is easiest for a superhero to make a living, Valora returned to her native Maine, where she moonlit as a photojournalist. She felt forced to tend for, and financially support, her sickly father, who is a strange, distant man, unappreciative of his daughter's generosity. For months, Valerie subsisted below the poverty line in a fairly miserable existence.

After an incident where she allowed herself to be kidnapped by a man named James Oleander, Valerie earned the ire of local crime lord Milo Patáky, doing all that she could to disrupt and inhibit his criminal operations. This actually made her quite famous, and restored her financial fortunes somewhat. Invulnerable against conventional firepower, Milo put out a hit on Valerie, who was confronted by - of all people - Lupus, another former member of the Bombshells, who had previously quit the team. Already demoralised from a traumatic encounter with her father and stepmother, Valora was defeated and kidnapped by Lupus, who gleefully tormented her captive before handing her over to Patáky - then stole her back to toy with her more.

Valora was eventually rescued by 'Hypatia', a third Bombshell who had come to Maine pursuing Lupus, and after saving Valora, the two heroines decided to join forces to bring Lupus in. But, driven to near-madness by her torment, Valora not only defeated Lupus with contemptuous ease, but once she'd beaten her to the point of helplessness, she tried to murder her outright. Hypatia stopped her, but Lupus got away in the confusion.

Clearly in no state to continue on as a superhero, at least for the moment, Valerie left Maine in an attempt to regather herself.


Hypatia: Hypatia, real name Cecily Rothschild, was another member of the Bombshells alongside Valora. A soft-spoken, gentle, but strangely ruthless young woman, Cecily has a moderately strong telekinetic ability, and makes up in refined control what she lacks in power. Cecily was the first to realise the Bombshells program was a fraud: it disguised itself as a joint operation between their team and a small contingent of marines, but really the point of it was to humiliate the Bombshells with defeat as often as possible to make their military partners look better. However, Cecily said nothing: she believed in the cause that it supported: after a villain named the Supremacist - active during the 1990s - made a mockery of the US military who bravely, though futilely, stood against him, they had lost public confidence and support. Cecily was, at first, willing to endure humiliation to restore that confidence, partly since her own father was an admiral.

However, Cecily's support quickly became moot. The program lost favour. Its architect, Lance Van der Boek, was dismissed, and in petulant revenge he had a disguised Lupus defeat, kidnap, and publicly humiliate the remaining Bombshells (this was after Valora had left). The program ended in disgrace. It also ruined a burgeoning romance between Cecily and fellow Bombshell Freebird, and it was partly in defence of Freebird's humiliated honour that Cecily went to Maine chasing Lupus. After the incident with Valora, and after Valora's departure, Hypatia resolved to stay to continue to search for Lupus, and to fill in for Valora.


Freebird: Real name Maria Okonedo, Freebird was, ostensibly, the leader of the Bombshells. Athletic, and serious, she took her duties to heart, and was devastated - considering it a personal failure - that the team failed. Freebird can project powerful energy beams from her hands, and is a capable superhero, but takes failure extremely hard. She, too, nursed feelings for Cecily, but in the aftermath of her disgrace found she was unable to open up to her.

Lupus: Real name Charlie Korhonen, Lupus is as savage as her name suggests. Not, perhaps, truly evil, but violently narcissistic, vicious, selfish, and wanton. Valora initially joined the Bombshells after rescuing them from capture, and Lupus was so humiliated by this that she quit the team on the spot. She then got into bar fight, and seriously injured a man. She was charged with grievous bodily harm, but the charges were dropped when certain military officials decided to use her as part of an experimental project to use superhumans in black ops missions (illegal according to the Madrid Treaty). This too, was a failure, but only because Charlie found herself - to her own surprise - morally incapable of killing.

She was, however, morally capable of kidnapping, and she abducted the three remaining Bombshells at the behest of ousted impressario Lance Van der Boek, publicly humiliating them. However, in an argument about pay, she accidentally broke Van der Boek's neck, and had to flee California immediately. She found out that a hit had been put on Valora, and decided to take advantage. Using her ability as a power mimic to replicate Valora's strength and another Bombshell's power of indefatigability, she defeated her and took her prisoner, delighting in her captive's sumptuous beauty. But she could not kill her, nor even could she allow her to be killed by Milo Patáky. But after Hypatia rescued Valora, and a rematch ended in terrifying disaster for Lupus, she once again fled - only to be tricked by Patáky. Lupus can only hold one strong power at a time, and one other if the second is very weak. Patáky tricked her into discarding Valora's strength for an immunity to poison, and immediately had his men capture her. When last we saw Lupus, she was being told that she belonged to Patáky.


Maiden America: The last Bombshell, real name Debra Goodheart. A plucky, sweet lass, and the youngest member of the team, Debra has been largely uninvolved in the larger events shaping the story. Her ability is that she never grows tired, and though it is useful, it was more useful in Lupus' possession than it was in Debra's. To her credit, she was the only one to take the dissolution of the Bombshells on the chin.


Milo Patáky: Milo is a small, ratty, nervous, fearful man who sees himself as a repulsive, cowardly 'un-man'. Nevertheless, he was intelligent enough to build up a modest criminal empire, one which expanded slowly over the years at the urging of his underling, James Oleander. Milo was strangely obsessed with the beautiful, virile James, considering him to be everything that he was not. The two even had something approaching a real friendship. However, after an incident in which a telepath revealed to James that he nursed blacker desires than even he himself had suspected, James almost killed his boss. He relented at the last moment without Milo finding out, but it just so happened that a picture had been taken by a certain Valerie Orville of the moment he'd turned his gun on his employer.

A hunt for the picture ensued, but turned out to be moot. Milo found out that James had betrayed him anyway, and immediately dispatched his men to kill him. He escaped, but Patáky caught up with James in Canada, and after having his men beat him, he personally murdered James by cutting him to ribbons with a knife, and then plunging that knife into his head. Since then, Milo has appeared like a new man to his subordinates: he is still as intelligent as ever, but now much more daring, much more courageous, and much more willing to confront his enemies head on. He has seemed to transform into the model gangster. The reality is that Milo has become deranged, haunted by his murder of James, tormented by hideous nightmares. He is in a perpetual state of dissociation, one which he is almost consciously perpetuating, and his appetite for violence appears to be growing. Those close to him fear that his instability may lead to disaster.

John Mann: Milo's second in command. A perceptive, intelligent young man, though also a man of casual brutality, he seems to be being groomed by Milo for greater responsibilities and leadership roles. He is the only one who suspects the truth about the 'improvement' in Patáky.

Saskia Dubois: Valerie's journalist friend. A fae, playful, teasing woman, Saskia grew to like Valerie very quickly, and encouraged her to investigate Milo Patáky. Initially she found herself very attracted to her beautiful friend (though, she has a partner and never intended to woo Valerie), but their relationship has changed over time into something almost a little more maternal.

Piper Monaco: Saskia's girlfriend. Raised a Catholic, she still harbours some residual guilt about being in a lesbian relationship, as well as some guilt about the fact that, when she met and fell in love with Saskia, she had had a partner at the time. Nevertheless, she and Saskia love each other deeply, even if their hang ups - Saskia's flightiness; Piper's guilt - do cause them problems.

Oliver Blane: A gunnery sergeant in the USMC. A man possessed of quiet humour, and a slightly playful side. During Valerie's time in the Bombshells, she and Oliver grew somewhat close, and there were sparks of attraction from both sides. Nothing came of it, however: during the most serious battle the Bombshells ever engaged in, Oliver had what appeared to be a sudden attack of cowardice, and Valerie found him curled up on the floor with his ears covered. In fact, what had happened is the battle had triggered flashbacks of the sinking of a battleship on which Blane had once served, and of which he was one of the only survivors - most of the other crewmen either killed in the ship's sinking, or sadistically torn to ribbons by the Supremacist, who had sunk the ship.
Last edited by Damselbinder 3 years ago, edited 1 time in total.
Damselbinder

Valora 4-1: The Dregs

Cecily Rothschild’s life was not turning out as she had expected.

She was young, beautiful, well-educated. Privileged. Well-monied, and well brought up enough to know how money ought to be used. When she had imagined herself as a forty-year-old, she’d pictured herself as some kind of corporate executive: a successful, but benign capitalist. In that way, though she had an attractively unusual personality, she was in her convictions a conventional person.

Even her being a superhuman had not forced her life down an unconventional path. She had never been mistreated because of her powers, or bullied, or been made to feel freakish. Quite the opposite. There was for example, the occasion on which Cecily’s mother had first discovered her powers, when Cecily was a child. She’d been playing with her stuffed animals using her nascent powers; floating them about the room, merrily supplying the voices of “Petweenia” (an alligator) and Cobbledeedee” (a rat) as they engaged in a drama that, to a six-year-old mind, seemed very serious. Cecily had not understood, therefore, why her mother had burst out into hysterical laughter. She’d thought she was being made fun of, and she’d looked so forlorn – her toys plopping unsupported onto the floor – that her mother had immediately wrapped her in a loving, maternal embrace; something she did not do often.

So, there was nothing inevitable about Cecily, about any person with powers becoming a superhero. Even without the immense degradation of public trust in superheroes following the rise and fall of the Supremacist, there had always been hundreds of superhumans for whom their abilities just weren’t an important part of their lives. Given that Cecily had never had a martial or athletic disposition, and that her powers didn’t seem very strong, one would have found it difficult to imagine her donning the ostentatious trappings of superheroism. For those who knew her very well, they could appeal only to her sense of duty for an explanation.

Certainly it was duty that had made her join the Bombshells. An admiral father, and a mother whose attitude to her family’s wealth was essentially noblesse oblige for capitalists, had made Cecily very conscious of the notion of personal responsibility. She took very seriously the opening words of the 28th amendment , so when she had had an opportunity to use her abilities for a cause in which she had at first believed, she had taken it.

For all the mendacity, humiliation and disaster that Lance Van der Boek’s program had entailed, Cecily did not exactly regret her time as a Bombshell. She felt tricked, and cheated, but they had performed in their tenure as a team some genuine heroics. The program’s goal – to restore by good PR a bit of America’s pride in its military – had failed, but that was not Cecily’s fault. Nevertheless, even Cecily herself expected the dissolution of the Bombshells to have been the end of her time wearing the proverbial cape. She was not like Valora, not so profoundly mighty that her nature demanded that she use her powers for the common good.

And yet here she was. A full-time, professional cape – with all the trimmings. A black mask over her elegant face, its eyeholes covered in a one-way gauze that covered her blue eyes but let her see uninhibited. Tall, black, flared boots clinging tightly to her graceful, pale legs. A high-necked, dark-red and black leotard. Dark-red opera gloves: all accented with strips of gold. On the black ‘v’ that covered her breasts and much of her abdomen, there was what looked like a capital ‘Y’ but was in fact an upsilon: the first letter of Cecily’s codename, ‘Hypatia’, in its original Greek. It too was worked in thin, fine gold, and was almost invisible when not under direct light. If nothing else, Van der Boek had taught her the importance of theatricality.

Why had she come here? Here to Portland, which seemed to the uptown, cosmopolitan Cecily to be little more than a sort of sprawling hamlet. Here where everything seemed so small and so grey, and where Cecily seemed both to stand out sharply against the atmosphere of the place, and to fade away into it.

“That’s the wrong question,” Cecily thought. “I know why I came here.” She knew the broad outline, at least. She had been chasing Lupus, her former teammate, who had not only been instrumental in that team’s downfall, but had visited a profound personal humiliation on Cecily and the others and had, Cecily believed, had murdered Lance Van der Boek just for good measure. She had felt a genuine will to expose Lupus to justice. She wanted to show people that the Bombshells had failed only because they had been betrayed. She wanted, indeed, to show that to one person in particular.

She had almost succeeded, with Valora’s help. But in the aftermath of their second encounter, Lupus had escaped. Since then, and Cecily had seen or heard nothing of her. She had hired private detectives and, when they failed, she had tried to pierce Maine’s bureaucracy to be able to work with the police. But in just over a month of searching, she had found only the merest, vaguest hints to suggest that Lupus was still in Portland. Why, then, was Cecily so dead-set on remaining?

The simple answer, Cecily supposed, was Valora.

Since her second battle with Lupus, no-one in Maine had seen Valora – the only superhero worth anything even approaching a shit that the state had had in a decade – anywhere. The citizenry who had come, slowly, to accept her; the young, superhuman or otherwise, for whom Valora had begun to become a figure of admiration; the various law enforcement agencies who had come to depend on her – all these Valora had abandoned. In her place, only Hypatia was left: a superhero of far less experience and infinitely inferior power. Most were convinced that she was dead.

Valora’s absence, once it was generally recognised as permanent, was a tinderbox for a swift and brutal unification of Portland’s entire criminal element. No thief, no drug dealer, no pimp, no counterfeit pharmacologist – none but the most inexpert, amateur frauds and muggers failed to pay homage to Milo Patáky. A tide of blood had risen that Cecily had not known even how to begin to contain. So brutal was Patáky’s conquest of all the rivals within sight of his throne that most of Cecily’s work wasn’t even done in Portland, but in Lewiston and Biddeford, where Patáky’s influence was not quite as all-encompassing, and the battles for territory continued. Cecily had been shot at many times by both sides, who resented this elegant interloper. She could not charge, daring, into the fray as Valora would have done, and she had very nearly been killed more than once. No other superhero in the state – what few there were – dared to challenge the brutal violence of Patáky’s expanding empire. Certainly not with the regularity that Hypatia did.

Hypatia had not been completely without success. She had more than once shielded bystanders from becoming collateral damage. She had even been able to overpower a pair of gunmen who had been trying to assassinate a recalcitrant gangster in Augusta. This won her a little local acclaim, dimmed only slightly when a second, successful attempt was made the following day. That this was Hypatia’s greatest victory was telling.

Cecily had considered resenting Valora for leaving, for abandoning the citizenry of Maine to the predations of this crime lord. She had certainly seen such views being put forth in the popular press. But Cecily could not really hold Valora’s departure against her. Not after what she had seen. Not after the wrathful madness that had twisted Valora into a figure of such terror that she still, sometimes, rose as a spectre in Cecily’s dreams. That Cecily was moved by Valora’s suffering and wholly sympathetic with her was immaterial: if she could become as crazed as that, she couldn’t be trusted with the power she had at her disposal.

It had not taken a month for Cecily to realise that she was out of her depth. It had not taken her a week to realise that. But she had had little moral choice but to try, if vainly, to stem the tide. Only on this day, four weeks exactly since she had first arrived in Portland, had she tried anything more than damage control. Only on this day did she seek allies.

At this time, the most successful superhero ‘teams’ in America were the River Valley Supermen and the Fundaments . When one thought of them, thought of the places in which they convened and debated the great dangers of the day, one thought of skyscrapers and great halls, and very big, important tables. The modest little reception hall that Cecily had rented for the meeting didn’t even have a table. It had plastic chairs, which Cecily had arranged in as neat a ring as possible, and it had a varnished, wooden floor. It was not otherwise a place auspicious of greatness. When Cecily’s first guests started to arrive, little was done to alter that impression.

All told, there were exactly forty superheroes who had gone through the bureaucratic rite of confession in the state of Maine, including Hypatia herself. Of those, three were frauds, two were in prison, and four had quit without telling anyone. Four of the braver ones were in hospital following encounters with Patáky’s thugs. Of those, two would be dead by week’s end. So, percentage wise, the fact that Hypatia’s invitation garnered a response from only nine people wasn’t too bad.

There was one person Cecily didn’t recognise, who was hanging back, concealing themselves rather ostentatiously in shadow. The others she knew from her research: Mountebank; Rubberman; Blue Bacchus; Glitterata; Lamia; Red Fang; Buzzsaw; and Shatterqueen. A collection of has-beens, ignorant neophytes, and below average also-rans. Their outfits looked worn, and cheap. Their expressions were despondent, bored or – in Mountebank’s case – covered completely by a spray-painted motorcycle helmet. Only three had arrived on time, and Red Fang had only done so because he’d thought the meeting was an hour earlier than it was. By the time Glitterata, the last to arrive, had sat down, Cecily had already had to say her opening words three times.
“Good morning,” she said, quickly correcting to ‘good afternoon’ once she realised how late they were already running. “Thank you all for coming.”
There were murmurs that vaguely approximated to a ‘you’re welcome’.
“My codename is Hypatia,” Cecily said. “I am new to Maine. Almost exactly as new, in fact, as the terrible violence that has become a regular feature of the lives of the people of this state. I have, in my small way, tried to dam the river, but… my abilities are moderate, at best, and I’m afraid I’ve been largely unsuccessful. I have called this meeting, primarily, to ask your aid. More than that, I propose a more permanent union of our powers. I wish to start a… well, I believe the phrase most often used is ‘super-team.’”

There were a few more murmurings. The figure at the back of the room audibly scoffed. Red Fang and Buzzsaw, the only two who knew each other’s real identities, shot each other a look.
“Hypatia, wasn’t it?” Buzzsaw said.
“That’s right.”
“Look, you seem like a nice kid, but this is… not a good idea.” She was older than most of the others, looking to be in her early forties. She wore a practical, yellow outfit, mostly made of kevlar and improvised leather guards. The bottom half of her face was all her mask showed, and it was pitted and scarred.
“Why not?” Buzzsaw’s challenger was Blue Bacchus, one of the younger heroes there, a hydrokinetic of relatively low power. “She’s right: someone has to do something about what’s happening. Why not us?”

Red Fang stood up. He was the only one there who was remotely famous, and he spoke with an air of weary authority. His manner suggested that he intended not merely to speak, but to declaim.
“I’ve been in this business for a long time,” he said. “More than ten years, now. And in that time, there’s something I’ve come to understand.” He raised his right hand, and a ball of red light appeared in it.
“Y’see this is about all I can generate now. I can throw this at someone, and it’ll explode with about 200 ft.lbs of energy when it hits a target. When I was in my twenties, I could manage… maybe 250. Now if that sounds impressive, it shouldn’t: that’s less than the average handgun.” The physics were a little more complicated than that, and Red Fang’s face creased momentarily as he debated to himself whether to bother explaining that but decided that his point had been made. “Let’s say the nine of us went up against nine men with assault rifles. We would get massacred.”
“Who says we’ll be going up against people with assault rifles?” Blue Bacchus interjected. “They’re just gangsters.”
“Don’t you watch the news?” Buzzsaw said, shouting across the others. “They’ve been blowing each other up with rocket launchers! You wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“Not alone, sure. But isn’t that the point of Hypatia’s idea?”
Thanks to Blue Bacchus, attention returned to Hypatia, and she tried to capitalise.
“I’m not,” she said, “suggesting that we try to fight these people in open warfare. We would be trying to disrupt the business of Milo Patáky as much as possible, make as many arrests as possible to help prosecutors build cases against his organisation. Oh – uh, yes?”

Glitterata had put her hand up. She was an attractive woman of 25 years, but still dressed like she was an attractive girl of 18 years.
“Who’s Milo Patáky?” she asked from behind a sparkly, pink mask.
A couple of the others scoffed, but Mountebank and Rubberman were quite pleased that someone other than them had asked.
“He’s the owner of the Falmouth Grand Casino,” Hypatia explained, “and a crime boss. Until recently he’s had modest ambitions, but the… explosion of violence this state has seen in the last few weeks is because of him. His involvement is perfectly well known to law enforcement, but no-one has been able to make anything stick.”
“No-one will testify against him.” Shatterqueen was the one who’d spoken. She was a trim, fit young woman in a relatively plain, black outfit, with a mask that suggested something a little Zorro-esque. Her top quite plainly displayed a set of rigid abdominal muscles, and despite often being described as “ivory-skinned” she had, apparently, developed a deep tan. “I’ve got a pal on the force who says he just pays off everybody who gets caught. And not that many people are getting caught.” One couldn’t tell from what she said which side she was on. But when she finished, she yielded the floor to Hypatia with a respectful nod. Hypatia began to suspect that Shatterqueen, alongside Blue Bacchus, was a likely ally.
“None of that changes anything,” Red Fang said. “We can’t do shit. No-one here is all that powerful.”

Rubberman gave a distant, airy growl.
“Hey man, I don’t, uhh, you know, I don’t know, you know?” he ‘said’. “I’m… like, you know… mostly bulletproof?” He looked up at the ceiling, his tone suggesting that he was not taking things entirely seriously. “And, y’know, what about that uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Valora lady? What happened to her? If she helped out, we could, y’know. Get, uhhhhhhh. Stuff done.”
“We need to put that possibility out of our minds,” Hypatia said. “Valora is… unavailable.”

“How do you know that?” Buzzsaw asked.
“I know her, a little,” Hypatia replied. It was not something she was entirely sure she wanted them to know. “All I will say is that Valora is in no position to be helping us, and that – if you’ll believe me – it’s not something you should hold against her.”
“No-one here has any right to hold anything against her,” Shatterqueen said. “We haven’t seen her like in this part of the country… maybe ever.”
“It’s true,” Blue Bacchus added, eagerly. “People used to spit at us in the street before she showed up!”
“That’s part of the problem,” Buzzsaw shot back. “No disrespect, but…” She gave another look at Red Fang. This was something the two had spoken of before.

“What do you think’s going to happen now that Valora’s gone?” Red Fang said. Uncomfortable, he tugged down the collar of his deep red cloak, and Hypatia briefly glimpsed an ugly burn on his chest. “I don’t know why she left, and I won’t ask,” he continued, sensing dimly that it was not something to be pried into. “But it was gonna happen one way or another. She was going to go somewhere to make more money, get more famous or – hell, just… go somewhere she could do more good than here. It’s happened before: any cape who’s anywhere worth a shit doesn’t stay here long. That’s why you’re stuck with us. The Dregs: too weak or too incompetent to be able to get out.”

A few of the others looked offended. Lamia haughtily lifted an aquiline nose, folding one sinuous leg over the other. But even she didn’t actually object.
“When John Q. Public figures out that all of us put together couldn’t do in a week what someone like her could do in an afternoon, they’re gonna start getting sick of us again.”
“You’re talking like the last few months have been some kind of golden age for us,” Mountebank said. He was a huge man, enormously muscular and enormously fat, very much looking the professional wrestler that he had once tried to be. “But as far as I can tell all Valora did was hog all the easy prey for herself. Yeah, I got a few more smiles from civilians, but I didn’t earn one red cent more.”
“You’re all missing the point completely!” Blue Bacchus exclaimed. He stood up. On his breast he put his right hand. Grandly he gestured with his left. Hypatia’s manner, he decided, was too elegant and soft spoken. But he, Blue Bacchus, he could convince the others of the nobility of her cause. He had, after all, a third-place ribbon from the Waynflete School Public Speaking Society’s Annual Mock Hustings! “You see, friends” he spake, “it’s not about the money.”
“Yes, it is.”
The person at the back had been so silent for so long that by the time he finally spoke, everyone else in the room had forgotten he was there. The unnatural boom of his voice didn’t help matters: Glitterata almost leapt out of her seat, while Blue Bacchus quietly retreated into his.

Hypatia’s ninth guest did not bother with a mask. By now, everyone knew his identity. He had a gaunt face, and . The only indication that he was anything other than a normal man, albeit one whose dress sense hewed a little too close to that of a member of Green Day, were the characters 騒音 emblazoned on his t-shirt. They meant – or at least could be read as – ‘Cacophany’.

Hypatia knew of him. Even though she’d still been a Bombshell at the time of his disgrace, the story had garnered sufficient nationwide attention for it to feature on page 18 of a daily edition of the New York Times. In desperation to meet his weekly quota, he had attacked Valora, trying to force her to give him some petty criminal she had collared. He had failed, as almost all who challenged Valora did, and in her fury she had handed him over to the police along with her quarry. She hadn’t pressed charges, but Cacophany’s desperation had turned him into persona non grata overnight. It had also cost him his licence to operate as a registered superhero.

The others looked at him with either confusion or disdain. Even Rubberman seemed faintly irritated that Cacophany was there. But he was by quite some way the most powerful superhuman present, and that carried a sort of weight of authority. Even his disgrace added to this gravity: there was something inescapably romantic, or at least dramatic, about a fallen hero.
“Thank you for coming,” Hypatia said, ever the gentlewoman.
“Well I’m about to shit all over your idea,” Cacophany said, “so maybe don’t thank me yet.”
Hypatia stiffened. She had never understood, or been much willing to tolerate, people who didn’t bother with basic politeness. Still, she allowed him to hold court.
“Who here actually does this full time?” Cacophany asked. Four of the others put their hands up. “Well, if you do, congratulations: you’re a chump. You’re making… slightly more money than you would in an entry level position as a fry cook at a KFC. And that’s assuming you meet your quotas every week.”
“Blue Bacchus was right,” Lamia said. She spoke slowly, and quietly, but not softly. “There’s an element of philanthropy in our work. If we wanted to be wealthy, we’d be financiers.”
“That’s not the point,” Cacophany said, obviously annoyed that he’d been interrupted. “The point is that we’re not tolerated unless we put ourselves in danger. If we don’t try to stop the bank robbers; the hostage takers; even supervillains. The really dangerous shit that no cop wants to have to deal with. Now you’re asking us,” he said, directly addressing Hypatia, “to take on a mob that’d make Al Capone blush.”
“What do you mean ‘us’?” Buzzsaw said. “Last I checked, you’d lost your licence.”

Cacophany turned on her in anger, but by the time he was actually facing her, that anger had unmasked itself as shame, and he threw up his hands in rhetorical surrender.
“Fine,” he said. “You’re right. I don’t get to play. But my point stands.” To Hypatia he said: “These aren’t the knights of the round table. They’re normal people who happen to have weird abilities. If you want us to put ourselves in danger – well where’s the hazard pay?”
Cecily wished Cacophany was not expressing himself so combatively. It would have made it easier to accept what he was saying, which she largely did, without seeming as though she were capitulating.
“I am still in negotiations with the MCRO ,” Cecily said. “They may be willing to offer a limited number of us some kind of stipend if we avail ourselves to the police specifically to help curb the violence of the past weeks. I’ve also applied for a federal grant, though strictly speaking that’s for counter-terrorism, so we’re unlikely to get it. I… also would be able to supplement our funds to a small extent myself. I’m not sure how long for, though. My circumstances are very fortunate, but I’m not a millionaire.”
To his credit, Cacophany felt a little guilty.
“Miss,” he said, “I don’t want to take money from you. That’s not my point.”
“But it is, isn’t it?” Hypatia replied, finding a little sternness in her voice that was not there when she took off the mask. “It’s a question of your bottom line. Not of our responsibility to help those weaker than ourselves. You,” she said, addressing Red Fang. “You said that we would all be hopelessly outmatched against men with guns. Well, I don’t know how many foot pounds of force my powers can exert, but I imagine it’s a lot less than yours. And yet I have survived several encounters with Patáky’s thugs. No-one is invulnerable, but if we pool our resources it’s hardly childish naivete to think that we can make some difference.” She quickly scanned the room for reactions. They were listening, but she suspected her forceful tone had not won her any friends. Even Blue Bacchus now seemed doubtful. She tried to change tack.

“That is not to say,” Cecily continued, “that I am ignorant of how badly professional superheroes are treated in this state. And that is another reason why I asked you to come here. This… would not be the first team of which I have been a part. The group into which I was recruited turned out to be little more than a fraudulent exercise in public relations. But there was some virtue in the idea that lay behind it. You were right: perhaps an invincible superwoman like Valora would inevitably do little more than foster unreasonable expectations. But if a group of, forgive me, more ordinary superhumans were to help at least blunt the edge of this wanton destruction, we could seriously alter popular perception.”

There was a moment, just after Cecily had finished speaking, when it really could have gone either way. She herself could not have said more: she’d have sounded pleading. But if Cacophany, Buzzsaw or Red Fang had given some kind of assent to Cecily’s logic, she might have been able to convince almost all of them. But the first one to speak was Mountebank, and the first word out of his mouth was ‘fuck’.
“Fuck this,” he said. “I’m not going in front of bullets so that a bunch of flighty, flip-flopping civvies might like us a little more.” He rose; and stormed out.

Rubberman watched Mountebank go, before oozing his goopy, semi-solid body (this was, thankfully, something he could turn on and off at will) off his chair as well.
“Way I figure,” he said, “this is kinda pointless anyway. Why fight this Patáky guy? He’s only, uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh taking out his, you know, like, rivals. Like, other criminals, right? Well screw it, let him fight them. Once he’s done, shit’ll calm down again.” He left too.
Folllowing this, there was a mass exodus. First Glitterata, then Buzzsaw, then Lamia, then Red Fang. Blue Bacchus mumbled something about Hypatia getting in contact with him, but he didn’t stick around either. Shatterqueen left after him, but seemed nervous, rather than disillusioned. Cacophany was the last left.
“You were right,” Hypatia said, before Cacophany had the chance.
“Well, good,” he replied. “I didn’t mean to rain on your parade, but - ”
“I mean that you were right that I shouldn’t have thanked you.” She glanced at a clock. “I believe I still have this hall booked for another fifteen minutes. That being the case, I would like you to leave.”
We may not give Cacophany all that much credit for feeling guilty this time.

Cecily waited until she was alone before she put her head in her hands. She took off her mask, laid it on her lap. She said ‘damn’ a few times. Beyond that, she didn’t know what to do. This had been her only plan. Without reinforcement, without some kind of support structure, she didn’t stand a chance of doing anything worthwhile in Maine. As far as she could tell, she had two options: total capitulation; or calling for aid from further afield. Perhaps she could make an appeal to the Fundaments, who sometimes farmed out a member or two when they felt the cause was worthy. She could try to corral Maine’s superheroes again if that stipend did come through; and if it didn’t she could even try appealing to Jackson Morrow’s Foundation, though she had never heard it giving assistance so far from California. But even though these ideas were not nonsense, Cecily found it difficult to think of them enthusiastically. She had an instinct that it was either this, her first plan – or nothing at all. The fire that had been lit in her when she had first come to Maine, the fire from which ‘Hypatia’ had been born, was starting to fade. It would certainly have made Cecily’s life easier if she let it fade, but she didn’t want to. But it was fading, whether she wanted it to or not. She needed a spark.

In absence of that spark to carry her, she had to make do with her own two legs. Putting her mask back on, she made her way to the side entrance, flinging the door open with an uncharacteristically blunt use of her powers.
“Ow!”
This was a strange reaction from a door. Cecily approached, frowning and uneasy. She played a steady, quiet melody of the notes in her mind that fuelled her power. When she passed the threshold, though, she let the music die down.

Nursing what would, in a few minutes become a bruise, Shatterqueen was standing on the other side of the door, looking at it with profound annoyance.
“Oh!” she said, perking up when she saw Cecily emerge. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“I rather think I’m the one who should be apologising,” Cecily replied, “since I appear to have just hit you in the face.”
But at this news, Shatterqueen gave a merry laugh.
“Oh, that was you! Sorry, it’s still my fault: I shouldn’t have been standing so close to the door.”
“Perhaps we can agree that no-one’s to blame,” Cecily said, in a definite effort to end a burgeoning conversation before it began. She began to walk past Shatterqueen, but her fellow heroine stood in her path.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and suddenly her tone was quite serious. “I am genuinely interested in what you had going on here, but I have to admit I had an… ulterior motive in coming here today.”

Curious, Cecily gave the area a brief scan. It was relatively isolated, with the building she had been in and the one adjoining it forming a kind of alcove, which led onto the street by a passage through which a broad-shouldered man facing straight on would have struggled to fit. They were, therefore, unlikely to be interrupted. But the area’s isolation made Cecily a little uneasy, and she retreated a few steps into the doorway.
“What was this motive?” she said. She was the essence of politeness, but she was watching Shatterqueen quite carefully.
Shatterqueen, for her part, seemed a bit nervous of Cecily as well, and she made no attempt to get any closer.
“It’s… sort of weird,” she said. “I haven’t been as brave as you, Hypatia, but I have fought Patáky’s men a couple of times. And… by a couple of times I mean ‘exactly twice’. It was the second time that I wanted you to talk about.”
“Oh yes?” Hypatia said.
Shatterqueen nodded. “The second time it wasn’t just men, right? There was a woman with them. She looked like she was giving orders.”
“That’s not all that unusual,” Cecily said. “I’ve encountered a fair few female gangsters myself.”
“No, no sure,” Shatterqueen said. “But that’s not the point. I’m pretty sure she was a superhuman.”

Cecily took a step closer. “… How do you know that?” she asked.
“She… I saw her tap one of the men on the shoulder. Barely touched him. But he reacted like Bruce Lee had just kicked him in the face.”
Cecily’s lips were pursed very tightly. For her, this was an expression of fairly extreme emotion.
“What did she look like?” Cecily asked.
Shatterqueen took a moment to think. “Young,” she said. “About your age, I think. Pretty, but kinda wild looking. Dyed hair, maybe green or… no, wait, I remember. It was blue.”
Cecily’s eyes shot open.

“Lupus!” she exclaimed, awash with surprise, excitement – and dearly needed relief.
Finally! Finally, some indication that she was still on the right track. Finally, some indication that the purpose Cecily had discovered in Maine wasn’t totally divorced from the one that had brought her there. Finally, confirmation that her moral duty was not in total opposition to her more personal quest. Not if you were a mind-reader could you have said something to Cecily that would brought her more succour. Not if you were the world’s greatest telepath could you have found something more apt to light that spark Cecily had sought. Now, Shatterqueen was no telepath. Nothing even resembling one. But she was clever. She’d had an intuition that what she’d said would be exactly what Cecily would want to hear: and we must all beware being told what we want to hear. She chose that moment to strike, and Cecily’s world went black.

She did not fall unconscious. She was not suddenly ambushed with a blindfold or a bag over her head. The world really did look like it had gone black. From Cecily’s perspective it was like going blind in reverse, with a total blackness spreading like paint over everything she could see, starting with what was closest to her, and then spreading out over the street, the city, the sky – the whole world vanishing into a blackness so total that it was violently disorienting, more like staring at a black wall that was right in front of Cecily’s face than staring out into a great void. For a frightening moment Cecily really thought that she had gone blind. Yet she could still see, with perfect clarity, her own body. In that way it made it worse than total darkness: if you just close your eyes, after all, you don’t suddenly lose all sense of place and balance. But being still able to see herself – yet nothing else around her, not even the ground – was so confusing that even standing still she almost toppled over. Cecily needed only an instant’s shock to realise that she was being attacked, and she began throwing out bursts of telekinetic energy in random directions as a sort of improvised sonar. But as clever as this might have been, it came too late. Shatterqueen had already moved behind her.

“Wh-what?!” With speed that Cecily wrongly took to be superhuman, a polyster lashing strap was whipped around her torso, clipped into place with a loud ‘clack’, and yanked tight, snapping her upper arms against her sides, trapping them completely; running right under her breasts, and neatly bisecting the ‘Y’ symbol which lay just beneath them.
“Unh! Nhhhhh!!” Cecily groaned, straining both her arms and her powers, and finding that neither were capable of breaking the strap. She tried to reach up with her forearms, but she couldn’t bend her elbows enough. When she tried to focus enough to undo the strap with her powers, rather than breaking it, all she managed was to go still enough for another strap to be thrown around her. This time its circuit was around her waist, binding her forearms now, pressing them against her so that her hands were flat against the slim curves of her hips, her arms now completely immobilised.
“NO!” Cecily cried out, as much in hope that someone would hear her as in protest. But though she hoped for aid, she did not wait for it. Gritting her teeth, she threw her power outwards in a wave. Her ability was a tool of precision, not a sledgehammer, and using her abilities in this way got the least out of them. Still, she thought she heard a grunt of pain, and she found herself able to run. But in the void, she tripped over a broken paving stone, and she tumbled forward, almost going head over heels. Using her powers, she managed to right and to catch herself, but this meant someone else caught her too.

“MMPH!” There was something soft over Cecily’s mouth. Something soft, and wet, that smelled strangely like strawberry shortcake. It was going over her nose as well, and with a moan of dismay, Cecily realised that she knew exactly what it was. “Ch…chloroform…”
“There now,” Shatterqueen said, pulling Hypatia’s body closer, gripping with one hand around her victim’s stomach as she extended the other over Hypatia’s chin and jaw, her thumb making sure the cloth stayed in place over her nose. “Don’t fight, Hypatia. Just breathe.”
“Ummphh! Mm-HHMMPHH!! Mhh… mmmmphh…!” Cecily could already feel the drug taking devastating, decisive effect. The strength was dropping out of her with precipitous speed, her muscles already struggling to obey her mind’s commands. She did fight, rolling her soft shoulders and writhing her sensuous, delicately womanly hips. But every second that fight was becoming more and more pointless. With her legs - long and graceful; coltishly shapely – Cecily could do no more than stumble. Her legs almost seemed too long for her to control them properly, and her knees forced inwards against each other, splaying out her supple calves and forcing her thighs – left half bare by her tall, black boots – to caress each other, like Cecily was delighting in the hazy throes of self-pleasure, even as she whimpered in helpless distress.

But it was not just her body the drug affected. That is, it was not just that Cecily felt sleepy: she felt… fuzzy, like her mind was being muzzled, stifled. She could scarcely think, but it felt not as though her mind were merely weak, but that it was being deliberately overpowered.
“No sense struggling,” Shatterqueen said, pressing herself closer to Hypatia’s reed-like figure. “This is a special recipe. We need to muffle you, Hypatia, don’t we? Need to make sure it can’t get up to any naughty teke tricks.”
“Mmhh… mhhh…” Cecily mewed, almost in affirmation. ‘Muffled’ was exactly how she felt. She felt like she had lost the power to make her own thoughts. Like she had been muted. Even her power, which she had learned to control through a kind of mental music, was silenced: she could hit the piano’s keys, so to speak, but the strings had been cut.

And she had not just been muted, but deafened, and blinded too. She could barely hear anything, not even the sound of her own deep, heavy breathing. She still could not see anything; nothing at all except for the cloth over her mouth, just at the edge of her peripheral vision, and even that was fading. Her eyes were a truly beautiful, emperor-butterfly blue, and they fluttered with all the requisite delicacy.

She could still feel, though, and she felt a hand gliding up to her face. Some of her hair, long, straight and sunset-red, was moved so that it didn’t cover her left ear. Cecily felt Shatterqueen tilting back her head, could feel the heat of Shatterqueen’s mouth close to her. She could not hear her assailant’s breath, nor her own, nor the sounds of the nearby road that, though it seemed hidden by an infinite void, was only about fifteen metres away. She heard nothing at all, until Shatterqueen brushed her lips against Cecily’s ear and whispered:
“Sleep for me.”

“Mph…!” The words thrummed through Cecily with a heavy, heady pulse, like those three words had made the gravity of the Earth cling tighter to her.
“Sleep for me,” Shatterqueen repeated, nuzzling Cecily as she whispered to her. She sounded different now, her accent sounding New Zealander, or maybe Australian. It was a pleasant sound. “There we go, darling… you want to sleep for me, don’t you? I’ve got such a nice voice… you’ve only got good thoughts for me, darling, don’t you? You want to sleep for me. You want to sink for me…”

Cecily found immediately that she did want to. She couldn’t bring any counter thoughts to bear, could not feel anything other than that these words were pleasant, and giving into them was pleasant. So she felt herself melting against this deceiver, this betrayer; letting herself sink back into the strength of her captor’s arms. Distantly, at the edge of a rapidly fading consciousness, Cecily was aware of a shadow of fear and distress, but they too were muffled, like she had been stripped naked and then wrapped up in a sheath of thick wool, unable even to listen to herself.

“That’s it,” Shatterqueen said, her voice going in steady waves between hushed intimacy and true whispering, cajoling the lissom maiden she’d captured into the deepest of slumbers. “Go limp for me, sweetie,” she said, and she heard Hypatia whimper as she did exactly that. Her arms went still. Her long legs stopped shuffling against each other. Her swanlike neck bent back, the back of her head resting on Shatterqueen’s left shoulder.
“Such a good girl…” Shatterqueen cooed, stroking Hypatia’s cheek with her index finger. “You want to give in, don’t you? And there’s really nothing else to do. No way to fight. No way to think. You just want to let me pull you down… make you helpless… make you sleep…”
“Mh…” Cecily’s whimpers were now so soft even her captor could barely hear them.

“Such a good girl,” Shatterqueen repeated, smiling to herself as Hypatia lay softly in her power. “You want to breathe in the chloroform, sweetie, breathe it all in until you’re so deep down, so deep and soft, so deep and soft and helpless…” Carefully, Shatterqueen felt for the edges of Hypatia’s mask, finding the pressure clips that kept it attached to her face. She pressed them with her thumb and forefinger, and slowly lifted the mask away.
This, finally, stirred Cecily just a little. She felt herself unmasked, felt her lovely, aristocratically feminine face unveiled; naked. She blushed, and lifted her heavy eyelids just a touch, just enough to look her captor in the eye, just enough to show her captor a beautifully innocent, crestfallen expression; her big, blue eyes wet and bright and pleading even through the haze of the chloroform.

“Such a beautiful girl,” Shatterqueen whispered, genuinely delighted by what she had revealed. “Such a sweet little damsel. You want to be a damsel for me don’t you?”
“Nhh… nhh…” Cecily protested, even minutely shaking her head.
“Oh of course you do, my darling,” Shatterqueen said, and leaned down again, so she could whisper into Hypatia’s ear again. “You want to be my pretty, helpless little damsel, don’t you, sweetie? Besides,” she added, before concluding in the softest, gentlest whisper: “you don’t have a fucking choice, do you?”
This, at last, defeated Hypatia. Her eyes fluttered a few more times, before beginning to roll back, at just the same time that enough moisture for a single tear formed in each eye. Finally, with a long, slow breath, Hypatia succumbed.

Shatterqueen smiled broadly. She shrank back her shadow so that, to an outside observer, it would seem only that it was unusually dark in a certain corner. Then, carefully, she took the cloth from Hypatia’s mouth, wiped the residue from her lips. She held Hypatia by her shoulders, lifting her into a standing position, before turning her around, and allowing Hypatia to flop against her chest. Then she began to crouch, slowly easing Hypatia’s body – a little taller than her own – up, and then fully over her shoulder.

She was a pleasant weight. She sank warmly against Shatterqueen’s body, her leotard letting her captor get a quite thorough feel of her sylphish figure. She could feel the gentle swell of Hypatia’s modest, pert bosom against her back, could see out of the corner of her eye the milky softness of her rear. But it was Hypatia’s legs she found herself the most drawn to, so long that, slung over Shatterqueen’s shoulder, the tips of her toes reached past Shatterqueen’s hips.

Not, in fact, that the name ‘Shatterqueen’ was really hers. The real Shatterqueen had died from congenital heart disease two years earlier. But she kept her identity so closely guarded that though her untimely death was well-mourned by a loving family, no-one knew that ‘Shatterqueen’ had died. Hypatia’s captor had discovered that the state considered her ‘active’ and had assumed the identity for her own, though she used it only occasionally – mostly just to keep the illusion going. But occasionally it was useful to don the mask. Though she was born ‘Shauna’, when Hypatia’s captor had to introduce herself, she most often went by the name ‘Lot’ .

So Lot – let us call her – carried Hypatia’s limp frame in complete safety from discovery. So confident was she, and so skilled in dimming and masking herself from detection, that she walked right out into the open, to where she’d left her car, a plain 2001 Honda Civic: all the better not to draw attention. She opened the passenger side, and placed Hypatia in the seat, before getting in herself on the driver’s side. She spread a thin layer of shadow over the windows, dark enough that no-one would be able to see that Hypatia was bound and unconscious, but bright enough that no passing police officer would become suspicious. For this reason, she didn’t even drive off straight away once she’d shut her door.

