Work Text:
June was halfway through a six-inch stack of photographs when she heard the squeal of tires spitting gravel peak above the rain. Prying herself out of her seat, she frowned in the general direction of the front of the building. Gabriel was supposed to be out prowling the city all night, but she could recognize that rattling, sputtering engine anywhere. Concern blossomed into alarm as she heard the truck door slam and heavy footsteps race awkwardly up the loading ramp, and she hesitated only long enough snatch her holster off the table and jam it in place against her stomach.
Half the reason she and Gabriel had picked the abandoned post office as their temporary headquarters in Brockton Bay was that the building was build like a fortress, all solid concrete walls and thick metal doors. June peered around the corner just in time to see them leap open to a familiar, albeit drenched, face.
Gabriel—Trenchknife when he was in costume—was too professional to ever sag in relief, but the fact that she saw a shudder pass through him sent all kinds of alarm bells clamoring. His short-trimmed hair was matted like she’d never seen, and huge mottled bruises spilled across his jaw and down his neck. A moment later she noticed the blood.
“Gabe, what’s—fuck! Fuck!”
“Arm is broken,” he ground out as she slung the other arm over her shoulder and dragged him deeper into the building. Broken was an understatement; she’d seen a lot over the years and her stomach still lurched as she glanced at the brutalized limb. Hell, it was hanging on by a thread—
“Cape threw me through a wall.” He had a way of making every sentence sound like a report. This time the effect was weakened by a pained hiss. “Male, middle-aged, Nazi getup. Brute. Close-quarters specialist.”
“Yeah, that’s—that’s great.” Talking was a good sign, but adrenaline could cover up a dozen bullet holes. First, get him on the couch. She didn’t see anything, but the coat was going to have to go. Trauma kit—shears, tourniquet, gauze, bandages. Then fluids—
She bolted for the other room.
“June!” Her feet skidded against the floor.
“Was being followed. Tried to lose them on the way over. Had to focus on getting here in time. Not sure if I managed both.”
Her head was too crowded. One thing at a time. Wounds first.
Gabe was breathing shallower when she got back a minute later, but he was still conscious. She grit her teeth and forced herself to take a good look at the injury. It was about exactly as bad as she expected.
The tourniquet they kept in the truck—thanks, Foster—was doing an excellent job at keeping the blood loss to merely ‘ruining.’ The oily brown muck bubbling out of Gabriel’s pores tenuously held the broken pieces together, but it was a patch job at best. His power would make an absolute mess of things unless she stitched it back into roughly the right shape first. She started with the gauze, and then moved on to prepping an IV. It gave her enough time to finally face what he’d said.
“…about that cape.”
“—as soon as you’re stable, we head for the opposite end of town. Lie low for a day, then circle back and stakeout the post office—”
The muffled growl of an engine rolled over the post office. Gabe stiffened beneath her fingers, and something cold and sharp congealed in her gut. Her fingers crawled over to the grip poking out of her waistband.
Seconds passed, and then she almost jumped out of her skin as the front doors boomed, ringing like a gong. She whipped her pistol out of the holster, waiting for the screech of metal giving way, and then… nothing.
“Last time I checked I didn't think we were here for any of these assholes,” she muttered to Gabriel. He snorted—a rare display of emotion breaking through the stoic facade.
“Unsurprisingly, the Nazi didn't need a reason to pick a fight. Made contact with him by accident down by the Docks; didn't get so much as a word in edgewise.”
“Maybe he recognized you from your army days.”
“Very funny.” His tone hinted he may have thought otherwise.
Despite the banter, the second boom startled her just as badly as the first—this time echoing from what sounded like halfway around the side of the building, harsh with the crack of splintering rock. Her breathing picked up against her will.
This… little fucker! There wasn’t even a door over there!
“I don’t suppose this is the part where you say you can take him,” she forced out, the attempt at humor falling over dead the moment it emerged. Gabriel glanced away.
“I do not like my odds,” he begrudgingly admitted.
Yeah. Yeah, neither did she. And yet, as methodical slams began to ring out once more from the front of the building, she found the worst of the tension draining out of her arms, the infinitesimal shaking that she hadn’t even noticed stilling as the uncertainty fell away and she finally acknowledged the only remaining path forward.
“Well, guess this one’s on me, then.”
She wrenched the back door open with a squeal of rusty metal, and the repetitive booms from the front side of the building died. The keys almost slipped through her fingers as she hurriedly locked the door behind her, and then she was officially committed. Knuckles white around her gun, she shuffled blindly into the foliage.
The yard was black as pitch. For a lot on the edge of a city, she might as well have been out on another planet—the overgrown trees surrounding the property swallowed up any light trying to creep in from Brockton proper. She groped through overgrown brush by feel and the vague memory of walking a lap of the property. Nature had reclaimed the yard in the years since the post office must have been abandoned, grass devolved into a wild tangle of waist-high grass, shrubs, and stacks of illegally-dumped trash. At least the lot itself was simple: a big box of a building on the side of a hill, yard on three sides and a gravel drive sloping down to the front.
At night, in the thin mist coming down, she could barely see her own hand in front of her face. She had to orient by the slope beneath her feet, feeling the way the ground rose from the back of the yard towards the front. Hunkering down in the grass at the bottom of the hill, she bit her lip and breathed. In and out. Her pulse throbbed in her ears.
Keep it simple. Keep it straightforward. She