She took a moment to admire Hypatia. She was beautiful: what people used to call a woman of breeding. She had a kind of airy, dyed-in-the-wool elegance that made one feel she was the kind of woman who would look as refined in a bikini as she would in a ballgown. Lot noticed that Hypatia’s knees were slightly lifted and realised that it was because the coltish damsel didn’t have enough legroom to accommodate her. Smiling, she adjusted the seat far enough back that Hypatia’s legs could flop straight forward. The movement made Hypatia’s head fall onto her right shoulder, and her legs fell into a position of pigeon-toed passivity. Lot reached over, squeezed one of Hypatia’s thighs, feeling the refined delicacy of its creamy skin; the svelte softness of its constitution.

But with that indulgence, she returned to her business. Turning the keys in the ignition, she slowly drove off, still making sure not to attract any attention. She kept to the speed limit. She stopped at every stop sign, even when it was obvious that the roads were free. She smiled to herself, and wondered just how much money Hypatia would make her.
Damselbinder

Maria Okonedo’s life was not turning out as she had expected.

At fourteen, already an accomplished distance runner, she had expected to be an athlete. That became impossible when she’d discovered her powers, because superhumans were not allowed to compete in international sporting events. At eighteen she had expected to be a fitness instructor, but her brief foray into this (perfectly honourable) profession had made her uncomfortable: California gym culture and its peppy machismo had not agreed with her. At twenty when she had first tried her hand at crimefighting, and even at twenty-one, when she had been recruited into the Bombshells, it would not necessarily be fair to say that she had expected to continue on as a superhero, but it had at least seemed to be where the wind of her life was blowing.

It would be wrong to say that Maria saw this as a tragedy. That it had ended in such spectacular failure pained her every time she thought of it, but the mere fact of the Bombshells coming to an end wasn’t a bad thing. Its end had been freeing, even. For, at the time, Maria had taken her role as ‘leader’ of the Bombshells extremely seriously and having, even theoretically, responsibility for people’s lives had been… fraying.

By contrast, Maria’s life now was almost tranquil. Every day was the same. She woke at 6, showered, went for a run, came home, showered again, ate a small breakfast, jogged to the office, spent eight-to-ten hours at the office, jogged home, performed a regimen of press-ups, sit-ups, squat-thrusts, lunges and 20 minutes on her exercise bike, ate a light dinner, tried to improve her Spanish, read, watched perhaps an hour of television, and then went to bed.

On Sunday mornings, she went to Church with her mother. Every Wednesday she attended a yoga class, every other Thursday she attended a book club . Every Friday she would go for at least one drink with her colleagues in HR. If she got really drunk, the kind of drunk where it makes you feel really sleepy until you actually get into bed and then it keeps you up all night, she would put her laptop next to her in her bed and watch pornography. There was a particular company from which she tended to purchase such material, and though all of their films featured at least one man, Maria didn’t mind. The male body was beautiful, even if it didn’t arouse her. But it was especially the way this company filmed the female body that she liked. The focus on legs, and bare backs and stomachs. But though the pleasure Maria found in such material was of an almost artistic kind, it always made her feel dirty when she woke up the next morning: a moral hangover to go with the ordinary kind.

It was on such a morning following such a night that Maria woke. She had actually gone to sleep with her smut on loop, so she woke up to see a woman exposing her breasts to camera. Scandalised by what had satisfied her only a few hours before, she snapped her laptop shut, and rolled over to hide her face from it. In her new position, she saw that her clothes from the previous night were crumpled on the floor, but her pyjamas were still folded on top of her dresser. She realised that she was naked. As she’d tossed and turned in the night, dreaming that she was a minor character in Friends, she’d wrapped herself up in her sheets like a would-be moth. She wriggled about to unwrap herself and, when the sheets were thrown open, she found that her cocoon had preserved something from her night’s indulgence: she smelt intensely, and headily of sex.

For a moment Maria indulged in this sensation. Her hands roved over her own body, find that her regimen of conditioning had given her as many aesthetic benefits as physiological. Her stomach was hard, and tight; her arms and shoulders were lean, but strong; her deep-brown legs shapely, feminine, and taut with a runner’s jackrabbit grace. She even started stroking her own small, high breasts.
But this was too much. She wasn’t just pleasuring herself; she was… wallowing in herself. She had never thought of herself as a vain person before, and she felt like she had uncovered an unpleasant side of herself.

She rose, showered in water that was a little too cold, and washing her body just a little too harshly for it to feel pleasant. She dressed, in her least flattering gym clothes, and began her morning routine, even though she was now suspicious of her own motives for doing so. She disliked the thought that she had put all this effort into her physical conditioning only for the purpose of beautifying herself.

In reality, Maria had badly misread herself. That is, of course she had not been completely disinterested about how good her regimen made her look; but it was not even that which had made her so uncharacteristically sensuous. There was nothing of Narcissus in it. It wasn’t about herself. It was about sex.

There was a part of her that wanted sex to be more important in her life than it was. Not just to have more of it – though obviously that would have been nice – but to make it something she thought about more, something she enjoyed more when she had it, something through which she could express herself. It was not a coincidence that Maria, who was so physically athletic, had this side of herself. She was, intrinsically, a very physical person. If you had invented a machine that could put bodies in other minds, Maria would have felt that to have the machine used on her would be to kill her. This side of her even influenced her religious life. Her mother was Christian and her father was a Muslim, and she though she had at times been more attracted to Islam, which felt to Maria something of a less mythologically focused religion, there had never been any real chance of her converting: Maria just couldn’t conceive of a God without a body.

Maria even permitted herself a private heresy: she did not accept the Virgin Birth. Aside from the fact that it was a little too fairy-tale, she didn’t like the idea of God entering the world in such a miraculously sterilised fashion as traditionally prescribed by Christianity. To divorce sex from the creation of life was to rob Christ of his physical humanity.

“It sounds almost like you see sex as something sacred. Or am I misunderstanding?” Cecily had asked her this question, once, when Maria had tried to explain her personal theodicy. She wasn’t religious, but she had always been very patient with Maria’s faith, and curious without seeming too prying – even when she was asking Maria’s opinions about sex.
“Not… sacred exactly,” Maria had replied. “Actually, not sacred at all. But… human. You can’t take sex away from human life. That’s… what I think, anyway.”
“That’s stupid.” The interjection had come from Charlie. Maria and Cecily hadn’t even realised she’d been listening to them. “‘Ooh, sex can only be to make babies, ooh!’ What a load of horseshit. What, am I gonna go to hell if I take one in the ass?”
“That’s not what I meant!” Maria had said. “I said sex can’t be taken away from human life: I didn’t mean it the other way round.”
“So you don’t think gay people are spitting in the eyes of the Lord Jesus?” Charlie had said.
“Of course not! I’m gay myself – not that it’s any of your business.” Maria had been so irritated with Charlie, feeling tricked into revealing something private about herself, that she had not noticed Cecily’s reaction. She had looked at Maria in surprise, and then a small, coy smile had formed on her face. Only much, much later did Maria remember this, and realise its significance. This, then, was a simpler reason that she didn’t want to think about sex at the moment: there was still only one person with whom she was interested in having any.

It was all this focus on the physical, on the importance of her body to her selfhood, that made Maria feel antsy. For though she kept her stomach hard, her thighs firm and her shoulders strong, she had not used her powers once in more than a month. It wasn’t hard to work out why: her ability to radiate energy from her hands was useful only for destruction, for battle, and she had not been in a battle since Lupus – if it really had been Lupus – had kidnapped her.

In the middle of a sit-up, Maria fell on her back, close to panic. She couldn’t remember how to use her powers. She flexed her hands, trying to call her power to them, but she couldn’t think of the right… she couldn’t even think of the right word to describe what she couldn’t find. Perhaps her powers were gone. Why should she have supposed that the mechanism that caused her powers to work was reliable? Perhaps lack of regular use had atrophied them to nothing. Perhaps they’d just broken. That did happen, sometimes.

But the moment passed quickly. She’d just been thinking about it too hard, like the proverbial millipede. Her living room was filled with deep, red light, as wispy orbs the size of tennis balls appeared in Maria’s hands, waiting to be unleashed. She held onto them for a few seconds, reminding herself of their reality. If she released even one of those orbs, with a swing of her arm she could have sliced through her ceiling and killed everyone in the apartment above. She knew she was powerful. Yet it had never quite been enough.

Throughout the rest of the day, this little episode bothered her. She’d not thought very hard about what her relationship to her abilities was. She resented being denied a career as a professional athlete, but she had faith that there was a reason for her power. She was a little uncomfortable that it was decisively a weapon that she had been given, but at least it was a weapon the lethality of which she could control. She had no serious distaste for her abilities: she just couldn’t bring herself to use them.

But by the end of the day, one spent largely in a somewhat fitful repose, Maria could not continue thinking as she had done. That moment that she had feared her powers lost – it was difficult for Maria not to see this as some sort of sign. The messenger might have just been her own subconscious rather than divine nudging, but it was still important.
“I’m a coward,” she said to herself, out loud. The words ambushed her. She felt like she had been struck. She froze, stinging from the blow, then exploded into action.

She sprinted through her apartment, actually kicking off a wall to round a corner faster. She ran to the far corner of her kitchen, with the loose tile. She tried to prise up the tile, but she remembered that she had grouted it shut a few weeks ago. Instead of reaching for a chisel, she used her powers like a welding torch and just cut the cement away, pulling the tile off and casting it haphazardly aside. She reached in, pulled out the heavy, worn suitcase she’d stored beneath the boards. It was covered in paint and dust, and Maria’s purpose was delayed by a prolonged coughing fit. But she retook command of her lungs and opened the briefcase.

They were still there, the trappings of superheroism that she had hidden away for what felt now like a very long time. Her dress, stitched together from a space-age fabric, not all too dissimilar in texture to a wetsuit. She pulled off her gym clothes and slipped it on, with a momentary – and completely irrational – fear that it might not fit anymore. But it settled snugly against her trim contours. It was scarlet, inlaid with two baby-blue bands running vertically from the dress’ skirt to Maria’s shoulders. The skirt was flouncy, very short. It had been longer when she’d first pieced it together, but somehow in the redesign process to which Van der Boek had subjected them all it had got shorter, and shorter.

But Maria saw, among her discarded gym clothes, the black shorts she’d been wearing. They were small enough that they wouldn’t be visible under her dress when she was standing still, but they’d still shield her modesty when she was moving. She pulled the shorts up her legs, the lycra fitting with a satisfying tightness to the tops of her thighs and her rear, which had an attractive mixture of tightness and prominence. She couldn’t think why she hadn’t done this before: immediately she felt more comfortable in her scarlet livery, even finding a degree of pleasure in its generous display of her tautly feminine legs, rather than being embarrassed by it.

She ignored the boots she’d worn as a Bombshell, reached underneath them to the low-ankled sneakers she’d used before; done up in the same red and blue as her dress. They were stiff from lack of use, but a few runs-on-the-spot made them feel as comfortable as ever. Maria actually found she was excited. She tied her long, dark-brown hair into a ponytail, tightly pulling her hair away from her face, and swished it about to make sure it wouldn’t come loose in the middle of a fight.

But the heady, heroic momentum of Maria’s enthusiasm didn’t last. She began to wonder what the hell she was doing. What was she planning? Just to run about Renning City hoping to bump into a supervillain ? This was California, sure, but it wasn’t a cartoon. And what if someone recognised her? She had her domino mask, but that would hide little if someone saw her up close. And what if she ran into someone who recognised her from the papers, someone who would throw her humiliation in her face? No, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t. She couldn’t take that weight again. She turned around. She began to unfasten her livery, to chastise herself for such naked foolishness. It had been a stupid, stupid idea.

And then she stopped dead in her tracks.

We do not all get conversions as dramatic as Saul’s on the road to Damascus. Some of us never get any conversions at all. But one nevertheless tends to underestimate how potently transformative just having a thought can be. Sometimes we ourselves, even as a paradigm shift in our own way of thinking begins to direct us, do not realise that there has been any change at all. All Maria thought was: “I want to do this.” It was just that, not putting her superheroism in terms of a duty, or a responsibility, or a gift, or imagining what Cecily or even Valerie would think of her for her timidity. It was simply something that she wished to do.
And it was in such wise that Freebird took flight again.

Maria did not, in the end, have to do any running about. This was not Maine, after all: this was California, the heart of American superheroism, and there were plenty of mechanisms for superheroes to find ways to make themselves useful. Freebird was still registered, and as such had access to a special police frequency, where the police would announce crimes in progress for which they wanted superhuman aid. She’d been getting orders and assignments from Van der Boek for so long she’d quite forgotten about this. She’d had to buy new batteries for her little radio – still in costume – but even empowered, for a while, Maria’s little radio just hummed to itself. After twenty minutes, a call was put out for someone to intervene in a bank robbery, and Maria steeled herself to deal with possibly quite serious violence – but before she could muster up her strength, the voice on her radio informed her that the situation was in hand, thanks to the intervention of someone named “Doctor Arrhenius.”

Maria was actually a little bit put out. Foiling a bank robbery was just the sort of thing people imagined superheroes doing, so it would have been an especially suitable way for Freebird to return to the world. There was another call for help, for a carjacking by a superhuman that had spilled into unusual violence, but Maria realised that it would take her more than an hour to get there. She began moving in that direction anyway, but she knew that the situation would almost certainly have resolved itself by the time she got there.

Before Maria had got very far, however, there was another alert.
“Code, uh…” the radio operator mumbled, apparently having to check something. “Code 6… Charles near north side of Mulcahy Park. Proro assistance requested.”
As far as Maria could remember, “Code 6 Charles” was quite vague, meaning something like ‘dangerous suspect; officers present at the scene’. It was strange that the radio operator wasn’t being more specific, but Mulcahy Park was close: doubtless she would be the first, probably she would be the only, cape to get there. She had not fought alone for a while, she realised, and it made her forgivably nervous. But it was a little exciting, too. Like any athlete, she had something inside herself that wanted to be challenged. When Maria actually reached Mulcahy Park, though, the nerves began to reassert themselves with somewhat greater vigour.

She had not stumbled upon the scene of a great and terrible disaster. No-one had been killed, no great and terrible damage to the public purse had been done, and it was not a day that would live in any particular infamy. But there were police barriers up, with an improvised barrier of vehicles behind it, and the officers present looked confused and frightened. For within the wall of police cordons was a much larger, much thicker wall - of solid ice.
“Hey!” one of the officers shouted at Maria, running up to her with their hand on their undrawn pistol. “Miss, you need to move away from here right now. I’m not asking, and I’m sure as shit not asking twice.” He had a bullyingly officious, threatening tone, one with which Maria was unfortunately familiar when being addressed by policemen. She had never faced any aggression from the police for being a superhuman. She’d had plenty for her skin tone.
“Your department put out a call,” Maria said, stiffening. “I’m a registered cape. I can help you.” Keeping her arm at her side, she accessed just enough of her power to make her hand glow dark red. There were wisps of vapour as the moisture in the air around Maria’s hand flash-boiled.
The officer called for his sergeant.

Sergeant Mayweather was not so much less suspicious than her underling as she was happy immediately to vent all responsibility in Maria’s direction.
“Thank you for showing up,” she said. “We don’t know what the guy who’s making all this ice is doing: as far as we can tell he’s just kind of rampaging around Mulcahy Park… freezing everything.”
“Has he hurt anyone?” Maria asked.
The Sergeant shook her head.
“No,” she said. “Witnesses say he pretty much went out of his way not to. He just chased everybody out and then made that.” The wall of ice to which she referred was already half a metre higher than it had been when Maria had arrived.
“Alright,” Maria said. “I… should be able to deal with this.”
“Great,” Mayweather said. “We’re all counting on you.” Her tone was obsequious, but in a way that said ‘I’m happy to give you all the credit; I’m equally happy to put absolutely all of the responsibility for dealing with this on you and, if you need help, you sure as hell aren’t getting any from me.’

A gap was made in the cordon for Freebird to pass. She approached the ice barrier, began to gather her power in her hands. As she raised them, she heard stifled laughter behind her, heard someone muttering her codename: she’d been recognised. The red light in her hands flickered, and she flushed. Memory of her humiliation at Lupus’ hands rose up, and her mind was filled with the ridicule she imagined from all those around her. It was exactly what she had feared.

But though Maria could not, in all honesty, say to herself that this didn’t matter to her, she could at least say truthfully that she knew that it shouldn’t have. She gritted her teeth, yelled in a strong voice for the officers to stand back, and then drove her hands forward. From her palms sprung twin beams of crimson light which ground into the barrier like the flames of a welding torch. A great cloud of steam rose from the point of impact, as the barrier began to melt under Maria’s power. It grew weaker, and weaker, and weaker, until with a shout Maria exchanged heat for force, and with a pulse of energy the barrier gave way completely, leaving a crumbling arch in its place. Wreathing her arms in scarlet fire, Freebird stepped through.

The villain was everything a hero looking for a great battle could ask for. He was large, and muscular. He was wearing a dramatically long, billowing coat. He wore a mask over most of his face but left a pair of fierce eyes uncovered. A cloak of cold wind spiralled about him, in the shape of a teardrop reaching three times his considerable height into the air. He was obviously a person of genuine power. With that power he had frozen everything about him within a range of 100 metres: the trees, the flower beds, the grass – the only thing he’d left unfrozen was a pond on which a few confused ducks were still quacking to themselves.

There was no chance of catching this man by surprise. When Freebird emerged from the steaming entrance she had created, he was already facing her. He shouted a brisk, wordless battle-cry and sheathed his forearms in frosty-blue energy. He fired a beam of it off to the side, creating a perfect, frozen hexagon a metre in diameter where it struck. He, then, was not an ordinary cryokinetic . Rather, he projected some sort of exotic radiation which created ice, rather than just froze moisture in the air.
“Who are you?” he shouted. It was aggressive, but not mocking; a genuine question, rather than a sneering ‘who are you supposed to be’.
“Freebird,” Maria replied.
“Freebird. Fine. Call me Glacier if you have to call me anything.” He began to approach, slowly, like a warrior entering an arranged duel.
“Why are you doing this?” Maria asked. “Do you want something? Or are you just… rampaging because you can?”
“My reasons are none of your business. Defend yourself!”

Glacier bellowed, and sprang forward, thrusting his arms towards his enemy. Twin bursts of blue light lanced out, and Maria had to leap out of the way to avoid being hit, rolling into a sprint as soon as she hit the ground.
Glacier assumed that he would be able to hit her easily: he only had to move his arm to keep up with her as she circled him. But Freebird surprised him with her athleticism. She was so fast, and so agile, that his eye could barely keep up with her, much less his arm. And then when he did get a bead on her, she threw a bolt of energy at him over her shoulder. It didn’t quite hit him, but his shot and hers grazed each other in the air, throwing up a great cloud of steam. When it dissipated, however, Freebird was nowhere to be seen.

Maria heard Glacier shouting in frustration. She had hidden behind a frozen tree, the curtain of ice over its leaves helping to shield her. She needed to catch her breath: not because her endurance needed replenishing, but because she was shaking. She must have been badly out of practice because, thinking over the skirmish, she realised she’d had several opportunities to attack him at full force. This Glacier person had raw power to a respectable degree, but Maria could see why she’d never heard of him: he wasn’t especially skilled. But he was no amateur either; he certainly had enough power to kill her if she was the slightest bit careless. She had to think quickly – and she formulated a plan.

She’d been inspired by the interaction she’d noticed between their powers, by the cloud of steam that had hidden her so effectively. If she could get their powers to clash again, ideally closer to Glacier himself, she could make another screen of vapour. That would have given enough room to use a trick she’d learned from practice with Cecily and the others: trading heat for force and using her powers to throw herself into the air. She figured that if Glacier tried to guess where she went after creating the cloud, he probably wouldn’t think of looking up first. If the gamble paid off, she’d have a clear shot at Glacier, and she had no reason to think he’d be any more resistant to damage than an ordinary person. It wasn’t a bad plan, especially considering it had been whipped up in about five seconds. So, one can forgive Maria for the fact that that her plan failed almost at the very first step.

Her powers already charged, Maria stepped out from behind her hiding place, fixing her eyes on Glacier, glaring a challenge at him. He accepted, cupping his hands and then forcing them forward with a grunt, sending a chaotic, screaming torrent of cold light at his enemy. Maria retaliated with an offhand effort, letting fly a quick burst of energy at a modest fraction of what she could produce when really trying. The point of it was just to make another cloud of steam to hide in; but though the clashing of the two superhumans’ powers produced, this time, a violent explosion of steam, nothing else that Maria had imagined would happen happened.

When their powers had clashed the first time, it had only been a glancing blow of their opposing energies. The second time had been a head on collision. But it was a head on collision in much the same way that a bullet encountering the impenetrable, unyielding barrier of a caramel flan was a head on collision. Maria’s offhand, low-power squib of an attack overmatched Glacier completely, shooting straight through his own projection, and striking him in the chest, burning his cloak and throwing him onto his back. When, a few seconds later, Glacier saw a triumphant - if confused - Freebird standing over him, her arms aflame with threatening might he wisely, and immediately, surrendered.

From the moment of her arrival, it had taken Freebird less than ten minutes to defeat and apprehend Glacier. Yes, only two of the officers present had been cruel enough to mock Freebird. But even the more polite of those who had recognised her had not expected victory, much less such a rapid one. She was from the Bombshells, wasn’t she? Weren’t they, you know, jokes? Wasn’t the whole point of them that they had been jokes?

Yet, when Freebird emerged from Glacier’s now-melting dominion, no-one there was in any mind to ridicule her. She seemed taller than when she had entered, her shoulders higher. With her long ponytail, her leanly athletic body and the light sheen of sweat over her skin, she put one in mind of a mare after a gallop: lithe, powerful, and proud.
And Maria was proud. Proud of the raw strength she had at her disposal; proud that she had defeated Glacier without endangering anyone; most of all proud of herself for having ventured out into the world again with her head held high. But it was a private pride. It pleased her to see that the officers were impressed with her, but it did not matter over much. If they had all been haughtily unimpressed, it would not have made much difference to how she felt about herself. For that reason, though she politely thanked the officers for holding the line until she had arrived, and though she gratefully received their gratitude, she did not stay to glory in her triumph, and swiftly departed.

Had Maria not left so quickly, she might have heard Glacier explain to the arresting officer that he had never really intended to hurt anyone. She might have heard him go on to say that he was a mercenary . She might then have heard him explain that he had been hired to stomp around Mulcahy Park with his powers until someone showed up to stop him. He did not admit, certainly not at the point of his arrest, who had hired him. But if Maria had stuck around long enough to see Glacier being driven off, she might have noticed, about forty metres from the scene of the crime, that a car drove off at just the same time, tailing the vehicle carrying Glacier. A second car pulled away only a few moments after the first. But this second car didn’t follow Glacier.

It followed Maria.
Damselbinder

It was a shame that so much of Mulcahy Park had been frozen over: it was one of Maria’s favourite haunts when she wanted to run, or when she wanted to be alone. But she wasn’t far from the Canal , so she decided to jog there. She wanted, probably even needed, some space. Though she stayed off the high streets, she got quite a few stares as she jogged along in her heroic regalia. It did still bother her a little – but only a little. She felt so distant from the agonised humiliation of only a few weeks earlier that she could hardly believe those emotions had been her own.
“I’m just so glad nobody died.” The thought sprung into her mind unbidden. It was not entirely clear to her where it had come from.

The Canal was not a canal. It was, really, a picturesque ditch. It that had been dug in the 1940s with the intention of it being made into a canal, but there had been some drainage problems that had prevented the plan coming to fruition. It had been in a foul, vermin infested state for decades until a citizens’ association – led and primarily funded by Maria’s church, in fact – had decided to use the space for the public good. It was now something between a public walkway and a garden, and there were market stalls there most weekends. To sit in solitude, or with a girlfriend and a coffee, it was Maria’s favourite place in Renning City.

It was too late at night for Maria to enter the Canal itself, but one could still walk along what would have been the ‘bank’ of the Canal, a paved area popular with cyclists, with a concrete overhang shielding one from the noise and the smell of the nearby road. Maria walked by the bank’s edge, fingers trailing along the safety wall. In the low light the hanging ivy, the beds of primroses and brash, confident little poppies looked especially pretty. To admire them all the closer, Maria leaned over the side, putting both hands on the wall to support herself. It was only then that she noticed that those hands were shaking.

Once she realised this, Maria found that her whole body was shaking. All the things that could have gone wrong in her battle flashed through her mind in a vomitous surge, and she had to exercise a great deal of self-control to prevent herself from hyperventilating. She could have been killed the second she faced off with Glacier. Sure, she had turned out to be much more powerful than him, but it could easily have been the other way around. She could have made some hideous tactical error and got others killed. Just like all those marines who’d been killed by Sinistrus. Just like Lance. Killed because she was too incompetent, or too weak.

“Oh, shut up!” Maria shouted, and found her powers flaring to life almost of their own accord. What had it meant, that moment when she’d thought her powers lost, if not to remind her that there were things she could do? Why was she torturing herself not only with lives that had been lost, but with lives that merely could be lost? “This feeling isn’t noble,” she thought. “It’s not compassion, or love of human life… it’s just – the schoolgirl who doesn’t want anyone to get mad with her!”

It would be wrong to say that there was no truth to this. Often, Maria’s moral instincts were couched in terms of “what would [x] think?”. When [x] was God that was, perhaps, sufficiently abstract, but when [x] was her mother, her priest, her friends or, worst of all, ‘the public’ it became difficult for her to show moral courage. But this was an instinct she had always sensed she should fight, even if it sometimes defeated her, as she had let it when the Bombshells had imploded. This time she had defeated it. At the very least she had done what snipers do: delay the inevitable twitch until after the bullet had fired.

Not for the first time in the past weeks, she thought of Cecily. Now she, Maria thought, was a woman of courage, moral and physical. The two had spoken only very occasionally, and very briefly, since their last face-to-face encounter, and Maria knew only a little about what Cecily was doing, other than that she was fighting as a superhero again. Perhaps Cecily would have been pleased to hear what Maria had just done.

Maria suddenly felt an urge to call her. At first, she recoiled from this impulse, because she thought that she was doing it to get approval or praise from Cecily, but she was wrong. It was merely, she realised, that she felt able to do something she had not been able to do perhaps in the entire time she had known Cecily: speak to her without shame. She wanted very badly, she realised, to speak to her. She wished that she had found her courage weeks ago.

She removed her phone from a concealed pocket in her upper arm, dialled Cecily’s number. Part of her had hoped that the call would go straight to voicemail but, alas, it rang merrily and loudly. After a few seconds, Maria heard a click, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up as Cecily answered.
“H… hello?”
“Hi, Cecily, it’s… it’s me. It’s Maria.”
“Wh… who’s this?” She sounded strange. It was possible that Maria’s call had woken her, but she sounded disoriented, not just sleepy.

“It’s Maria,” she repeated. “I know I called… kind of out of nowhere. Um…” It occurred to her that she didn’t actually know where Cecily was. If she was in New York or something it would have been nearly eleven at night. “I’m sorry, is this a bad time?”
“Oh… oh, Maria…”
Cecily said her name with such warmth, such breathy tenderness, that Maria blushed, hotly and brightly.
“A-are you sure you don’t want me to call back?” Maria asked. “You sound pretty tired.”
“You’re so sweet…” Cecily said. “No, I… always so glad to… hear… you… . But… there is – is something… something…” She went silent for a moment, then made a strange, strained sort of sound. “I’m… I can’t… can’t think…”
“Cecily, are you okay?” Maria was worried that Cecily was ill: she sounded delirious.

“Maria…” Cecily whispered, and hearing her own name in such intimate tones sent shivers up Maria’s back. “I’ve been… I… I…” Her voice was fading, as though she were on the cusp of passing out. Almost inaudibly, with a pleading, hushed distress mewed: “Maria… save me…” There was the sound of a short laugh, in a voice other than Cecily’s, and the call ended.
But Maria did not hear the laugh, nor had she heard Cecily’s soft, whispered plea. Her phone had fallen from her hand, clattering onto the concrete path, the back of its case cracking, and popping out along with its battery. Maria did not entirely forget Cecily, but it was not unreasonable to conclude that she now had a more immediate concern than the welfare of her friend. For she had felt a sharp, stinging pain in her backside and, looking down expecting to see an insect that had invited a swatting, she instead found a feathered dart sticking out of her left buttock.

“Wh-what?!” For a fatal instant, Maria froze, looking in stunned disbelief at the dart sticking out of her. When that instant passed, she plucked the dart out, but her effort had come far too late. There was a pale, yellow liquid coating the tip of the dart, and – as the first wave of dizziness hit her – Maria realised that she had just been drugged.

Stumbling backwards, Maria looked around with a feverish desperation. Who had attacked her? Where were they? How had they shot the dart into her without her seeing them? She imagined some cartoonish big game hunter – in fact she pictured the villain from Jumanji – poised on a rooftop somewhere, but there weren’t any rooftops in sight of the Canal’s bank.

“Unh…” It was affecting her already. She felt dizzy, uncomfortably warm, and her fingers were tingling. She tried to pick up her phone, but her fingers were stiff and clumsy, and she couldn’t get the battery back in. She groaned in frustration and just stuffed the pieces into her pocket. She realised she had to try to run, but she didn’t know which way to go. Her attacker could have been anywhere. But every second she wasted was a second she grew weaker, and in the end she just had to pick a direction at random.

Maria had thought that she was sprinting. She was trying to sprint. But though her strides were long, and fast, she could barely get herself above a brisk jog. With every step her body felt heavier, like she was being coated in tar. She was breathing hard and sweating far more than her speed would normally have caused her to. Her vision was swimming. Her muscles were straining. She was exhausted, and she had only run about thirty metres.

She was losing co-ordination. She almost tripped over. Then again, and again. Each time she caught herself, for she sensed that if she fell then she would not be able to get back up. But each time was harder, each fall a nearer and nearer and nearer miss. She stumbled, she strained, she groaned, and she fought the weights that were second-by-second fastening themselves to her limbs, and though she was slowing, she could almost see the steps that led up to the street, was close to somewhere that would put her in relative safety, if she could just keep going, keep pushing, dig deeper like in the nadir of a marathon, if she could just get to those steps… if she could… if she could just…

“Ah!” Another sharp sting. In dismay, Maria looked down, and saw a second dart, sticking out of the top of her thigh. “N… no…!” she gasped, and with a final effort and a shaking hand, she reached towards the dart. But her hand never reached it.
Maria’s body was heavy. Her shoulders were sinking. Her toned legs were trembling. Her vision was hazy and her ears were ringing and her skin flushed hot and cold, sweating and shivering. She tried to call upon her powers, but she produced only an anaemic red glow. She whimpered softly as she watched the glow die, and her arms fell to her sides, limp. All her coiled, athletic strength failed her. With a low moan that flowed from her with more and more somnolence, more and more crestfallen dismay as it escaped her lips, Maria felt her tight, limber body give in to the numbing toxin that had invaded it, and she fell to her pretty, silky knees. But even this was not a sufficient surrender, and Maria flopped forward, her head bowed, her chest resting against her thighs. Her arms lay flat, resting against the ground, immobile. Her palms faced upwards, fingers curled slightly in. Her svelte legs were pressed tightly together. She looked not merely defeated, but penitent; humbled. She tried to rise, failed; tried to lift her head, failed; tried to move at all, failed.

She was paralysed.

For anywhere between thirty seconds and ten minutes Maria just lay there. Kneeling: bowed and chastened by the dart still sticking out of her thigh. Her tight, heart-shaped rear was made to stick in the air by her humiliating position; Maria’s small, skin-tight black shorts now all that was defending her modesty.
“H… help…” she whimpered, but her voice didn’t carry. She could barely move her mouth to make the right sounds, much less give her speech any volume. “Help me…” There was no answer. There was no sound at all. Even the nearby road had fallen silent. Like Maria herself, all had become still.

It wasn’t just her body that was affected. The paralytic drug was making it hard to think, making her mind groggy, drowsy. Her eyelids flickered open and shut, but every time Maria thought she was going to pass out, she just… didn’t.
“It’s like… like they want me to… know what’s happening to me…” Maria thought. Her position was so humiliatingly servile, her beauty displayed with so little dignity, that she felt it a wonder that her captor hadn’t deliberately posed her.

Was ‘captor’ even the right word? She had no idea what the motivations of her attacker, or attackers, were. Perhaps they’d subdued her so they could assassinate her. Perhaps they’d done this as some sort of viciously cruel prank . Someone who just wanted to see a pretty superhero fall. Someone who’d wanted to kick mud in Maria’s face for having the temerity to be courageous.
But even that unhappy thought turned out to be wishful thinking. At the edge of her hearing, fuzzy though the drug had made it, Maria heard footsteps. Something about the slow, deliberate cadence of them made her aware immediately that this was not some passer-by. They were getting closer, and though Maria tried with all her might to move, she remained utterly helpless.

The footsteps grew nearer, until they were only half a metre away. Out of the corner of her eye, Maria thought she could see the edge of a boot, but nothing more. Whoever it was circled around her, getting nearer but also staying where Maria couldn’t see.
“Mm-mm-mmm,” was the first thing Maria heard from this man – and it was a man, speaking with a low, guttural growl. “You know I fancy myself a pretty good shot, but I was worried my skills wouldn’t be, ah, transferable to a dart gun. But I got you right good, didn’t I?” He circled closer, and Maria got a slightly better look at his boots: dark leather, thick, almost anachronistic. And though the man’s accent was neutrally American, there was something cowboyish about his cadence.

“Wh… why did you… attack me?” Maria said, her tongue heavy in her mouth, and each word hard to pluck from her memory.
But either her attacker didn’t hear her, or he ignored her, because he made no attempt to answer her question.
“Poor thing,” he said. “Can’t move a muscle, can you? Limp as a fish – even if you are a heck of a lot prettier ‘n one.” He squatted by her, put his hand on the back of her head. Maria thought he was stroking her hair, but with a violent jerk he curled his fingers around the base of her ponytail and pulled her up into a sitting position.
“Ah…!” Maria gasped, and though the pain in her scalp quickly subsided, its passing did not comfort her.

“Man, you are pretty!” he laughed, moving his hand to the back of Maria’s neck, curling his fingers around it to get a good, firm grip. He turned her head slightly to face him, and Maria got her first good look at the man who’d paralysed her.
He was squatting, so Maria couldn’t tell how tall he was, but from the breadth of his shoulders she had the impression that he was at least six foot. He was younger than she’d expected, adding to the impression of artificiality in his demeanour. He looked mixed-race, and he would have been pretty handsome if not for his extraordinarily ugly haircut, which looked less like a haircut and more like he’d just been attacked by a gang of nihilistic hairdressers. He was wearing a short, tan jacket, and a sweat-stained shirt. There was something dull about his eyes: not stupid, or vacant exactly but… empty. Maria was ashamed to discover that she found him extremely frightening.

“You don’t even wear a mask or nothing, huh? Damn, is that arrogant or what?”
Maria tried very hard to look less afraid than she was. She met his stare, but even paralysed her expression was very obviously fearful.
“Wh… why…?” This time, that was all she could force herself to say.
“Why? Hmm… that’s quite a question, darling.” He brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. “Maybe I’m just some passing ruffian. Maybe I’m a supervillain building up a collection of sweet young ladies. Maybe,” he said, his thin mouth curling upwards into an ugly smile, “maybe I just like seeing pretty ladies on their knees.”
“Now… your little playacting name is ‘Freebird’, ain’t it?” He laughed. “I hope you know how fucking stupid that sounds. I’m sure as shit not gonna call you that.” He looked her over. “To me… you look more like a Josie. Or don’t you like that?”
“Nh…” The last of Maria’s strength had gone. Now she couldn’t even speak.

“No objections? Well, Josie it is then. Pleased to meet you, Josie.” He lifted one of Maria’s hands, kissed it. His mouth was cold. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m -” He snickered. “Man, under the circumstances you’re never gonna fuckin’ believe this. But I swear! I swear you can – heh - you can go to the county records office and look it up on my birth certificate.” He let go of Maria’s hand, let it fall with a quiet ‘slap’ on her warm, naked thigh. “My name,” he said, “is Hunter.”

Hunter stood up, moving his hand from Maria’s neck to her chin, keeping her back upright, and making her look at him.
“Now I have to confess,” Hunter said, “that when I stuck you with those darts, I had a singular purpose. You see, I represent a certain organisation, Josie. It and I share certain… ideological commitments.” In a stage-whisper he added: “Truth be told, I think they’re a bunch of jumped-up-windbags, but – hey. Nobody’s perfect. And see, Josie, they wanted you.”

Both Hunter’s hands snapped to Maria’s upper arms, pushing her shoulders up and in towards her neck. He pulled her up to her feet, though of course he still had to support her. Her limp legs turned inward, her head fell back, and she felt her slow, heavy breaths pushing her firm bosom against Hunter’s chest.

“I… can’t… I can’t let him do this to me!” Maria thought, but she truly had no choice. No command that her mind sent was being answered. Her body was limp, and loose, and defenceless: putty in her captor’s hands. She felt him pull her body tightly against his, so close that she could smell his sweat through the stench of his cologne. In her drowsy haze, Maria felt like her body was betraying her: denying her not only her powers, but all the tone and endurance and strength that she had cultivated, all now serving no purpose but to make her a more beautiful object.

Hunter released one of Maria’s arms, and she drooped like a wilting flower to the side, her head flopping onto her fallen shoulder. He made sure that Maria could see what he was doing, before putting his free hand on her knee, and slowly sliding it up her bare thigh, rhythmically tightening and relaxing his grip as his hand ascended, working the finely toned architecture of her tight, supple legs.

“Don’t touch me! Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare put those filthy hands on me!” Such were Maria’s thoughts, but she could not turn them into words. The only sound she could make as Hunter fondled her legs was a soft, kittenish mew.
“Damn, Josie, you must work out every god damn day with pins like these,” Hunter said. “Better work ethic than I’d expect from a superhero, I gotta say.”

Hunter shifted his helpless plaything around again, supporting her lower spine with one hand and letting the rest of her fall back – like his captive was his partner in a tango. The heroine’s arms and her ponytail swung gently back and forth from the momentum of his tossing her about. Hunter liked seeing her body move against her will. He grabbed her thigh again, lifting it and pressing it against his own leg, amusing himself further by making the frozen tango all the more convincing.
“You’d be a hell of a flamenco dancer, Josie,” Hunter laughed. “I bet you and I could dance some fine dances.” He slid his hand further up, almost to the border of Maria’s undershorts.

“Nh… nh…” For all that her thoughts were dulled, for all that she was numbed, she felt every touch with overpowering detail. She realised that she didn’t just want to be free of him. If she’d suddenly regained control of her body she’d have hurt him as badly as she possibly could.
But Hunter could not see Maria’s face in her position. He could not see her distraught fury. But it was with Maria that he was occupied. In his mind, the task to which he’d been assigned mattered less and less. Enjoying ‘Josie’ seemed a much more valuable use of his time. God knows what would have happened if he hadn’t been interrupted.
“Hunter!”

The bellow came from the stairs leading up onto the street. A small, wild-haired man had appeared at the top of them, his grey eyes wide in fury. Behind him, a taller, younger man holding a drawn handgun, and a thick-set, muscular woman in her late thirties. Neither of them looked pleased either, but the smaller man was on the verge of apoplexy.

“What are you doing? Huh? What are you doing, you fucking psychopath?!” He barrelled down the concrete steps, jabbed his index finger right in Hunter’s face. “How long have you been down here? Hm? How long have you been entertaining yourself?”
“Relax, Sheldon,” Hunter said, slowly lifting Maria back onto her feet, letting her rest against him.
Maria looked at ‘Sheldon’ with desperate, pleading eyes. He didn’t ignore them, in fact it looked like he felt a bit uncomfortable, but he made no attempt to rescue her. He just turned his attention back to Hunter.

“We have been waiting for you for the last ten minutes,” Sheldon hissed. “I thought maybe something had gone wrong. I thought maybe you were locked in mortal combat for the glory of our noble cause. But no. I find you feeling up a pretty girl. I find you playing, Hunter. And why do I find you playing? Because, apparently, you – are – a child.”
“I think maybe you ought to watch how you talk to me, friend,” Hunter replied in a low, threatening voice.
But Sheldon was unimpressed. “Oh, switch it off, little boy.” He snapped his fingers, and the taller man ran up to his side. “Dolf, take the girl. Put her in the van. Tammy!” he barked, addressing the muscular woman.
“Mh?” she grunted back.

“If Hunter puts his hands on the girl again, then…” He appeared to be trying to think of something witty but gave up after a couple of seconds. “Then shoot him.” He jabbed his finger in Hunter’s face again. “I – am not – joking!” He turned on his heel, and stormed back up the stairs. “Now hurry the fuck up, all of you!”
Dolf did as his apparent master had ordered, but he was a little more nervous of Hunter than Sheldon had been. Still, he did take Hunter’s captive, and Maria found herself with a second abductor. Gloved hands took her by the thighs and the shoulders, and the paralysed beauty fell with a sigh into his arms. Her arm swung back and forth, her trim, shapely calves bouncing as Dolf carried her away.

Maria was baffled by all this. Hunter had obviously captured her for these others, but she still had no idea why. These three didn’t seem quite as foul as Hunter did, but they were on his side. What was happening? What were they going to do with her? In desperation, Maria tried to speak again. Hunter clearly did not have a conscience, and probably never had had one, but maybe ‘Dolf’ did.
“P… pl…” was all Maria could get out, though it was enough for Dolf to understand what she was trying to say. But if Maria had hoped for sympathy, she didn’t get it. Lying soft and defenceless in this man’s arms, Maria only succeeded in making him snarl at her.
“Shut up!” he hissed. “You should be thankful I don’t kill you right now!”
“Nh…” If Maria could have moved, she would have shrunk from him.

Dolf bore the fallen maiden out onto the street, running to avoid prying eyes. He pulled her in tighter against him, turning her head towards his chest, and lifting her legs a little higher. Aside from this causing her skirt to slip a little way down her legs, this also meant that she could no longer see where she was being taken. It caught her by surprise, therefore, when Dolf appeared to ascend a step, or ramp or something. Only once it was behind her did Maria see that she’d been taken into the back of a vehicle. Sheldon had said ‘van’, hadn’t he? Well he must have misspoken, because Maria had been brought into a massive cargo container, hitched to the back of a truck. But she didn’t get long to take in her new surroundings.

“Take her,” she heard Dolf say. A few seconds later, no fewer than four pairs of hands seized her.
The next two minutes for Maria were a dizzying, humiliating whirlwind. She was forced against a metal floor; flipped over onto her stomach; legs pushed tight against each other, arms folded behind her back. She heard a series of harsh buzzing and ripping sounds, and she only understood what she was hearing when her captors started binding her.

Plastic zip-ties cinching into her wrists, biting into her ankles, a larger one even forced around her shoulders. With an angry mosquito whine the ties were yanked tight. But at the same time as this, her legs were being lifted, and thick, black electrical tape was being wrapped around her calves, and around her forearms. But at the same time as this, her torso was lifted up so that they could wrap tape around her chest, trapping her upper arms, pressing into the undersides of her bosoms, so tight that Maria’s every breath creaked against the tar-black bindings. But at the same time as this, more tape was being wrapped around her lower thighs, sticking easily to her naked, moist legs; pressing her smooth, toned legs into one helpless limb. But at the same time as this, heavy, brown ropes were being looped about her, over the tape and the zip-ties, pressing into her calves and her thighs; over and under and even between her high, firm breasts, driving her powerlessness into her, capturing her body, venally emphasising the lean, feminine contours of her, the athletic sensuality of her figure, even as her bondage suppressed and stifled her equine grace. And every few seconds she felt another liberty taken. One of them stroked her legs. One of them cupped her breasts. One of them grabbed her tight behind and she could swear that she felt one of them smack it. There was a silent contract between her captors, it seemed: none would go far enough to earn their leader’s ire, but all would taste as much of Maria’s beauty as they dared.

Maria was spun over and over and over by her four captors, their eight arms like a muscly spider cocooning her, having already defeated her with its numbing venom. Maria almost wanted to laugh. It was ridiculous. It was ridiculous that this should have happened. It was absurd that this should have been happening to her just when she’d finally plucked up the courage to look the world in the eye again. She had thought that her donning the vestments of Freebird again would have given her some… kind of answer, even if she wasn’t sure of the question. Now she was afraid that this was so, because if what had happened could be translated into an answer for Maria, the only way she could understand it was as spittle in her face.

Zip-tied and rope-tied and tape-tied, Maria was bundled up so tight that her paralysis was almost redundant. The complex mesh of bindings encapsulated and controlled her trim body so completely that someone untying her wouldn’t have had the slightest idea where to start. She wasn’t mummified: much of the skin of her legs and the red of her dress was visible. But it would have been hard to find three inches of her below her neck that were uninterrupted by restraint. And soon even that would change.

Her captors hauled her up to her knees, a position that these people seemed to like to have her in. One of the men binding her was still holding a half-expended roll of electrical tape, and unspooling some her approached Maria. As he did, Maria saw Tammy and Hunter climbing into the back of the truck. Hunter leered at her, but the nameless man with the tape soon obscured him. With badly disguised relish, he pressed the black tape over Maria’s warm, soft mouth, smoothing a single strip over her lips, and from cheek to cheek. It got to the point that he was almost massaging her mouth, making sure every aspect of the shape of her mouth was displayed even as it was sealed: thoroughly gagging Maria with just one piece of tape.

Bound and gagged, Maria’s limp frame was dragged towards the front of the hold, lifted and then dumped onto something a little like a cross between a dentist’s chair and a psychiatrist’s couch. She still couldn’t move, still couldn’t get a real sense of where she was. All that she could see was the steel wall at the front of the container, and of a short man with wild hair with his back to her.

“I want you to understand something,” Sheldon said. “I don’t necessarily think that you have made any misuse of your abilities. In fact, you’re a registered superhero. You’re probably perfectly responsible.”
He walked a few steps closer, making sure to look directly into his captive’s wet, fearful eyes.
“So despite whatever drivel you hear from the others,” Sheldon said, “this is not personal. If you could speak you’d tell me you haven’t done anything wrong, and I’m sure I’d believe you. But again – I don’t care. You’re a means to an end.” He smirked, but there was something self-effacing about the smile. “That didn’t explain much, did it? Let me be clearer: you are going to be the subject of an experiment. That experiment might kill you, but killing you is not our goal. We just want to make you… normal.”
“N…normal?” Maria’s heart rose in her throat.
Sheldon leaned over her, and despite his words Maria saw vicious hatred deep in his eyes. “I see you’ve got the picture. But don’t be frightened. All we’re trying to do is make the world safer than it is.”
Maria understood perfectly well what he meant. She understood perfectly well what he wanted to do. The world would be safer, he meant, with no superhumans.
They were going to take away her powers.
Damselbinder

Valora 4-3: Submerged

Valerie Orville’s life was not turning out as she had expected. But this was only because she hadn’t particularly expected anything.

It had been five days since she had left Portland. At the time, she’d had no idea where she was going to go. Fond of skyscrapers, she’d entertained the notion of going to New York. Fond of the cold, she’d considered going up north to Canada. In one moment of weakness, she’d even considered going back to California to finish her degree, but that would have been such a shameful retreat that she’d have broken out in hives. Perhaps pride was a character flaw, but in Valerie’s case it was an indelible one.

Finally, Valerie had simply thrown herself on the mercy of the schedule of the Greyhound Bus Company. By happenstance, it had taken her to Virginia, to a part of the world that could have scarcely less resembled the leafy English county for which it was named: Norfolk. She had not stopped in Norfolk with a clear intention to hang her hat there. But after a few hours she decided that she liked it well enough: it smelled of the sea, and that was as good a reason to stay as Valerie could think of. It was the sea that ended up keeping her there.

* * *
The first time Valerie took to the water was out of sheer impatience. The first night she’d found a hostel in Newtown, one of the more urbane parts of Norfolk, and it was fine for the price being asked, but she had to share a room with three other people. She wasn’t whining, though. It was a youth hostel. It was twenty dollars a night. What do you think she expected?

But the thing they don’t tell you about youth hostels is that the proportion of people who stay in them who are actually youth is pretty minuscule. There are a seemingly infinite number of silver-haired retirees filling out the beds with suitcases full of anoraks and fishing tackle, and though Valerie had nothing against these well-meaning people who found productive ways to comport themselves in their twilight years and remarked ‘what a nice young lady’ when she helped them with their bags, when she was lying in the dark, alone in a new city again, with all that had happened in Maine still biting at her heels, Valerie could do nothing but listen, listen to them breathing through their mouths, snoring violently and smacking their chops with such wet, slurping, senescent regularity that Valerie wanted to pull out every false tooth from their yellowing gums and scream at them until their shrivelled old hearts sputtered - out.

It took Valerie five minutes to realise how wantonly disproportionate her reaction was. But five minutes had been enough time for her to throw a hoodie over her nightshirt and leave the hostel, almost knocking the night manager on her back as Valerie thundered past her. When she caught up with herself, she was already three hundred yards down the street.
“Fuck,” she said, covering her eyes with her palm. “Fuck.”

There was something wrong with her. A few days earlier she had tried to murder someone. Someone who had abducted her, sure. Someone who was themselves completely morally degraded, sure. Someone who deserved it - maybe. But Valerie couldn’t find a justification. She’d seen the mortal dread in Lupus’ eyes as she’d closed her hands around her scrawny neck, and it had given her pleasure. And when Valerie thought of it, she found that she had to make an effort to feel ashamed. Had to make an effort not to feel that pleasure again.

It was tempting for Valerie to think of herself like a volcano. That on that day, that terrible day when all her efforts to support her sickly father had been revealed as vain; when she had been defeated, captured and tormented by the most hateful of enemies, she had just burst. She could imagine this black, acid vitriol as something that had gestated in her belly, an ancient and furious bile, indiscriminately destructive when, finally, its pressure overcame her effort to restrain it and she had belched it forth in a caustic, ashen storm.

But the metaphor didn’t work. It was too impressive: self-flagellating and self-aggrandising at the same time. “Oh, aren’t I tragic?” it said. “Aren’t my emotions so mighty and heroic?” It hadn’t felt like that. When Valerie had had her hands around Lupus’ throat, when she’d been beating her within an inch of her life, she had felt small. Petty. Manically and miserably infantile. Moreover, when a volcano erupted – in her metaphor at least – they were spent, their pressure released. Their violence was apocalyptic: that is, final. Valerie’s violence hadn’t been final, though, and not just because Lupus had survived it. There was no catharsis. No sense of completion, or conclusion. And it just – didn’t - end.

She’d known. She must have known. She must have known how angry she was with her father for being so weak, for being so ungrateful, for being so shamelessly, unlovingly reliant on her. She’d just never have guessed herself capable of such bitter detestation. It wasn’t proportionate to what she’d endured, even factoring in what Lupus had done to her. It wasn’t like this rage was all she was: she loved, she laughed, etc etc. But the rage was like throwing too much chilli into a recipe. You couldn’t taste anything else. She was – ruined. Spoiled. A fruit with healthy skin and rotten flesh.

“I’ve got anger problems.”

Well. Shit. I mean, that was it, wasn’t it? Get right down to it – not even down that far – and that was the best description. Wasn’t very romantic. Wasn’t very impressive. Wasn’t cool. Didn’t make her tragic. Falling victim to a great, big, tragic flaw was lamentable, forgivable. Just being a bad person wasn’t. ‘A fruit with healthy skin and rotten flesh’? Fucking hell, that was almost worse than the volcano thing. She’d spent too long as a superhero. Too long as ‘Valora’. She was grand and mighty and important, so even her failings had to be grand and mighty and important.

“Oh, shut up!” Valerie said, out loud. God she was sick of this. Sick of pontificating endlessly about herself. Her own character was really not complex or interesting enough to demand this level of study. It was – she was – a bore. So fucking egocentric and – oh my god she was still doing it! Why couldn’t she just – just stop thinking? It was a fire –

No, not a fire. That was too self-aggrandising again! It was just a cigarette butt that wouldn’t go out.

But whichever metaphor Valerie preferred, the image of a fire that needed to be quenched lodged itself irritably in the corner of her mind’s eye. Without quite realising what she was doing, she started moving east. It felt like there was a slope, like it was just the easiest direction in which to travel. Only when she could smell the salt, irritating and purging the inside of her nostrils, did she realise that she had intended to go to the water all along.

It was a clear night, but the surface of the water was too disturbed by wind to reflect the stars. Because of this, from the pier on which Valerie stood it was like standing at the edge of a cliff: the sky above, and – if she looked a little way past the surf – an empty void below.

Valerie put her toes just over the edge of the pier. Even this was comforting, hearing the water and feeling the saline breeze against her face. But it wasn’t enough. The little cigarette butt was still smouldering away, burning and toxifying, and every thought, every emotion that she had or could imagine herself having made her angrier, and angrier, and angrier. Light from a passing motorcycle briefly illuminated the surface of the water, and when Valerie saw her own, distorted reflection it felt like cooking oil being spat in her face. She turned away, feeling silly and histrionic for having gone to the pier at all, but then something at least adjacent to resolve turned her back. She teetered on the edge for a moment, disgusted voices screaming at her in her own mind, where every action, or lack of action, or thought about an action, or thought about a thought, or feeling about a thought – everything was bad, and everything just made it worse, until finally Valerie’s tolerance snapped - and she jumped.

Imagine a jumbo jet. Now imagine a jumbo jet made entirely of steel – that is, imagine a solid brick of steel the size of a jumbo jet. Imagine that this block of steel were reinforced such that it would not bend or break under its own weight. It was within the power of Valerie Orville to lift such an object over her head. It was even within her power – although she probably would have badly hurt herself attempting it – to throw such an object with a fair amount of force. Imagine, then the amount of force she could exert on her own body. Imagine just how far she could go with one jump.

By the time gravity asserted its feeble, final grip on her, Valerie was above the few wispy clouds that hovered over the Virginia coastline. It didn’t feel like flying: it felt like being shot out of a cannon. It was a sort of helplessness, and Valerie found that she disliked it. But the wind howled about her ears and against her body, and there was some pleasure in that.

When she did fall, she fell fast. Her body was denser than an ordinary human’s, and so she dropped neatly, and quickly. She turned in the air so that she was facing the sky, and in a kind of vertiginous drunkenness she put out of her mind where she was, who she was, what she was. It was preferable to be a thing, a thing falling, and no more than that. The name ‘Valora’ was absurd but even ‘Valerie’ seemed wrong to her now. Even ‘human’ seemed wrong. Even ‘animal.’

“Just a thing,” she thought. “Just a thing.” Then she hit the water.

The impact of her body colliding with the water barely registered. The rush of salt water into her nostrils and ears was more irritating. She opened her eyes, and it was the same as being blind. She couldn’t see anything, her dense body already having sunk far below the waves. It continued to sink; down and down and down. Valerie felt cold, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Only absurd extremes of heat or cold could damage her, so there was no pain. The pressure of the water was nothing, and so the only thing that gave her any discomfort was, after a few seconds, the lack of air. But she was sinking so fast that her feet reached the seabed some time before the need to breathe became urgent.

She stood, then, submerged and subsumed. She couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear anything but the faint gurgling of the water about her. Couldn’t feel anything except the swishing of the water. She would have liked to have floated. She would have liked for the water to hold her. But this was pleasant enough. She felt her lungs making increasingly strenuous demands on her, and it occurred to her – very briefly – that it was within her power to ignore them. But as soon as it became really painful, Valerie pushed her feet against the seabed, and rose rapidly through the waves.

It had been difficult for Valerie to learn to swim. She sank so quickly, and ordinary techniques assumed a relatively buoyant body. Treading water was especially difficult, and even now it took Valerie a few seconds to remember how to do it properly, the rhythm of leg kicks she’d developed that kept her afloat with sending her surging, Free Willy style, out of the water. But soon she’d got it. She hovered there for about a minute, before it distantly occurred to her that she had no idea where she was.

“Shit,” she muttered. She’d thrown herself miles out into the Atlantic Ocean, and she’d lost all sense of direction. She looked up at the stars for guidance, but though she could just about recognise Orion and the Big Dipper, she had no idea how to navigate with them. She needed a better vantage point.

This time, Valerie breathed in as deeply as she could, her great strength allowing her to draw in far more air than a normal person could. She let herself sink again, but this time when her feet reached the bottom she kicked off with far more force. She hadn’t used her full strength this time, so she ‘only’ reached about thirty metres into the air. But that was enough for her to be able to see the lights of Norfolk in the distance.

When Valerie hit the water again, she entered it with a heavy, delphine grace. Instead of letting herself sink this time, she started swimming in a leisurely breast-stroke, in the vague direction of the city. Her strength vastly overpowered her increased density, so the gentlest movement was enough to carry her forward at speed. She slipped below the surface, and gave a firmer kick, with both legs, shooting herself through the water and creating a high wave behind her. She dived deeper, and knowing that the ocean was empty of anyone but her, she spun around, crested, dived again right to the bottom, and then just swam, as fast as she could, realising that she could probably hold her breath for as long as ten minutes (Twenty? Thirty?) if she wanted to. She only slowed down when the seafloor started sloping upwards in front of her, and she realised that she was near the shore. She looked up, through the surface of the water, and it was shallow enough and still enough that she could clearly see the stars and an almost-full Moon. She felt the cold and the motion of the water. She felt the comfortable plenitude of her held breath. For the first time in a very long time, she felt extremely fortunate.

Let us ignore the technicalities. Let us ignore that bureaucracy. Let us ignore the culture, the codenames, the duties, the responsibilities, the pontificating. Valerie had magical powers. She was protected from bomb and bullet, fist and flame, knife and noose; she was not invulnerable, as Lupus had shown her all too clearly – but she was a lot less fucking vulnerable than you or I. And though she could starve, though poverty could in theory threaten her again, Valerie had already had to restart her life twice, and both times she had been perfectly successful. Now that she only had herself to look after, Valerie felt safe. Her whole relationship with the world around her, she realised, was different from that of an ordinary human, even from most superhumans. The world could do so little to harm her.

As she approached the shore, it occurred to Valerie to search herself for ambivalence about cutting herself off from her father. She saw a space that guilt would occupy, and nothing in it. She wondered if that was the beginning of happiness. Half an hour later, in her bed, dry, with the smell of the salt in her hair all that remained of the welcoming sea, she concluded that it was not.
________________________________________________________________
Damselbinder

The second time that Valerie took to the water, she was a little better equipped. Five days had passed, and she had managed to get herself a job waiting tables at an Irish pub on Granby Street. It wasn’t the nicest place, and it wasn’t the best job, but it served her well enough. The proprietor had a… libertarian attitude to her tax duties, so Valerie was paid in cash, and paid a perfectly reasonable amount. One of the advantages of Valerie looking the way she did was that there was always a sense that she had other options. There was little point, therefore, in trying to cheat her. Yet another natural advantage for which it had only recently occurred to Valerie to be grateful.

It was late afternoon when Valerie got off work, and early evening by the time she arrived at the beach. It was warm, so even though it was outside of tourist season, there were quite a few people around. To the extent that she was paying any attention to the other people at all, Valerie was vaguely aware that the composition of the crowd was unusual. It was mostly families and young couples and thriftless teenagers and so forth, but there was a greater than typical proportion of men in their early thirties. Some of them seemed distantly to notice Valerie, but none of them approached or ogled. Their mood was sombre.

But Valerie wasn’t curious enough to give it more than half a moment’s thought. She walked to the edge of the water, took off her shoes. She watched the water’s surface for a few moments. Watched the waves coalesce, dissolve into nothingness, return to life. Valerie had lived in coastal towns almost all of her life, but she had never paid the ocean all that much attention. It hadn’t captured her imagination before. In her years as a skilled amateur, and her months as a competent professional, she had only ever photographed the ocean incidentally. When she thought about this, Valerie supposed that it was strange, because she thought the ocean was the most beautiful thing in the world. She had always thought that, but she was only just realising it now. This ignorance made her uncomfortable, so she took off her clothes, put on her swimsuit, and approached the surf.

This time, Valerie had wanted to make sure that she could have the freedom of the water. As well as buying a simple, navy, one-piece swimsuit, she had bought a small compass, and bound it to her wrist, to make sure she didn’t go too far out and get lost. With that small fear quashed, she dived in, and vanished beneath the waves.

In only three minutes, she was miles out to sea. The deeper the ocean became, the more Valerie revelled in it. Like a dolphin she leapt in and out of the water, taking joy in her powers in a way she never had before. She took pleasure in the feeling of the water, in the speed, in the little kick of adrenaline that came from summoning her strength and really pushing it. Her technique wasn’t great: she was basically just doing front crawl underwater, which was far from the most efficient way to use her power, but she had so much power that she was doing at least 25 knots.

She felt giddy. She’d been looking forward to doing this all week; planning for it, imagining it, building it up in her head until there was no way it could possibly have been all she wanted it to be. But it was. It was better, even: most of the water, golden from the setting sun, was a silky void, but about twenty-five minutes into her voyage, Valerie caught sight of a fellow traveller.

It was a large fish, gliding imperiously beneath the waves, with small, sharp, dark eyes at the end of two squarish protrusions. It was long, and slim, and Valerie got a shiver of satisfaction at seeing its movements part the water with such haughty ease, a shiver seeing something so utterly where it belonged, where it had belonged for millions of years: silent, ancient, and flawless. She was no expert, but even Valerie recognised a hammerhead shark when she saw one.

Valerie slowed down to take a better look at the shark, and was a little startled when she realised it was much further away than she’d thought. In a long, lazy circle it turned towards her, and as it swelled in her sight, she saw that it was huge, at least four metres long. It was spiralling inwards towards her, tentatively curious about this foreign object in its domain. Soon it was only a few metres away, and still closing, and the sun illuminated the dappled pattern on its dorsal side. The taut curl of its musculature as it swept around her and the glint of its teeth made Valerie’s eyes flash with delight: it wasn’t, to her eyes, a beautiful animal, but it didn’t need to be. It was beyond beauty. It was beyond judgement, by Valerie or anyone else. It was itself, and it was flawless.

Valerie carefully moved closer, wary of frightening the shark away, but it did not seem perturbed by anything she did. It might have been wary of the intruder, but it wasn’t frightened of her. Valerie couldn’t say the same, though. She knew she was a superhuman. She knew that she was powerful enough that it could not possibly hurt her. But her instincts were screaming at her: “THREAT THREAT THREAT! RUN RUN RUN!” Yet because she did know that she wasn’t in real danger, she felt the terror only as a thrill. She swam closer still, worrying that she might really be pushing it now, but her brinkmanship did not have get the reaction she’d feared. Faster than Valerie could properly keep track of, the shark turned on a dime, and it lunged at Valerie, clamping its jaw down on her arm.

“Mghh!” For a moment Valerie felt quite certain that the shark was about to rip her arm off, and was pleased to remember that it couldn’t. But as useless as its assault was, it didn’t let go of her. Once the startled fear wore off, Valerie was surprised that the shark was still attacking her. She thought that sharks were quite cautious with unusual prey. Did hammerheads ever attack humans?

It was only once the beast was really close that Valerie began to understand. First because of its distance from her, and then because it had been circling her, she had only seen the creature’s left side. Now she could see its right, and she saw that the hammerhead was pitted with scars. Its right eye was injured and there was a notch in its right pectoral fin. In fact, now that it was closer, she could see there were scars on its left side too, all of different sizes and shapes and ages. These injuries didn’t come from one unlucky encounter, but from dozens, over many years. It had fought countless foes: other hammerheads; larger sharks; an orca that had almost blinded it; the bottom of a boat whose propellor had gouged out part of its side. Yet still it fought. Still it had challenged her, still it bit down on her impenetrable skin, still it wrestled and thrashed, its beady eyes glinting with unsatiated bloodlust, with pure, animal wrath. There was something wrong with it, some imbalance in its hunter’s mind that made it fight when another of its species wouldn’t have bothered. It was, somehow, diseased. Only miraculous good fortune had kept it alive. But it was alive.

It was no longer pleasant to observe the animal, and Valerie was beginning to worry that it would hurt itself. Quickly, but carefully, she grabbed it by the nose, squeezing just to the point where the shark would be startled by pain, but not actually injured. It was startled by her strength, and it sort of jerked, relaxing its grip on her arm enough for Valerie to pull away without breaking any of the shark’s teeth. For a moment the two just looked at each other. Then Valerie stroked the edge of the beast’s square head, and lightly pushed it away. It hesitated – then turned away, and vanished into the deep. Valerie watched it until it was gone, then rose to breathe.

She looked at the place where the shark had bitten. There were still visible pressure marks from its bite. She lifted her arm to her mouth, and pressed her lips against the marks.
Damselbinder

Valerie’s compass did its job, guiding her back to the Virginia shoreline. When she came out of the water she felt like she was coming out of a dream. In the days to follow she would wonder if the shark had been real at all. Assuming it had, she still didn’t know what to feel about it, other than a powerful presentiment that she should, and did, feel something.

She found her things where she had left them, but didn’t fully dress. She threw on a hoodie, a pair of sandals, and slung the rest of her things over her shoulder. The sun was low now, and for its prettiness there were still quite a few people on the beach, but no-one was swimming. Those slightly unusual groups of men were gone. Valerie noticed this more consciously than before, and something at the back of her mind made her think it was significant, but she couldn’t immediately say why.

Insufficiently curious to give the matter real thought, she started walking. She was, circuitously, going back to the hostel, but she walked along the beach for a while first. After a few hundred metres the sand turned to pebbles, and a few metres after that, to an unlovely, solid concrete wall; a kind of platform that isolated the tourists from the industrial side of the shore: the marina; the shipyards; the Navy base a few miles up the coast. There was a small, ill-maintained staircase for ascending this wall, the top of which elided clumsily into Norfolk’s roadways. Valerie, however, bypassed the stairway entirely, and just jumped up onto the top of the pebbledash eyesore.

When Valerie alighted, she saw that some people were gathered near the end of the platform, about twenty. At the end of the platform was a monument, an aircraft-carrier in bronze. Not some tawdry paean to the glories of militarism, but a much more forgivable tribute to the shipbuilding industry that had provided Norfolk with the bulk of its wealth. At least, that was what Valerie had assumed when she’d half-noticed it four days earlier. The attention others were giving it, though, made Valerie take another look, and she realised her mistake.

The monument, in rather sober, muted bronze, was not to the shipbuilding industry generally. It was to a particular ship: the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman. And it was not just a monument. It was a memorial.
That was what Valerie had had at the back of her mind when she’d seen those men at the beach. Today was the anniversary of the Harry S. Truman’s sinking – Valerie had seen a snippet of an address from President Gore about it that morning . The Truman had been constructed in Norfolk, and Norfolk had been its home port for many years. At the time of its sinking, its captain had even been a local . For some of the survivors, and – decreasingly as the years went by – people simply wanting to pay their respects, this monument had become a little Mecca.

Valerie hung back, not wanting to intrude. But she couldn’t leave either. With the sun setting against the waves, the sky beginning to fade to a melancholy indigo, the scene was too picturesque to ignore. She had the impression that the group had been larger until recently, and indeed as she waited, gradually more and more of them began to filter away. They tended to go in pairs or in threes. When a clump of five broke off, it left only four still at their vigil.

One man broke off by himself, but he did so not with the quiet sadness of the others; he turned sharply, even irritatedly. Most people would have taken his body language as meaning that he didn’t want to be there, that he’d come as a grudging favour to somebody else or something. But Valerie recognised the man’s emotion instantly for what it was, because it was something she had seen so often in herself: anger that devolved into sentimentality; embarrassment of stumbling into cliché. Had this fellow not reacted in this way, Valerie probably wouldn’t have looked at him very closely. Since he had, she did, and since she did, he looked back.

He recognised her instantly. It was difficult not to. Few women had her beauty, fewer still her dourly proud bearing, her ursine dignity. But he was so surprised, so incredulous that she could be in Norfolk of all places, that he thought he must have made a mistake. It was absurd, like being halfway through A Christmas Carol and turning the page to see it suddenly turn into a novelisation of Star Wars. He didn’t know how to deal with it, so he didn’t, and he just started walking away.

“Oliver!”
The sound of his own name forced him to stop. He turned around, and he had to confront that it really was who he thought it was.
“Valerie,” he said, more to himself than to her. “I – Jesus, it is you, isn’t it?”
He looked different. His strawberry-blonde, downy hair was longer. He had a short beard, and his skin was more tanned. He was still in pretty good shape, but he was a bit heavier around the midsection than when he’d been a serviceman. But he still had gracefully-muscled, well-shaped arms, broad – but not bulky – shoulders, and quietly cunning green eyes. He was still a very beautiful man.
Valerie had not expected ever to see Oliver Blane again. They hadn’t been that close. They’d charmed each other, and they’d flirted, and it had gone no further than that. If there had been a chance for something more, it had been torpedoed the night of the battle with Sinistrus. Oliver had collapsed into terror. Valerie had collapsed into wrath.
“Yeah,” Valerie said at last, “it’s me.” She had plenty more that she felt, but no more that she could say.
“Valerie, I -” A surprised smile flickered on his face for a moment, but was buried by his confusion. “It’s good to see you, but this is really fucking weird.”
“Yeah, it is,” Valerie replied. “But it’s good to see you too.” She had tried, once, to find out what had happened to him after she’d left California. She’d been rebuffed, and she hadn’t thought much about him since, but she was surprised at how affecting it was to see him. With real relief she said: “You look well, Oliver.”
“You too,” he replied, and he meant it, but he was half-turning away even as he said it.
She saw that he wanted to say more. She saw that out of the friendliness of his character he wanted just to catch up with her, at least. But she saw a deep shame rise up in his countenance, and she knew he wanted to leave. She felt the same thing, and she wanted to let him go. He wasn’t a lover. He wasn’t a close friend, or a friend at all. He was a somewhat more than casual acquaintance, and the two encountering each other was a meaningless coincidence.
And yet Valerie found herself insisting that he have a drink with her, and Oliver found himself accepting.

It was something to do with the shark.






Don’t ask me what.
Damselbinder

Shatterqueen – that is, Lot - didn’t think she was evil. Sure, she was totally immoral, but she was a thoughtful enough reprobate to have reverse-engineered some justification for the way she lived: profiting from the suffering of others.
“It’s natural,” Lot would say. Her powers had been given to her for a reason, surely. And since her power over shadow was clearly most advantageous to a ne’er-do-well, she was just fulfilling her God-given function.
“Others do it,” Lot would say. Everybody in the world screws somebody over every time they want anything. Your trainers are made in sweatshops, and you rarely think about it. Worse: when you do think about it, you don’t do anything.
“Your morality is so bourgeois,” Lot would say. I mean, you’re not moral because of some profound sense of righteousness: you’re just on autopilot, doing whatever’s expected of you, like a salmon robotically swimming upstream just because all the others are. Better, surely, to be a trout.

And on the occasions when Lot voiced this philosophy, and a prospective victim told her that she was talking nonsense and her self-justifications were pathetically flimsy, Lot would laugh, pat them on the head, tell them that they were absolutely right and then either hand them over to whomever had hired her, or put a bullet in their skull. She would give the matter no further thought and, when she went to sleep, she would slumber like a baby: totally at peace.

It was par for the course, then, that Lot hadn’t felt even a sliver of guilt as she’d kidnapped Hypatia. On the contrary, the rank immorality of the action had given it its headiest thrill. You see, when she had listened to Hypatia trying to convince those other – ahem – “superheroes” to join her cause, Lot had been absolutely convinced of the sincerity of Hypatia’s intentions. She was clearly a good person, had all the dignity and strength of character of a genuine hero. So being ambushed, being bound with polyester straps and drugged, being forced to melt into Lot’s arms and faint with such demure, whimpering sweetness – it was so undeserved. She’d been trying to do something genuinely righteous, and she’d been punished for it, and Lot found that terribly fun.

Even as Hypatia slept there was in her expression some awareness of that rank injustice. A slight crinkle in her finely plucked eyebrows; the slight unevenness of her strap-squeezed shoulders; the small, soft sounds that had just a little more voice in them than mere breath. It was barely protest at all, but Lot enjoyed the sense of offended virtue it suggested, and that she saw in Hypatia’s refined features.

She brought Hypatia to the latest of a series of hideouts: in this case, a cabin on private land. It actually belonged to Lot, though as with anyone who devoted themselves to a uniformly criminal existence, anything involving official paperwork was thrice three times more difficult than it would have been for an honest woman. But then, an honest woman wouldn’t have a beautiful, unconscious superhero tied up in her passenger seat, now would she?

There was no longer any need for shadows. Quite openly, Lot slipped out of her vehicle, ambled around it, and plucked open the passenger-side door. As though it were the most natural, as though it were the easiest thing in the world, she slipped her arms under her captive’s body, and began to lift her. As she did, Lot noticed a pleasant series of distinctions in how Hypatia’s body reacted to her touch. Her arms and shoulders, hemmed in by the straps Lot had used to catch her in the first place, were stiff, resistant. Her breasts were trapped from above and below by the straps, and held still by the tightness of Hypatia’s leotard. But her neck was loose, and it let Hypatia’s head slowly sway as she was picked up, a soft, serpentine, swooning motion. It dipped back as Lot lifted her higher, and though the ligaments of Hypatia’s swanlike neck did tense in a token, belated sort of way, her slim, arching back and her sweet, slightly open mouth betrayed the defeated peace of Hypatia’s slumber. Her legs, too, were loose and limp in Lot’s grasp, thighs falling softly against Lot’s hands, shapely calves bouncing and jostling, going right along with every motion that happened underneath them.

Lot was fit, but not all that much stronger than she appeared. Hypatia was slim, but a few inches taller than her captor, so cradling her wasn’t all that easy. But the effort was pleasant. Feeling that Hypatia was a completely dead weight, that she could do no more and no less than whatever Lot inflicted on her was coolly satisfying. Every time Lot had to adjust Hypatia, to lift her higher into her grip to spare the strain on her shoulders, it gave her reason to smirk. For every time, Hypatia’s body would ripple, and bounce, her hair tossed about like a bronze-red wave. Virtually any movement Lot made was rewarded with such a display.

Taxing her dexterity to unlock the cabin’s front door without putting Hypatia down, Lot took her captive inside. She didn’t hurry, but she moved with purpose, taking Hypatia from the front door to her ‘guest bedroom’ in only eight swift strides. Inside, there really was a bed, and though it lacked a duvet, its mattress was thick, and at its head there was a pile of soft, velvety cushions. When Lot laid Hypatia down, she made sure that her head would be comfortably embraced by these cushions, and given that she’d just abducted the poor woman, that really was the least she could do, no?

She sat on the bed next to Hypatia, and for a few minutes she watched her. No, not even ‘watched’: she just regarded her, as one might a painting in a gallery. She admired, for instance, the contrast between Hypatia’s creamy skin and the austere black of her clothing. She admired the refined shape of Hypatia’s mouth, the shimmering straightness of her hair, the long litheness of her figure. She did not, exactly, feel attracted to Hypatia: there was something sexual in her gazing, but it wasn’t relational. One is attracted to people. One lusts after people. Hypatia produced pleasurable feelings in her captor, but only inasmuch as it was pleasant to look at beautiful things. It was pleasant to own beautiful things.

She leaned over Hypatia. Without especially meaning to, she’d lined her captive up with almost perfect symmetry in the centre of the bed, and this offended Lot’s sense of aesthetics. Irrationally irritated, she clutched the higher of the two straps binding Hypatia’s arms, and jerked her half-upright. Hypatia’s head flopped forward, her long hair veiling her face. This irritated Lot as well, and she pushed Hypatia’s head back, brushing away the few rebellious strands that did not fall away. Then she released her, and Hypatia’s upper body flopped back down onto the bed with a soft thump, leaving her in a state of a much more alive asymmetry: her head turned to one side, her hair tickling the edge of her jaw and her neck, her legs bent slightly inwards.

As well as restoring Lot’s contentment with Hypatia’s appearance, the last few moments had made it clear that the heroine was still deeply, deeply asleep. Lot, therefore, felt quite safe to unbuckle Hypatia’s bindings. Her shoulders gratefully untensed, and Hypatia gave a long, quiet breath; a breath that one could not help but hear as a sigh of relief. She sank back against the cushions, and Lot brushed the back of her hand against one of her captive’s cheeks. Her skin, expensively maintained, felt delicate. Her figure was graceful, slim. She was soft. That it had ever been necessary to bind her now seemed a little absurd.

Lot removed her own mask, uncovering her small, clear eyes. She removed her gloves, uncovering slim, agile fingers. She removed her shoes, uncovering quick, scarred feet. She put herself on the bed, slowly moving Hypatia aside, then turning the sleeping heroine to face her. She slid her arm underneath Hypatia, tucked the heroine against her side. Hypatia’s face fell against Lot’s shoulder, and she felt a smooth wave of warmth from her captive’s skin, like a blush shared between the two of them.

Lot looked upwards. There was a mirror affixed to the ceiling, for precisely the reason that you’re imagining. She noticed the svelte, gracefully beautiful young woman next to her, but she didn’t quite see her as a thing in herself. She was lovely because she made Lot look lovelier by her proximity. She was valuable only because taking her had given Lot pleasure, and because by her sale Lot would be materially enriched.

Sometimes, Lot liked to think of herself as being something other than human. And not just because of her powers: she’d felt this way many times before her abilities had first manifested. Yes, the word ‘psychopath’ had been tentatively floated in front of her by concerned relatives and teachers and therapists, and in a dull sort of way Lot had to admit that this was accurate, but it was accurate in much the same way that it would have been accurate to call Godzilla a reptile: correct, but not really explanatory.

No, the only way that one could grasp Lot’s Lot-ness was – in her view – to think of her as inhuman. Because of her powers she was stronger. Because of her amorality she was freer. Because of her isolation she was special. And her isolation was necessary: for a time, if Lot needed to, she could blend in. She could, as she had done with Hypatia and the other (“pfft”) ‘superheroes’, pretend to be human. But if she tried to do it for any length of time, she would get bored and antsy, and end up doing something that… wasn’t constructive. Or, as happened more often than Lot liked to admit, people began to feel that there was something wrong with her. It is an insufficiently appreciated fact that human beings are very good at sniffing out psychopathy, and this capacity had, gradually, made Lot feel that a solitary life was best suited to the type of being that she was. She was a solitary animal and, therefore, a predator.

Hypatia, then, was not human either. She was just ‘prey.’
Damselbinder

For about half an hour, then, lion lay with lamb, until finally lamb showed signs of stirring. For a further three or four minutes Hypatia made twitchy, fitful little motions, then seemed to settle back into total slumber. About two minutes after that, however, she made a more definitive show of encroaching wakefulness. Her breaths grew deeper, and shorter, and her limbs began to shift about a little. After a little of this, Hypatia’s eyelids quivered, and there was a little flash of blue as, just for an instant, her eyes opened. But the weight of the drug laid too heavily on her, and they fell shut again. It took another minute for Hypatia to regather her strength, for her eyes to open fully.

Cecily was not completely incognizant. She could feel that she was being held, that she was lying on a bed, and that her body was weak. She knew there was more, and in a distant sort of way she even knew that she was in danger. But everything felt disconnected. Everything felt confused.
“Wh… what time is it…” she mumbled, not because she actually cared, but because ‘something you might say when you wake up’ was about as specific as her mind was able to get.

Gaining a little more awareness, Cecily saw someone was looking at her. They were close. They were holding Cecily against them. Yet Cecily could not feel the alarm that the situation seemed to demand. She found herself drawn to their eyes and, once drawn, unable to look away again. They were light brown, small but wide open, like the eyes of a bird.
“Hello, Hypatia,” this person said. Her voice was low for a woman’s, silky. She spoke with a New Zealand accent. “My name is Lot.”
“… Are you sure?” Cecily replied. She half-recognised the face in front of her, enough to be distantly surprised that the familiar face came with an unfamiliar name.
“I’m sure,” Lot said. “You can trust me, sweetie.” She reached forward, and put her hand on Cecily’s head, slowly stroking her long, red hair.
“Mh…” Cecily sighed, half-formed doubts and fears dissipating like salt in hot water. Touch was precious to her, and Lot’s slow hands sent shivers travelling up and down her spine. She felt Lot’s fingers teasing the strands of her hair, lightly twisting and toying with them, and it was so relaxing that she almost fell back to sleep.

“You’ve got such pretty hair,” Lot said, barely speaking above a whisper.
“Thank you,” Cecily replied. The response was literally automatic, so much so that the strange triteness of it disturbed her. Troubled, she found the strength to tell Lot that she felt strange, and to ask if something had happened to her.
“Yes, darling. Something did happen to you.” Lot took her hand from Cecily’s hair, and sat up on her knees. She put her thumb and forefinger around one of Cecily’s wrists, and with only that, lifted her captive’s hand so that it looked like Cecily’s arm was outstretched. She kissed Cecily’s hand, and then dropping it, so it fell with an audible slap onto her midriff. She did the same with Cecily’s other hand: lifting it, kissing it, then letting it fall, so that it looked like Cecily had her hands folded neatly in her lap.
“I… can’t move them…” Cecily said, more confused than distressed.
“I know, darling,” Lot replied. “You’ve been drugged. You can’t use your powers. You’re too weak to move. Too weak to think.”

As she was speaking, Lot reached out with her powers, so that from Cecily’s perspective it looked like she was going blind. The ceiling, the walls, the rain-spattered, foggy windows – everything melted away into a total blackness. Even the bed, so that it looked like she was floating in a featureless, black ocean. She could see only two things: her own body, and Lot. She found herself transfixed by her, the only thing her mind and her senses could hold onto in the void that had formed within and without.

Lot saw the way Hypatia looked at her, saw the look of something like trust – which in Hypatia’s state was all she could really rely on. It gave Lot pleasure to see Hypatia’s pretty, wet blue eyes looking at her in this way, and it made her sort of hate her for her softness and her weakness. But it was a special kind of hatred. For someone like Lot, for her species of animal, this special hatred was the closest thing she had to affection.

Lot moved so that she was sitting on the edge of the bed, right at Hypatia’s feet. She took one of Hypatia’s ankles, lifted it, rested it on her shoulder. Slowly, she passed her hand down Hypatia’s leg, enjoying the quiet creak of her tall, black, leather boots. She curled her fingers around the top of the boot, then slowly pulled it down, freeing Hypatia’s leg, unveiling her pristine, white thigh. She tossed the boot aside, then let Hypatia’s leg fall as well. She did the same for the other, seeing how Hypatia watched her in a doe-eyed, somnolent daze.

“Why are… you?” Hypatia asked, but it was a question borne of confusion merely, not objection. So she was satisfied when Lot replied:
“Just making you comfortable, Hypatia,” Lot said. “You’re my guest. I like my guests to feel comfortable. I like my guests to feel good.” She slipped off Hypatia’s other boot. The lining made a pleasant sound as it swished against its owner’s fine, fair skin. Lot discarded the second boot. She slowly unpeeled Hypatia’s knee-high socks, and kissed her on the top of her left foot, near her ankle. “You do feel good, Hypatia.”

This was not a question. It was a declaration of fact, pronounced with breezy, relaxed confidence. There was no echo in the pine-walled bedroom, but the sentence reverberated in Cecily’s mind, ringing hard and loud over and over until it became true by sheer force of repetition. She could not take her eyes away from Lot, watching as the mousy-haired assassin stroked her calves. She felt something like a thought, something like a feeling rising in her mind, but a flash of Lot’s eyes would send Cecily’s thoughts back down, to dissolve in the blankness of her narcotised pseudo-consciousness.

“You have such pretty legs,” Lot said. “They’re so long… so smooth… it’s very pleasant, stroking them like this.” She pressed two fingers into Hypatia’s calves, moved them up and down, pushing hard enough that it was almost more like massaging than stroking. “It feels good to be touched, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Cecily replied, hazily.
“And it feels good to touch you. And you like that, don’t you, Hypatia? You like that I’m getting pleasure out of this. After all, you need me.”
“I…?”
Lot made her point simply. She just let Hypatia’s legs fall, flopping down onto the bed, askew, haphazardly pigeon-toed.
“See?” Lot said. “You’re limp.”

The word ‘limp’ echoed in Cecily’s mind, thrumming through her. It was already true, but it became truer by the pronouncement, and Cecily felt heavy and light all at once: even blinking felt like terrible effort. And if she wasn’t convinced enough, Lot did more to convince her. She lifted Cecily’s legs again, swiftly and strictly squeezing them, before letting them fall once more and lazily flopping one over the other.

“See, Hypatia? You can’t move a muscle, can you?” She took one of Hypatia’s wrists, held it between her middle and ring finger. “I’m barely holding you. Try to pull away. It’s okay, you’re allowed to - if you can.”
Obediently, Cecily tried to move her hand away, but the miniscule effort it would have taken was beyond her.
“Poor thing,” Lot said. “You’re so weak.” She lowered Cecily’s hand, rested it just underneath her bosom, palm down. “And you’re so cute, too. It must be scary, huh? If someone found you like this, they could do anything they wanted to you.”
With sudden violence, Lot lunged forward, swept up Cecily’s hair around her fingers, and lifted her by it, just a few inches. She gripped Cecily by the back of the neck as well to avoid hurting her too much, but it was not out of kindness. One wishes to make use of one’s possessions without damaging them, that is all.

Cecily was like a rabbit caught in headlights, unable to do anything but stare at the danger, motionless, looking up with crestfallen, almost pleading eyes.
“There now,” Lot said, “don’t be scared. I’ve got you. You’re completely helpless… completely at my mercy – but mercy’s exactly what I’ll give you. I’ll look after you, Hypatia. I’ll take care of you.” She smiled. “Thank me, Hypatia.”
“Th… thank you,” Cecily whimpered, all the more grateful when Lot eased her back down into the soft embrace of the cushions she’d laid out for her.

Lot swallowed, feeling a little shiver of pleasure. This was just playing – taking pleasure of this fair, slender maiden was not why she’d gone out of her way to kidnap her. But Hypatia’s grace and dignity matched with such perfection to her sleepy, doe-eyed pliability that she was irresistible. She slipped down next to her captive, close enough that she could feel the warmth of Hypatia’s breath.

“That’s it,” Lot whispered. “Just lie back, sweetie. No worries. No thoughts. Just blank… and soft… and weak…”
The words washed through Cecily’s mind, purging it of all hints of nascent resistance, dissolving them to ash.
“Tell me your name,” Lot asked. “You’re my guest… I can’t keep calling you by that silly superhero name forever, can I?”
There was something in Cecily that wanted to retort, to say that it was not silly, that Hypatia of Alexandria was an inspiration and a personal hero, an example of dignity, intellectual courage and brilliance that she had always wanted to emulate . But that part of Cecily was forcibly muted, and in that way what Lot was doing to her was more brutal than if she’d just jammed a ballgag into her captive’s mouth. Softly, and clearly, then, Cecily told her captor her name. She even included her middle name, Suzette, a name she usually preferred to remain forgotten. Something inside her was shouting furiously, but she could not hear it.

“Cecily,” Lot echoed. She sounded it out a couple of times. “That’s a very pretty name.”
But Cecily didn’t really hear the compliment. She’d begun to sense more consciously that something was wrong.
“Please,” she asked, “what… happened to me?” The sudden darkness and the sibilant, lilting tone of Lot’s voice were threateningly familiar, and her powerlessness frightened her.
But Lot paid little heed to Cecily’s fear. She drew her close, taking her lightly by the chin, dipping back her head, and brushing her nose against Cecily’s left ear.
“Hush now, darling,” she said. “Don’t worry about that. You don’t need to know why you’re weak. Just know that you are. But it’s alright. I’m here to take care of you.”

Dipping Cecily’s head back a little further, Lot began stroking her pale, swanlike neck; feeling its taut, refined delicacy, feeling Cecily’s quivering pulse beneath her fingers.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” she whispered. “Just sink down deep for me. Feel all warm and fuzzy and muzzled, ‘cause it’s a good feeling, isn’t it Cecily? Your pretty body’s so limp and loose and light. Such a sweet body. Such a soft body.” One hand stayed at Cecily’s neck, and the other slipped down, cupping Cecily’s bosom from beneath.

“Wh…?” Cecily lifted her head to look down, seeing her chest being fondled. But before she could even question it, the hand at her neck had snapped up to her mouth: thin strong fingers pressing down against her glossy lips, sealing them shut, Lot’s fingertips and the heel of her palm combining to form an inescapable vice over the lower part of Cecily’s face.

“No, no, no, my darling,” Lot whispered. “No questions. No fighting. Just let it feel good. It does feel good. As far as you’re concerned, you and I are the only two things in the world, and I’m giving you all my attention. So just lie back, Cecily. You don’t mind my hands on your breasts. You like it. You like to feel me… coaxing… teasing… playing…” She laughed lightly in Cecily’s ear. “Squeezing.”

Lot did squeeze, compressing Cecily’s bosoms against each other, and sending a wave of tingles shooting up her captive’s chest. She heard a little whimper from beneath her hand, saw Cecily’s cheeks flush, saw her naked legs shifting languorously against each other. Lot smiled widely enough to bare her teeth, delighted that the noble heroine was so firmly under her spell.

Cecily couldn’t think. Couldn’t fight. It was, truly, so pleasant to be touched; to be held and to have such sensuous attentions lavished on her in this way. Everything was dark. Everything was warm. Every sound was pleasantly softened and distorted, fuzzy and lazily unclear. Lot’s threats and promises – at once firmly reminding her of her terrible vulnerability and assuring her that Lot would protect – worked exactly as intended, taming Cecily, cajoling her into meekly accepting Lot’s possession of her.

“You’ve been working so hard,” Lot said, and it was true.
“You’ve been so stressed out,” Lot said, and that certainly was true.
“You need someone to take care of you. You tried to take on the whole world, but you’re too weak, too soft… too limp,” Lot said, and as she said it, in Cecily’s mind, it became true. She sank back, eyes half-open and unfocused; cheeks red; softly, sleepily mewing beneath the hand that muzzled her with such comforting security.

“That’s it,” Lot cooed, “that’s it. Sink for me, sweetie. Sink deep for me. You’re my sweet little damsel and you don’t have one thought in that gorgeous head, do you?”
“Mh…” Cecily assented.
“That’s right. It’s blank. You’re blank. Your whole mind blank and void and emp…ty. Feel my voice, baby, feel my words slipping into every wrinkle of your brain… filling it… completing it. You don’t need anything else but my voice. You’re all muffled and comfy and docile, aren’t you, sweetie?”
“Mhh…” Cecily mewed. She couldn’t help herself. It was all so easy. It was also so pleasant. And while there was a small part of her that clung onto cognisance, a small droplet of fear on the canvas of her doeish meekness, it was powerless. Captive and entranced, she felt unlike Cecily Rothschild, unlike any person at all; she was just a bundle of sensations, being tied in pretty patterns by the voice of her possessor.

Audaciously, but not urgently, Lot pulled Cecily’s whole body on top of her. She held her intimately near, trapping her with slim, chain-hard limbs. She coiled up Cecily’s legs with her own, so long and so yieldingly soft. She pushed inwards, watching with satisfaction as the fine, delicate musculature of Cecily’s thighs obediently tensed. Freeing Cecily’s mouth, she rubbed her captive’s torso with both hands, up and down like steady waves at a rising tide, feeling the svelte contours of Cecily’s chest, her waist, her hips, feeling them through the rubbery, satisfying texture of her ink-black leotard.

Lot reached into her pocket, plucked out the balled up cloth that she’d used to kidnap Cecily in the first place. It was partly dried out, but there was enough of Lot’s concoction, the cocktail of soporific and psychotropic chemicals that had reduced Cecily to this state of sleepy, pliable trance, taking away her powers and sapping all the strength from her shapely body. Lot brought the cloth close to Cecily’s mouth, saw her big, blue eyes widen as the cloth got nearer, watching it with such fetching, forlorn innocence. Yet it was not so much the sight of the cloth as the smell of it, the cloying sweetness which, as scents are wont to do, stirred memory in Cecily. It was jumbled, and dark, and confused, but there was at least some sense that it meant danger. It was, barely, enough to trigger a response, and Cecily summoned what remained of her mental energies in an attempt to resist.

And the result of this summoning, of Cecily’s heroic effort to oppose the will of her villainous kidnapper, was that the cloth fluttered so slightly that Lot didn’t even notice, and that Cecily moaned the word ‘please’ – as close as the entranced maiden could get to outright defiance.
“‘Please’?” Lot smiled. “Oh, you’re so polite. But you didn’t need to ask me at all.” Screwing the cloth up in her hand, she thrust it over Cecily’s mouth and nose, pushing down and tilting her captive’s head back at the same time.
“Umphh…!” Cecily felt a pulse at her core as this second wave hit her, like a silent, white explosion. Most of the chloroform in Lot’s concoction had vaporised, so she didn’t end up feeling much sleepier; but the drug that targeted her mind and her powers, the drug that stultified and mollified her, that lingered in great abundance still. And as the drug tightened its grip around her, so too did Lot, squeezing Cecily’s chest and her flawless, naked legs, intensifying her shadow until to Cecily’s narcotised, captive mind it truly seemed as though Lot were the only thing in the world besides herself – more than herself, even.

“You like this, don’t you?” Lot whispered, pouring the cloying treacle of her voice into Cecily’s ear. “I know you do. I know everything about you. Oh, not the bullshit. Not your real identity; not your history; not your mother’s maiden name or where you went to school or what’s your favourite novel – because none of that matters anymore. That stuff’s just trivia, and it’s all… fading away, hm? No, baby, I know what really matters.”
“Mhhhhh…” Cecily whimpered, her own voice inaudible to her. She could hear only Lot, could see only Lot. Her every word was commandment. Drowning in powerlessness, hypnotised and narcotised and all but paralysed, Cecily felt only the distant shadow of shame – and even this would be pleasurable if Lot said that it was.

“You see, I heard you before. When you were trying to get all those losers to join your cause. I heard what you said, and I know you really believed in it. You’re so noble, sweetie – but I know the secret. Your secret. I know what ‘noble’ really means.” She turned Cecily’s head to the side, softly nibbled her earlobe, and then whispered as close and as hushed and as captivating as she could. “You just want to be good don’t you? You want to do what you’re supposed to do. Want to do what’s expected. That’s all goodness is, Cecily.” But though this sounded like criticism, as she spoke Lot began caressing Cecily’s fair skin with especial softness.

“That,” Lot said, “is why I ab…solutely… love superheroes like you. True believers. Not the freaks or the thugs you were preaching to today, but the ones who are good girls through and through. See, I know that every good girl… wants someone like me. You need someone like me, someone to tell you exactly what to do, or you’ll drive yourself crazy… you need someone to replace that voice inside their head that tells them they have to be perfect.” She relaxed her grip over Cecily’s mouth, pulled the cloth away, set it carefully aside. With equal care, she wiped the residue of the drug from Cecily’s pristine, moist lips. Like a snake she slithered around Cecily’s body, so that she was perched on top of her, her legs folded underneath her captive’s slim hips, her hands wrapped around her captive’s elegant shoulders.

Cecily had listened to each word with complete attention, accepting everything that was put to her. She saw Lot, and only Lot, and all the rest was blackness. It was like the inverse of an echo: the silence and emptiness that surrounded Cecily reverberated in her own mind, blocking and blanking it out. The sibilant pleasure of Lot’s voice captured her like ropes of silk. Was there, even, some truth to it, present circumstances be damned? Wasn’t it a relief to have the burden of moral responsibility taken away? Not to have to think? Wasn’t there a kind of sweetness in this surrender?

“Sweetie,” Lot said, the repeated epithet only securing her hypnotic hold on Cecily’s mind. “Sweetie… you know you want to be a good girl for me… a meek, submissive little pet for me.... You’re so helpless… so limp… so weak… sunk so far and so deep in the soft, warm dark… but it’s not scary, is it? Because you know I’m the one keeping you safe. You should be grateful. And you are grateful, aren’t you?”
“Y… yes…” Cecily mumbled.
“Of course you are. And you want to show me that you’re grateful, don’t you?”
“Yes…”
“So you’re going to be my good girl, aren’t you?”
“…

…yes…”
Damselbinder

The words themselves meant little to Cecily. They didn’t even mean that much to Lot. The point was the submission. The point was the surrender. Lot did so enjoy this rare pleasure, this pleasure of turning a virtuous, heroic woman like Cecily and making her melt with her drugs, her abilities, and the warm power of her voice. Yes she touched her, yes she found Cecily’s body beautiful, and pleasurable to handle and caress, but the essence of her delight wasn’t sexual exactly. A gorgeous young woman was lying beneath her, clutched between her thighs, utterly vulnerable, but more than anything, Lot was just pleased to have so firmly got the best of her. Still, she might have taken somewhat more from Cecily than she did – had she not heard the sound of a phone ringing.

The volume, and the sharp shrillness of the tone, startled both women. Without thinking, Lot withdrew her umbral cloak, and though Cecily lay, still, helpless and pliable, the velvet grip of her trance relaxed just a little. Lot still held her gaze, though, and so Cecily watched as her captor investigated, patting Cecily down in a search for the concealed cellphone.

“What the hell?” Lot growled. Hypatia wasn’t wearing much: it didn’t seem like she had too many places to hide something. Irritated, Lot flipped Hypatia over, the limp damsel flopping onto her front with a quiet mew, buried in the cushions which now concealed half of her face, one arm tucked under her stomach and her legs loosely crossed. Not being able to see Lot, and indeed no longer so absolutely the subject of Lot’s intentions, Cecily drifted, directionless, in a thick, off-white haze. Her thoughts were feeble, half-nonsensical, and little to do with anything in particular as she lay beneath her kidnapper. They accomplished nothing - but then, a few moments earlier, she hadn’t been able to have any thoughts at all.

Finally, Lot found the offending item, tucked into a concealed pocket beneath Hypatia’s shoulder-blades. It seemed hopelessly illogical, until Lot remembered that Hypatia was telekinetic. She flipped the phone open , and would have just hung up the call and torn the battery out, but for the fact that she happened to mutter the name on the caller ID to herself:
“Maria.”
Nothing that Lot had said while Cecily was entranced, not one epithet or command or patronizing compliment, not one syllable had had such a profound an effect on Cecily as that name. It pierced the veil Lot had wrapped her in, and in her unpeeled vulnerability she could not hide the reaction. She gave a strange cry, a moan of inexpressible passion and longing and deep, deep frustration.

Lot didn’t come close to understanding why Hypatia had reacted like that, or what the reaction meant. She was, however, maliciously curious, and so she held the phone by Hypatia’s ear.
“It’s for you, Cecily,” she said. “Go on. Answer.”
Confused, Cecily turned her head, blinked a few times, trying and failing to clear the fog.
“H…hello?”
“Hi, Cecily, it’s… it’s me. It’s Maria.”
But Cecily was still disoriented, still not able to quite raise herself to completely conscious thought.
“Wh… who is this?” she said, feeling that she knew the answer, but couldn’t quite get everything to fit together in her mind. More, now, she became aware that there was something wrong with her.

“It’s Maria. I know I called kind of out of nowhere. Um… I’m sorry, is this a bad time?”
Maria’s voice, her clear, genteel, not-quite-stern way of speaking – it was like a cool splash of water after a sauna. It was firmness and shape after the melting blankness of Lot’s numbing, paralysing intonations. And aside from that, it was just so very pleasant to her. It was like being kissed on the forehead, and Cecily closed her eyes, smiling with such deep tenderness that even Lot was struck by the beauty of her expression.

“Oh… oh, Maria…”
Cecily could not know, but her breathy reply had a profound effect on the person at the other end of the line.
“A-are you sure you don’t want me to call back?” Maria said. “You sound pretty tired.”
“You’re so sweet…” Cecily replied, biting her bottom lip. “No, I… always so glad to… hear… you.” She was tired, though. Very tired. Something was… no, she couldn’t just be happy to hear Maria’s voice. It wasn’t that simple. What… what was she forgetting? She felt strange – weak. She couldn’t… couldn’t… - what was it? “I’m… I can’t… can’t think…”
“Cecily, are you okay?”

Suddenly, the muted alarm bells at the back of Cecily’s mind were all she could hear. Something was wrong. She was in – she was in danger. She was in terrible peril. But she couldn’t get her brain to work properly, couldn’t get herself to express the thoughts, or even really have them.
“Maria…” Cecily said, with desperate affection. “I’ve been… I… I…” The effort of saying even this much, of having a thought this connected with reality was immense, and Cecily felt a chasm yawning beneath her, widening the harder she pushed herself to say what she felt that she had to. Her long, fine eyelashes fluttered as the drugs capturing her mind pulled at her, commanding her to sink back down, to give in again. But Cecily had just enough strength for one last plea: “Maria…” she whispered. “… Save me…”

It was so beautifully pathetic that Lot could not help but laugh. She snatched the phone away, pulled the battery from its housing, and discarded both battery and phone onto the floor.
“N… no…” Cecily tried to rise. She even tried to use her powers to pick up what Lot had dropped, but she could not even begin to find the sequence of notes in her head that would allow this.
“Hush, hush, hush,” Lot said. “None of that now, sweetie. We don’t want to be ungrateful, do we?” She eased Cecily over, again onto her back, and curled her fingers around both of her captive’s wrists. “No fighting. There’s nothing to fight. No thoughts to have. Just see me now, huh? There’s a good girl. Just see me.”

Again, Lot constricted Cecily’s field of view, drowning out the rest of the world, focusing everything on her. All again was lost to shadow, and the room, the bed, the trees outside – it all faded away. Once again, Cecily could see nothing but Lot. Hear nothing but Lot. Think of nothing but Lot. Seeing her captive’s vision laser in on her again, Lot smiled. Cecily stared up at her, stared into her. Her expression looked a little strange, a little stern, a little angry, even, but that was a small matter. That Cecily’s gorgeous, deep-blue eyes were, in fact, white and black with dignified fury was irrelevant. Lot had wriggled her way into Cecily’s brain before: she could easily do it again. A little more of the drug and she’d melt again. Ah, not even that was necessary! Look, she was puckering her lips. She wanted to be kissed, the sweet little thing. Well, perhaps Lot would oblige if – wait. Hang on. Was she… whistling? What on Earth had possessed her to – oh hang on. Had Lot just gone blind in her right eye? Hang on. Was Lot clutching her head in agonising pain? Had she fallen to the floor screaming in ear-splitting agony and rage? Was there blood coming out of her nose?

That was a little odd, wasn’t it?

For all her life, Cecily had used musical patterns to control her powers. It was a kind of synaesthesia, a way of finding a language for something that had no words, a part of her that evolution had not given her body a proper way of controlling. Insofar as her powers were refined, and subtle, those patterns were refined, and subtle, and exceedingly complex. But to start with, when she’d been a child, she’d actually hummed little tunes to herself to help her along, to have something on which to focus. In her drugged state, Cecily had not been able to play her tunes in her head, had not been able to assert any kind of fine control. But she had been able to whistle – a single, simple note. The problem was that such simplicity vastly limited her choice of action. She could push, she could pull – or she could squeeze. She hadn’t, exactly, intended to reach through Lot’s skull and squeeze the left side of her occipital lobe, but had she been cognisant enough to judge her own actions, she would not have felt especially guilty.

But Cecily was still heavily sedated. For three minutes she just lay there, flat on her back, exhausted by her telekinetic exertion and on the cusp of passing out again, listening to her captor crying out in pain and shaking, quivering on the floor. Not only that, but Cecily kept forgetting that Lot was her enemy, kept thinking that she needed help, only to remember that it was Cecily herself who needed help.

Finally, with immense effort, Cecily managed to pull herself up. If she’d been merely chloroformed she might have tried to use her powers to help herself, but that was completely out of the question. Slowly swinging her legs off the side of the bed, she haltingly put her weight onto her bare feet, and quivering, struggling to keep her thoughts straight in her head, she rose.

Three times she almost fell even before taking a step. Three times after taking her first step her confused, drained body almost convinced her to fall to her knees. But she prevailed, taking one heavy step after another, her vision hazy, her balance threatening to betray her at any moment.

But like there was a timer in her mind, Cecily knew it would not last. The chains were too heavy, the mist too thick. She was on borrowed time. Insofar as she could articulate any thought at all, she’d ‘planned’ just to run away and hope that she could flag down a passing car or something. But that wasn’t going to happen. She would never get far enough before she fainted again, and she did not know how long Lot would be debilitated for.
“The phone…”
She was extremely fortunate that Lot hadn’t just smashed it. Slowly, Cecily approached the discarded halves, had to support herself with the edge of the bed to pick them up without falling. But, somehow, she did manage to get them. Somehow she even managed to get the battery back in its housing, though clipping on the back cover defeated her. With shivering hands, she pressed three buttons, and with what remained of her strength, she held the phone up to her ear.

It rang, and rang, and rang, and Cecily felt a gnawing fear that it would never be answered at all. But her addled state was extending her sense of time – it was answered after only a few seconds.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
But those few seconds had been too many. Like water, Cecily felt the phone slipping from her hands. She looked down in dismay, but her vision was so hazy she could no longer see it. She wanted to reach for it, but she couldn’t. She hadn’t been fast enough.

Her arms dropped to her sides, bouncing and swinging as Cecily lost control of them. Her coltish, svelte legs trembled as they, too, began to fail her. Her shoulders sagged. Her head began to sway as her neck weakened, her long hair brushing against her back as that swaying turned into lolling. Her alarmed expression, her bright, fearful eyes began to fade. Back into blankness. Back into darkness. Back into meekness. Slowly she fell, down again, down to her knees, hitting the ground with a soft, solid thud.

“No…” she sighed, thrusting out her chest in one last, pointless, effort to reclaim control of her body. All it did was make her fall faster, defeated again as her chest hit the ground.
One arm was trapped underneath her. One was reaching forward towards the nearest window. Against that arm Cecily’s face was resting, and her legs lay perfectly straight behind her. Raising her eyes, she saw that the phone was quite near, and the call was still going. But she couldn’t reach it, couldn’t even grab it with her powers.

“Hello? Hello, are you there?” the speaker burbled. “I swear to God if this is another time-waster…”
“H… help…” Cecily moaned, but found her voice terribly quiet, much too quiet to be heard. “Help,” she said again, raising the volume of her plea only very slightly. “Sh… Shatterqueen… kidnapped…”

That was all she was able to say. The dark fog was too thick, the weighted blanket too heavy. She thought she could hear someone on the other end say something back, but she couldn’t tell what. It might have been reply, it might have just been the operator complaining again. She couldn’t know. Her eyes fell shut after that.

Just as she passed over the threshold of consciousness, she was aware of two more things. The first was a loud, heavy crunch as a foot smashed her cellphone to bits. The second was the feeling of strong arms roughly hauling her helpless body up again. Lot was screeching something at her, but Cecily didn’t hear it. She was spared that, at least.
Damselbinder

The Perils of Valora 4-5: Superheroinas al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios

One of two ways, going to a bar with someone is always going to be irritating. Either it’s at least halfway decent and, therefore, really busy and you can’t hear what anyone you’re with is saying. Or, it’s empty, and you can have a decent conversation; but then the vibe is really depressing and no-one wants to say anything.

And don’t say “oh, you can just go to a café” because you can’t get drunk at a café, and we all learned a long time ago that you need to get drunk when you have an encounter as weird as the one Valerie and Oliver were having. Even the Bible says so . For that reason, the two had stuck themselves on the ‘depressingly empty’ prong of Morton’s fork, and were in the process of lubricating their capacity for conversation with the cheapest grog they could afford.

Oliver was drinking vodka. He didn’t really like spirits, but it was the quickest way to loosen himself up. If he’d been feeling a little more comfortable he would have ordered a cocktail, or one of those berry ciders that some places served, but he found himself reluctant to order a drink that might be regarded as ‘feminine’. He pulled his eyes up from the bottom of his glass, and looked at Valerie. Being in the middle of a swig of real ale, she didn’t immediately look back, so he had a few moments to size her up now that the stunned surprise of happenstance had worn off a bit.

It had been almost a year since he had last seen her. She looked a little less thin, and a little more toned, but more or less she was the same. The only thing that had differed from Oliver’s memory was a mistake: he’d remembered Valerie being taller than him, when she was actually about an inch shorter. It only made the encounter seem less real.

Oliver was about to say something – some kind of friendly platitude that would think of itself in the saying – when Valerie quickly jerked her head round, gave Oliver an unconvincing smile and told him that she was surprised he was drinking vodka.
“Why’s that?” he replied.
“You were a sailor,” she said. “I thought rum was – uh – more, uh, your thing.”
The joke was bad, and had been awkwardly delivered, but it still made Oliver smile. He’d been able to see step-by-step the emotional chain in Valerie’s mind from ‘Hey that’s a funny idea’ to ‘I’ll make this joke’ to ‘Hmm I maybe didn’t think about this hard enough, oh well it’ll sort itself out in the telling’ to ‘oh geez this isn’t funny at all can I still abort’ to ‘fuck it I’m in too deep’ in about a second and a half.

“In my experience,” Oliver said, “when you’re stuck in a big, metal can for a few months, booze is booze.” He downed his vodka, exaggeratedly winked, and gave a piratical “arrrr.”
Valerie’s smile grew more natural. She was extraordinarily good-looking, and Oliver was reminded that he had tried to befriend her the first time around very much with the hope that they might sleep together at some point. Even though Valerie’s motivation had been exactly the same, Oliver suddenly felt viciously ashamed of himself.

“So, like…” Valerie made a motion like she was brushing a cobweb out of her face. “Fuck, I don’t even know how to put it. You know. Basic stuff. Catch me up with the life and times of Oliver Blane.”
“You want to get that stuff outta the way, huh?” He meant it as a joke, but Valerie appeared not to take it that way.
“No,” she said, seriously. “I want to know.”
Oliver leaned back, looked up at the ceiling.
“There’s not a huge amount to tell. I took an honourable discharge the day after you left… I went to go stay with my brother for a while… I – oh!” He looked back at Valerie, grinned. “I was a bodyguard for, like, a week.”
“Oh yeah? Guarding anyone interesting?”
“Yeah. Cher.”

Valerie spat ale almost directly in Oliver’s face. “Wh – what the fuck? Cher? If I Could Turn Back Time Cher?”
“Yeah yeah,” Oliver replied, with boyish pleasure.
“How the hell did you swing that?”
“My brother runs a security firm, right? Well Cher was doing a tour, and I think one of her normal bodyguards got, like, typhoid or something.”
“Typhoid?”
“I know, I know. It’s super weird. There was definitely something fishy about all that, like I swear to God it was an episode of Unsolved Mysteries waiting to happen – anyway, whatever. Point is, Mr Handsome Ex-Marine over here made for a very tempting replacement.”
“Wait – it was your brother’s company arranging the gig? Isn’t that, like, pretty egregious nepotism?”
“And how!” Oliver replied, cheerfully. “But uh…” He looked away. “It didn’t work out.”
“Fuck her,” Valerie said, instantly filling the encroaching silence. She stood up. “You want another vodka?”
Oliver thought for a moment.
“…Could I maybe get a rum?”

Valerie had to wait for a couple of minutes for her order to be filled. She leaned against the bar, keeping Oliver in the corner of her eye. He was looking down at the table, his eyes flickering around. He looked almost out of breath. At first Valerie allowed herself to think that she empathised, that the two were reminders for each other of a black day in both their lives. But she harshly chided herself for this assumption, for what she read as an instinct to understand him through herself.

She did, however, allow herself to guess what Oliver had meant by ‘it didn’t work out’. Something had happened, something of which he was ashamed. Maybe even something a little like what had happened during the battle with Sinistrus. Whatever. It wasn’t Valerie’s business.

Yet, unwillingly, she found herself imagining a possibility. Maybe he’d been on duty, and heard something that had sounded like a gunshot, and had wildly overreacted. Maybe there had been some sort of threat and he had collapsed under pressure. Maybe he had had another flashback or something. She half-imagined, half-remembered seeing him that night, curled up, shaking and weeping, and she felt a stab of anger, and nausea.

But when Valerie brought him his drink, and he flashed a witty smile at her, she smiled back. When, in receiving it, he briefly touched her hand, it was nice. When he mentioned that he’d seen her once or twice in the papers, and that he hoped she’d been doing as well as it had appeared, his genuineness gave Valerie pleasure.

“Yeah, it’s been going well,” Valerie answered, quickly. “I’m at a big advantage compared to my… peers, I guess you’d call them? Hard to fuck up a superhero career when you’re bulletproof and can bench-press a Toyota Corolla.”
“C’mon, Valerie, don’t sell yourself short. I bet you could bench-press a whole fleet of Toyata Corollas.”
“Well, I don’t like to brag…”
Oliver finished off his rum. After that and the vodka he was edging onto being tipsy, and it was having the desired effect. His stomach wasn’t so tight, that itching sensation in his collar had mostly died down, and he felt more like he was just catching up with an old acquaintance, rather than having an unhappy past rammed directly down his throat.
“So,” he said, easing back into his chair, “what brings you down to Virginia? You, uh, on somebody’s trail, maybe?”
“No,” Valerie said. “I’m… um…” Valerie had to choose whether or not to tell Oliver about what had happened to bring her here. She decided instantly that she would not. But she didn’t want to lie to him either.
“I had a tough fight. Things got weird. I’d been fighting pretty much non-stop for like months before that so I figure I needed a… you know.”
“Sabbatical?”
“Oh, I was just gonna say ‘vacation’, but that makes me sound cooler. Yeah, I’m taking a sabbatical.”

After some light laughter, there was a more extended pause. The strangeness of the situation had caught up with them again. The seconds were magnified in Valerie’s mind, and the awkwardness of it became intolerable.
“Look,” she said, with an insistent, almost aggressive earnestness, “today must be really shitty for you. Then you bump into Miss-Stupid-Coincidence and – ” She threw up her hands. “I’m glad you stopped to talk to me, Oliver, but – I won’t be offended if you want to go.”
“Do you want me to go?” Oliver asked.
“No,” Valerie replied.

Oliver looked Valerie in the eyes for a few seconds. She thought he was trying to work out if she was being honest, but he’d believed what she’d said immediately.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong,” Oliver said. “Today has been shitty,” he said. “I mean, you never know how you’re meant to feel at these memorial things. At least, I don’t.” Oliver moved forward, rested his elbows on the table. He angled his head in such a way that he didn’t have to look directly at Valerie, without it looking like he was avoiding her gaze, exactly. “It’s a ‘national tragedy’,” he said, with mocking irony, but irony he seemed to think better of in the saying of it. “No, I mean – it is. It was. People have a right to… have feelings about it. But, uh… I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t feel like sharing it with The Nation. Like, uh, ‘get your own trauma!’, know what I mean?”

This wasn’t something Valerie had, precisely, experienced herself. She felt that all her traumas were very much her own. But too much her own. She guarded them jealously, stored them up, held them close and secret. They were hers. They were her. She could well imagine how Oliver might feel the same way about his own wounds. She could well imagine that having to share those wounds with all of his countrymen would be infuriating.

“I think I get it,” she said, unwilling and unable to express her feelings more deeply. Yet, out of earnest sympathy, she touched him on the arm. He looked up at her. They allowed themselves to look into each other’s eyes without speaking for a few seconds.
“How long are you gonna be in Norfolk?” she asked.
“A couple of weeks,” he answered.
Valerie smiled.
Damselbinder

Three days passed. Valerie had asked Oliver to meet her by one of the industrial shipping piers. It was not, perhaps, the most traditional spot for a date, but Valerie intended it to be the beginning of a long walk, and she liked the aesthetics. Whatever else she was, she was also a professional photographer, and the drama of the great coal ships berthed at Pier 6 was better than beauty.

And yes, she was thinking of it as a date this time. Neither she nor he were stupid, and almost in spite of themselves the two were following along the path that lay in front of them. Valerie had turned the matter over in her mind many times over the past 72 hours, and only latterly had she become comfortable with allowing all to be as it seemed. On the day itself, she found she was nervous, for this was the first time in a long time that she’d actually been on a date. She’d had plenty of brief encounters and one-night stands, but she hadn’t gone for a full-on dinner-and-a-movie date since she’d been in high school. She hadn’t dressed up, exactly, but she’d made something of an effort to look nice, wearing a canary-yellow sweater-dress, a pair of silver earrings . She was excited, and though she couldn’t help mocking herself, mocking the simplicity of that pleasure, she still felt it.

She sat down on the edge of a pier, bare legs swinging gently as she watched the water. She hadn’t dived again since the day with the shark, and even now she didn’t particularly feel compelled to. But she knew that she could, and she found that that was comforting. She closed her eyes, and listened to the sound of the water sloshing against the end of the pier. She let herself be absorbed by it, and by the sound of the great hulks bearing huge shipments of coal with their heavy, smoky, industrial scent. It was pleasant, if only because it was separate from herself.

Valerie was aware when Oliver sat down next to her, but didn’t open her eyes. There were about forty centimetres separating them, close enough that Valerie could just about feel the warmth of him through the mild chill in the air. She could smell him, too: the slightly sharp, slightly sweet smell of his cologne; the fruity scents of shampoo and soap which told Valerie that he’d showered just before coming out. She opened her eyes, saw that he was looking out to sea, furrowing his brow like he was trying to see something just outside the comfortable range of his vision. He was wearing a tight, black t-shirt, and Valerie found herself admiring the definition of his arms and his chest.
Oliver noticed that Valerie was looking at him, but didn’t look back. Instead, he distorted his handsome features into a misshapen, cock-eyed smirk.

“Ah-well, I say I say, ma’am, hhhhwat’s a fiiiiiine looking lady like yourself doin’ out hyah, I do declay-ah,” he said.
“…Are you feeling alright?”
“ ‘Alright’? ‘Alright’? Hhhwell, that sounds like big city talk to me, ma’am, and I wouldn’t know nothin’ about that, I’m just a simple man trying to make my way in this wide world of ours, so I don’t know ‘bout any of this fancy rich folk talk.” He turned to look at her. “How’s it going?”
Valerie snorted, half trying and half pretending to try not to laugh.
“It’s going fine. Had to deal with some shitty customers, today. But, ” she said, shrugging, “that’s the job.”
“Not breaking the sabbatical, I hope?”
“Ah, it’s no big deal. Once you’ve had a job where you have to regularly deal with the threat of actual death, shit like ‘customer rude; boss mad’ doesn’t quite have the same impact anymore. But you know that,” she added quickly.
“Mm,” Oliver replied. His expression suggested he was about to make a joke, but seemed not to be able to find the punchline, or the energy. He got up. “Want to take a walk?” he said.
“That’s the plan.”

The two strolled along the piers at a very leisurely pace. Both of them took pleasure from their maritime surroundings, though Oliver seemed to be paying more attention to the ships than to the water.
“I got a question,” Valerie said.
“Shoot.”
“Why the military? I always got the impression you had, like… a specific reason for joining up, but I never got the chance to ask before.”

Oliver slowed down a little as he thought.
“I mean, there’s an easy answer and a hard answer,” he said. “Easy answer is: they paid for my engineering degree. But… I don’t know. I probably would have spent some time in the service even if they hadn’t. As for the hard answer, I…” He thought. “Man. I’m sorry, but I… I honestly can’t think of how to explain it. I just sorta… needed to? I don’t know. Fuck it: I like boats – I think at this stage in my life I need to admit that that was a pretty big part of it.” He grinned. “Man, you have no idea what a gigantic hard-on I got the first day I was assigned to the Truman.”
“Okay, cool, gross, cool.”
“Oh come on, you’ve gotta know where I’m coming from. An aircraft carrier is like… it’s a ship. With fighter jets on it. They come up from inside the ship on little fighter-jet-elevators. If you don’t think that’s the raddest shit then I just don’t know what to tell you. It’s – it’s like a G.I. Joe action playset come to life!”
“Alright… I kind of hate that I know exactly what you mean,” Valerie said. “It’s kinda James-Bond-y.”
“Thank you,” Oliver said. “…Huh. Maybe, uh… maybe I should have gone with the ‘James Bond’ comparison instead of… G.I. Joe.”
“Nah, you’re okay,” Valerie responded. “Besides, I had a massive crush on Beachhead when I was eight.”
“Who?” replied Oliver, whose knowledge of the franchise in question was due entirely to cultural osmosis.
Slightly embarrassed, Valerie just told him not to worry about it.

By the time the two got past the industrial waterfront, and back to the more tourist-friendly part of Norfolk’s coastline, the sun was low, and the sky was cast in a rich, burnt pink colour, darkly reflected in the dappled surface of the Atlantic. Valerie stopped to look, and turned away from Oliver, stretching her arms above her head. For a moment, she was directly in the sunlight, so her dress and her legs looked almost the same colour. Since it hugged her figure so snugly, Oliver had a brief, vivid impression of what Valerie looked like naked. She looked over her shoulder at him, and saw – more or less – what he’d been thinking. She felt herself smiling, and her eyes flashed, the sunlight making their colour stand out more than usual.

Oliver’s eyes, by contrast, were shadowed, although Valerie could see he was looking at her very, very intently. The shadow lying across his features, his well-wrought, wiry muscularity and the curliness of his blond-brown hair put Valerie slightly in mind of a fawn, or a satyr: something natural, lustful and a little mysterious: a keeper of secrets. He started walking towards her, and in excitement Valerie bit her bottom lip. With every step he seemed to be recalculating, rechecking what Valerie thought of him, and Valerie made as sure as she could that, at present, what she thought was “Yes.”

As Oliver approached her, Valerie turned to face him directly. They stood only an inch or two apart, staring into each other’s eyes. Their faces were serious, and yet they smiled – almost laughed from sheer nervous, sexual energy. Oliver put his hands on Valerie’s dramatically tapering waist, and Valerie ran her hands through his hair. It was fluffy, like how she imagined a wild sheep’s hair would feel. She kissed him, or he kissed her, and Valerie heard Oliver make a soft sound as their lips met. She didn’t know whether she found it sexy or off-putting, so she responded by curling her fingers tightly in his hair, pulling him closer, sliding her tongue into his mouth. He tasted of toothpaste, and to a lesser extent of really good coffee. He put his arms around her, and she felt his well-shaped, strong triceps against her sides. That, Valerie found unambiguously sexy, and she breathed a lusty laugh into his mouth just before breaking the kiss.

When Valerie opened her eyes, she saw Oliver looking back at her with a look so serious that it was almost grim. Yet his cheeks were flushed, and he was close to panting, and the combination of such obvious attraction and masculine dignity held Valerie frozen for a moment, astonished by how beautiful she found him. She was a little lost in him, and that was – given how she’d spent so many of her days of late – close to bliss.

Oliver, for his part, was just as stunned, though the reason was different. Part of the reason he looked so serious was that he was wrestling with different feelings about Valerie. There was a dual layer of starstruck astonishment; part of which was because Valerie was famous, and it was difficult for him to keep together the larger-than-life superwoman Valora, and the grave young woman that he had come to know, a feeling for which Oliver didn’t altogether blame himself. What he took more issue with was how affected he was just by the fact that he’d been kissing such a ravishingly beautiful woman: there was a kind of ‘I can’t believe a girl like you would notice a guy like me!’ aspect to it, which Oliver felt was immature, and a little bit fake-modest. He was a charming, handsome man: why shouldn’t she be attracted to him? And there was something else, too, about Valerie herself. Something he couldn’t quite place, but which worried him at a level just beneath the conscious. Add to this the adrenaline and tension and pleasure of a first kiss with someone in any situation, and it was small wonder why Oliver felt unable to say much for a while.

“You want to keep walking?” Valerie said, half-whispering. She had no idea what he was thinking, but there was obviously a lot going on in his mind, and she found that she had a fair bit of patience for him.
“Yeah,” Oliver said, quietly. His expression softened as he emerged from the shadow of thought, and he stuck out his arm – like unto the little teapot short and stout – inviting Valerie to link hers with it, which she did. Both of them walked with their free hand in a pocket.
“Can I ask you a question?” Oliver said, after they’d walked silently together for a minute or two.
“Sure, Oliver,” Valerie said, and there was a soft, casual friendliness in her voice that Oliver hadn’t heard before.
“Why did you want to be a superhero?”

Valerie let out a long breath, a breath that, by its end had resolved into the word ‘fuck’.
“I… you know what, I’ve got an easy answer and a hard answer too.”
“Oh?”
“Easy answer is because my parents didn’t want me to,” Valerie said. “My dad - ” She stopped. The informality sat ill with her, but ‘my father’ would have sounded weird. “My old man,” Valerie compromised, “always wanted me to hide my powers. It’s ‘cause of him that I bothered with the whole secret identity thing in the first place.”
“Yeah, I wondered about that,” Oliver said. “You never struck me as the kind of person who’d want to hide their powers.”
Valerie shrugged.

“Mystery solved, I guess,” she said. “I don’t know – I don’t hold that against him too much. Having a child with powers like mine must have been pretty frightening. I mean, I’m lucky: it’s always been easy to control my strength, but he didn’t know that.” She smirked. “One time I scared the crap outta the neighbours though. There was, uh… a fourteen-year-old – can’t remember if it was a boy or a girl - picking on a kid who lived next door to me, right? Like… cartoon bully shit, taking her lunch money, or whatever. Anyway, I ended up putting them in the hospital.”
“Jesus. How old were you?”
“Three,” Valerie said. It was the punchline of the anecdote, but she delivered it with a little more relish than it deserved. She sensed this and, suddenly nervous of what Oliver might think of her, moved on.

“So yeah, that kinda feeds into the ‘hard’ answer,” she said. “When you’ve got something that’s been part of you your whole life, and it’s something you’ve got and nobody else around you has – well, that’s you isn’t it?” Inside her pocket, she pushed her thumb and forefinger together, aware that she was applying to her digits enough force to crush diamond into dust. “I am my powers,” she said. “I have to live through them.” She had always felt this, but she had never had to put it into words before.
“… I never thought about it like that,” Oliver said. “I guess I don’t really know any superhumans apart from you. Hell: apart from you and the rest of your team, I’ve never even spoken to a superhuman, that I know of.”
“I’d be surprised if too many others thought of it the way I did. Even for naturals it’s weird to be literally born with your powers active, like I was. I probably would have been news if my parents hadn’t kept it secret. At least… I think I was born with them.”
“Hm?”
“Well, I know I was born really premature, and I had to be delivered by c-section. I always just sort of assumed it had something to do with my powers. I – well I asked my dad, but he couldn’t remember.” Valerie hadn’t quite caught herself before stumbling into a topic she had really not wanted to devote any of her time with Oliver, and she hurriedly mumbled the last few words, hoping Oliver wouldn’t catch what a strange thing to say it was.
“He couldn’t remember? Who forgets something like that?”
Valerie made a non-committal ‘eh’ sort of noise.
“Didn’t you ask your mom?”
“My mom? She – oh.”

Valerie stopped.
“Yeah, right, I never told you. Okay,” she said, giving a little ironical laugh. “This is one of those – when you tell people shit like this they don’t know how to react, in my experience. So, in advance, because you’re obviously a nice person, whatever your reaction is - is fine. That said: I couldn’t ask my mom because she died from an aneurysm when I was six.”
“Oh, man, Valerie, I’m sorry.”

Valerie was not lying when she’d told Oliver that whatever his reaction was would be fine, but she was not being altogether honest with herself. The same words that Oliver had said, from another mouth, might have really annoyed her. And fuck, Oliver might have expressed himself a little bit better if he’d had a while to think about it, but he was obviously genuinely sympathetic without being mawkish or precious about it. Valerie didn’t like to think of herself of someone of whom this would be true, but his reaction made her feel safer with him.

“Hey, fuck my curiosity,” Oliver said. “We can talk about something else if you want.”
“It’s fine,” Valerie said. “I…” She tightened her arm, pulling Oliver a little closer to her. “I don’t mind people knowing that stuff.”
“Yeah, I gotcha,” Oliver said.
They walked arm in arm for a little while, both enjoying the feeling of the other against them. After a few minutes they found a bench, sat down together. They watched the water, the darkening sky, felt the air grow colder. After a minute of soft, companionable silence, Valerie put her head on Oliver’s shoulder. He turned to her, lifted her chin, kissed her. She crossed her legs towards him, touching his calf with hers. Oliver noticed her dress had slipped a little up her thigh, and Valerie noticed him noticing.

“Hey,” she whispered in his ear. “You can look. I want you to look” She couldn’t see Oliver’s face from her position, but she felt him smile.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m looking.” She had very, very pretty legs. Long, smooth; solidly feminine: the pressure of her left thigh against the top of her right showing a pleasing combination of tightness and softness.
“You like what you see?” Valerie asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “But I think you knew I’d say that.” He brushed his nose against her cheek. “Right?”
“I had my suspicions,” Valerie replied. “Hey,” she added, a little more softly. “I… really like you, Oliver.”
“I like you too, Valerie,” he replied.
“So…”
“So… what?”
Valerie kissed his neck, his jaw, his cheek. She nuzzled his right ear, stroking his hair as she pulled him closer.
“So…” she whispered, intimately. “Fucking invite me over, dipshit.”
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

(Thank you to all those who've kept up with the story - would be v. nice to hear what people think of it all)
Damselbinder

In the cab back to Oliver’s place the two sat as close as decorum would allow, mutually allowing the tension between them to tighten. They didn’t speak, but they were totally focused on each other. It was like a game, where they were each trying to catch the other looking at them. And every time one of them got caught, they both wanted to pounce on each other, but both resisted – not so much out of propriety, but just because it was fun. At one moment, their eyes locked and they got sort of stuck on each on each other, not sure what the rules of their game dictated. As an almost physiological response Valerie shifted towards Oliver, her seatbelt tightening against her chest. It pulled her dress tighter over her bosoms, and Oliver felt his pulse quicken. Valerie saw the light hairs on Oliver’s arms standing up, and she shivered. She couldn’t help touching him, at least a little, and so curled her fingers around his nearest hand. He squeezed back, and Valerie stroked his palm with her thumb. His skin was softer than she’d expected.

Once they got out of the cab the two found it pretty impossible to keep their hands off each other – or perhaps it would be fairer to say that they could no longer be bothered to keep their hands off each other. They made out in the street. They made out in the atrium of the apartment building. They made out right in front of Oliver’s door and that was sufficiently private that Valerie began started pushing herself up against him, breathing hot against his neck – but Oliver stopped her.

“It’s not that I – just - ” he stammered, and Valerie thought that something was wrong until she noticed he was almost laughing. “My friend’ll be home. It’s not a problem or anything, but we’re probably gonna have to go past him, and…”
“Oh, right, yeah,” Valerie replied, semi-successfully battling her impatience. “Don’t want to offend the guy.”
“Yeah yeah, it’s just I didn’t actually like… ask him if it was okay to – I mean, it’s his place so…” Oliver said, but shook the doubt away. “Nah, he’ll be cool. Just… be prepared.”
“For what?”
He had muscular arms and a fake tan. His head was shaved. He was wearing a backwards baseball cap, an expensive sports jersey and a thousand-dollar watch. He was tossing a football from hand to hand, and was speaking on a Bluetooth earpiece, speaking very loudly. Had he had the words ‘I am a stockbroker’ carved in stone letters fifty cubits high, he could not have more obviously advertised what he was.

He pulled his headset out of his ear. “’Sup,” he said, to Valerie. “I’m Chuck. This is my place so, uh… you’re welcome.” He turned around, replaced the headset.
“He’s a sweetheart really,” Oliver said, noticing Valerie was giving Chuck a bit of a dirty look. “Come on.”
He led Valerie away, and the two practically stumbled over each other to get into his bedroom. Before they were even through the door they had their arms around each other, and Oliver had to blindly slap at the wall to switch the light on because Valerie had already pulled him into a rough, eager kiss.

“There is,” she said, breaking away briefly, “something really… moreish about you.” She laughed at her own strange choice of words and pressed her lips against Oliver’s mouth again. She half-moaned, half laughed as she kissed him, and she felt his mouth curling upwards as he supressed a laugh of his own. Valerie put her hands on his waist, then slid them under Oliver’s t-shirt a little way. He made no objection, so she went further, her thumbs edging over his navel and up towards his chest. He didn’t have an ironclad six-pack or anything, but his abdomen was pleasantly hard and pleasantly soft. Oliver began reciprocating, putting his hand on Valerie’s thigh and lifting it against his leg.

“Oh, fuck yes,” Valerie grunted, delighted by the firmness of his grasp on her, and she began to push against him, rhythmically pressing her breasts against his torso.
But something wasn’t quite right. She couldn’t tell what it was at first, because her libido was working very hard to make her unaware of what was remembering. But she did remember: it hadn’t been long, really, since someone had touched her a little like Oliver was doing. Valerie had spent most of the time drugged, so the memory was hazy, but it couldn’t be erased either.

Lupus pawing at her.
Lupus grabbing her.
Lupus enjoying her.
But she grabbed the memory and choked it, choked it down until she had forced it to yield. “No,” she thought, “no way. You’re not taking this from me.”

Redoubling her passion, she seized Oliver with both hands, feeling his chest, his biceps, his shoulders, his back. She did it as much to keep her mind on the right things as out of desire. “You’re so fucking hot,” she said.
“You’re beautiful,” he replied. He never would have said it if he’d had more control over himself, because there is absolutely no way to say ‘you’re beautiful’ to someone without sounding like a complete tit. But it had come out so quickly and so instinctively that it sounded as sincere as it was, and Valerie was caught off guard. It made her feel warm, and sort of proud, and she pulled back, locking eyes with Oliver, eyes alight with a vivid consciousness of her own loveliness, her youth and her vibrant, powerful sexuality.

But then, it wasn’t herself she was interested in. She beckoned Oliver to come to her, and he did. She took his hands and smoothed them down her body, guiding Oliver’s hands over her collar, her fulsome, heaving breasts and the contours of her hips.
“Jesus,” he breathed. He looked her in the eye, his expression almost confused. “You are… kind of unreal.”
“Damn right,” Valerie replied, quickly and insistently. “Now get me the fuck out of this dress.”

He did it quite slowly. He put his hands on her shoulders first, moving them up and down over her, feeling her dramatic, voluptuous contours through the stretchy fabric of her clothes. Valerie felt a growing impatience, but Oliver wasn’t being hesitant, exactly. He was going at his own pace, and she liked that just fine: she just wished ‘his own pace’ was a little faster.
But he didn’t delay long. His hands went to the nape of Valerie’s neck, finding the zipper that ran halfway down her back. He pulled it down, and Valerie felt the dress going loose. She felt a tingling in her feet and the backs of her knees as Oliver undressed her. He tugged the mustard-yellow fabric down, exposing Valerie’s strong, soft shoulders. He kissed them, and her collar, and noted how responsive she was to being touched there. A grin flashed on his face: he had discovered a secret. He didn’t linger, though, and continued undressing Valerie, her breasts bouncing slightly when he freed them from the confines of her dress.

“Fuck,” he whispered, and Valerie laughed: amused, but not mocking. She wiggled her hips, and the dress fell the rest of the way, crumpling at her feet, leaving her in just her underwear, and leaving Oliver’s heart drumming a rapid, deafening rhythm in his chest.
Valerie skipped away from Oliver, keeping her eyes on him and making sure he could get a good, good look at her. She wanted to see his desire. She wanted to see how much he wanted her. He wanted to see him devouring her body with his eyes: her arms, her neck, her waist; the curves of her smooth, naked legs and the sheer, sumptuous generosity of her gorgeous, fulsome breasts. She gave him a teasing smile, and stroked herself, touching her chest and her thighs, daring him to come and get her.

But Oliver could play this game too. He smiled at her, slyly, and in a movement so swift and graceful that it caught Valerie quite by surprise, he swept off his t-shirt, baring his arms and his shapely chest, and began slowly unclipping his belt. But Valerie didn’t let him get much further than that. Seized by desire and viciously crushing resurgent recollection, she virtually ran to him, and leapt into his arms, wrapping her long legs around his waist, wrapping her arms just under his, and furiously kissing him. Oliver almost toppled over: he hadn’t expected it, and she was a lot heavier than she looked. But he just about managed to bear her, and began taking her to his bed.

For a moment, Oliver felt Valerie’s thighs grasp him more tightly as she unwrapped her arms from him. This only lasted a few seconds, and Oliver didn’t know why she’d done it at first – until he heard a quiet sound of something hitting the floor, and felt her bare breasts against his chest, dark-pink buds hard against his skin. He just barely managed to get himself and Valerie onto his bed before the two collapsed under the weight of their passion.

Hands against chests; thighs between thighs; lips against necks, and cheeks, and faces; pulse against pulse. The two wrapped each other in each other, and for at least thirty minutes they just fondled, and kissed, and stroked, hovering on the edge of going the full distance, but almost too enmeshed in each other for the brief untangling that would entail. Eventually the only thing that could stop them did stop them: Oliver desperately needed to take a piss.

“Well hurry the fuck up!” Valerie shouted, smacking him lightly on his muscular backside as he slipped off her, running deliberately comically to his en-suite, and making his partner giggle in frustrated anticipation. She noticed something just before Oliver disappeared from view, though: there was heavy scarring on the backs of his legs.

It wasn’t all that surprising. He’d been burned in the sinking of the Truman, no doubt. It didn’t make him uglier, at least not to Valerie. But it disturbed her. He’d been - branded. The worst day of his life had marked him, forever. At least it wasn’t somewhere he’d have to look at most of the time, but – it was always there. Permanent, irreparable damage. As she pondered this Valerie, whom no wound could mar, felt terrified.

And once she started thinking, she couldn’t stop. Like she was in a minecart that was just beginning to roll down a hill, she felt a violent momentum. She began to think of all the small things Oliver had done or said that had bugged her: the little noise he’d made when they’d kissed, for example. His slightly puerile sense of humour. The fact that he hadn’t said anything when his roommate had been so rude. The way his mouth sort of twisted up and squirmed when he was about to smile. His soft hands.

What was it that attracted him to her? I mean he was good looking, fine, but what else? Clever, sure; witty, sure; good person; probably. Generic, generic, generic. It was always something deeper. Attraction to someone meant they’d scratched a very specific itch, for good or ill – usually ill. What itch did he scratch?

And then she remembered the bigger thing – the biggest thing. Seeing Oliver that day, curled up and hiding in the middle of his flashback, shaking and crying and whimpering, and suddenly everything soft and sweet in him seemed disgusting, seemed weak, and because she knew exactly whom she was comparing him to, and how filthy and how shriekingly unfair that was, and what that meant about her, that weakness seemed all the more detestable.

And fuck, maybe it didn’t even have anything to do with that. Maybe it was simpler. Maybe she was just buying into that dime-store romance novel crap. ‘Oh, he’s so tragic! Oh, he’s so damaged! Oh, let me heal the noble, wounded soldier with my passionate kisses and heaving bosom!’

And now that her guard was down, but her body still pulsing, expectant and primed, she began to think of Lupus again, and this time she couldn’t choke it down. Now all she could think of was that she was just using Oliver. Just trying to blot out some bad thoughts by having him pleasure her. Couldn’t help but feel that she was essentially bad.
What the hell was she doing here? In this bed, with this man, in this town? She should have st
ayed in Portland. She should have killed Lupus. She should have let herself enjoy beating her to death. And she should have gone straight from there to kill Milo Patáky. And then the next bad guy. And the next. Why not? Doing the world a service and getting her jollies at the same time. Why not? Why not? What was she but scarred and mad?

And then Oliver came out of the bathroom. He sauntered easily towards the bed, sat down at the end of it.
“Sorry if I killed the vibe,” he said, a little above a whisper. He couldn’t quite see Valerie with the lights off. “But now that we’ve, uh, paused, can I say something?”
“Sure.”
“Just - thank you. Not for this, at least not exactly. You’ve just been so nice, and at a…” He paused to find the right words. “It hasn’t been this hard around this time of year for a while, and running into you again was so weird, and kind of freaked me out a little at first, but I’m really, really glad it happened. It… sort of changed the shape of everything. And I know that shit’s been hard for you, too, even if you don’t really want to talk about it.”
“Oliver - ” Valerie began, but he spoke over her.
“It’s fine,” he said, and meant it. “You don’t have to tell me about anything you don’t want to. I’ve always thought people were entitled to their secrets - I just want you to know how much of a difference you’ve made to me. Even if – heh – even if you have your wicked way with me and bolt right out that door and I never see you again, I… will be very happy that we met again when we did.” He rubbed the back of his head. “‘Swell of music. Fade to black.’ Sorry, that kind of turned into a speech, didn’t it?”

Valerie didn’t answer. Compelled to fill the silence, Oliver said: “Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make this more emotional than it needed to be. I… uh… I also have kind of a stupid question? If we – um… do what it kind of seemed like we were about to do – like, do we need to do it a particular way? ‘Cause of your powers?”
Again Valerie didn’t answer.
“Fuck,” Oliver thought. “I’m sorry – I really hope that didn’t come across as offensive.”
“No,” Valerie said.
She sat up. Her face was still concealed.
“I’m lucky, remember? My powers are easy to control. It’s not really possible for me to use my strength without deliberately meaning to, so it’s not like I could get carried away. And – and it wasn’t offensive at all. I know how strong I am, it’s a completely fair question. I should have said something sooner.”

At first Oliver thought that she was annoyed; but trying to be polite about it. But she moved quickly forward, and took his hand, gripping it tightly.
“I don’t - ” She was breathing heavily. To Oliver’s astonishment, she was trembling. “I don’t have to – I mean, I…” She clenched her fist, trying to compose herself. Suddenly she moved forward, putting her face against his neck, obviously trying to make it so that he couldn’t see her face. “I don’t have to use my powers,” she said. “I can…” She pressed her mouth against his neck, and slowly wound her arms around her. “I can be gentle, Oliver. I can… if that’s what you want… if that’s what you need… I can be gentle… I can be gentle…” She started to kiss him, tried to kiss him on the mouth, but he pulled away.
“Hey. Are you okay?”
“No, f – I mean, that doesn’t matter. I’m fine. I’m good. I’m here, and I’m – I – you can have whatever you need from me, okay? Whatever would make you feel good. Whatever would give you pleasure. I want that. I want to do that. I want to be that for some- for you. Just – just let me give… let me – let me…”

She was shaking. When she realised he could see it, she snapped back from him, covering her chest with her arms. She was heaving, and Oliver wasn’t sure whether she was crying or she was about to be sick.
“You’re right,” she muttered, “I can’t. I can’t be… can’t be…”
“Jesus, Valerie!” Oliver exclaimed. “What’s going on? What happened?”
Only when Oliver raised his voice did Valerie seem to notice again that she was there.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should go. I’m sorry I spoiled things.” She tried to get up, but Oliver instinctively put his hand out to her. He hadn’t really meant to, but he ended up pulling her towards him. It was something to the tune of one one-hundred-millionth the amount of force it would take to even make her exert real effort to resist. But she collapsed. She fell against the side of Oliver’s bed, not so much crying as just shaking and hyperventilating. Oliver slipped down beside her and held her, and she didn’t or couldn’t find the will to pull away.

“I – shouldn’t – have let it – get this far,” Valerie croaked between breaths. “It’s not – right.”
“What are you talking about?” Oliver said. He was getting scared.
“Ohhhhhhh…” Valerie groaned. “If you’d… if you’d just been some quick fuck it would have been fine but… I like you… I do like you, so – I shouldn’t…” She managed to raise her head. “You don’t know…” And then, so quickly that Oliver almost didn’t understand, she blurted out: “I tried to murder someone.”

“I – what?”
Valerie pulled away completely, stood up, retreated into the corner of Oliver’s room.
“The ‘big fight’. It wasn’t just a fight. It was – it was Lupus.” She laughed. “Remember her? Well, she’s a fucking supervillain now. She… beat me. She kidnapped me. And she… well when I got free I tracked her down and I tried to murder her!”
“Wait, wait, slow down. I’m sorry, I don’t – I don’t understand. Lupus attacked you? Why?”

“Oh, who cares why?! Because she’s a bitch, I don’t know! But I don’t mean I just fought her. I beat the shit out of her. I made her beg. I made her beg for her life. And then I wrapped my hands around her throat and I tried to strangle her to death. God!” she bellowed. She sank to her knees, clawed hands covering her face.

Oliver’s reaction was not completely sympathetic. He was frightened. He was confused. There was a big part of him that said, ‘I don’t need this.’ A big part of him that resented Valerie for taking her baggage and dumping it onto him, however unwillingly. But because he was a good person, and because it was so obvious to him that Valerie was a good person, and because he had affection for her, he did what his brother had done for him the first time he’d had a shrieking fit of hysterics and had pissed himself after coming back home alive from the Truman: he’d just hugged him and been there with him.

Valerie couldn’t help herself this time when Oliver sat next to her and put his arms around her. She buried her face in his chest, and let him hold her. In her self-violence she had said one thing that was true: this hadn’t been about to be a quick fuck. There was something real between them, and the intimacy that they had shared had made it more real. She wanted to twist away from him, but – oh god, it was so relieving to feel this from someone she liked.

When a few minutes had passed, and Valerie was shaking a little less, Oliver tentatively spoke.
“Help me understand,” he said. “’Cause right now I really don’t get it.”
So she told him. The fight, Lupus’ torment of her. The revenge, Hypatia’s interference. And when he rightly sensed that there was a missing element, that anyone who’d known Valerie for ten minutes would know that she would not have responded as she had under normal circumstances, she even sputtered out a heavily truncated version of her encounter with her father and stepmother.

“I’m sorry,” she said, after she was finished. “I just – this is the exact opposite of what I wanted. I wanted… you. I wanted to know about you, and be with you and – and I wanted to make love to you. Not just vomit this all over you. I’m so… sick of it. My stupid fucking white-people drama, and you - ” She was embarrassed to say it. “You’ve been through real shit. Not my made up soap-opera shit.”

“Look, I… I’ll admit it was a bit of a shock,” Oliver said. “Hearing all that, I mean. But – don’t do that. I hate that! Pain is pain. Mine isn’t special. It didn’t put me on a goddamned crucifix. And it doesn’t mean yours doesn’t count! Jesus, I don’t know if…” he said, and then trailed off. He hadn’t known where he was going with that sentence when he started, and had hoped he would just think of something as it went on. But, eventually, words did come. “I have no answers. I can’t stand in judgement. I can’t blame you. I can’t forgive you – because frankly I still barely get what the fuck happened. But…”

He moved around, her, keeping his hands on her shoulders, and looking her in the eye.
“For whatever it’s worth,” he said, “Valerie, I never had the slightest doubt in my mind that you were capable of being gentle.”

Valerie started, like she’d been shocked. She looked back at him, and just stared. She felt she was looking at an echo: his pain, his shame, his hardship, his anger. But she didn’t want it to feel like that. She didn’t want to see herself in him. She thought that was self-centredness again. She had not been loved enough to identify the essence of it in herself.
“Can I ask you a favour?” she said.
“Sure.”
“Can I sleep with you? Like… literally?”
Oliver touched her face.
“Of course.”

They did sleep together. They lay far apart in Oliver’s bed, Valerie nervous about encroaching too much. But the sheets smelled like him, and it was comforting. She fell asleep, and dreamed of water, and about three hours later, she woke up. She’d been disturbed by Oliver getting out of bed for a glass of water.
“Fuck,” he mumbled, bumping his foot on the bed, as he stumbled back into it. He lay down, facing Valerie, with a rather serious, contemplative look on his face. He seemed not to notice Valerie was looking at him, or even that she was awake. “Fuck,” he said again, with rather more gravity. He put a hand near one of Valerie’s by accident and was surprised when Valerie reached over to take it.
“Hm?” He looked at her, saw she was looking back at him. He felt Valerie stroking his fingers, his wrist. He smiled, sort of, and shifted over a little closer to her. “You okay?” he whispered.
She didn’t answer. She just moved herself closer, letting go of his hand, and softly stroking her face.
“You’re beautiful,” she said.
In the warm, and the dark, they melded.
Damselbinder

The Perils of Valora 4-6: “You’ve Gotta See Her”

Captivity is much like dancing, in that it unites the displeasure of being frightened with the displeasure of being bored. Maria alternated between shivering from the effects of adrenaline, and being so tired and bored that she would fall asleep. Some of the more sympathetic of her captors wanted to leave her be, but it was on the instructions of Sheldon – Doctor Sheldon – that they kept her awake, to make sure she wasn’t having an adverse reaction to the drug she’d been paralysed with. For the third time since being kidnapped, then, Maria was shaken awake.

“Mmh… mh!” She kept being startled by the state she was in. Even asleep she hadn’t quite lost the awareness of her captivity, but each awakening was still a bitter surprise. Finding herself limp; finding her powers inaccessible; finding herself roughly, stiflingly bound. Tape and rope and plastic cables trapping her, binding her, tautly capturing her limber figure.

Maria’s chin rested on her chest, so she had an uncomfortably clear view of her bondage. She saw how the tape flattened her bosoms against her chest, while the rope above and below tried to accentuate them. She saw how her hips were a little raised from the pressure of her hands behind the small of her back: Maria could even feel the double-thump of her pulse as her tied wrists, pushed together into one, thrummed a matching rhythm into each other. She saw her legs – toned, tight, and naked – criss-crossed with bindings. The duct tape clung to her smooth, coffee-brown skin like an unwanted kiss, while the plastic cables pressed and held, making her thighs and her slim calves feel tensed even though they – like the rest of her – were completely limp.

But it was the ropes, the heavy, thick, sandy-beige ropes, that had the most disturbing effect on Maria’s psyche. They were more comfortable than the cables, less intimately clingy than the tape – yet they sank her heart the most. It told her that she wasn’t just ‘restrained’ as someone arrested by the police was ‘restrained’: she was tied up. She wasn’t a hostage in the way that someone caught in the middle of a bank robbery was a hostage: she’d been kidnapped.

One of the people who’d taken her passed into her sight. Maria seemed to recall she was named ‘Tammy’. Not very tall, but very broad. She lifted Maria’s head, pushed it back against the chair she’d been dumped in.
“Hey,” she said. “You awake?”
Slowly, Maria lifted her wet, brown eyes.
“Good.” Tammy turned Maria’s chin to the side, put two fingers against her neck. “Pulse is fine,” she declared. She turned Maria’s head back, shone a light into her eyes with a small torch. “Follow it,” she said, moving the light from side to side.
Maria found herself obeying.
“Fine.”

Maria thought that her captor was done, but when she’d put the torch away Tammy curled her muscular hands around Maria’s shoulders and pulled her forwards, almost folding her double at the waist, straining even Maria’s athletic flexibility.
“Mh? Mh-MHHH!” She was caught totally off-guard, not having thought that she could feel much worse about her situation than she did already. But Tammy bending her over showed with brutal effectiveness the totality of her paralysis: she could be contorted, and manipulated and flopped about however her abductors liked, her body robbed of everything but life, and beauty.
“Hm…” Tammy mumbled something to herself that Maria couldn’t make out, and at first it seemed like she was tightening Maria’s bonds, but after a few seconds they felt, if anything, slightly looser.

Tammy put Maria back in her original position, even readjusting her head when it fell limply against Maria’s left shoulder. Without speaking to her, she continued her inspection of Maria’s bonds, tugging at the ropes around her chest, then adjusting and fiddling with the complex pattern of restraints around her lower body, making Maria blush from the firm assiduousness with which Tammy pushed and patted and prodded her trussed-up legs.

“I’m not doing this for fun,” Tammy explained, in a gruff voice. Obviously she’d heard Maria’s embarrassed whimpers. “I’m checking that you’re not having an adverse reaction to the drug that’s keeping you paralysed.” She said the word ‘paralysed’ with emphasis, though it wasn’t clear if this was relish, threat, or something else. “You got a bigger dose than we’d intended,” she added, deliberately raising her voice, and looking with scorn at someone behind where Maria was sitting. That someone didn’t quite come into Maria’s sight, but she heard them walking near, standing right behind the chair she was bound in.

“I don’t know what’cha want from me,” they said, in a familiar drawl. “I hit her with one dart and she didn’t go down.”
Maria felt a hand closing around her ponytail, and tugging her head back. Like someone was switching between slides in her brain, her field of vision rolled upwards, until she could see the face of the man who’d captured her in the first place: the all-too-aptly named Hunter.

“Hey, beautiful,” he said, grinning in a way that nobody but he would find amusing. He was tall, faintly good-looking if one liked men gaunt, and smug. His light-brown face was dusted with stubble, and – which Maria only noticed now – one of his eyes was slightly lazy. She glared at him, finding herself flushed with anger, the shame of her capture transfused into wrath, which burned no less hotly for its impotence.

“If you’d waited,” Tammy said, “it would have worked. I told you not to expect it to be like in a movie: the drug takes time to work its way through someone’s system.”
“Man, I don’t know why you’re so tetchy with me, Doc,” Hunter replied. “She’s fine, ain’t she? You got your subject for your little science project. In fact, Doc, I think you don’t give two shits about her health. I think you’re mad ‘cause I’m the only one around here who knows he ain’t on the side of the angels.”

“Fuck off, Hunter,” Tammy grumbled. She stamped forward, away from Maria, making sure to shove Hunter out of the way as she did.
The shoving didn’t seem to bother Hunter much, though. He laughed loudly, and then leaned over their captive until his mouth was right by her ear.
“I’m just playin’ around. I know exactly why she’s mad: it’s ‘cause I keep callin’ her ‘Doc’,” he explained. “She ain’t a doctor. She’s a vet. Now don’t get me wrong, Josie, I’m not mocking the vocation of veterinary medicine or nothing – but in my experience you can always tell the difference between the ones who are vets because they want to be vets, and the ones who are vets ‘cause they flunked outta med school or whatever. It’s always –” He put his hands on his hips. “—Yeah I’m a vet, so what? Heh. These people, I swear…”

Maria was beginning to get something of a picture of the organisation that had kidnapped her. This was not a hidden, powerful cabal. This was some kind of association of like-minded amateurs, though she got the impression that there was a circle Hunter wasn’t in.
“Perhaps he’s a mercenary,” she thought. “For whatever difference that makes. I can’t do anything. I can’t – I - I can’t move!” she thought, and she moaned behind the tape sealing her lips with helpless anguish.

In her dismay, she found her mind drifting back to the worst thing of all: that man’s threat to take away her powers. She had a strange kind of numb fear in her stomach, strange because she was so confused. Sheldon – that was his name – he’d said it wasn’t personal, and Hunter had talked about a ‘science project’. So were they just trying to take her powers away to prove that they could? Why her? Okay it wasn’t personal, apparently, but why a superhero? And though Maria didn’t imagine herself as very high on the scale of her kind, her powers were certainly dangerous to any enemy. Weren’t there easier targets?
There was another question, too. Actually, a much more obvious one.
“How?”

From the first time that Jerry Shuster had demonstrated, under laboratory conditions, that he could fly using nothing but the power of his mind, there had been those who had tried to find ways to ‘switch off’ such abilities. In fact suppressing a superhuman’s power wasn’t all that difficult: there were a variety of cocktails of drugs which could keep a superhuman incapacitated without just putting them to sleep. But there had never been invented a way of taking away people’s powers permanently. With most civilised nations considering that robbing a person of their powers was, in principle anyway, morally equivalent to dismembering them, there hadn’t been any serious research into such things since the end of the Second World War.

What, then, made Maria’s kidnappers think that they had the slightest chance of accomplishing what they said they could accomplish? Whether it was a good thing or an evil thing, discovering a way to rob superhumans of their powers would be one of the most impressive scientific achievements of the century. And Maria would have been perfectly willing to believe that her kidnappers were just fools, and that they were only dangerous because she was at their mercy – had it not been for Sheldon.

He’d just come into view. Short, a little dumpy, perhaps in his early forties but, since he seemed not to take care of himself very well, he looked older at first glance. He had an intelligent face, though, so Maria found it difficult to believe he was some egomaniacal fantasist. He probably had good reason to think he could deliver on his threat.

“Oh for God’s sake,” Sheldon grumbled, and pulled the tape off Maria’s mouth. He looked like he was about to apologize, but he checked himself. He looked right at her, and it was pretty clear from the discomfort of his expression that he was forcing himself to. “Here,” he said, holding a plastic cup to Maria’s lips. He carefully tilted it down, and Maria felt water running over her tongue. She had, she realised, enough control of her mouth to spit the water into Sheldon’s face, and part of her wanted to. But she didn’t know if she’d have a chance like this again, and they might keep her captive for days. Longer, even. Who knew? So, she drank, and tried to remind herself not to feel grateful.
“There,” Sheldon said, and made to leave.
“Wait.” Maria’s voice was weak, but it was audible. She saw Sheldon wince, and then turn back to look at her.
“What?” he said. He’d tried to snap at her, but it had come out sort of sheepish.
“Tell me…” Maria said. “Tell me why you’re… doing this…”
Sheldon looked straight at her, in silence, clearly wrestling with himself.
“Why what? Why we’ve abducted you?” he replied. “You already know that. We’re trying to remove your abilities.”
“But –”
“Yes. Yes! I understand,” Sheldon covered his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “I suppose you have the right to know, don’t you?”

There was a bump from underneath them. Sheldon almost fell over: both he and Maria had nearly forgotten they were in a moving vehicle.
“Fuck,” Sheldon muttered. “The roads in this fucking state…!” He’d bitten his tongue. There was a seat bolted against the wall near him, and he plopped himself in it. Maria still couldn’t lift her head, so she could only see him in the corner of one eye.

“I used to be quite eminent,” Sheldon said. “Not the finest mind of my generation, maybe, but…” He waved his hand. “Superhuman research, you know. They still use my system of categorization in most institutions .” He smirked. “Not that it matters much. It’s hardly a field of science at all. No line of theoretical inquiry ever seems to take us anywhere. We hypothesize, we test, we fail. We hypothesize, we test, we succeed, we test again – and then we fail. Like the rules change just to spite us. But I didn’t care. I don’t care. I don’t understand why the scientific community isn’t devoting every resource it has to this. How – heh! – how can this not be the most urgent problem there is? Not just understanding how superpowers work, but finding some way to get rid of them! How can we go on like this? How was it ever even remotely acceptable to let powers like yours continue to exist? That’s what we’re doing here.” He gestured at the others working with him. “They’re bigots and fools, most of them, but they all accept the importance of what we do, and they’re willing to suffer for it. Even die. We’ve got to bring some – some sanity back to the world, for God’s sake!”

He covered his hand with his mouth, sensing that he was beginning to rant. He didn’t exactly care what Freebird herself thought of him, but in general terms he didn’t want to come across like a mad scientist.
Yet his outburst had had the opposite effect from the one he feared. Maria found his motivation all too sane. Thought about a certain way, the very existence of her kind was terrifying – a slap in the face to all notions that the world would every be comprehensible – and that was leaving aside terrors like the Supremacist. She was reminded of when the Pharisees had accused Jesus of working miracles only with the help of the devil . It had never bothered her in her faith, but in the context of the narrative itself she’d always thought Jesus’ response to them had been woefully unsatisfactory. How could she deny that their powers were evil, when so few of them were good for anything but violence?

“I wrote a paper, about four years ago. I meant it as something of a joke – suggesting that the phenomenon responsible for superpowers was a new fundamental particle, and that that particle was aware: deliberately eluding discovery and analysis just to make idiots of us. People thought I was being facetious, and I suppose I was. I’d have forgotten about it, I expect. But then,” he said, leaning forward so that Maria could see him better, “someone sent me a letter.”

There was a strange look in his eyes, hovering on the edge of excitement and terrible fear.
“‘Doctor Isidoro Ellul’, they called themselves – obviously a pseudonym, but whoever it was is a genius. They told me I was right, that the particles I was talking about did exist. They called them sophons . They gave me… things I’d never have been able to work out in a million years. Encouraged me to continue my work, and even said I could take credit for everything they’d shown me. And I realized something, something I’m not even sure they had realized – that there is a way to affect the sophons. There’s a way to destroy them.”
“But… why did you have to kidnap me? Why couldn’t you just… go public? Find a volunteer?” Maria spoke very deliberately. She had to, with her tongue and the muscles of her face so heavy and sluggish, which made it difficult to gauge her emotions.

“Go public? Don’t be absurd! I’d just make the problem worse, wouldn’t I? The superhuman community would be up in arms, wouldn’t it? Researchers would end up getting slaughtered in the streets! And – for all I know it runs both ways, doesn’t it? Maybe someone smarter than me could figure out a way to create sophons, or attract them, or something, and then the problem would just get worse.” He stood up, abruptly. He looked faintly embarrassed to have ranted in this manner. “Oh,” he said, “you wanted to know why it had to be you.” He shrugged. “I think the process is more likely to work with someone with your type of power. That’s all.”
“That’s all,” Maria repeated. “That’s all…” She closed her eyes. She looked like she was about to cry. “Could I have a little more water, please?” Her voice was wavering. It was a bit pathetic.
“Sure,” Sheldon said. He stood up, went back over to her. He unscrewed the cap of the bottle. He leaned over Maria, carefully easing her head forward. “Is that alright?” he asked.
“Yes, thank you,” Maria said, softly. Then she spat in his face.

Sheldon reacted like Maria’s spit was made of acid. He dropped the water, staggering backwards, furiously wiping the spit off his face with both sleeves. He surged back with aggressive, ungainly steps, and raised his right hand, about to strike Maria across the face. But he stopped at the last moment, hand frozen in the air.
“Why not?” Maria said, her paralysis still making her sound a lot less emotional than she really was. “Why not hit me? You might as well.” She saw him lower his hand, and despite the drug, her eyes flashed with indignation. “What, you think slapping me would be worse than what you’ve already done? You’ve had me drugged and tied up. Taken against my will. You don’t think that’s violence?”
For a moment, Sheldon looked shamefaced, but he checked himself.
“I think it was necessary,” he replied. “Slapping you wouldn’t be. It doesn’t surprise me that someone with a superhero’s child-morality wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.” He stormed off. Both he and Maria felt they had lost the argument.
Damselbinder

***
About twenty minutes passed. Maria slipped in and out of sleep once or twice. In her waking moments she wondered if the world would be better off without her kind, if it would not be better if Sheldon and his colleagues succeeded. It was difficult to say. Either way, Maria found that her feelings were not so much about her own powers as about superhumans in general. Her instinct was that they were a good thing: they were another aspect of creation, something unique, and so ceteris paribus something beautiful. Then she remembered the room full of body bags the day Sinistrus was arrested, and it became difficult to maintain this attitude.

The vehicle had stopped. This had happened so many times now, at traffic lights and so on, that Maria had stopped noticing it, but this time the steady vibration of the engine stopped as well, and Maria felt her stomach tighten. They were there, wherever ‘there’ was. She heard a general chatter, and the sound of Sheldon’s people talking seriously with each other. Maria tried to overhear what they were saying, and heard something about a ‘device’, but not much else. She was so focused on trying to glean some information that might help her that she didn’t notice the footsteps approaching her.

“Hey.”
Maria turned her head in the direction of the voice. It was Tammy. Maria opened her mouth to speak – to plead, in fact, for Tammy to see reason, but she wasn’t given the chance. Tammy grabbed Maria’s jaw, tugged it down, and stuffed something into her mouth.
“Mghpllhff!” Maria protested, working out just from the texture of the stuff that it was a wad of sponge. She tried to push it out with her tongue, but Tammy held her mouth shut.
“This is what happens when you spit in people’s faces, Freebird,” Tammy growled. She pressed something down with her free hand, and with a whimper Maria realized that her mouth was being taped shut.
“Mmhh! Hrghh-MMPPHH!!” Maria moaned, feeling Tammy wrap tape around her head, trapping her lips, her cheeks, her jaw, each circuit muzzling her more and more tightly. Her moans were not so much protests as laments that defeat seemed inevitably bound up with her fate. Tammy’s use of her codename had made it occur to Maria that her captors knew who she was. Sheldon had said they needed someone powerful, but surely there was a caveat to that.
“Not too powerful, though,” he should have said. “Weak enough that we could capture you.”

Tammy lifted Maria to her feet. She was a little taller, and much stronger, than Maria. Well-muscled and broad, she easily took Maria’s svelte, tight figure into her arms. Even though her body was a dead weight, Maria could feel Tammy had no trouble bearing her. She took a firm grip of Maria’s shoulders and her bare thighs, and held Maria’s body close against her chest, her captive’s head falling against her collarbone, her pretty calves dangling in the air – the only part of Maria not pressed hard against Tammy’s powerful body. Feeling such a firm grip, feeling herself so decisively taken, carried and overpowered – it was mortifying, and Maria felt her cheeks and her smooth neck flushed, her bosom straining against her bonds with deep, hot breaths.

Tammy tried not to look too closely. When Sheldon had initially proposed his plan – after having got rid of people he was sure would object – Tammy hadn’t had any intrinsic moral objections. She was one of the ones Sheldon had mocked, with a ‘sob story’ in her background. In her case, she’d lost a boyfriend in the crossfire of a battle between Gravion and Zechariah Cullinane . So, when Sheldon had suggested that, in order to secure a particularly powerful superhuman they were going to attempt to abduct a superhero, part of her had even looked on the idea with some relish. She was one of many who thought that, especially after everything that had happened during the nineties, there just shouldn’t be superheroes anymore.

And yet, for all her anger, for all her cynicism, there was a strange kind of beauty in Freebird beyond the merely bodily: she was something different from the rest of them, different even from civilian superhumans. Her captivity didn’t dim this quality: if anything, it enhanced it. She was transformed into a figure of grand tragedy, forlorn and defeated, and in her cruel bonds gaining a sort of purity: a fall from grace which bestowed innocence, rather than taking it away. Certainly her whimpered protests had this softly innocent quality, and for a moment Tammy even felt Freebird begin to writhe a little. But her strength must have given out quickly, because almost as soon as Tammy looked down Freebird grew still again, and her countenance grew kittenishly meek.

The fallen hero was borne quickly out of the vehicle’s hold, and though they had parked in a garage, Sheldon’s people moved quickly and nervous, fearful of discovery. Maria had a chance to see more of her captors more closely, and from the gravity and seriousness of their expressions she had the impression that Sheldon had been right about them: they really did believe in the importance of what they were doing.

They brought Maria down to what was obviously never meant to have been a laboratory. It looked like the basement of an office building, and there were wires haphazardly strewn across the floor, the walls, even hanging from hastily built, makeshift pylons to bring power from the grumbling, overtaxed diesel generators to the computer terminals, and medical equipment, and other things Maria was too much a layperson to identify.

“Is it ready?” Maria heard Sheldon asking.
“Yes,” someone replied. They hadn’t been in the party that had abducted Maria. “I don’t know if the generators are going to hold, though. Whoever did the electrics on your magic canister didn’t do a very good job: if I sneeze too loudly when I’m standing next to it the damn thing blows a fuse.”

Only when Maria was laid down, on a flat, plastic surface that was probably subbing in for a real gurney, did she see what ‘the damn thing’ was. It was, or it had as part of it, a large, glass canister, seven feet high. There were large metal pincers, or maybe clamps, inside. Above the canister there was a great mess of wires, which were plugged into about half a dozen generators. Even though the machine didn’t appear to be doing anything, the wires’ sockets occasionally sputtered and sparked. Every element of it looked completely ramshackle – save one.

There was something protruding from the ceiling of the canister, if that was the word for it, inside the glass. To Maria’s eyes it looked like it was made of silver, with a dull, slightly sparkly reflectivity, vaguely pyramid shaped, coming to a sharp point so that, hanging down from the top of the canister, it looked like the tail of a scorpion. This object, somehow, was the means by which Maria’s powers would be stripped from her.

Sheldon came over to Maria but didn’t really seem to see her. His right hand was shivering from excitement, or at least anticipation.
“Tammy,” he said, “is the drug still working?”
Tammy put her hand around Maria’s ponytail, pulled her until she was sitting up, then let go. With a soft sigh, Maria flopped back down onto her back, looking up at her abductors with wet, helpless eyes.
“Limp as a fish,” Tammy said. “She’s not going anywhere.”
“Hmm. Maybe we should give her another dose anyway, just in case.”
“I wouldn’t advise that,” Tammy said, quickly. “Hunter already double dosed her when he captured her.
“… Fine. Let’s hurry then.”

He stepped back, snapping his fingers and beckoning someone over. Two someones, in fact: a man and a woman in dirty-looking jumpsuits who had been attending to the equipment in Sheldon’s absence. They were wearing surgical masks, and goggles, and carrying what Maria supposed were surgical scissors, but they were not – thankfully – to be used on Maria herself. Not exactly.
Their cold manner, their strong hands, their concealed eyes and faces, the flashing blades of their scissors – they were like figures from a dream. They weren’t hurting her: just the reverse, they were cutting her free of her bonds. But while the others had barked at her and bullied her and sneered at her, it was hard to tell if these two even knew she was human.

They flipped her over onto her front, roughly controlling her slim, light body. They freed, Maria’s ankles, her calves, her thighs – tearing away at the tape and persistent bits of rope – before they sliced through the bonds around Maria’s arms. They remained still for a moment afterwards, apparently a little stiff, before slowing sliding down off Maria’s back, and falling into place by her sides. Only then did Maria discover what the point of unbinding her had been just the first step. They needed to get everything off her: first her bindings – then her clothes.

“Ummphh?!” She was still gagged, so when they started stripping her she couldn’t really protest. She just had to lie there, feeling as they unzipped her dress, exposing her shoulders, her shoulder blades, and her slim, smooth back. One of the technicians grabbed the dress’ hem, and yanked it firmly upwards, unpeeling it from Maria’s body, tugging it up and over her head, and then discarding it in a red-and-blue heap on the ground.

“Mhh…mhhh!” Maria was panting, her neck and her shoulders and her silky, runner’s legs damp with sweat. She was wearing very little now: just a sports bra, her sneakers, and her small, lycra shorts, clinging like a second skin to her trimly-sculpted rear. The technicians turned her back over, and as Maria became able to see her surroundings again, she grew aware of just how many people – at least thirty – were in the room with her, and as they glanced at her exposed, supply athletic figure, each set of eyes that glanced at her was like a little electric shock. If they had gone all the way and stripped her nude, Maria, thought, it would not have made much of a difference to how naked she felt. But she couldn’t react. She had to take it. She had to keep still. She had to wait.

There had been a point to all this. On her sternum, on her shoulders, on her hard, flat abdomen, the technicians placed pieces of the same silvery metal that Maria had seen inside the canister. They were about the size of quarters, though much heavier, and though they just looked like plain metal discs, they stuck to Maria’s skin. Apparently this was of some significance, because when Sheldon noticed that the discs were sticking, he clenched his fist in triumph.
“Alright,” he said. “I suppose that’s it. Get her inside.”
The technicians took Maria by the shoulders, lifted her up to her feet. They meant simply to drag her over to the canister, each holding her by one arm. They got her about half the distance, before both of them noticed something. Their victim’s hands were splayed out, her palms pointing directly at them. Her eyes were closed, in a look of extreme, painful concentration. They both stopped.

“Hey, Sheldon,” one of the technicians said. “I think she’s trying to do something.”
“Yeah,” the other said. “She’s trying to move. I think we’d better sedate her again.”
Sheldon frowned. He glanced at Tammy, who shook her head, but he decided to overrule her.
“Do it,” he said. Despite Tammy’s reservations, Sheldon was proven conclusively to be in the right. For, the very moment Sheldon gave the command, Maria blasted both technicians squarely in their chests.

If four people – if two people, even – had made a serious go of trying to restrain Maria, they probably would have been able to. She could barely stand. Her legs were trembling. Her blasts had been enough to knock the two technicians out, sure, but only because they were at point-blank range. But these were not ruthless, shady mercenaries. These were not rugged, grim supervillains. They were a loose association of faintly like-minded amateurs, and they saw their would-be victim attacking them with blood-red light, so they panicked.

Maria had tried to attack the moment she was untied. She’d realized she could move when Tammy had picked her up, but she wouldn’t have been able to untie herself then. But even when she was untied, she was so sluggish that she wasn’t confident she’d have been able to stand. She’d wanted to wait for the absolute last moment, to recover as much strength as she possibly could before springing her trap.

In that sense, then, she’d been successful. If she had waited a few more seconds she’d have been inside the canister, with no guarantee she could break out of it. But there were forty metres, and thirty people, between her and the exit, and she still had to ascend a stairway. More than that, she did not know how many times she’d have to use her powers to keep her kidnappers at bay, and didn’t know how many uses of them she had in her. Her body was slow, heavy, unresponsive – but Maria really was very, very fit.

Step, by step, by step, Maria pressed forward. Her thighs ached every time she moved them, but they did move. And though it was tiring, every step brought vigour, as the drug continued wearing off. And not just that: as some of her assailants tried, haltingly, to stop her, she held her power at the border of emergence, her hands shining crimson. Though she couldn’t be hurt by her own powers, she felt their heat, and it was like she was cooking the poison out of her veins.

“For fuck’s sake!” Sheldon bellowed. “She can barely walk: somebody stop her!” He looked at Tammy, but she cowered behind one of the monitors.
Had she known? When she’d felt Freebird wriggle a little when she’d picked her up, had she known that she was beginning to recover? When she’d insisted that Sheldon not drug Freebird again, had she wanted her to have some opportunity to escape? It was possible. Anything was possible. Tammy hoped so, anyway, because the alternative was that she was simply incompetent, and that she might have just got them all killed.

“MGhhmmph… ugh!” Maria grunted, blasting her gag off her own face and spitting the sponge onto the floor. “Stay… back!” she shouted, as some of Sheldon’s people managed to find a bit of courage and moved in a ring to surround her. Her threateningly outstretched palm didn’t seem to scare them, and from the expressions on their faces it looked as though they were beginning to doubt that she had much more fight in her – she had to attack. She’d been learning, with Cecily’s help, to get the most out of her powers, focusing as little energy as possible for maximum effect. But she began to panic too, and fired wildly, filling the room with harsh, crimson light, throwing her enemies aside, blowing up monitors and carving thin, steaming gashes in the concrete walls. It all but exhausted her – but it did clear her path. She tried to run, straining like her ankles were attached to huge, invisible iron balls. She actually made it to the stairs. But no further.

As soon as it had all kicked off, Hunter had slipped quietly out of sight. There was a doorway between the stairwell and the laboratory, and a small space off to the side that couldn’t be seen from the lab itself. He’d done this for two reasons: firstly he thought it was likely that Freebird would be restrained before she escaped, and he didn’t want to put himself in the line of fire. Secondly, if she got past the others, she wouldn’t see him waiting for her. And so right as Freebird was about to reach the doorway, he stepped out in front of her, taking her completely by surprise. His right hand was raised, palm flat, fingers stiff.

“Lights out, Josie,” he said, and brought his hand down right between the base of Freebird’s neck and her right shoulder.
“Unh!” Maria cried out, stumbling backwards, almost falling.
“That was quite a display, Josie,” Hunter crowed. “I mean, you don’t seem like you actually know how to use your powers that well, but you sure put on a hell of a lightshow.”
“My name,” Maria growled, “is Free- unnhh…!” She tried to stand, but her legs quivered underneath her, and she fell to one knee.
Hunter smirked.
“Nah, I think I’mma stick with Josie. Just suits you better, I think.” He made something of a show of looking her up and down, eyes roving over her exposed skin. “You are really fuckin’ pretty, you know that?” He laughed. “Almost a shame what Sheldon’s gonna do to you.”
Maria tried to get up again, but only ended up sinking further. Not entirely surprisingly, this only provoked more laughter from Hunter.
“What’s the matter, darling?” he said. “Feeling a little sleepy just from that little tap I gave you?”
Then, rather to Hunter’s chagrin, Maria stood up. She rubbed the spot he had struck, and then looked at him, confused.
“No, actually,” she said. “Why? Was that supposed to knock me out?”
“…Um,” Hunter replied. “EUUUUUUUUGGGGGHHHHH,” he added, after Maria put her right hand on his chest, and launched him at violent speed into the nearest, flattest, hardest surface. He didn’t get up again.

Maria turned around. Her hands blazed crimson. Her muscles burned and her body trembled, and she was still very afraid that her strength would give out and she would fall again – but she didn’t
“Don’t… follow me!” she shouted. “If I have to… to kill you to defend myself, I will!” Her voice was weak, but they all heard her. They all believed her, and they all cowered. A couple of them were holding guns, but even those didn’t dare get in Maria’s path. What had they been thinking, taking on a superhuman of even moderate power? All it would take, sceptics had said, would be one mistake, and their captive would make mincemeat out of them. The only reason she hadn’t done so seemed to be because of her superior moral character. They felt foolish. They felt ashamed.

All save one.

“NO!” It was Sheldon. Dumpy and ungainly, he staggered towards Maria, even though he didn’t look hurt. “You’re not going anywhere. No. Do you hear me? NO!”
It was ridiculous. He didn’t even have a gun. Powers or no powers, Maria would have had little difficulty overpowering him in a fight.
“Don’t make me hurt you,” she said. “If you run now, maybe the police won’t catch you.”
“Ha!” Sheldon kept coming forward. “Don’t be stupid. My life is over. All our lives are over. We accepted that when we started on this course. This – this duty is all we have left! If you were really a ‘hero’, if you were really a good person, you’d surrender and let us take your powers!”

Sheldon got one step closer, and that was one step too far. Maria raised a glowing hand, and when he still didn’t stop, she blasted him in the chest. Yet somehow, though he cried in pain, he stayed on his feet. She blasted him again and he still didn’t fall. She hit him one more time, dialling up the heat of the blast, so much so that his shirt caught fire. Yelping, Sheldon tore the burning fabric from his chest, exposing his pallid, flabby torso. There was something else, too, and for a moment Maria was afraid that her powers had severely burned him – but the ‘burn’ had clearly been there for a long time. And as she looked, saw the squamous, mottled, dark grey… thing that clung to Sheldon’s body, covering everything from his pectorals to his navel, she realized she was not looking at an injury. He hadn’t just been able to bear her attacks because of strength of will. He was a superhuman.

“I won’t apologize,” he said, “for doing what no-one else can be fucking bothered to!” His chest opened. A mass of grey tendrils burst forth.
If Maria had been three times as hardy and five times as experienced, and not drugged to even a minimal extent, she would still not have been able to react in time. Just being superhuman herself didn’t mean she was immune to the ontological shock of seeing the rules for what a human being was supposed to be getting unwritten in new and horrifying ways. So Sheldon’s tendrils ensnared her long before it occurred to her to do anything about it.

Against her skin, the tendrils had the texture and consistency of wet clay. But their flexibility took nothing from their strength. In a disorienting torrent they poured onto Maria’s body like a river of serpents. With horrified eyes she watched them capture her, swirling around her torso and pressing her upper arms against her sides with vicious force. Flailing and straining her forearms, Maria responded with her own powers, and she could easily burst through the tendrils when she could aim at them, but there were always more to replace the ones she destroyed. Eventually she just couldn’t destroy them quickly enough, and they ensnared her forearms as well, squeezing them inwards, pressing her palms against her slim hips, instantly neutralising her powers, which dissipated to nothing against Maria’s own body.

With this done, the tendrils were free to envelop the rest of her. They coiled around the taut smoothness of Maria’s midriff, the curve of her waist, her breasts, her helplessly writhing shoulders, squirming strong and slippery over her warm, supple skin. They slid down over her toned legs, slender and smooth, slamming them together into one, stifling every wriggle, reversing every movement, crushing any resistance at all. And as Maria looked down at herself, seeing her beautiful body so vilely defeated, moaning and gasping with piteous dismay, she saw the bonds begin to surge upwards, past her neck, to her chin and her jaw.

“Ugh! Ughh! N-no n-NNNNMMMPHHHHHH!!” Maria moaned, her voice stifled, lips forced shut by these living bonds, winding round and round her soft mouth until she was totally muted. With wet, desperate eyes, she looked around at Sheldon’s colleagues, and saw that they, too were horrified. It was clear that none of them had known that Sheldon possessed this ability. Tammy, Maria noticed, was covering her mouth in disgust, and Maria managed to catch her gaze.
“Pllhhhphh…” Maria whimpered, “pllhhphh… hllp… mhh…!”

But Tammy didn’t move. She was frightened, amazed, and when she heard Freebird pleading to her, begging for rescue from this awful new captivity, Tammy realized that she didn’t want her to escape. She was, she realized, really and truly more interested in her revenge – which she now was willing to admit it was – than in allowing this innocent woman her freedom. Perhaps it even pleased her to see Freebird so afraid, so helpless.

“Open… the canister!” Sheldon ordered, his voice hoarse, and pained. He drew no pleasure from what he was doing, not even the satisfaction of imminent success. He was obviously in pain, and he himself seemed to want to avert his eyes from what he was doing. Still in a sort of daze, one of his subordinates did as he asked, while a couple of others had the presence of mind to begin switching the machine on. “UNNGHHH!!” Sheldon cried, and actually lifted Maria a foot off the floor, swinging around and beginning to stagger towards the case, shaking as he bore his thrashing burden. To those watching him, it didn’t seem like the tendrils were part of his body, exactly – more like they were drawing their great strength from him, yet not making that strength his own.

Maria felt as though she were going to faint. Not from weakness, but just from the awfulness of it. There was an agonising humiliation to her recapture, to being so close to freedom and being caught again. She was facing away from the canister, but she knew she was getting closer to it, closer to the thing which would strip her powers from her, maybe even kill her outright. She tried to fight. She tried to have some heroic surge of power that would let her free herself from bondage. But nothing came. She was beaten. And when, with a groan, Sheldon forced her into the canister, she realized that it was over.

Before she could even think to move, she was automatically held in place, Sheldon’s tendrils unwinding from her as she was shackled. Thick, sturdy metal bindings clamped down over her ankles, her thighs, and just below her knees. Cold steel forced itself across her hips, pinning her hands in place as before, as useless as before. A shackle covered her breasts, pressing them with rigid security in against her chest. One last fell across her mouth: an inescapable, cruel muzzle.

“NHHH! MMhhhh-nhhhh-MMPHHH!!” Maria cried, wriggling and straining, flexing her agile body against her bonds, finding herself no more able to escape these than the last ones. “NNNNHHHHHHHH!!” she cried, as the canister was closed, and locked. Maria realized that it was about to begin. That is, it was about to end.
“Ughhh…” Sheldon groaned, his tendrils withdrawn into the squamous cavity attached to him. He collapsed to his knees, and when one of his subordinates came over to help him, he angrily pushed them away. “I don’t need your help!” he hissed, staggering to his feet. “Do you see now?” he shouted at all of them. “Do you see why this cannot go on? You all saw – this – this abomination! It should not exist!” He turned around, fixing his gaze on Maria. “Do you understand now, you fool?!” He pointed to one of the technicians manning the controls of the machine. “Do it!” he bellowed.
They obeyed.

The first change Maria noticed was a rising hum, getting higher, and higher, until it was painful, then passing out of the range of Maria’s hearing altogether. After a few seconds, her attention was drawn to the scorpion’s tail hanging above her. She wasn’t entirely sure why she was so drawn to it at first, but when she looked at it more closely, she realised that it was vibrating. After a few seconds more, it began glowing.

“MPH!” Maria felt a physical tug, like she was being pulled towards the scorpion’s tail. After a few seconds, another tug. She had a strange feeling, like there was something bubbling inside her. It wasn’t painful – it was tingly, even, but it – it made her feel hot, and it was not a pleasant heat.

For a few minutes, Maria remained in this state, feeling strange and hot, but feeling no other effects. As she struggled, she began to feel really rather warm indeed, and soon her acres of bare skin glinted with sweat. She panted, bosom straining against the clamps binding her, thighs rubbing together as she lay bound. She closed her eyes, and realized that she felt very heavy, and sort of groggy. She opened her eyes, and saw that there was a very faint light in the air, like a translucent, golden ribbon, hanging between her and the inverted, silver pyramid above her. It was rather pretty: like a shaft of light illuminating motes of dust as it passes through a gap in a set of blinds. It was slightly hypnotic. So, it snuck up on Maria when the draining began in earnest.

“Mhhh…mhhhhhhhhh!” Maria saw it before she felt it. The ribbon of light did not hang gently in the air anymore. It grew thicker, clearer, and redder, and it was clearly flowing now, flowing from the silver discs that the technicians had attached to Maria’s body. As she watched it slipping from her, she started feeling strangely drowsy. “My power…” she realised, watching it flow from her. “That’s… that’s my power… they’re taking it…” And then, as if Maria having this thought was what decided that it was true, the flow became a surge.

“MMMMMMPHHHHHHHH!!” Maria cried, her whole body stiffening, the red light pouring out of her, sucked out of her, all drawn up and away from her. “Mhhhhh-mhhh-mhhhMHHHHPHHH!!” she moaned, the energy drained in a pulsing rhythm, her body pulsing in response, throbbing as her power’s essence was stolen. Forced into a helpless, sensual dance, Maria gyrated against her bonds, cheeks flushed, breath rapid, her moans high and long and forlornly maidenly.

As Maria was drained, the canister began to grow foggy from steam, as heat built up within its confines, growing mistier and mistier the more that was taken from Maria’s exhausted body. Within the heady vapours she sighed, feeling the power fade from her hands, feeling the strength stolen from her, feeling herself… reduced. She could feel a void growing inside herself, a space noticeable now only by its emptiness – a space that seemed to grow larger than it had been for being so taxed. It felt private, intimate, and the pulses and tremors travelling through her beautiful body were reflections of this that Maria wished she could stop herself from showing. But she could do nothing. She was helpless – truly helpless – and felt somehow that whatever happened from now, she always would be.

On and on and on it went, her captors seeming intent on sucking every last drop of power from her. She was on the edge of passing out now, so terribly drained, so terribly weak: sighing and writhing, defenceless and drowsy.
“Oh… Oh I can’t… can’t…” she thought, her eyelids fluttering, her mind no longer capable of cogent thought. “My… unhh… they’re taking… taking, but… but I’m so weak, I – why are they – oh… oh – oh – OHH!” Her body stiffened and tightened as the light grew blindingly intense. The steam was thick now, so thick that Maria could barely see in front of her for more than a few centimetres. She felt pulse after pulse after pulse flowing from her, felt her eyes go wide and her toes clench – until with a cry that was almost musical in its feminine surrender, she was utterly spent.

Outside, they could not see her. They could see only the steam and the red light and knew nothing of her but what they could hear. In either fear or pity, the technician manning the controls slammed his fist down on the emergency shutdown button. There was a loud ‘crack’ as the shackles unlatched, and the door of the canister sprung open.
For a few seconds, perhaps as much as a minute, there was complete silence. No-one dared move. They all felt as though they had witnessed something terrible, in the archaic sense of the word as well as the modern. More prosaically, they were afraid that they had killed her, for none among them now could have looked on their captive’s death with a clear conscience. But she was alive.

On her own feet she staggered out from the shroud of steam. Her skin was wet, damp from the steam and from her sweat. Her cheeks and her neck were flushed, in a way that was impossible not to find almost tragically sensual. Her eyes were half-open, and her head swayed as she walked, as though she were struggling to keep awake. She just barely made it out of the canister and stopped about four feet in front of it. She appeared to notice her captors and raised her hand toward them. But nothing happened. There was no light. There was no power.
“Oh…” she whimpered. And then she fell. Her shoulders sank, her head dipped forward, and she dropped, powerless, to her knees. Silently she tumbled forward, silently she landed on her front, and silently she slipped into unconsciousness.

No-one, not even Sheldon, showed any signs of cheer. If this was a victory, it was an ugly victory. Freebird was depowered, but alive. What were they to do with her now? Sheldon had been vindicated, but he had been proven to be a superhuman. Was that a problem? Was he a hypocrite? Did that matter?

Tammy was trying very hard not to think about those things. She was trying very hard to remember that this was the day they had worked towards for years. They had done it: they had finally created a method of scrubbing this disease from the health of the world. Surely it would only be a matter of time, now.

Because of this attitude, Tammy was the first to take action. With false confidence, she strode over to Freebird’s fallen figure, and hoisted it up. With rough strength, she tossed the vanquished heroine over her shoulder, feeling her bounce limply against her back, her slim arms swaying in time with each other, her naked skin damp, and hot. She dumped her on the same slab she’d plopped her on before and then managed to find and catch Sheldon’s eye.

“We did it,” Tammy said. “It was ugly – we knew it would be ugly – but we did it.”
“Yes,” Sheldon said. He had buttoned up his coat, and his arms were self-consciously crossed over his chest. To one of the technicians he said: “How much data did we get? We need to be able to replicate this, to get others to replicate it, maybe.”
“Plenty,” they replied. “If these readings really are of sophons, than we’ve hit the motherlode.”
“Good,” Sheldon said. “Good.”

He moved away from the others. He glanced at Freebird, but he could hardly bear to look at her. He felt it was hard to breathe, and he walked quickly to the lab’s exit. He almost tripped over Hunter, who was still unconscious, as he went out, and – snarling – he gave Hunter a vicious kick in the ribs before stepping over him. He sat down on the steps with his head in his hands.
Tammy found him a few minutes later.
“Are you alright?” she asked. “Using those – using your powers. Does it hurt?”
“Yes,” Sheldon replied. “No. Well. Not much. It’s more… tiring than painful, exactly.”
“Why did you keep this a secret?” Tammy asked. “Why didn’t you volunteer yourself, if you’re a superhuman?”
“Believe me,” Sheldon said, “I’d have liked nothing better. But the process, as we have it now, wouldn’t do anything to me. I have a physical growth – a new body part. Influencing sophons wouldn’t cut it off. I don’t know – maybe with this new data I can figure something out, but… I fear I might be stuck with it.”
Tammy did believe him.

“What do we do with Freebird?” she asked. “She survived. I wasn’t expecting her to.”
“Whatever we do,” Sheldon said, “I’ll do. It’s a grim business, Tammy, but it is necessary. We can’t have anything threaten our work, especially not now.” He stood up. “Right,” he said. “I should… probably say something, shouldn’t I? Rally the troops before someone has an attack of conscience and hands themselves into the fuzz.”
“Probably,” Tammy replied. They walked back in together.
They were just in time to discover that all hell had broken loose.
It was difficult to know what was happening at first. People were making a terrible lot of noise. There was screaming. Some of the computer monitors were on fire. The entire room was bathed in deathly, blood-red light. And at the centre of it all – was her.
She was floating. Her arms were outstretched. Her back was arched and her head was raised to the sky. Thick waves of energy burst from her, and then were sucked back in again, only to burst out again stronger. From her whole body there was a radiant aura of power. Her body’s exposure didn’t make her look vulnerable anymore. It made her look like a goddess.

“Wh… what the fuck? What the fuck?!” Tammy cried. Looking desperately to Sheldon and finding that he was laughing, she grabbed him by the collar and tried to shake him to his senses. “Sheldon, what happened? How is this possible? What did we do wrong?”
“Nothing,” he answered, simply. “We didn’t do anything wrong.” He laughed again, giddily. “We did absolutely everything right. We followed the rules perfectly. It’s just that the rules changed.”

Suddenly, Maria dropped to her feet. Power still swirled around her, but it was within her control. She was fully conscious. Fully awake. Fully aware. She was confused, and astonished, and frightened – but she understood what had happened. Whatever means they had used to strip her of her powers had backfired spectacularly: they had only made her stronger. She decided to test how strong.
“Get back,” she said. “Get back if you value your lives!” she said. She called on the new well that had opened within her. She had barely begun to plumb its depths when her body threw out a ferocious wave of force.

Every fuse blew out. Every screen smashed. Every wall was burned. Every baseline human in the room was hurled into the air, at which point gravity finished them off on Maria’s behalf. Only two things withstood her first fury: the machine that had tried to rob her of her power, and Sheldon, whose squamous carapace had absorbed the brunt of the blow. On her cage, Maria directed her energies in her usual fashion: red beams from both hands. This had been intended as a form of restraint, but it proved precisely the opposite, and she obliterated the entire thing in a spectacular explosion. Astonished by her power, she watched the flames she had created in fascination and fear, just barely hearing a voice over the roar of the fire, a voice bemoaning her destruction of his invention. So Maria turned to deal with Sheldon once and for all.

He tried again, pulling open his jacket and groaning as his tendrils shot forth. But even prior to Maria’s enhancement this would have been foolish, for she understood his powers now, and she had always been formidable. As she was now, she roasted the tendrils, pouring fire into the void that clung to Sheldon’s torso, leaving him falling in agony to his knees.
Groaning and shaking, Sheldon looked up at Freebird, wreathed in light and flame. He saw her quietly, carefully looking through the rubble for her dress, and carefully slipping it back on. She walked back over to him. She was, it seemed, too powerful now to have need of haste.

“When I thought,” she said, “that you had done all this because of what you believed, I almost respected that. I could understand, if you really did think everything you said you did about superhumans, I could believe that you might think what you did was right. But it’s not, is it? You hate that.” She pointed at his ruined, twisted carapace. “You hate that, and you see that whenever you see someone like me.”
“Hypocrite!” he spat back. “Even you think it’s disgusting, I can hear it in your voice!”
“Listen to me!” Maria shouted, and Sheldon could not help but cringe from her wrath. “No-one – no-one in the history of the world, has ever done anything good because of disgust! It’s… it’s the worst emotion there is. Even vengeance is better than that!”
Frustrated, and tired, and scared, and sick of this clever man who had used his talents for such worthless evil, Maria shook her head, and just pushed him out of the way.
“The police will be here for you soon,” she said. “I’ll be waiting outside if anyone tries to escape.”
“Even if…” Sheldon hissed, intent on getting the last word, “even if I’m a hypocrite, even if I’m a bad, bad man, that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. You – we are abominations! We shouldn’t exist! I’ve failed – I’ve failed spectacularly – but someone has to find a way.”
Maria stopped. She moved back to where Sheldon was lying. She pulled him up to his knees.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe you’re wrong. Frankly, I don’t care. You tried to cripple me, and I defended myself. None of this,” she said, and she felt a strange surge of relief, “none of this is my responsibility.”
Damselbinder

The Perils of Valora 4-7: “There’s no ‘I’ in Hypat– in Superhero”

When Tucker Brown got home to his cheap, dirty apartment, he found an eviction notice plastered on it. Since he had made absolutely no attempt to pay his rent for the last three months and had ignored the rather worried inquiries of his landlord, this wasn’t altogether surprising. He had 24 hours to leave. That was fine. He hadn’t planned to stay in Portland long anyway.

He went inside, wondering if he would bother making a fuss about being kicked out. It would be within his power, but there probably wouldn’t be much point. He sat down on a dilapidated old sofa, picked up a half-full can of beer that had been sitting on the floor for the last two days, and drank it, almost silently. He leaned his head back, and yelled, emotionlessly.

He could have delayed the eviction for a little while if he’d wanted to. Five days earlier he’d won four thousand dollars on a scratchcard, but two days after that – that is, as soon as he’d actually got his hands on the money - he’d blown every penny of it on a high-class prostitute and a fairly absurd amount of cocaine.

Not that he’d actually snorted any of it. His evening’s companion had had a fair amount, but Tucker had never actually snorted cocaine before, and though he’d vaguely imagined that he’d take enough to kill himself, nervousness and fear of getting a fit of sneezing and embarrassing himself in front of the young man he’d hired had kept him from going through with it. Nor had those been the only reasons that he’d stayed sober. It just so happened that he’d met the person who’d sold him his Big Bag of Drugs before. He’d arrested him about a year earlier, using the name Cacophony.

He was thirty-seven years old. The structure of his life hadn’t changed much since he was about twenty. He wasn’t married; he didn’t even have a boyfriend. He didn’t have a steady job, never had had one. He spent his days fighting, spent his nights drinking, and just let the filth pile up around him.

When he’d come across the summons from Hypatia the previous evening, he’d meant just to ignore them at first. He was barred from being a superhero, the only thing he’d ever really been any good at, so he hadn’t even really had a right to answer her call. He’d gone out of spite and, which he was less willing to admit to himself, loneliness. What he’d actually said when he was there, about superheroes needing to get paid decently to be willing to risk serious danger, he had genuinely meant, but it had given him too much pleasure to dash Hypatia’s hopes. He hated himself for that.

After another beer, from a fridge no less, he became tipsy enough to start feeling maudlin. He thought about Hypatia’s superhero summit again, and about Hypatia herself. She’d been so prim and proper, and yet so severe. Young, but quietly self-assured and a believer in the real good of what she had devoted herself to without coming across as naïve or childish. It was the latter quality that put Tucker in mind of someone he’d once known.

Superheroes tended to start alone, then gather into groups. Even for those who weren’t vain, if you wanted to make a career out of it, you needed to establish your brand. But Cacophony had been one of the few heroes to start out as what one had to call a sidekick. His partner had been Thunderclap, the shining light of the Maine superhero community in the late eighties and early nineties. She was powerful, noble, and one of the deftest masters of the public relations sides of superheroism that the trade had ever known. Tucker had been quite content to let her do all the thinking for him, to allow her to point him in whatever direction she liked and do as he was told. He provided support, and a brutality that her powers over weather patterns sometimes lacked. In exchange, she gave him guidance, leadership, and helped him begin to become famous in his own right.

She’d been murdered in 1994. A confederation of East Coast superheroes had been able to resist, even to suppress, the swelling ranks of the Supremacist’s acolytes, so he had dispatched one of his assassins to kill their leading lights. Not the best assassin. Not even the second best. And there had been no battle. They’d just walked up to Thunderclap in the street, pretended to be an admiring fan, and when she shook their hand the assassin had stopped her heart and left her to drop dead in the middle of a busy road. Three more of Maine’s most famous heroes had been assassinated in the same way before anyone had even figured out what was happening, and the assassin managed to get one more after that before being killed in a gun battle with the police. They had discovered that the assassin had been given a list of superheroes to kill, of which only two had not been crossed off. Cacophony hadn’t even made the list.

Tucker missed her. With her, victories had flowed easily, and often. Through her he’d been able to attend fancy galas and parties, which had in turn got him into the beds of some pretty gorgeous men. And she’d been a good friend to him. Fun when she wanted to be, but more often a very serious woman, she had taught Tucker more about right and wrong than he had ever learned from his dull, unimaginative, nihilistically conventional parents. Once she was gone, he had tried to honour her memory as best he could, but the community she’d been at the centre of had shattered, and no-one in Maine particularly wanted to hear about their dead hero’s angry sidekick. Since then, he’d just… rotted.

Seeing Thunderclap’s sincerity and dignity reflected in Hypatia had been an unpleasant joke. Her mask had covered her eyes, but Tucker had felt them boring into him, as though his old friend had risen from the grave and been disgusted with what she had found. And as well she should have been. He was a complete failure, and it was entirely his own fault.

He got up. He supposed that he should probably look around for stuff that he wanted to keep. He went through his closets, found a few old photos, a dusty leather jacket that he’d been wearing the night he’d lost his virginity. He could probably pawn it for about twenty dollars. There was something else, too, that he’d buried among his relics and old trophies. It hadn’t actually been there that long, and he’d shoved it here simply because he didn’t have anywhere else to keep it. It was an old police scanner, one that he’d been using since about 1998 but that had been manufactured in the seventies. At first, he was happy that he’d remembered it because it was something else to pawn, but the longer he thought about it the more he felt that he needed some way to obviate the guilt Hypatia had left him with.

It would be one last hurrah. Plugging the scanner in, he decided that he would sit by it and listen until he found some cause worthy of his power. He would thereby have broken the terms of his suspended sentence and be sent to some god-awful federal prison where they would fill him full of drugs to keep his powers in check, but it would have been worth it. Even if it were not moral, exactly, it would be a hard, dramatic full-stop to his life. That was better than the rot, surely.

And everything went according to plan right up until he heard a call for help. A gun battle had broken out on the corner of Congress and Chestnut Street, and a civilian had already been killed. The men were carrying automatic weapons. Tucker could have got up right then and there, but he was ashamed to discover that he was afraid for his life. There was another report forty minutes later, that there had been a drive-by shooting on Hyland Street. And those were just the ones in Portland, the ones he could reach. A civil servant had been found beaten to death in Sanford. A building had been destroyed with a rocket propelled grenade in Augusta. An entire motorcycle gang had been machinegunned in a bar on the I-295. More than his own cowardice, Tucker discovered the true extent of the violence Hypatia had been trying to fight. Maine was burning.

But it was too much. It didn’t give Tucker courage or inspire him. It just made the problem seem so large that his powers were a laughable trifle. What could he do? Nothing. Even if Hypatia had united him and the others, she’d have achieved nothing. Vindicated for the worst possible reason, Tucker was about to turn the scanner off and yell at it until it broke, but one last thing caught his attention.

In the light of everything else he had heard, it seemed a mere trifle. A request was made that an officer check out a 911 call, a call that had been made from a cellphone, so that there was only an approximate location. Apparently, the caller had seemed confused and distressed, so there was the possibility that they were either in danger, or that they were a total crank. But it needed to be checked out. The caller had used the word ‘kidnapped’. They had also used the word ‘Shatterqueen’, which meant nothing to the officer making the broadcast.

But it meant something to Cacophony.
__________________________________________________________________________________

“Wake up.”
Cecily obeyed, but she didn’t immediately open her eyes. She was afraid to. Though she’d been unconscious for about an hour, it felt to her as though she’d only been out for a few seconds, and the last thing she remembered was her captor’s hideous, furious shriek as she’d recovered from Cecily’s attack. She’d managed to phone the police but had only been able to mumble something vague to them. There wasn’t any real chance they would come for her.

She was lying on the floor. A floor, anyway: she didn’t know if it was the same one she’d fainted on. She felt for the internal music of her powers and found it silent: what strength she’d been able, momentarily, to gather in an instant of passion was expended. She’d probably been dosed again in her sleep, too, for her mind felt fuzzy, heavy, confused. What had happened before could not happen again: her powers had been locked behind a thick, iron door. Even when she tried just to move, she couldn’t, and she wondered if she’d been paralyzed. But that wasn’t quite right. She could wriggle a bit, could feel her slender legs, denuded and soft, rubbing together. But something was pinning her, holding her.

“Mh…mph?” There was something over her mouth as well. Something warm. It moved, pressing harder against her lips, and Cecily realized the thing over her mouth was Lot’s hand.
“Open your eyes. Open your eyes for me, Cecily.”
Slowly, not wholly willingly, Cecily did as she was told.

“Mhhhhhh…!” The face looking back at her was frightening, even through Cecily’s drugged haze. Lot’s eyes were boring holes into her, and one of those eyes had had its white replaced with red: a side effect of Cecily’s telekinetic assault on her. Lot’s mouth was pulled into a snarling mockery of a smile. Cecily saw that Lot was sitting astride her, her captor’s strong thighs squeezing Cecily’s hips and, perhaps more to the point, pinning Cecily’s arms against her sides. “Mhh… mhh…” Cecily mewed, wiggling a little, but Lot easily outmatched her, suppressed her. She felt like a rabbit in the jaws of a fox; or perhaps a gazelle, all coiled up by an anaconda. Some prey animal, anyway.

“There we go,” Lot cooed. “There’s those big, blue eyes of yours. So pretty. So sweet.” With her free hand, she began stroking Cecily’s hair. “All soft, and sleepy, aren’t you Cecily? Such a good little damsel…”
But then with a hiss, Lot jerked down, increasing the pressure on Cecily’s mouth until it was almost painful, and pressing her forehead was nearly against her captive’s. She switched her powers on, and this time the world did not gradually fade away. It vanished with the sudden snap of a bullwhip, and all at once Cecily was alone in the universe with her predator.

“But you’re not good, are you, Cecily? You were very, very bad, weren’t you? Oh, I couldn’t be mad at you if you’d… oh, I don’t know. Thrown me into a wall. Smacked me in the head. But that had to be spite, Cecily, to make you hurt me like that. And after I’d been so gentle with you. After I’d treated you so nicely… stroked you… touched you so softly… looked after you while you were all limp and weak… now that’s just ingratitude.”

In the formless blackness it was difficult for Cecily to tell what was happening exactly but, in some way, Lot was moving her. Only when she stopped, and her sense of the weight of her body shifted around her centre of mass, did she understand that Lot had stood her up. It was a little confusing, because she thought that she could still feel the pressure of the floor against her back. But it was just that Lot had forced her graceful figure up against a wall.
Freeing Cecily’s mouth, Lot held her captive by her shoulders, grinding up against her slim hips. Her thumbs curled around the fabric of Cecily’s leotard, its red and black standing out sharply against her delicate, pale skin.
“Don’t you look innocent?” Lot said, her voice lowered to a harsh stage-whisper. “Pretty blue eyes all sleepy and cute. So sweet. So weak.” She started rubbing her thighs against Cecily’s long, lily-white legs. “But there’s something else in you, isn’t there? You wanted to hurt me. You wanted me to suffer. For a moment back there, I was in more pain than I’d ever felt in my life.” She wasn’t exaggerating.

“I… was… defending myself,” Cecily replied. Lot’s slow mastering of her still hung heavy on her will, and so her words were half defence, half apology.
“Maybe you were,” Lot said. From the way her expression kept shifting, it was like she didn’t know whether she was angry or not. “But you could have just laid there and done nothing, sweetie.” She stroked Cecily’s face, and Cecily fancied she saw her smiling. “But you didn’t. You’re not all sugar and gumdrops, are you?” She brushed her nose against Cecily’s long, white neck. “You’ve got bite. I think that makes me like you more, Cecily.” She placed her lips close to Cecily’s, so close that Cecily could feel their warmth. She closed her eyes, meekly awaiting the kiss she thought would come. But it never did.

“The thing is,” Lot said, “it made me like you more, sweetie… but you hurt me. That’s not something I can just let you get away with.”
Lot released of one of Cecily’s shoulders, reached into her pocket. She took something out.
“I’m… finding it a little difficult to get back in the right headspace. Do you know what I mean? Curling you round my little finger and making you sink just by whispering the right words in your ears… I think that’s behind us. I think you’ve broken that spell, Cecily.” She snarled her words, pushing Cecily hard against the wall with her arms and with her hips, making it absolutely clear who had the power. Lot deliberately dimmed the effects of her powers, allowing Cecily’s attention to shift, to see the cloth Lot was holding and to smell it, smell the thick, sweet, stifling scent emanating from it. With great pleasure, Lot watched Cecily’s face, her sweet, delicate countenance, take on an expression of fetching dismay.

“Please,” Cecily mewed. “Please… please don’t…”
“Don’t what?” Lot asked. She brought the cloth close to Cecily’s face. “Say it. Don’t what, Cecily?”
“Don’t… don’t drug me…”
“Why shouldn’t I?” Lot asked. “Is it because you’re already helpless?”
“…Yes…” Cecily whispered, strong enough to try not to admit it, too weak to stop herself from doing so.
“Say it, Cecily,” Lot commanded.
“I—” Cecily squeezed her eyes shut, bit her lip to stop herself from saying it. It wasn’t rational to resist when resistance might invite harm; and could give her no real advantage besides. Yet she felt she had to, felt that the gamma on her chest demanded it of her, that as Hypatia it behoved her to fight even when fighting was pointless. But she couldn’t think properly, couldn’t move the haze aside, couldn’t help feeling this fearful awe and warm submissiveness. So when the words came, it was with gentle anguish, and a low, passionate lament of Cecily’s quiet, iron dignity.
“I’m… helpless…” she said.
“Tough,” Lot replied, and shoved the cloth over Cecily’s face.

The feeling was like that of a city finding, overnight, that its foundations had been built on a peat bog and that everything was collapsing at once. Lot knew her art well, and Cecily was instantly and absolutely subdued. All thoughts of resistance were banished from her mind. All access to her powers totally cut off. Her own words rebounded hypnotically in her mind, and Cecily felt and was utterly, utterly helpless within only a few seconds. Smothered and stifled, Cecily breathed in dose after dose of the cocktail of sedatives and soporifics that Lot had prepared for her.
“There we are,” Lot said. “There we go, sweetie. Back into the deep. Back into the dark.”
“Mhhhhhhh… mhhhhhh… mhh…” Cecily moaned in musical rhythm, spiralling regularly downwards as she was conducted. Lot’s powers were directed on her with such intense focus now that all Cecily could see were her eyes; hard eyes, eyes inhuman and cold; eyes that hypnotised, that drew Cecily in and wrapped her up in trance; eyes that captured her, that held her gaze with an iron glove even as Cecily’s own eyes – warm, bright, sweet – fluttered and faded and dimmed.

Cecily’s body was affected as much as her mind. Thick somnolence stole away what little strength she’d regained. Her arms were dead weights. They hung still by her sides. Her neck could hold up her head, but only because Lot was pushing it against the wall behind her. Cecily’s legs – graceful, tall, naked - failed her completely; for Lot relaxed the pressure against her captive’s body, and Cecily began slowly to fall.

“H…mh…?” From Cecily’s perspective, within Lot’s void, her falling was equivalent to Lot rising, looming, towering over her like a cold, stone tower. But the tower stooped, bending so that she could keep drugging Cecily, keep mollifying her.
“Sink,” Lot demanded. “Sink down. Sink down into control. Sink down into sleep. Sink down to your knees.”
Cecily did just as she was told. Even hopelessly weak, she was able to kneel neatly; prettily. Straight-backed and elegant, she gazed up at Lot with heavy, wet eyes, continuing to drink deep of the sweet, numbing vapours, her limbs limp, her thoughts foggy, her powers shackled.

Lot watched her captive kneel, all the lovelier in her doe-eyed somnolence. Even now, to Lot, it seemed that Cecily was pleading with her, her quivering eyelids appearing to Lot as coy, coquettish pseudo-innocence. It pleased her. It pleased her to see Cecily falling under her power, to see everything in her stifled except what could serve her captor, especially after what Cecily had done to her. It gave it an extra pleasure, seeing her dropping all meek and sleepy to her knees, defeated again: recaptured; reconquered. She was furious with her too, but that only added to the pleasure. Her ‘bite’, as Lot had called it, made Lot compare Cecily to herself, which was more or less the only way for her to think well of something, other than as a possession to be used. She looked at Cecily differently, now: her delicate, intelligent face; her fair skin; her long, red hair. She was beautiful, and Lot felt that more hotly than before. Yet for all this, Lot was a psychopathic narcissist whose ego had been bruised – and that could not be allowed to go unavenged.

“No, Cecily,” Lot said, seeing that her captive was on the cusp of falling unconscious. “No, you don’t get to have it that easy.” She took the cloth away from Cecily’s mouth, taking her by the chin to stop her from falling on her face. “Your strength sleeps. Your powers sleep. Your resistance sleeps. Everything that would tell you that you don’t me to take charge of you – sleeps. But I need the rest of you awake. Awake enough that you know exactly what I’m doing to you.”

Cecily felt she was being touched. Lot’s hands under her arms, lifting her, but not very far. Then on her slim, feminine hips, lifting her further. Then she felt gravity tugging her down, felt herself bending at the waist, and through hazy vision saw her slender arms swinging limply, before a curtain fell before her eyes. It was her hair, slipping towards the ground in a glossy, bronze-red waterfall. Something thin and strong had taken her by the waist, clamping her down, and something was running up and down her legs, caressing her supple, white skin. Cecily’s cheeks glowed with a soft blush, for the feeling was pleasant and her legs were very sensitive. Only when she felt her body being shifted, as Lot tried to make the weight of her captive sit on her a little more comfortably, did Cecily understand that she was being carried, that Lot had thrown her over her shoulder.

“Nh…” Cecily tried to move, vaguely aware that she ought to resist, and with Lot’s threat of punishment still pounding hypnotically in her mind. But she was just too weak to do anything, and she watched herself go limp with a quiet little “oh…”.
Lot took Cecily to a different part of her cabin, a living room with cheap, functional pinewood furniture. Every step was pleasure, for with every step she felt Cecily bounce against her, felt Cecily’s hands brush against the small of her back as her arms swung limply back and forth. Now that Lot had had this change of attitude, now that she had begun to see Cecily not merely as an object, but as a woman, she had a sort of second wave of realization of her captive’s loveliness. Her figure, pressed so close against Lot’s body, was as slender and stately as an orchid, her legs the supple, silky stems. Before Lot knew what she was doing, she was not just fondling Cecily, but pressing her lips against her captive’s thighs and her small, shapely rear, and at the same time squeezing, and at the same time stroking, and at the same time panting lusty breaths against Cecily’s fair skin with every stolen kiss.

Heart racing, Lot peeled Cecily off her body, threw her down onto a waiting couch. Yet she landed lightly. Her neck dipped back a little, her hair spreading out in a red wave behind her. Her thighs sank slightly into the couch’s cushions, her knees primly pressed together, her calves splayed out. She was all askew, but there was an intrinsic symmetry to her, a grace and intelligence in her figure and her face, even under the thick, foggy mask of her helpless weakness. Even after being drugged and tossed down roughly onto a couch by a woman who had kidnapped her, she was irreducibly elegant. It made Lot pant. She hated it.

The control was meant to be hers. With her powers and her drugs, and her slow voice she was meant to coil her pretty captive around her little finger, to make her feel whatever she wanted. To surrender. To submit. To toy with her mind and body until she was so sleepy, so confused, so insidiously stimulated that she would need Lot’s will instead of her own. Lot was supposed to hover above. To be like God: a subject of worship, to demand worship, yet to be indifferent to it. To need nothing. To want nothing. In Lot’s mind, this blasphemous self-aggrandisement did not seem absurd. In Lot’s mind, the hubris was Cecily’s, and that hubris needed to be punished.

She left Cecily, briefly, coming back in bearing a load much smaller than her last, but almost as heavy. She dumped it next to Cecily, where it rattled and clinked against itself. As Lot went to fetch something else Cecily’s heavy eyes turned, slowly, to see what had been laid beside her. Her vision was swimming, and from its shape she thought it was a coiled-up snake. With great effort – and, perhaps, not thinking very clearly – she lifted her arm to pet it, for she had always thought that snakes were sweet. But when she touched it, it was cold, and hard. Her touch helped her eyes to make sense of their input, and Cecily realized what she was looking at, and she whimpered quietly:
“Ch…chains…”

She was still looking fearfully at them when Lot returned again, only looking up when she felt Lot sitting next to her, curling an arm around her shoulders. Cecily meant to look her in the eye, feeling that that was probably what Lot wanted her to do, but Lot turned her chin away.
“Not at me,” she said. “Look there.”
Obeying, Cecily raised her eyes to look at the other thing Lot had brought in, and she saw herself – reflected in a standing, full-length mirror. She saw herself, unmasked and powerless, saw her own innocent, blue eyes looking back. She saw Lot’s arm around her right shoulder, tugging her close, pulling Cecily’s legs close, then lifting one and crossing it over the other, letting Cecily feel the warmth of her own skin against itself, Cecily’s posture a picturesque mockery of her ladylike grace.

“It’s not going to be how it was before,” Lot said. “You could have had it so easy. You could have just melted away in my voice… all warm and fuzzy.” She took a firm, greedy grip of Cecily’s thighs. “Of course, you are still fuzzy… still muffled and hazy and sleepy for me… but you’re not going to enjoy it. You need to see what happens when you rebel. You need to be punished.”
Lot now applied her power with greater intensity than she had at any point during Cecily’s captivity. Again, the world went dark. Again, Cecily found herself drifting in a trancelike void. But this time, even her captor was excluded. Even in the mirror, Cecily could see only herself looking weakly and blankly back. Soon, however, something else came into her vision. Again, for a moment, Cecily thought she was looking at a serpent, but her mistake this time was far more forgivable. For, with Lot taking on her name in the truest, most literal sense, the chains appeared to be moving on their own. They rose into the air like snakes and, like snakes, they began to wrap themselves around their prey.

“Unh…!” Cecily shivered when the first link touched her skin, brushing against her upper arm. The chain was about an inch-and-a-half wide, and a clean, dull silver. These chains were not for mooring ships or locking gates. They had been forged, or so it seemed to Cecily, expressly to imprison her.
In a steady, rattling rhythm the chain circled her, winding slowly, curling around her, slinking across her shoulder blades, then looping back around her other arm, and sliding about halfway down Cecily’s ribs. It wasn’t tight. It didn’t need to be. On the second loop, following the same path as the first, Cecily did feel a little pressure, but about as much as a light hug from a not-quite-intimate friend. Then the next loop grew tighter, just enough to bunch her shoulders up a little. But she still could have slipped out of it if she hadn’t been drugged.

It was only on the fourth loop, when the bottom halves of Cecily’s upper arms and the top halves of her forearms had disappeared beneath the links, that the ‘serpent’ grew cruel. With a quick, hard yank, it pulled the loops tight, and Cecily moaned as her arms were trapped, her shoulders pressed upwards and inwards towards her neck. At this, the serpent grew more daring, and as it continued to bury Cecily’s midriff beneath metal, another head of the serpent looping back upwards, and curling first below, then above, then between Cecily’s fair, high bosoms, forming a sort of harness in the shape of a figure eight. At her back, the harness resolved into an ‘X’ shape, locking itself into place with a length of chain connecting it to the thick bundle of links covering Cecily’s stomach and her forearms. Unseen, the serpent’s master connected the two sets of links with a small, durable padlock. At the very moment it closed, with a loud, definitive ‘clack’, she whispered into Cecily’s ear:
“You’re shackled.”

The phantom words and her own reflection merged together into one truth for Cecily’s addled mind, reverberating endlessly. She saw herself bound, felt the tight squeeze of the chains around her arms and her breasts, and through her quiet whimpers she sleepily lamented her captivity. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst, to Cecily, was that the chains were obscuring her leotard and, more importantly, the gamma symbol emblazoned in gold at its centre. Her mask had been taken from her. Her powers had been suppressed. That symbol was the last thing that proclaimed what she was, what she had chosen to be: the duty that she had taken upon herself as Hypatia. The chains shackled her body, and that was mortifying by itself, but that they should shackle Hypatia too – Hypatia the idea – this was close to unbearable.

Cecily shivered. In the mirror she saw why: the serpent was slipping down her body, rubbing cold and unyielding against her delicate, porcelain skin. Forlorn and tame, Cecily watched the steel snake capture her long, beautiful legs, slinking around them, seizing them with lusty relish and pushing them with inexorable strictness against each other, the mirror ensuring that Cecily saw just how low Hypatia had fallen. She saw the metal dancing against her, forming itself into sharp, regular patterns, a weave of steel being knitted around her thighs and her slim, white calves, until there was an inch of chain for every two of Cecily’s skin.

And then, contradictory sensations. Cecily could not see the one chaining her up, but she could feel her. As the chains were being locked into place around her legs, Cecily felt a warmth amidst the coldness. Her thighs were being stroked, but she couldn’t see it, and the drugs didn’t even let it occur to her that Lot was the one responsible. The feeling seemed to be coming from nowhere. Then another invisible touch, grabbing and teasing her breasts through the thin, stretchy material of her leotard. Then little explosions of heat on her jaw, her face, and her delicate, swanlike neck – kisses that Cecily could not see, each one of which brought out a low, embarrassed gasp.

Slowly, languorously, Cecily started shifting in her chains, and only as she tested them – albeit weakly – did she understand just how mighty the ‘serpent’ was, and how inescapable its cold embrace. But Lot’s unseen hands and unseen mouth comforted her, stroking, fondling, kissing, and at one moment running her tongue the entire length of Cecily’s neck, and in the smoky, opium-den haze in which Lot was drowning her, Cecily sighed, falling back against Lot’s unseen body, undulating against her as she was moulded to her captor’s wishes.

“You like it, don’t you, Cecily?” The phantom voice poured into Cecily’s ear, slipping past her defences, defences sublimed away into nothingness by Lot’s cruel, obliviating potion. “Of course you do. You like everything I do to you. I’m the best thing that ever happened to you: you need someone stronger, someone who can direct you, who can reward you for being obedient and punish you when you rebel. And oh, it makes you ashamed, doesn’t it, knowing that you like it, knowing that your cheeks get all hot and you get all wriggly and sweaty when you see yourself in chains, when you see yourself helpless, see yourself caught and owned and taken.”

With these words, Cecily felt a tug at the nape of her neck, felt the unfastening of a catch and the lowering of a zip. Then, in the mirror, she saw her high-necked leotard begin to slip down, to loosen of, it seemed, its own accord. Slowly, the severe black of Cecily’s costume gave way to the white of her silky, marble-smooth shoulders.
“N…no…” she mumbled, embarrassed by her exposure. She had sense enough to see that she looked pristinely vulnerable, as pretty and as delicate as fine china. Her slender, elegant body, which under ordinary circumstances she was quite pleased with, betrayed her – reified her.
“This is your punishment, Cecily,” Lot said, her whispers soft, cloying poison. “Seeing what you really are, seeing what everyone like you really is. Seeing yourself laid bare.”

“Oh… but I – I… ooohhhhhh…!” Cecily whimpered, over and over, sighing with dismayed sweetness, her body so sensitive to her kidnapper’s caresses, so longing for touch. Invisible hands danced over her shoulders, squeezing and massaging Cecily’s traps and her neck, or shooting down to fondle her legs while hidden lips attended to her abandoned shoulders. And Cecily buzzed and trembled and shivered, falling in any direction that Lot pushed her, writhing sinuously, so soft and so weak, all wrapped up in such hard, powerful bonds – it was shamefully sensual. The very image of her, of a beautiful young superheroine so utterly defeated, kidnapped and shackled – it was a thrilling one. As Hypatia, Cecily was a living symbol of feminine strength, so capturing her, sapping her of all power, stripping her of her warrants and binding her in chains, was shockingly, scandalously erotic. Seeing herself in the mirror, seeing that taboo of power breaking through her made Cecily gasp. It made her pulse.

Or… no, that… was that Cecily’s mind? Could it really be that she felt this way about her captivity? She couldn’t tell anymore. Everything was jumbled, mixed together in her head. The sweet, cloying scent of chloroform – and whatever else Lot had poured into her – hung over everything, and Cecily was hopelessly lost in the fog. But even as Lot cajoled Cecily, ensorcelling and entrancing her, Cecily cried out – weakly, but passionately – in sensuous anguish. She didn’t understand how she could feel pleasure from her capture and her failure, not realizing that that was the point – that was the punishment for her disobedience.

It was precisely Cecily’s own nature that Lot was trying to smooth away with the hypnotic equivalent of brute force. Precisely her unimpeachable dignity and her ruthless morality that Lot was trying to destroy, because it was this that Lot found unbearable: it made her feel something close to admiration. Like anyone who was as virulent a narcissist as Lot was, her ego was perilously fragile. That she might, momentarily, be struck by the courage and strength of her captive didn’t matter, really. Ultimately, Cecily’s resistance had failed: Lot had recaptured her, and she had her in a state of total helplessness.

And because of this, because of Lot’s fragility, control began to slip from her. She started forgetting the logic of her punishment, getting lost in the gentle slope of Cecily’s shoulders, the shimmer of her hair, the sweetness of her skin. Eventually she lost control of herself completely, not only revealing herself to Cecily, but dismissing the effects of her powers entirely. She swept the captive maiden into her arms, lustily grasping Cecily’s thighs and pulling them against her body. Eye-to-eye with Cecily, she saw her captive’s eyes slowly widen in surprise, startled by the sudden ending of the spell, and on seeing Lot so plain and so close, staring at her with such unpretentious, sweet innocence. Lot was powerless against it.

In truth, Cecily had been kissed more expertly in her life. Lot’s kiss was rough, forceful, too wet and too vigorous – yet at the same time strangely passionless. But it didn’t matter all that much. Cecily was chained, stripped, drugged and hypnotized: putty in her abductor’s hands. She was as responsive as Lot could have wanted, yielding up maidenly sighs to every kiss. Lot might have been a fragile narcissist, but she was a victorious one, and her physical conquest of Cecily was quite real.

For quite a while, Cecily lay between Lot and the couch she’d been dumped onto, her chains only clinking because Lot was grinding against them. As the predator feasted on Cecily’s unblemished loveliness, the prey found that her mind was able to drift, no longer totally hamstrung by Lot’s powers. As she floated on a toxic miasma of humiliation and shallowly physical pleasure, Cecily felt a kind of ugly, blunt irony. Here she was, wrapped in an intimate embrace – however unwanted – and yet she felt absolutely alone.

It was not, exactly, that Cecily regretted what she had done. Starting her crusade in Maine had been the right thing to do. And even if you could have shown Cecily that it had not been right, that would not be the end of the world. She had been taught to accept failure, and anyway she would have truly been able to say that she had – even in her worst misjudgements – acted in good faith.

But being able to accept failure was conditional on either being able to fix whatever one had broken, or at least being able to pick up the pieces and move on. But if it all ended here – in imprisonment, or worse – then failure would have the last word whether Cecily had a positive attitude or not. In her misty haze, she realized that the cynicism and rejection of Maine’s other superheroes had upset her, that she had hoped for their alliance more than she had allowed herself to admit. For Cecily’s great strength was that she believed, without irony, in goodness. She’d believed that if she appealed to the consciences of Maine’s heroes, heroes that had been starved and woefully unappreciated, she could light a fire in them and spur them into action. For her to find that this was outside her power was immensely disheartening. She was a little too kind to think of ‘the Dregs’ as cowards, but she discovered that she was disappointed and really rather angry with them.

Besides, Cecily was alone in an unfamiliar place, fighting enemies that were not even her enemies. It was Valerie’s war, and Cecily had just been subbed in due to injury, despite being a vastly inferior player. What great battles had she fought since coming to Maine? A few minor skirmishes here and there. Putting her life at great risk, of course, but on reflection not for all that much gain. Valora had been the greatest threat of all to Milo Patáky’s criminal empire. Hypatia was hardly a blip on his radar. And that was fine, that was all fine – she didn’t mind being less effective than one of the most powerful superhumans in the world – but it was not fine if it ended as Lot seemed intent on ending it. She thought of Maria, but it gave her no power this time. It just made her sad.

Lot pulled away, finally catching herself, ashamed that she’d been so swept up in Cecily’s loveliness. She’d thrown away her calm, tar-thick domination for a few minutes of pawing at a pretty girl she’d tied up. She was ashamed of herself, and so reacted with sheer, petty spite.
“Hey,” she said, mock-softly. “I’ve been silly, Cecily,” she said. “You’ve been my guest for all this time, and I haven’t even told you what you’re doing here.”

She slipped her hands under Cecily’s thighs, and drew the slender maiden onto her lap, supporting her neck with one hand, and breezily caressing her legs with the other.
“Maybe I shouldn’t put it so passively,” Lot said. “It’s less ‘I haven’t told you what you’re doing here’ and more ‘I haven’t told you why I tricked you, knocked you out and stole you.’”
Cecily looked back, crestfallen, awake enough to be ashamed by what Lot said, too weakened even to protest.
“Well, Cecily, it’s like this.” Lot pulled Cecily closer, until their noses were almost touching. “I’m going to sell you.”
“S… sell me?” Cecily’s voice was tremulous.
“That’s right,” Lot replied, delighted by Cecily’s fear. “You’ve got no idea the black market there is for people like you… people like us. There’s all kinds of shady shit that goes on just underneath the surface if you can be bothered to look. Some people want you to figure out how your powers work. Some people want you to see if they can take your powers for themselves. And some people,” she added, pausing to plant a single kiss on Cecily’s long, quivering neck, “some people just want you… because you’re pretty.”

Cecily’s eyes went wide, the words thrumming right into the core of her. The weight of the chains seemed suddenly heavier, her powerlessness a more urgent peril.
“Please…” she said, “please don’t…”
“Oh, isn’t that adorable?” Lot said. “You’re so polite, Cecily. But… polite doesn’t cut it, I’m afraid. I need deference. Beg me.”
“I… beg you,” Cecily said, slowly, but without hesitation: if it was necessary, it wasn’t shameful. “You must… let me go… still so… so much to be… done…”
“Aww, don’t be scared, sweetie,” Lot replied. “The buyer I’ve lined up only wants an itty-bit of you. Just a drop. Hell, I’m giving him a drop of me, too.”

She flashed her eyes at Cecily.
“See, this is the problem for someone like you. Someone who holds their head so high. You don’t hear what’s crawling underneath the surface. There’s a collector in town. Someone paying good money – not great, maybe, but good – for superhuman blood.”
“Wh… blood?”
“Or skin, or hair, or anything like that. They give a little more for blood, though. That, sweetie, is why I was at your little confab today. To pick up a few samples from some better-than-average superhumans.” She snorted. “I just didn’t expect it to be such slim pickings. Cacophony’s okay, but the others? Red Fang? Mountebank? Lamia?” She laughed. “I can’t even remember what she does. Turns invisible or turns into a snake or something – whatever. Point is, I wouldn’t have got a penny for them. But you,” she said, lifting Cecily’s legs higher, practically cradling her forlorn captive, “you’re something special. There’s not many true-tekes out there, and anyway there’s plenty about you that’ll make you… lucrative. So I’ll sell you, baby, and then I’ll sell you again.” All the time that she spoke she watched Cecily’s expression. At every innuendo, every implied threat, Lot scanned Cecily’s face with hawklike scrutiny, furiously intent on seeing that Cecily was sufficiently frightened. “Do you see,” she added, not finding Cecily quite to her satisfaction, “what you are? You’re my meal ticket. That’s all you are. A pretty, helpless puppet for me to throw away once I’m done with you. Get it? Do you get it?”

Oh, sure, Cecily writhed in Lot’s grasp. Sure her eyes plead with her captor, and she whispered a quiet, desperate, sweetly polite entreaty for Lot not to do what she threatened. And, sure, it gave Lot some pleasure to see Cecily squirm at her threats and her teasing, and anyway just looking at her so lovely and so meek was delightful. But it just wasn’t quite the same anymore. It didn’t hit the spot for her in the way it had before, now that she had let Cecily see her so out of control.

Part of her wanted to double down. Part of her wanted to keep Cecily for herself, to have her as a perpetual captive, keeping her drugged and tied, toying with her mind for days and days until, eventually, Cecily’s will was entirely melted away and she didn’t even need to be drugged to be Lot’s meek little slave-girl. But this was, first, impossible and, second, stupid. Cecily – Hypatia – was a means to an end, and that end was enrichment. She was a thing. Just a thing. That was all.

With an expression more severe than her customary, self-congratulating smirk, Lot pushed Hypatia off herself, and stood up.
“Time, the… what’s the time?” she muttered to herself, glancing at a small digital watch that she kept in her pocket. She grimaced when she saw how much time had passed: she was due to make the exchange with the buyer’s agent in only a couple more hours. She glared at Hypatia, blaming her for the delay. “Right,” she said. “No more playing.”

Lot had left a large sports bag by the door when she came in, and she moved to get something from it. On returning, she was brutally swift. Hypatia had barely had the presence of mind to notice that Lot had left the room before a familiar odour wafted into her nostrils, and before she saw a white handkerchief in Lot’s hand. It was soaking wet.
“Nhh…” Cecily gritted her teeth. She knew what was going to happen.
Lot sat on top of her, her backside resting against Cecily’s hips. She looked sort of blank. It was probably her most natural state: not trying to deceive or manipulate or control. It was as real as she got, and Cecily found it frightening.
“Nothing fancy this time,” Lot said. “It’s just chloroform. I’m through entertaining you, Hypatia. I just need to switch you off.” She held Cecily by the back of her neck, and with vicious strength pushed her captive’s sweet face into the wet embrace of the thick, dripping cloth.

“No… please don’t put me to sleep… you don’t need to – MMHHHPHH!” The shock of it, the forceful, artless pulse of the vast quantity of chloroform in which Lot was drenching her actually roused Cecily for a moment, before swiftly and brutally plunging her back down. “Mhhhh-hhnn… mhhbhhmm-nnhhphhmmff…” Cecily mumbled, growing still as the waves surged over her powerless body. It was shamefully easy. Lot had been right to describe it in the way she had: Cecily had already been helpless, so now she was just being turned off. Her eyelids drooped, her eyes themselves growing loose and unfocused, crossing slightly as her vision grew hazier, and hazier.

Stifled and subdued, Cecily felt like she was being wrapped up in an inky-black cloak. It smothered her, wiping away all thought and all hopes of resistance. Her subtle mind was dulled, suppressed, her body yielding up every last drop of its strength. Her chains were now mockingly, insultingly unnecessary, and their cold embrace just made her retreat into the oblivion of the chloroform. At least that was warm.

Lot watched Hypatia succumb, watched her eyes rolling back in their sockets, rolling in time with her languid moans. A drop of chloroform fell from the cloth, clinging to Hypatia’s neck. Lot watched it slip down, slowly caressing her creamy skin, travelling down over her collarbone and her sternum, and finally disappearing from sight as it slipped between her small, firm breasts. Again, Lot found herself unwilling struck by Hypatia’s beauty. She was elegant, and dignified, but there was nothing hard or cold in her. She was soft. She was gentle. Lot passed the back of her hand over Hypatia’s naked shoulders, and they were like warm satin.
“There we go,” Lot cooed, continuing to stroke Hypatia’s skin. “There’s my good little damsel, huh?”
“Mhhhhhhhhhhhh…” Cecily sighed, humiliated by Lot’s control of her, and yet wholly surrendering to it. She passed some threshold of consciousness, and she sank more deeply, more limply into Lot’s arms, drinking the somnolent fumes, feeling them claim her again. Her eyes slipped shut, and she felt herself slowly shutting down. She could still just about hear Lot’s silky voice still cajoling her, still commanding her.
“Sleep,” was all she said, in a hushed, intimate rhythm, the word pushing Cecily down into darkness, a drug and a pillow and a chain all at once. “Sleep… sleep… sleep… sleep… sleep… sleep…”
She obeyed.
***
Lot took no chances with her slumbering captive. The handkerchief she’d drugged her with was large enough to tie around Hypatia’s face, so she repurposed it as a gag, forcing it over her mouth and nose, tying it tight enough that, with the material still soaking wet, it was still possible to see the outline of Hypatia’s mouth.

With some difficulty, she lifted the fallen maiden into her grasp, straining against the combined weight of Hypatia’s body and of the chains she’d wrapped her in. But she managed it, just about, draping her tall, silky burden across her arms. The weight of the chains stopped Hypatia’s calves from bouncing as she was carried, lending her captive frame a sense of defeated stillness. Only her hair moved, rippling with each of Lot’s heavy steps, as Cecily’s slender neck arched over lots forearm, its muscles and ligaments tensing from the posture, displaying the fine and delicate architecture of Cecily’s body.

Lot carried her outside, cloaking the two of them from any prying eyes. She kept it up all the way into her humble vehicle, laying Hypatia down in the front passenger seat before climbing in herself. Even inside her car, Lot kept up the shadow, just in case anyone could look in. It would be no barrier to her driving, or anything like that. Lot’s eyes could pierce her own veil easily.

Yet, even to Lot, the world did still seem to darken. The trees, her cabin, the interior of her car – they all faded. Everything but Hypatia: the black of her clothes; the silver of her chains; the red of her hair and the white of her fair face. Everything faded but her captive; the soft, helpless, innocent, sleeping maiden so vulnerable and powerless and pure. For a moment, then, Lot’s powers rebounded on her, and she was seized by desire. She smothered Hypatia’s neck and shoulders in kisses, tingling at the silky texture of Hypatia’s skin against her lips. She turned her, lifting Hypatia’s ankles and draping the heroine’s bare, chained-up legs across her lap, roughly and lustily fondling them, feeling how Hypatia’s thighs yielded to the pressure of her fingers, even as they were kept tense and taut by the chains that bound them with such sensual cruelty.

Having Hypatia completely unconscious like this made Lot feel freer just to do as she pleased. She still disliked her own lack of control, disliked how plainly and artlessly sexual the sensations she stole from Hypatia were.
“But fuck it,” she thought. “No-one’ll know but me anyway.” She indulged herself quite shamelessly now, pressing her lips against Hypatia’s ankles and then working all the way up the generous length of both of her captive’s legs, leaving no square inch of them un-kissed. With vindictive lust, she yanked down Hypatia’s leotard, completely exposing her small, creamy-white bosoms, grasping them with both hands, and working them like clay, capturing them between her slim fingers and kneading them, grinning as she saw Hypatia’s light-pink buds rise and stiffen, kissing both in turn and shivering as she heard a sleepy, kittenish mew from behind Hypatia’s tight, wet gag.

Laughing, she pulled Hypatia’s limp frame onto her lap, continuing to fondle her breasts as she kissed her neck and her sweet, sleeping face.
“Maybe I won’t sell you,” Lot whispered, panting into Hypatia’s ear. “Hmm? Maybe I won’t give you away… even in your sleep I can hear you moaning…” Lot’s vision tunnelled. Hypatia’s face and her chloroform-soaked gag were close to Lot’s own mouth and nose. Everything else was growing darker, and Hypatia was growing brighter, filling Lot’s vision, filling her mind. “You still need me, don’t you? Still need my control… you’re mine, understand? You’re mine, you’re—”

Lot pulled back. It wasn’t just that she was getting carried away. Breathing hard, and blinking sleep from her eyes, she realized that the fumes from Hypatia’s gag were affecting her. She’d almost passed out right on top of her captive.
“Jesus!” she hissed, astonished with herself for showing such weakness. She felt strange, not just because of the drug, and looked at Hypatia in angry confusion. Why did Hypatia have such an effect on her? Why was her soft innocence so provocative? It wasn’t something as simple as lust – it couldn’t be. Lot was far from being asexual, but she had never been all that interested in such things. It meant connecting to other people, however shallowly, and that was irritating, and dull. Was it just that Hypatia was so attractive? Sure, she was a lovely woman, but she wasn’t Helen of Troy. Why did she seem to… matter so much?

The answer didn’t occur to Lot. It never could have occurred to her. It wasn’t anything particularly profound, either. Simply that the life she had chosen left her completely isolated from human contact. Kidnapping and hypnotizing a beautiful woman – the back and forth of their lop-sided battle – was about as close to companionship as she got. In ignorance, then, Lot tried to put these feelings aside, and began driving off. It was stupid, she thought. All this passion hadn’t amounted to anything. Except this wasn’t quite true. If she had not been so lost in the beauty of Hypatia’s slumber, she would have noticed the other vehicle approaching. Though it had been moving at a fairly leisurely pace, when its driver saw Lot’s car pulling away, it began to follow. When the driver saw that the other car hadn’t noticed, or was ignoring, them, they switched on their siren.

Lot went very, very still. For a few seconds she just kept driving, not altering her speed, making sure that the police cruiser she could now see in her rear-view mirror was following her. It was.
“Shit,” she muttered. This was difficult. Her cloak was not the ability to turn invisible, and though she could use it to prevent people from noticing her, once they had noticed her it was different. If she were stopped, it would have been rather obvious that there was a thick cloak of blackness in the driver’s seat. Stupidly, she’d left Hypatia quite on view: no problem for anyone looking in, it would just seem like the windows were tinted, but if she had to lower the windows she wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep Hypatia hidden. Gritting her teeth, she slowed down, and began to pull to the side of the road.

The cruiser pulled up behind her. A man in his late twenties got out. He had a cold expression, and his hand was already on his holstered handgun. He was already suspicious of her, then, not just pulling her over for a broken taillight or something. Was it possible that they were looking for Hypatia? Surely not. How would they even know she was missing? The only possibility was that someone had seen her kidnapping Hypatia in the first place, in which case they surely would have been there much sooner. And Hypatia herself could hardly have asked for help, because she—"

Oh.

When she’d resisted. When she’d hurt Lot and tried to go for the phone. Lot had thought she’d got to her in time, that she’d crushed the phone before Hypatia had had a chance to do anything with it. She’d – she’d just sort of assumed that Hypatia had failed because… because of course she had! She was so soft and so meek – that she had fought against Lot was, though maddening, sort of attractive, but that she had fought against Lot successfully… that was intolerable. Cursing herself, she looked to see if there was any way she could just escape. The car had no tie to her real identity and, if she eluded the police, they’d be very unlikely to be able to track her. And the road was very close to a line of thickly gathered trees – powers or no powers it would be easy to make a clean getaway if she could reach them. But it would be difficult to do that while carrying Hypatia – if the officer was trigger happy, he’d have plenty of opportunity to shoot her. Lot grimaced. She wasn’t afraid, but she was very irritated. This was going to get messy.

If it hadn’t been for the tinted windows, the officer might not have been quite so suspicious, or so quick on the trigger. But he knew that he was entering a position of disadvantage: as a policeman, he had to give a warning before shooting, and if the person in the car meant him harm, they would be able to get the drop on him. That he couldn’t even see them made things worse. He drew his weapon and aimed it just a little lower than he would if he were actually shooting.

“Sir,” he shouted, assuming the driver’s gender not so much because he suspected them of crime, but because it fell outside his imagination to picture a woman driving a brown Honda Civic. “Sir, roll down your window!” He kept far back. “ROLL DOWN YOUR WIN – oh.” The driver’s side door had opened, and a young-ish woman with tanned skin and tight, black clothes had stepped out. Her hands were up.
“Officer,” she said. “What’s the problem?”
“Turn around,” he ordered. “And keep your hands raised.”
The woman obeyed. She did not appear armed.
“Am I in trouble, officer?” she asked.
“Ma’am,” he replied, nervousness making him shirty, “you’ve got an armed police officer pointing a gun at you. I think maybe you should just assume you’re in trouble until I tell you you’re not.”
“If you insist,” Lot replied.

The officer got closer, circling Lot until he could see into the interior of the car through the open door. It was strange: he still couldn’t quite see what was inside, like it was full of fog or something. He moved a little closer and realized that he could sort of see something: an outline of… maybe a person?
“Ma’am, do you have a passenger in this vehicle?”
“Yes,” Lot answered.
“Tell them to step out of the car.”
“If you like, officer, but it won’t do any good.”
“What do you mean ‘it won’t do any good’?” The officer moved back again, making sure that Lot was in the centre of his field of vision.
“She won’t hear you,” Lot replied.
“Why not?”
“Because I drugged her, officer,” Lot said. At the same moment, she withdrew the cloak from inside the car, giving the officer a full view of Hypatia’s chained, unconscious body. Then, while he was startled, she drew the gun that she’d kept cloaked at her side and shot him in the head.

Lot was a decent markswoman, but she’d had to be very quick. For this reason, the wound was not immediately fatal; rather, it drove a deep, bloody gouge into the officer’s temple. He cried out, fired blindly at Lot’s feet – almost hitting them, in fact – and then collapsed onto the ground. He was actually conscious for a few seconds, and so he was able to see the bullet that had torn through his head lying only a couple of feet away from him. He tried to grab it, his hazy vision making it difficult for him to judge distance. He heard himself calling out for his father: not for aid, but because he was twice a widower, and the officer didn’t want to leave him alone. In despair, then, he lost consciousness, quite rationally expecting himself never to wake up again.

Lot moved over to him quickly. She threw a shroud around both of them: it would certainly look strange to any passer-by, but that was much better than them seeing her with a policeman with a hole through his head. She grabbed him by the ankles and started dragging him off the road. She’d just hide him behind a tree so that he couldn’t immediately be seen from the road, then do the same with his car. Then she’d abandon her own car at earliest convenience, and all would be well.
She heard another car approaching. For safety’s sake, she moved the officer behind her own car so that her shadow would not look too obvious. Thankfully it wasn’t another police cruiser, so she expected it would just glide on by. But it didn’t. It stopped, and someone stepped out.
“Walk away,” Lot muttered. “Walk away, you idiot.”

It was a man in his late thirties, maybe early forties. He was tall, and quite well-built, but there was a slobby, unattractive messiness about his appearance. He had bleary eyes, and Lot wondered if the man was drunk. That was the last thing she needed: some drunken idiot stumbling onto the scene. Well, she’d kill him too, if it came to that, but she would have preferred it not be necessary. To her chagrin, the man began to wander over. He saw the empty police cruiser and made a noise of confusion. Lot raised her pistol and made ready to shoot him if he even looked like he might reach for a cell phone. He moved over to Lot’s car, and she quickly raised the cloak over Hypatia again. He did, indeed, peer inside, and like the officer seemed a bit confused by what he was looking at. He turned his head to the side like a mystified dog, and Lot was tempted to laugh at him, for he looked so very stupid.

But then a change seemed to come over him. His confused expression froze into a hard grimace. His eyes sharpened to a point. He scanned around for something; his large hands clenched into two quite impressive fists. Then he opened his mouth, and he screamed.

It was, immediately, completely impossible for Lot to use her powers under Cacophony’s assault. She felt dizzy, and sick, and her ears were in such pain that it was all she could do not to pass out. She rose, stumbled, balanced herself on the trunk of her car, fired three shots, two of which missed wildly, and one of which hit Cacophony in the shoulder. He was hurt enough that his scream stopped, but it had only been a glancing blow, and he was not seriously wounded. It was an excellent opportunity for counterattack, but Lot was so disoriented that she fell flat on her back.

Tucker was bewildered. He had come here following the police scanner, thinking that – from what he’d heard – Shatterqueen had been kidnapped by someone. But, if he was not mistaken, he had found Shatterqueen with a gun in hand, dragging (what he thought was) a dead policeman. And she wasn’t using Shatterqueen’s powers but had created some sort of shadowy fog or something, which was what had made him so sure something was amiss.

“What’s going on here?” he said, injecting his power into his voice to make sure Shatterqueen didn’t retaliate. “Did you shoot that cop?!” He moved over to her, kicked the gun out of her hand. “Answer me!”
She couldn’t. She was still groaning in pain, curling up and clutching her ears, which rang loudly and painfully like a bomb had gone off next to her. She sort of vaguely flailed at him, so weakly that he thought she was pointing at something. He looked in the direction she had indicated, which just so happened to be the interior of her car. Only then did it all click into place.

It was a shock to see Hypatia in such a state. Ignorant of her history, Tucker could scarcely have imagined her as a captive at all, let alone one who seemed so overwhelmed, so helpless. With the upper half of her face uncovered, and the lower concealed by her gag, she looked much less like Thunderclap than she had done before – yet still some aspect of her countenance put Tucker so much in mind of his old friend that he clutched at his chest, and turned in fury on ‘Shatterqueen’, understanding that the 911 call the police had received had not been identifying the victim, but the perpetrator.

But Cacophony’s fury would not be avenged. There would be no grand battle between him and Lot. In the face of her terrible error, of miscalculation after miscalculation after miscalculation, Lot had remembered who she was – what she was. She was a predator. And what did predators do, real predators like tigers or hawks or wolves, when they were faced with a vicious, powerful enemy? They yielded to their natures – and they ran away. And, whatever else her powers could do for her, they were very good at helping her flee.
***
When Cecily awoke, the sky was dark, and the stars were clear. She was lying down, her head slightly raised by the surface of whatever she was lying on. Her eyes blinked slowly open; but they were still unclear. She couldn’t hear properly. In fact, her ears hurt, and were both ringing. There were lights about her, red and blue, and she could not immediately make sense of them. She tried to sit up, but she was still very weak, and fell back heavily against the gurney.
Yes, she was lying on a gurney, wasn’t she? Or something of that sort.
“I suppose…” she thought, “she did sell me… to a laboratory to be… experimented on…” From what she last remembered, it made sense. And yet, as sense returned to her, her hypothesis began to hold up less and less. For one thing, she wasn’t tied up. And when she tried to reach out with her powers to the sheet that she saw covering her legs, she was able to move it. Only a little, mind, but she could do it without all that much effort: she didn’t feel the stifling seal on her abilities that Lot’s drug had given her. As her vision grew clearer, she saw that there were people around her, and after about a minute she realized they were in uniforms. They were police officers.

“Miss?” A heavy-set, friendly looking policewoman was standing near her. “Can you hear me, Miss?”
“…Yes,” Cecily replied, heavily. “I’m sorry… I’m a little confused… how did I come to be here? Where…?” Awakening a little, she reached out to the officer with urgent alarm. “Lot – the woman who abducted me – she was masquerading as the hero Shatterqueen, and the real Shatterqueen may be in great danger. She… she… oh…” She had taxed herself too much, and fell back against the gurney, breathing hard.

“It’s alright, Miss,” the officer said. “Don’t worry about that now. She’s gone. You’re safe.”
“I… I see.” Cecily had presence of mind enough to guess that ‘she’s gone’ meant ‘she escaped.’ But she was still so confused – she had fallen asleep in anguish and despair, sure that she would awaken a slave, or else never awaken again… and she had awoken to this. Safety. Rescue. Calming words from a kindly voice. It was so much like the relief of waking from a nightmare that for a few seconds Cecily was genuinely confused about whether she had dreamed her captivity or not.

“Excuse me,” she said, when she had gathered her wits a little more. “I’m… I still don’t quite understand how I came to… to be saved.”
This was a more awkward matter. When the other officers had arrived at the scene, they had of course been immensely grateful to Cacophony, both for rescuing Hypatia and, indeed chiefly, for saving their colleague from death. But once it was discovered who he was, it had become… difficult. They had ‘asked’ him to remain for questioning, and it was still being decided whether or not he would be formally arrested for breaking the terms of his suspended sentence.

“A superhero found you,” the policewoman said, an answer that she hoped would not lead to any follow-up questions. But she saw a strange look come over Hypatia, saw her begin to breathe more quickly. “Miss, are you feeling—”
“Please,” Cecily interrupted. “Are they still here?”
Reluctantly, the policewoman answered that yes, he was still at the scene.
“Is it possible… for me to speak with him?”

It took a few minutes, and a bit of persuasion, but soon enough, Cacophony’s bulky frame came into Cecily’s sight.
“Uh… hi,” he said. He was a bit embarrassed. “I heard you wanted to talk to me?”
Cecily did not immediately reply. She had taken a moment, since he wasn’t wearing his mask, but on hearing his voice she had realized who it was.
“You?” she said, in total astonishment. “It was you?”
“Yeah,” he mumbled. “Is that a problem?”
“No,” Cecily said. “No, of course… of course not. I’m just… with everything you said this morning, I can hardly believe… that you… oh, but that doesn’t matter. Thank you, Cacophony. Thank you,” she repeated, trying to imprint on her voice every ounce of gratitude that she felt. “I owe you a debt of gratitude I doubt I will ever… be able to repay.”
“It’s alright,” Tucker replied. “I didn’t end up doing all that much in the end. The woman who captured you ran away without much of a fight.”
“Still,” Cecily said. “I’m sure I would dead or enslaved without your intervention.”
“You’re welcome, Hypatia,” Tucker replied, trying and failing to match her sincerity. “Look, I – I’m sure we’ll be able to talk again soon. Maybe when you’re feeling a little stronger? I have to, uh, finish talking to the police. Giving my statement,” he added, not wanting Hypatia to know the difficulty he was in.
“Of course,” Cecily responded. “Whatever you wish.”

Tucker turned away and began to move towards the frowning lieutenant who’d been keeping an eye on him until now. But he felt a tug on his sleeve, and turned around to see that Hypatia was responsible, using her powers to draw his attention because her voice simply wouldn’t have carried.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but may I ask one more thing?” She sounded a little emotional.
“Um, sure,” Tucker replied.
“I…” She shut her eyes. “Please forgive me for what I’m about to ask… it is a very selfish question. But… would you be kind enough to answer it? And please… please be honest. It’s just that I—” She opened her eyes again. “What… what I said this morning… I was wondering if it had made any difference. If, perhaps, that might have been part of the reason why you… if you understand me…”
He did. He thought on it. It took him about thirty seconds.
“Yes,” he said. “It did. I think it made a pretty big difference, actually.”
The reward for Tucker’s honesty was the sight of the softest, sweetest smile that he had seen for many years.
“Really?” Cecily replied, voice weakened by her emotion. “Oh, I’m so… so glad…!” She fell back against the gurney, her eyes falling shut, slow tears slipping from them. She clasped a hand against her heart, and breathed a sigh of deep, passionate relief. “Sublime,” she said. “That is… so… sublime… .”

Tucker felt tears in his eyes too, but he mostly suppressed them. Later, when he was able to be alone, he wept.



Hey all, DB here. We're about 60,000 words deep into this story, and it would be fab if I could get some sense of how y'all are feeling about it. Otherwise, hope you enjoy. Peace out!
Damselbinder

The Perils of Valora 4-8: “Touch”

Valerie was used to waking up early. It was only 5.30 in the morning when her blue-grey eyes blearily opened, and normally she would have just got straight out of bed, even when she didn’t particularly have anything to do. But she didn’t want to move. She was still sleepy, and the bed was comfortable, and the man next to her was very warm.

She turned her head, saw Oliver lying next to her. He slept on his side, and his back was to her. She looked at him for a bit, then turned away herself.
“Fuck,” she said. She felt… weird. Empty. Well sort of; empty, but not in a bad way? ‘Emptied’, perhaps, was better. It was a wholesomely unpleasant sensation, like drinking a foul-tasting but effective medicine.
She felt Oliver’s hand on her shoulder. Having spent most of his adult life in the armed forces, he was even more used to early mornings than Valerie, and had been awake for almost half an hour.

“Good morning,” he whispered.
“Morning,” she replied. She pulled Oliver’s arm over herself, pressing her back against him. They were still both naked, but feeling Oliver’s body didn’t start getting Valerie excited, exactly. It was just nice.
“How are you feeling?” Oliver asked, after a few minutes.
Valerie unhooked herself from Oliver, turned over, leaving a little gap between them.
“I’m okay,” she replied. “I’m good, I think.”
“Awesome.” He yawned, and Valerie yawned back at him. They held hands.
Valerie stroked Oliver’s palm with her thumb, looking dreamily into middle distance.
“Hey,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you last night but what you did, um…” She bit her lower lip. “You kinda knocked me out.” She looked sheepish.
“What did you want to say?”
“Uh… nothing you couldn’t guess. That I’m sorry about going nuts, that I’m grateful you were so… like… superhumanly cool about it. That I… uh…” She blushed, her cheeks seeming to glow in the darkness of the low, not-quite-dawn light. “… I think you’re a very special person.”
“Thank you,” Oliver replied, after his first attempt to express his gratitude caught in his throat. He wanted to return the sentiment, believing it honestly, but couldn’t find a way to make it sound sincere.

It was actually more difficult now than it had been the previous night. If, as Oliver had been comforting Valerie, you had paused time and asked him ‘how come you’re being so chill about this’, he probably would have told you that he was being kind to Valerie in the way people had been kind to him in his worst moments and that, well, it was just in his nature to be nice to people that he liked.

But now he felt suspicious of himself. It had been fairly easy for him to be accommodating, he realized, because Valerie had seen him at his worst, and weakest. Now he had seen Valerie at hers. It made him feel more comfortable around her, and maybe that was partly okay because she was famous, and it had shown that she was definitively a human being, so… fine. But her weakness made him feel better about his own and that he didn’t like. There was a bit of a ‘see, you’re as bad as I am’ quality to his feelings, and in thinking of that he momentarily regretted making love to her. Sex could bring out the worst in people, perhaps especially in men. It had made him feel vulnerable, therefore defensive, therefore spiteful.

But there were other colours on the palette besides that. In the half hour where he’d been alone in wakefulness, he’d had time to think more about what Valerie had said. Firstly, he needed to ask her what the hell was going on with Lupus, for that was the most bizarre element of the whole story. Aside from that, though, the thing Oliver had been most struck by was just the fact that Valerie felt so bad about something so obviously forgivable. If you’d put the Supremacist, helpless, in front of Oliver, would anyone really have blamed Oliver for torturing him to death?

The first time Oliver had met Valerie, it had been on that derelict ship that the criminal Leatherback had been using as headquarters. He’d seen her, standing proud and victorious among a dozen heavily armed men out of whom she had beaten the stuffing, the deck strewn with pieces of a yacht that Valerie had picked up and hurled right through the hull of Leatherback’s ship. When Oliver and his comrades had confronted her, she had looked at them with total fearlessness. He’d assumed that she was a woman comfortable with violence.

And yet this. This agony over brutalising someone who had kidnapped and tormented her. It was true that Oliver didn’t wholly understand the deeper emotional currents, but he knew enough. Enough to realize that Valerie, probably without being aware of it, was a person of profound moral integrity.
Valerie saw her paramour breathe out a sharp sigh, obviously one with a great deal of emotion in it.
“What was that?” she asked, very quietly, very softly. “You okay?”
“Hm? Yeah, I’m fine,” Oliver replied. “Just… I don’t know. Nothing bad.”
“Feeling a bit mixed about everything?”
“A little, yeah.” What he didn’t, and probably couldn’t say was that he was trying to reach some kind of balance in how he thought of her. Trying not to have to lower Valerie to feel on the same level as her; trying not to efface himself when he realized how grateful he was that the power Valerie held was held by her and not by someone else.

“I could feel it,” Oliver said, as though in sudden realization.
“Feel what?”
“When we were… you know. I know you were holding your powers back—”
“Mostly,” Valerie interrupted, pressing her thighs together, and glancing down between Oliver’s.
Oliver did one of his twisty-lipped, pursed grins.
“Right,” he said. Very pleasant memories returned to his mind. “I, uh… where was I?”
“Something about my powers.”
“Oh, yeah yeah.” He pulled Valerie’s hand a little closer to himself. “I… I think I understand what you said before a little better.”
“What?”
“That you are your powers. I could feel it. I could feel them running all the way through you. Every motion. Every touch. Every – uh… oh, Jesus.” He looked away, shaking his head. “Okay, I sound like a complete loser. But—”
“Shut up.”

Valerie was looking back at Oliver with hard, wide eyes.
“Hey, Valerie, I didn’t—”
“No, I’m serious,” she said. “Shut up. Don’t… don’t do that. Don’t – add something ironic or funny or whatever because you think I won’t take you seriously. I don’t laugh at people who are trying to say something that means something to them. Okay?”
“…Okay.”
“Good. Because, like… there’s no way to talk romantically without sounding like a jackass. So that’s just something we need to accept. And you didn’t even sound like – look, that was one of the sweetest things anyone’s ever said to me, and I just… I just want to have it.”

She drew closer.
“Please trust me,” she said. “At least trust me enough that you can… you can be a big loser in front of me and I’m not gonna give you shit for it.”
“Alright, Valerie. I understand.”
“Unless it would be really, really funny.”
“Natch.”

Oliver looked behind him, saw that it still wasn’t even quite six o’clock.
“Hey, it’s still really early. Do you want to get up yet?”
Valerie considered. “I don’t want to go back to sleep,” she said. “But… I’d like to… stay with you for a while. Is that okay?”
“You mean ‘would I like to stay in bed with a violently hot naked woman?’”
“Yeah, that.”
“Then the answer is yes – but gimme a second.” He slipped out of the covers. “Getting water. You want some?”
“Mm-hm,” Valerie replied. She began curling the covers around herself the second Oliver was out them, and gave a loud, open-mouthed yawn which put Oliver in mind of a hibernating bear.

It was still dark. When Valerie had rolled the covers around, it had released a thick, pleasant smell of sex: intimate, bodily and – since Valerie was used to her own scents – distinctly male. She’d wrapped herself up in it, felt it settle onto her. Into her. It was sexy, and relaxing, and – tingling – she began to fall back to sleep. Though much of the pleasure of the night had been about Oliver himself, much of it had just come from the act. She’d been in him, and he in her, and just thinking about someone else’s wants, someone else’s pleasure, someone else’s body, even, was so different from how things normally were, from how twisted and angry and selfish she could be. She’d wanted to be gentle with him, and she had been. She’d wanted to be open with him, and she had been – too much, maybe, but he’d accepted it. She’d wanted to feel warmth for someone else, and because Oliver was lovely, she’d been able to. She felt raw, still, and wounded – but comforted; moreover, grateful.

When Oliver got back, the first rosy fingers of dawn were tentatively caressing his lover’s body. She’d twisted up the covers so much that they were barely covering her anymore, and shafts of light were slowly inching their way up her smooth, curvy legs, which shifted comfortably against each other. One of her hands was holding the corner of Oliver’s duvet over her hips, the other hand resting flat about halfway up her torso. Her head was tilting back, her neck stretched back: warm, slightly tensed, sweeping down to her strong, silky shoulders. Her hair lay across one of her shoulders, partly illuminated by the dawn light. It was golden.

Oliver lay next to her, careful not to disturb her. He looked at her for a while, just watching her breathe, watching the dawn light slowly unveiling her to him. He couldn’t quite keep his hands off her completely, though. He put the back of his hand on top of Valerie’s head, and started stroking her hair, teasing her long, soft locks between his fingers. He knew he was doing it, but there was something unconscious about it as well. He liked her, so he touched her. He suspected she needed it, maybe more than she’d needed sex. Just to be touched by someone who was fond of her. He realized that he cared for her very deeply, and he let himself admire her, let himself care for Valerie the superhero as well as Valerie the angry, hurt, grimly funny young woman. He wanted to be something good in her life, even in only briefly.

“But hopefully not,” he found himself thinking. He wanted to spend more time with her. He wanted to cook her favourite meal for her. He wanted to watch her favourite film with her. He wanted to make love to her with her favourite album playing in the background. He wanted her to want all that for him, too – basically, he wanted to be her boyfriend.

Oliver kept on stroking Valerie, even when sunlight happened to fall across one of Valerie’s eyes, and she woke up again. She realized what Oliver was doing, and she found it so relaxing that she almost dropped off again. But she made herself stay awake. She wanted to be conscious of it. She wanted to keep this in-between time, these bonus hours before the day really began, and take from them all that she could.

She looked at Oliver and sensed maybe some of the tension he felt. She tried to imagine what it must have been like for him the day of the raid. The awfulness of the battle itself, his flashback, his collapse. Then looking up and seeing Valora standing over him. About as blunt a symbol for femininity as you could get, looking down at him at his absolute worst. Looking at him with disgust. Valerie could scarcely think of something more humiliating. She hoped he understood now. She hoped he saw the warmth in her eyes when she looked at him.

She sat up suddenly, and she threw her arms around Oliver, pressing him against her. She kissed his wiry neck, his left temple, his short, blunt nose. She tangled her fingers in his hair.
“Are you still glad you ran into me?” she whispered.
“Of course,” Oliver replied, relieved that the answer came so easily. “Are—”
“Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes…” Valerie coiled her legs around Oliver’s hips. She held herself against him as tightly as she could without hurting him. “Oliver,” she said, just for the pleasure of the sound. She heard her own name in reply, and she liked the way that he said it: gently; sweetly. It pleased her, now, to be with a man who could be so tender. It was in his nature, she felt, but it was difficult for him. Like a master craftsman with cuts all over his hands. And it was such a relief – such desperate relief – for Valerie to find that she could like these qualities in someone. That they could make her feel so warm. That years and years of un-love hadn’t calcified her.

Maybe that was why the business with Lupus had been so awful. Why it had almost broken her in two. Because the rage and bloodlust had been one of the only times in her life she had been consumed with passionate emotion. Ugly, miserable, and lower-than-animal, but obviously intense. Consuming. It had felt like that was all Ulysses had left her. Indeed, though Valerie would have wished it otherwise, her time with Oliver elicited feelings nowhere near as intense as those she’d had with her hands wrapped around Lupus’ throat. But it wasn’t that far off. And it was just as real.

And she didn’t feel ashamed.
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A fantastic rendition of human emotion brought here like a precious and very needed New Year's gift, damselbinder. Something renewing and woderful. Thank you for it. As always your talents bring your characters to life with clarity and precision and heart.
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Damselbinder

DrDominator9 wrote:
3 years ago
A fantastic rendition of human emotion brought here like a precious and very needed New Year's gift, damselbinder. Something renewing and woderful. Thank you for it. As always your talents bring your characters to life with clarity and precision and heart.
Aww, thank you Dr D!
Damselbinder

There were four major obstacles to the absolute control of the drug trade, and latterly prostitute and arms trade, of Maine by Milo Patáky’s organization. The police were not one of those obstacles. They were ill-equipped to deal with the well-armed, battle-hardened thugs in Patáky’s employ, and though there was a steady stream of arrests, nothing went higher than the mid-level dealers and lieutenants. Patáky’s method of operating his businesses was byzantine, and many cells in his organization didn’t even know for sure that Patáky was their boss. Those that did were completely silent. No-one dared betray him. More than that – none of them wanted to. Somehow, nebbish, nervous little Milo had inspired fanatical loyalty from a mixed association of down-and-outs, psychopaths and murderers.

No: the threats came mostly from their own world. From the entrenched Slavic mob that had been in Maine since the sixties; from a massive gun-running empire that stretched across Maine, three other neighbouring states, and into Canada which did not altogether care for Milo horning into their racket; and from overseas threats to their supply line that even Milo could not directly control. It was to deal with the second of these problems that John Mann, Milo’s second-in-command, dispatched a – what would you call it? Raiding party? A load of large, angry men with guns-that-are-big.

The point was that, at 8 o’clock in the evening on a Sunday that had been damp and dismal at its best, a man walked into a fast-food restaurant on the edges of the town of Mexico. The restaurant had no customers, but there were several people inside: it was known quite well that it was a front for a criminal element, with all relevant authorities being quite well compensated. Only outsiders occasionally blundered in, as those within thought had probably happened now. They did not particularly appreciate the newcomer. One of them told him to get lost. One of them may have said something not particularly kind about his mother. The newcomer seemed to understand, thankfully, and walked out again. He bumped his hip on the door on the way out, stumbling, and the fellows in the restaurant had a good, hearty hyuk at his expense. The moron even dropped something out of his pocket as he left, and one of the restauranteurs went over to see if it was something valuable that he could pocket. On seeing the item, he wasn’t sure. I mean, how much was a grenade actually worth?

That the explosion killed one of the men in the restaurant was an unexpected bonus. It had been intended only to provide cover for the rest of Patáky’s thugs. Two cars pulled up, with reinforced windows and doors, and six men got out of each. Two took position on either side of the smoking hole that was where the restaurant’s door used to be to ambush any escapees. The others took cover behind their vehicles and opened indiscriminate fire.

Patáky’s men, however, had underestimated their enemies. The surviving gunrunners took shelter behind a heavy counter dividing the restaurant floor from the kitchen, and it held up well against the bullets of their foes. They returned fire with some of their most formidable merchandise, and in the opening exchange two of Patáky’s men were wounded.

It quickly devolved into a bloody siege. Patáky’s side had superior numbers, but the gunrunners – as one might expect – had superior hardware. One of the gunrunners called for reinforcements, but they were some way away. Patáky’s men had a decent chance of wearing them down before they arrived.

But, suspecting that their enemies might have called in aid, the senior man among Patáky’s thugs – a short, gold-toothed multiple-murderer named Arby – decided that they needed to risk death if they were to have a chance of clean victory.
“You two!” he shouted, to the two men flanking the restaurant’s entrance. “Cover us! We’re going to charge!”

They obeyed, laying down a withering volley of continuous fire as Arby sent two others in. Managing to get inside the restaurant, they found that the grenade that had allowed their assault had thrown aside or blown apart any possible cover that they could hide behind. So, they just fired blindly, hoping that their fire would keep the gunrunners from shooting back. But the gunrunners just pointed their weapons over the top and around the sides of their cover: even firing blindly they could have cut Patáky’s men down easily. And they would have, but for the fact that Arby had worked his way around the back of their restaurant, killed the man guarding the entrance, and completely got the drop on them. He could have asked them to surrender. But that would have gone against Mr. Patáky’s policy: “Negotiate when you must. Slaughter when you can. Keep life simple.”

But Arby was not given the chance to shoot. Nor were his enemies given the chance to shoot back, nor his allies. Their weapons had betrayed them: leaping suddenly from their hands, and turning around in the air, barrels pointing at their wielders’ faces.
“Arby!” shouted a fellow thug. “They’ve got a superhuman!”
“No,” Arby said, through glinting, gritted teeth, “they don’t.” None of the others had encountered this enemy before – but he had.

She was not like Valora. Not an indestructible, invincible terror. Sometimes she ran, when numbers overwhelmed her. Some had heard her cry out in effort when harried. Some had come very close to killing her, or at least thought they had. Bullets had a strange way of always being not-quite on target when aimed at her. She was tactical, too: attacking when and where she would be effective. Whenever a trap was laid for her, whenever they expected her to show up, she wasn’t there. Hypatia herself did not know it, but she’d had them chasing their own tails for weeks until Patáky ordered his men to plan as though she were not a factor, and just accept that she would sometimes get in their way. If they managed to kill her, great, but unless that happened her interruptions would just have to be considered ‘breakage’. She was a shadow, and a thorn, and all who had fought her hated her for her brilliance.
Through a shattered skylight Hypatia descended, gilt in obsidian and crimson. A red mask covered the top half of her face, tall, black boots covered her long, white legs. Her hair fluttered in the wake of her supernatural energies. She did not quite let her feet touch the floor.
“This battle is over,” she declared. “Surrender at once.”

Arby glanced at one of his underlings, giving him a stern, commanding look. The man was obedient – but stupid. He thought Arby was telling him to attack, when he had meant precisely the opposite.
“No, don’t!” Arby shouted, when he realized the error, but it was too late. His underling ducked under his floating gun and charged at Hypatia, assuming that since she had her back to him she’d be vulnerable. He learned how badly he was mistaken when he felt a crushing pressure on his chest, and he fell, shaking and gasping to his knees.

“What you’re feeling,” Hypatia explained, looking back over her shoulder, “is a hand closing around your heart. Understand this, all of you: I have the power, and the stomach, to kill at need. If I am forced to pull one of the triggers I am holding, I will pull all of them. Moreover,” she added, pulling the guns a little further away from their owners’ foreheads, “it would be perfectly legal.”

She released her grip around the thug’s heart, but then threw the man violently onto his back. In fact, this simple act of blunt force was much more strenuous for Hypatia than the fine skill she’d needed to disarm them all, but she played it off as though it had been easy. “But I have no wish to. Walk outside with your hands folded behind your heads, and I won’t harm you. That is,” she said, looking down at the man who’d tried to attack her, “I will not hurt you further.”

Slowly, the three gunrunners stood up, hands raised. Given that Hypatia had saved their lives, they were more willing than Patáky’s men to obey her. Still, Arby and his subordinates moved towards the door as well. Carefully, but swiftly, Hypatia moved the rifles so that they were pointing at the backs of the gangsters’ heads.

“I’ve still got guys out there,” Arby said. “What if they don’t feel like co-operating?” He made this sound a little like a threat but, really, he was afraid they would do something stupid and get him killed.
But Hypatia was not in the least bit perturbed.
“How they feel,” she replied, “is not germane.” She turned her head, and Arby noticed that she was wearing earplugs. It seemed very strange. It was stranger still when Hypatia covered her ears too. She was, therefore, well insulated against Cacophony’s screech – but it still hurt.

Arby’s men didn’t understand what was happening to them. The pitch of the shriek was too high for them to fully register, so all they knew was that something was making them feel dizzy, and sick. Two of them actually did throw up. They knew they were being attacked somehow, and when they looked about to try to see their aggressor, they saw only the silhouette of a broad man in a black t-shirt and bandana. His mouth was wide open but, if it had been closed, he would have been grinning from ear to ear.

By the time Hypatia came out with Arby and the others, Cacophony had already divested the other gangsters of their weapons, and slapped them in cheap, but effective, plastic cuffs. Hypatia slowly guided the ones she’d apprehended to the other side of the car Cacophony had shoved his against, and with decisive, delicate skill, cuffed the six of them as well. To keep up the mystique that her persona as Hypatia required, at least to her enemies, Cecily kept a completely straight face – but she was delighted. At no point since coming to Maine had she achieved such a swift and decisive victory. Milo’s organisation was large, but it wasn’t infinite. Losing this many triggermen all at once would be a real blow to him. And though one man had been killed, it could have been many, many times worse. God only knew how many would have died if the local police – only now belatedly arriving – had been forced to deal with the firefight themselves.

Hypatia caught Cacophony’s eye, gave him a brisk nod. She had said that she would never be able to repay him for rescuing her, but she had started trying almost immediately. She had not been able to get Tucker’s license to operate independently restored – and given what he had done, perhaps that was only proper. But because of Hypatia’s insistence, and because Cacophony had saved not only her life, but that of a police officer who had also argued on his behalf, he had been given a special dispensation, one that was normally only given to minors: he could work as a pro cape, as long as Hypatia was supervising him. In other words, Tucker was a sidekick again, and he couldn’t have been happier.

“Is this all of them?” Hypatia asked.
“I think so,” Cacophony replied. “I saw a truck of guys heading our way, but they backed off when I, uh… yelled at them.”
“Patáky’s?”
“Don’t think so. I’d say they were reinforcements for the out-of-towners.”
Hypatia nodded. “Still,” she said, “once we’ve handed off these gentlemen, let’s see if we can find if any security cameras caught footage of them.” This was something Hypatia had started doing as soon as she’d begun engaging with Patáky’s men, and she had developed quite an extensive dossier of faces.

It was for this reason that Hypatia began scanning the other storefronts, looking for cameras that might have caught sight of the men Cacophony had seen. And as she cast her eyes up, she looked away from the bombed-out restaurant that Patáky’s men had invaded. She did not, therefore, see that there was one man they had missed.

He was one of the two that Arby had put on the door to ambush anyone coming out. Hypatia had seen both during her brief scoping of the joint, but she hadn’t had time to commit their faces to memory. For that reason, she’d assumed that both of the two were among the men Cacophony had arrested. Indeed, one of them was. The other had escaped Cacophony’s debilitating attack only because he had been born almost completely deaf. If he’d had any sense, he’d have just run away. But he didn’t, and he saw that Hypatia’s back was turned, and he elected to kill her.

He didn’t, though, and for a few seconds he wasn’t sure why. He suddenly couldn’t move. The simplest explanation was that Hypatia had noticed him and was restraining him with her powers, but she still didn’t seem to have noticed him. She was still talking to Cacophony, in fact. He felt a heavy, crushing pressure on his chest and his neck, numbness in his hands and feet. With a groan, he watched his gun fall out of his hands. Only then did Hypatia notice him, spinning around and raising her hands in defence. She too, looked confused, but only briefly. She put her hands on her hips, smiled a little. She said something that he lip-read as the word ‘lamely’, which was didn’t make much sense. He was not able to resolve the mystery before he passed out.

Once he was incapacitated, the thing that had restrained and choked him unwound. It slid along the ground, shifting and swelling and rearranging itself, until it went from slithering, to crawling, to walking. The air around it shimmered, and to the astonishment of those unfamiliar with the phenomenon, it resolved itself into the shape of a petite woman with dramatically curvaceous hips and long, curly hair. The shimmering became like a skin of glass, and shattered, revealing tanned skin, dark eyes, long gloves and a form fitting, emerald green, scaly bodysuit that stopped halfway up her generously feminine chest.

“Am I earning my keep yet?” she laughed, baring retreating fangs that she licked with a tongue that had, until a few moments ago, been forked. For Cacophony was not the only person who had been moved by Hypatia’s words on the morning of the gathering of the Dregs. Lamia had virtually fallen in love with Hypatia on the spot and would have pledged herself to the cause that day if Hypatia hadn’t been kidnapped. Certainly, when she had tracked Hypatia down and asked to join her, Hypatia had been pleased to find out that Lot’s mockery of Lamia’s powers had been inaccurate. It wasn’t that she could become invisible. It wasn’t that she could turn herself into a snake.

It was that she could turn herself into an invisible snake.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Valerie and Oliver spent much of the fortnight that followed their meeting together, seeing each other at least at night ten days out of fourteen. Aside from cooking her a meal, which just never really ended up happening, Oliver got to do everything he’d wanted to do. He already owned a copy of Tusk, and Valerie’s favourite movie – Once Upon a Time in the West – happened to be on tv one of the nights she’d spent at his place. Or rather, his friend’s place – so he’d been there the whole time, rather deliberately making a point of it being his place and that they should be grateful he’d given them space. Which they were: Valerie had even brought a bottle of scotch for him that night as thanks. But she’d also moaned as loudly as she possibly could when she was in bed with Oliver that evening as well.

Valerie kept expecting it to get worse again. She kept expecting this lightness in her heart to fade. She kept expecting herself to get sick of Oliver for no good reason, to start finding his mannerisms – his cheek; his occasional, quiet silliness – annoying. But she didn’t, not even when she discovered something about Oliver that was pretty unarguably a character flaw: that he was very moody, and that sometimes he was dour and nearly silent for hours at a time, which he didn’t seem to be able to help. But, even then, he never got snappy. Even then his company was just less pleasant, not unpleasant. Nor did Oliver grow tired of Valerie’s bluntness, how she would declare quite strong opinions about things as a way of getting around having to talk about them, or how her jokes were sometimes a bit clumsy. Their time together kept being nice. Valerie, in herself, kept feeling… okay. It was like being a chronic migraine sufferer, and then suddenly waking up to find that your migraines had stopped, for no reason. Because if they had stopped for no reason, they could come back for no reason.

The hardest moment came when Oliver rather innocently asked how Valerie’s father was, since he already knew that Ulysses had been sickly. At no point had Valerie been more tempted to flat-out lie to him.
“I’ve… cut ties with him,” Valerie said. “I’ve made sure he’s okay for money, and—” She’d gone too quickly, and she had to stop; literally to catch her breath. “I… can’t have that man in my life anymore. I can’t.”
“Why?” Oliver immediately regretted asking. That Valerie had said as much as she had was obviously straining her trust of him already.
“Because I hate him, Oliver. I hate him and he deserves it.” There was a cold, bored simplicity in her voice, even though this was the first time she’d expressed her feelings so plainly. It was not a thing that people said of their fathers without ambivalence, and yet to Oliver’s ear there hadn’t been a hint of reservation.

The conversation ended there, and their meeting ended only a few minutes afterward. For that evening, and for the next day or so Valerie thought she was right back to square one. She began to think that her time with Oliver had been a holiday: pleasant, but ultimately meaningless. Transient. Because she had seen her hatred as so taboo for so long, because she had hidden it so deeply, she had blown up its significance in her mind. Since it already was important, in its awful way, she’d inflated it to monstrous proportions. At one and the same time she was absolutely confident in what she said to Oliver, and she was absolutely confident that it made her a terrible, hateful person.

And then one morning she woke up and she just didn’t feel like that anymore. She went to work. She had a pretty good day. She made herself fried chicken, drizzled in absurd quantities of chilli oil, with latkes fried in garlic butter. She went for a walk, found a quiet bench in a park, and read a few pages of a book she’d been meaning to finish for the last two years. When it got a bit too dark for that, she started going back, and pulled her phone out of her pocket. She dialled what was now the first number on her speed-dial. They picked up after two rings, and Valerie heard herself being greeted by a warm and friendly voice.
“Hey, Saskia,” Valerie replied.
***

“Oh, Valerie, sweetie, he sounds like an absolute stud,” Saskia laughed. “If I had a handsome, muscular, sensitive soldier-boy waiting at home for me – why I’d never even make it out the front door. Ow!” She was sitting with her feet resting in Piper’s lap. Piper, who had until then been lazily stroking Saskia’s calves, had pinched her on one of her toes.
“You okay?” Valerie asked.
“I’m fine, dearest,” Saskia replied. “Just got a little nip from the serpent of envy.” She blew a kiss at Piper, who responded in kind after giving her the finger.
“I hope I didn’t interrupt anything,” Valerie said. “I just wanted to see how you were. How… things are.”
“I’m well. I really am,” Saskia said. “Poor Marjorie’s got sick, which is bad for her, but it means I’m filling in as acting features editor.”
“Oh, hey! That’s awesome. Even if it’s only temporary that’s gotta be pretty good experience, right?”
“Oh it is. Power’s gone straight to my head. I go into work each day with a bullwhip. I’m having my throne installed next week.” She heard Valerie laugh, properly laugh, and she pressed her phone against her chest in affection.
“Actually, Valerie,” Saskia said, putting the phone back to her ear, “I have to confess I got a little trouble with the fellas in the tall chairs.”
“What happened?”

Saskia was understating it. She had come close either to being fired or resigning in protest. The Portland Sun had not by any means been alone in hammering Milo Patáky at every chance they got. Saskia was a decent enough features editor, but she was a much worse one than she could have been, because she devoted so much of her energy to penning, then arguing for, then printing as much invective as she could possibly get away with.

Since Valerie had left Maine, Patáky had been pulled in for questioning – by the Portland local P.D., by the state police, by the F.B.I. – twelve times, on each occasion Saskia had someone telling her exactly when that interview was taking place, and every time he walked out of the relevant station – as he always did – Saskia was there shoving a tape recorder in his face. On only one occasion had Milo bothered to look at her, and Saskia had been furious with herself for how frightened it had made her. That was all fine with her superiors, and since her writing about Milo was always furious, well-researched and painfully funny, they were both journalistic and entertaining, and that had proven to be a lucrative combination.

It was Saskia’s article about recently elected state senator, Bob Barton, that had got her in hot water. Saskia’s headline was provocative enough, but she had supplemented her article with photographs of Bob taken by a private investigator she had hired of Barton, in his own home, meeting with Patáky. Barton had somehow found out about this (“I’m sure Patáky’s got a spy at the paper!”) and had threatened to sue the Sun for all it was worth if they dared publish. Barton was wealthy enough, and the Sun small enough, that the proprietor had immediately caved. All parties involved had been furious.

“I take it things are pretty bad, then” Valerie said. “If you were willing to pull something like that.”
“I…” Saskia had not wanted to say anything about the violence. She didn’t want to put pressure on Valerie to return. “Yes, it’s bad,” she admitted. “But it’s not as if public order is in danger of collapsing.” This was true, but only just. More than once Piper had asked Saskia if it might be worth leaving Maine altogether.
“I gotcha,” Valerie said, in as relaxed a voice as she could manage. Thinking along similar lines to Saskia, she didn’t want Saskia to feel that she had said anything wrong.
“How are you, Valerie?” Saskia said, inevitably. She was answered with a long, slow breath that ended in a comically strangled ‘aaagghhh’ sound.
“Better,” Valerie said. “I… I’ve been able to work a few things out. About my father. About myself. About what happened to me, and what I did. About Valora,” she added, surprising herself, and not being entirely sure what she even meant by it. “I tell you what it is, Saskia.”
“What, my darling?”
“I think I figured out what I want,” Valerie said.
Some of it, anyway.
***

Two days later, Valerie and Oliver were together again. He had called her not so much to spend time with her as because he had to leave Virginia, go back home. It had occurred to him that he might never see her again, and he at least wanted to say goodbye. But when they’d met again, Valerie had immediately and passionately kissed him, and it had not felt like a kiss goodbye.
“What are you gonna do now?” Oliver asked her. “Stay here?”
“No,” Valerie said, confidently. “I don’t feel bad about being here. I don’t feel bad about one second of it. But this was… a stop-off.”
“Are you going back to Portland?”
“Yeah,” Valerie said. “I’d be fine with never seeing that fucking city again, but… I have to go back. There’s something I’ve left undone.”
“‘Duty’,” Oliver said. “You think that’d be something I understand with all the, uh, ten-hut stuff… but I never really got it. Doesn’t surprise me that you do, though.”
Valerie turned to Oliver, held him by both his shoulders.
“Do you want this to be over?” she asked him.
“No.” He put his hands on her arms, holding her, gently. “But would a long-distance thing be good for either of us?”
“No,” Valerie replied. “It wouldn’t.” She felt Oliver began to let her go, but she only held him tighter. “You’re not listening. I have to finish this. I have to crush that puny little piece of pond-scum once and for all – but once I have, I am free as a fucking bird, Sergeant Blane.”
She kissed him again, wrapping her arms around his neck. He ran his hands through their hair, and again Valerie was surprised by the softness of his palms. But she didn’t mind it this time. She liked it. She wanted it.
“I want to give this a shot,” Valerie said, pulling away and then pulling close again. “Even if it blows up in our faces, I want this. I want you. I—” Valerie stopped herself. She had been about to say something that wasn’t true. She was silent for a few seconds, and then just as Oliver – abhorring awkwardness – was about to try to fill the vacuum, she found the right words.
“I’m not in love with you, Oliver,” she said. “But I would really fucking like to be.”
__________________________________________________________________________________
It was in slightly more pleasant environs than the first that Cecily called the second meeting of the Dregs. Tucker had found it for her: it was where Maine’s heroes had gathered in the days of Thunderclap, an isolated pavilion that had just enough grandeur to be appropriate but was hidden enough that they could talk freely.
There were fewer, this time, but perhaps that was better. As well as Cacophony and Lamia, Blue Bacchus and Buzzsaw had returned. And since Buzzsaw had returned, so had Red Fang. Everyone there took Hypatia seriously. Even when there was disagreement, there was no scoffing.
“Before we get down to brass tacks,” Hypatia said, “I thank you all for coming. It is not an easy thing, the life we have chosen. Staying away would not have made you cowards. Lamia was right when she spoke last time: there is an element of philanthropy in what we do.
“But,” Hypatia went on, “I wish to address to the issue of funding first. The Morrow Foundation turned us down. I have not yet heard back regarding the federal grant, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t hold out too much hope for that. Perhaps when we’ve built more of a reputation. Yet there is another path open to us. One which, I hope, will persist even beyond this crisis. I have begun putting together the paperwork for us to register… as a trade union.”

“A…?” Red Fang laughed, in surprise rather than mockery. “A what? A trade union of superheroes?”
“Why not?” Hypatia said. “We provide a service. Since we’re paid directly by the state I’d even go so far as to say that we qualify as public servants. We provide labour – very dangerous labour – for which we are woefully underfunded. And as all this violence has proven, our services are, if not essential, at the very least extremely valuable.”

“Would we have to reveal our identities if we did that?” Blue Bacchus asked. “I’m happy to fight. I’m happy to put my life on the line, but these guys we’re fighting are… real gangsters. If – if our families—”
“I don’t believe that is the case,” Hypatia said, with a comforting smile. “If it is, Bacchus, then we will of course abandon this possibility. That would risk far more than we would stand to gain.” She did a quick scan of the assembled company. They seemed, if not convinced, at least open to the suggestion. “Then, at least provisionally, do we agree that we should… we… er…”
In an instant, Cecily completely forgot what she was talking about. As she had scanned the pavilion, she’d noticed that there was someone else with them, hanging back and partly hidden by one of the poles supporting the pavilion’s roof. Cecily stared at her, frozen.

“I… uh…”
“I’m sorry,” the newcomer said, so the others noticed her too. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. Please go on.”
“R-right,” Cecily stammered. “Uh, yes, so – shall we put it to a vote, then?”
It was unanimous, or there was one abstention if one counted the newcomer. The discussion moved after that to practical matters; co-operation with law enforcement; tactics; attempts at identifying the current map of alliances and enmities between Maine’s criminal elements. Cecily would discover later that much of the information she’d gathered was out of date simply because of the brutal speed with which Patáky waged his war, but it was sufficiently recent history that it proved useful.

Certainly the others new that there was something going on between Hypatia and this lovely, athletically beautiful newcomer. She wore a red dress with blue, vertical stripes, hugging tight against her taut figure, with a pair of small bicycle shorts under the hem of her skirt, and a pair of relatively ordinary running shoes. Of all assembled, she looked the least like a superhero – or she would have done, but for a strange seriousness in her features, and the little wisps of scarlet flame that occasionally emanated from her body. One or two of them even thought they might recognize her, but they kept such suspicions to themselves. And, when the meeting was over, they left the newcomer and their de facto leader alone together.
When they were sure everyone was gone, the two approached each other.
“Hello Cecily,” the one said.
“Hello Maria,” said the other.
***
It was only now, as they swapped stories about the perils they had faced, that Cecily found out about the message she had left when in Lot’s clutches.
“I didn’t realize,” she said. “I was drugged… I didn’t remember. Maria, I’m sorry. Oh my word, is that why you came up to Maine? Because you thought I was still in danger?”
“No,” Maria replied. She laughed, lightly. “Cecily, you already told me you were alright.”
“I… did?”
“Yeah. The same night you were rescued.”
“Oh.” She blinked. “I don’t remember that either. I, er, must have been really pretty heavily drugged indeed.”
“You sounded it,” Maria said, smiling.
“I didn’t say anything stupid, did I?”
“No. You started singing at one point, but nothing stupid.”
“Oh my god. Oh, god that’s really awful.” Cecily covered her face with her hands. “I have a terrible singing voice!”
Maria was forced to agree.
Cecily took off her mask, blinking her large, soft-blue eyes as they adjusted to the light. Suddenly it became much more real. She was here. Maria was here, in Maine, and it seemed very likely that Maria had come for her. She wanted to ask, but she felt shy. She’d forgotten how attractive Maria was. Slender, and strong, her features writ with quiet intelligence. She couldn’t face that directly. Not yet.

“You were telling me,” Cecily said, “about this… Sheldon person – how his experiment backfired?”
“Yes.” Maria flexed her hands. “It feels strange. I keep expecting it to wear off, but it never does. She opened her hand and, in her, palm she manifested a ball of ethereal, scarlet flame.
To Cecily’s eyes it was familiar and unfamiliar. It was the same colour in which Maria’s powers had always appeared, but it was thicker; brighter. It swirled in a delightful pattern, its surface rippling as though it had liquid substance. Finally, it resolved into a particular shape, and Cecily gasped in delight when she saw that it was taking the shape of a rose.
“I could detonate it,” Maria said. “It would be much stronger than what I used to be able to produce.”
“Could I see?” Cecily asked. The thought of Maria being even more powerful than she had been was strangely exciting.
But Maria shook her head.

“I shouldn’t,” she said, looking around at the trees surrounding the pavilion. “Even if I launched it into the air, I… I think I’d start a forest fire.” She withdrew the rose back into her hand. “I’m… not sure what my limits are now. It’s difficult to experiment when you know you can do so much damage.”
“Of course,” Cecily replied. “How do you feel about that? About this new strength?”
“It’s a little scary,” Maria said. And yet she didn’t seem frightened.

Maria saw that Cecily was staring at her, with something like wonder, and she felt butterflies dancing in her chest. It was so pleasant to be back with Cecily, to be in her gentle company, under the watch of her gentle eyes. She’d had some ridiculous idea that Cecily wouldn’t want to see her, that she would be angry that Maria hadn’t come with her to Maine in the first place. But even as she’d been having these thoughts Maria knew them to be bunk, and it was even more obvious now.
“I like your costume,” she said, before she’d realized it.
“Oh!” Cecily laughed, lightly. “Yes, of course, you haven’t seen it have you?” She moved back, gave Maria a little twirl. “It’s quite dramatic, isn’t it?”
Maria, looking at Cecily’s graceful, elegant figure in a skintight leotard, long gloves, and thigh-high, leather boots, had to own that ‘dramatic’ would probably not have been the first word that came to her mind.

The two left the pavilion. It felt somehow exposed, and they both knew they wanted privacy. They moved to the bleachers of an open-air theatre that was nearby, out of season and unused. They tucked themselves into a corner that would be hidden from view to outsiders. They sat next to each other. Close to each other.
“Why did you come, Maria?” There was no accusation in Cecily’s voice.
“A few reasons,” Maria replied. “Something changed. Or… I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed before, anyway. When I thought I was going to lose my powers – well, it’s the obvious thing, isn’t it? I never realized how much they meant to me.” She shook her head. “But it’s more than that. I really believe they were given to me for a reason. My new power as well. Something wants me to have it, and I should use it. Using it here seems a better place than most. And –”

Maria paused. She didn’t want to get this wrong.
“When I think of you,” she said, “I think of you alone. Not in a bad way,” she quickly added. “You’re very, very strong, and I think you can deal with… burdens better than most people. You see that something needs doing, and you just do it. It’s who you are. I think if the weight of the world fell on you, you’d find a way to hold it, and you’d do it with grace. I think if I left, and all those people you’d managed to win over left as well, and it was just you against this… gangster, I think you’d find a way to beat him, because you’re intelligent, brave, and – and I think you can be ruthless when you have to be. I think you could do it all alone.” She put her hand on Cecily’s. “But you shouldn’t have to.”
“The only thing I don’t like about you,” Cecily replied, betraying signs of emotion that only those who knew her very well would be able to detect, “is that you don’t believe that of yourself.” She clasped Maria’s hand between the two of hers, squeezed it.

“I love you, Maria,” Cecily said.
Maria reached out to Cecily, and stroked her face, delighting in how Cecily shivered at her longed-for touch, feeling how Cecily fell against her in exhausted relief.
“I love you, Cecily,” she whispered.
They kissed. It was the second time. There would be hundreds of thousands more.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Only one thing remained before Valerie could return. She had to go into the water one last time.
She waited until the very night she planned to leave. She had spent most of it with Oliver, knowing that she would not see him again for quite a long time, in all likelihood. She left him in his bed and had felt that he was not happy to see her go, for reasons beyond the obvious. She imagined that he would be in one of his moods for a fair while. But that was okay. He could take care of himself. Insofar as he was weak, it was only in the way that we all are.

Naked, Valerie plunged into the ocean. She wanted it to be cold. She wanted it to be dark. She wanted it to hurt, a little, though it didn’t really. Everything else was perfect, though. It was very strange, actually. Later, when she looked at how long she had actually spent swimming, she’d seen from her watch that it couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes. But it had felt like hours. It had felt like she’d travelled for thousands of miles, surging through the water like a torpedo. She’d felt like the expansion of the universe was happening right in front of her, for her, that space was appearing entirely for her to inhabit, in the depths of the black cosmos of the Atlantic Ocean.

Nor, in all that time, did Valerie feel the slightest need to breathe. Her lungs made no demands of her. Her body’s strength did not even begin to fail. She was able to stay in the deep, stay in the dark, rubbing her body against the hard seafloor as she swam against it. It seemed empty. There were no fish. No limpets or mussels on any rocks. No rocks, even. No seaweed. Just sand below, and water above.

Valerie stopped. She let her dense body sink, and she stood on her feet. She could see the surface of the water, which shouldn’t have been possible in such low light. But she could see it rippling, melting, reforming, shifting. She waved her hand, sloshing water between her fingers, and it felt as if she could see the precise relationship between her movements and the ripples of the water’s surface. And in the middle of this strange gnosis, she saw it.

It hovered above Valerie, ten metres above her, and maybe a hundred metres away. She could barely see it. Even when she looked at it, she was not sure that she could see it. It was still. It was staring at her. She wondered if it was dead, but when a little moonlight shone through, she saw that it was very much alive. She saw, too, the scars that covered its silver-grey skin. It couldn’t have been what she wanted it to be. It couldn’t have been real at all, let alone the very same one that she had seen before. She felt an emotion that she could not name and searched for words to say to it that did not exist. She wanted to embrace it. She wanted to kiss it. Instead, she just opened her mouth and bellowed at it. It must have heard her, because it twitched, and then thrashed like it was wrestling with prey. It turned its scarred side to her, and she saw the dark orb of its left eye watching her. Then it turned away, and vanished forever into the liquid night of the sea.
Damselbinder

The Perils of Valora 4-Epilogue: “What a Way to Make a Living”
Things were completely different, and they were exactly the same. Darla had made another run from New Brunswick into Maine, at the whips of the same masters. She had not been told that anything had changed. But she knew that it had. For one thing, she didn’t deliver the Clios’ heroin to the same people anymore: she knew that the new ones worked for that man she’d met before, that awful man who’d made her piss herself in fear and had – Darla was sure – left her alive solely to amuse himself.

For another thing, it wasn’t even “the Clios’ heroin” anymore. Just “the Clio’s”. Two of the three brothers were dead, and the remaining one did not preside over a thriving criminal enterprise anymore. He presided over a rump state that had been left to him by a mockingly magnanimous enemy. Another reason that Darla knew things had changed was that her return trips had become easier: Darla left Canada with as many bricks as ever, but she returned with substantially less cash.

She was coughing the entire way back. She was increasingly unwell these days. The way her doctor had put it to her was that ‘none of [Darla’s major organs] had failed, but they’re all getting there.’ The doctor was not a psychiatrist, so she could not be blamed for having failed to realize that her words had only made Darla despair, and embrace her vices with greater enthusiasm than ever.

Her cousin, Jo-Beth, was in the car with her this time, asleep in the back seat. She had a boyfriend and three children – two of hers, one of his - waiting at home, and while Darla was very grateful to have her as a relief driver, she did sometimes wonder how her cousin managed to keep on this line of work. If they got caught, Jo-Beth would lose her children forever. Need was part of it: Jo-Beth was hopelessly addicted to online poker. But though Jo-Beth said more or less the right things about her kids and, as far as Darla had seen, was quite nice to them, Darla suspected that if Jo-Beth could snap her fingers and make her children somebody else’s children instead, she would do it.

As Darla thought this, it occurred to her that she would have taken them. She loved children. Even as a child she’d loved children, always sad that her parents had never had any more after her. She’d been afraid to have any herself, though. All the men that both were attracted to her and that she was attracted to were… unsuitable. Thinking on the empty ruin of her life, Darla thought it was probably for the best. She was not like some ageing bachelors and bachelorettes, who looked back on their lives thinking that children could somehow have saved them from all their mistakes. Rather, Darla thought that she likely would have made every mistake exactly the same, only they would have been worse for the additional suffering they would have inflicted.

Two hours after crossing the U.S.-Canada border, Darla arrived in New Brunswick. It was seven in the morning, and it felt pretty good to be home. Being in America had become especially frightening for Darla: it felt like his territory, like she could feel his cruel, ratty little eyes boring into her from out of every window in the country. She knew that his influence extended into her country now as well, but still: she was here, and he was there, and that would do for now.

A man Darla recognized was waiting for her for the handoff. She didn’t know his name, but she knew he’d originally been the lieutenant of Jacques, the oldest of the Clio brothers, and the first to be killed when the war – brief as it had been – had started. Jean, the ‘fun-loving’ member of the trio, was dead as well now, so the lieutenant had drifted all the way down to working for Gerald, the middle brother and generally considered to be the smallest fry of the three. From what Darla gathered, the deaths of his co-heirs hadn’t made him seem much larger.

Darla woke Jo-Beth, and the two got out. The lieutenant mumbled a greeting at them and moved immediately to take custody of the delivery. Darla had stashed it in under a plate under the trunk, accessible only by unscrewing a plate on the underside of the car. The lieutenant reached in, fiddled around a bit, and retrieved two large briefcases. He placed them on the ground, kneeled down, opened them, and carefully checked the money inside.
“Okay,” he said. “Good work.”
Jo-Beth got back in the car. Darla was about to join her, but the lieutenant put his hand on her shoulder.
“Not you,” he said. “The man wants to speak with you.”
Darla went still.

“Hey, Darla!” Jo-Beth shouted, leaning her head out of the window. “We goin’ or not?”
“I-it’s okay,” Darla said. “You just go on home now.”
Jo-Beth shrugged, not noticing how frightened her cousin was. She drove off.
“Follow me,” the lieutenant said.
Only now did Darla realize that he was carrying a gun.
The lieutenant – who introduced himself as “Mr. Rossi” when he remembered Darla had never spoken to him before – took Darla to a large house on the edge of town. It resembled the other houses on its street in most respects. It was distinctive only in that its windows were barred, and it was surrounded by barbed wire.

Darla was led inside. It was a nice house, actually. Not what she’d have expected from a gangster. It was tastefully decorated. But it was bright, colourful – fun. There was personality in it. When she was led into the living room, she continued to admire the décor, even when she saw Gerald Clio reclining on a couch inside.

“Bonjour,” Gerald said, with gruff cheer. “I see you are admiring my maison, eh? I paid for all of it but give Jean the credit for the… colour.” He grimaced. “He’ll be giving interior decorating tips to St. Peter now, I’m sure. What the fuck, eh?” he suddenly shouted. “Sit down! Relax! You’re my guest. Take the chill pill as the Yankees say, eh? Hon hon hon!”

Darla did as she was told. A maid came in, handed her a glass of wine. It was still only half past seven in the morning, but she didn’t feel able to refuse.
“It is good to see you again, Darla,” Gerald said. They had indeed met before, but Darla was surprised he was speaking to her so warmly. “Eh, Rossi, leave the moolah there, eh?”

Mr. Rossi obeyed, laying the suitcases down on a glass coffee table in front of Gerald. He found a wall and leaned against it.
“Okay,” Gerald said. He covered his face with one hand. He was nearing fifty, but he had aged very gracefully. “Let me explain the situation to you, Darla. My brothers are dead. Half my men are dead. My business is collapsing. All I am now is a wholesaler to the man who murdered Jacques et Jean, and – and this was always more their enterprise than mine, eh?”
“Um—”
“So I am finished,” Gerald said, and only now did Darla realize he was quite drunk. “I am selling out. Selling off. Packing my bags and going back to Quebec. But you, Darla,” he said, pointing dramatically at her, “you’ve suffered for me and my brothers. You’ve done good work for us. So here,” he said, shoving one of the briefcases in her direction. “Take it. It’s all yours.”
Darla thought he was mocking her.
“Mr. Clio,” she said. “You’re not… you’re not serious.”
“I am as serious as a man with this haircut can be,” he cackled. “How much is in there?”
“Um… about one-hundred thousand dollars, Mr. Clio.” Darla swallowed. She was shaking.
“What?!” Gerald said. “One-hundred thousand? My god, I must be crazy.” He reached out his hand – and pushed the other case to her as well. “How could I possibly think of being so stingy?”

Darla began immediately to cry. This was beyond life-changing. She could buy a house. She could afford private doctors. She could retire. Immediately. Live the rest of her life in comfort. She would go to the country. She – she’d get a cat. Three cats. And a dog.

“Jesus Christ, it is only money, eh?” Gerald laughed. He stood up, picked up one of the suitcases, intending to put it in Darla’s hands. But he stopped. “Jesus, is it really only 100 grand in here?” He didn’t want to be too generous, and he opened the case.
He stared at it. He looked at Darla. His drunkenly pleasant face was frozen in shock. Shock that twisted into rage, and fear. He screamed furiously at Darla, turning the case so that she could see the large explosive device attached to its interior.
Darla didn’t scream. She didn’t understand. She had checked the contents. There was no way. There was no way in hell that a bomb had been stashed in there. There was only one possibility, and slowly her head turned to look at Mr. Rossi. But when their eyes met, she saw that his eyes were watering. He had checked the suitcases. He had seen there was money, and nothing but money inside. He had not put anything in himself.
“How?” he whimpered, before the bomb exploded, killing all three of them instantly.
__________________________________________________________________________________
When John Mann, Milo Patáky’s second-in-command, received the call, he’d been pleasantly surprised. The explosive had only been meant to kill Rossi, who had been the one really running the Clio racket after Jacques and Jean Clio had been taken care of. That Gerald had been killed as well was a delightful bonus.

“Alright,” John said. “Get a message to Chirac’s mob. Tell him they’re our connect now, or they’re nobody’s.” He hung up the phone, smiled.
Victory, after victory, after victory. He felt like a general in an army, and he rather liked it. He’d been worried at first, when they kept on expanding, picked a fight with just about every mob within 100 miles in either direction. But thanks to his boss, and thanks to him to a fair extent, they’d won every fight. That situation with Hypatia and the other supers was concerning, but John was completely confident that he’d find a way to kill them.

He was in Augusta. Milo’s holdings there were more on the legitimate side, but he still found that he had plenty to do there. Increasingly he’d been given more responsibility over the clean side of Milo’s businesses, and as a result his name was on a fair number of deeds. On paper, he was worth several hundred thousand dollars in his own right. Even in practice, he was doing pretty damn well.

For this reason, the two-storey house he walked into was, technically, his own. So were half the houses on the street. None of them were worth much: Milo had bought them because he had inside information that the land on which they were built was being eyed-up as the site of a new Wal-Mart. But the one John had walked into was already in use.

John went straight inside, locking the door behind him. His nose crinkled: the whole house had a strong, chemical smell. As he approached the basement, that smell only became stronger. By the time he’d actually reached it, he felt faintly ill.
The basement was divided starkly into two halves. On the first, there was a bed, a toilet, a sink. On the other, a medical refrigerator, containing about ten blood samples, and four or five samples of hair, nails, and other biological detritus. There was also a duffel bag, a large pile of cocaine bricks and a chair between them with a woman sitting in it.

There was an I.V. drip in her arm, fed by a solution bag containing a clear, light-brown liquid. Her eyes were half-closed, and she barely seemed aware of where she was. When John came in, though, she did look up at him, and he saw a brief hint of a scowl on her face. But she didn’t stop what she was doing.
There were two other people in there with her. One who was half guard half nurse, keeping an eye on her vitals and thwarting the decreasingly frequent escape attempts. The other was more of a manual labourer. He would pick up a brick of cocaine, he would put it in the woman’s hand, and the brick would vanish, turning completely invisible. The labourer would then, carefully, place it inside the bag. The bricks would only reappear at a programmed moment, or after exactly 29 hours and 45 seconds. The woman had been ‘persuaded’ to program them to reappear only when they were exposed to a specific radio frequency. It was a method that had allowed Patáky to smuggle drugs with complete impunity for weeks.

But when the woman saw John, she closed her fist. She mumbled something that was intended to be one swear word or other.
“Come on,” the nurse-guard said. “Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”
The woman unclenched her fist. She couldn’t help it. It wasn’t that she was afraid of punishment. She just couldn’t disobey a direct order with that drip in her arm.

“We got any new ones?” the nurse-guard asked. He was speaking to John.
“Just one.” He handed over a small glass vial. There was blood in it. “I don’t know how useful it’s gonna be, though. How did they explain it… it’s like… you can hide yourself, or control shadows. Something like that, anyway.” He looked at the woman in the chair. The very tips of her hair were blue, but the rest of her hair had faded back into its plain, natural brown. “You think she’ll be ready for field work soon?”
“I think so,” the nurse replied. “We haven’t had any… problems for a week.”
“Alright. Mr Patáky’s pleased with the results so far, but he wants more. Get it done.”
“Yes, sir.”

John left with a foul taste in his mouth. This was the only thing Milo had done to which he had ever considered objecting. This super had tried to cheat them, so he’d have had no problem just putting a bullet in her head, but this? This was one of the only things that registered on his conscience as evil.
“Hear that, Charlie?” John heard the nurse speaking just before he closed the door behind him. “If you’re good we’ll take you on a field trip.”
John stopped. He grimaced.
Then he kept walking.
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bare_thighz
Henchman
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Posts: 56
Joined: 10 years ago

Guess it's not "NOW COMPLETE" or is it? Is your story completed now?
Damselbinder

bare_thighz wrote:
3 years ago
Guess it's not "NOW COMPLETE" or is it? Is your story completed now?
Ah, you misunderstand somewhat. Valora 4, the fourth full story in the "Perils of Valora" series, is complete. There will be no more uploads on this thread. There will, however, be a "Valora 5." So "Valora 4" is finished, but "the Perils of Valora" isn't.
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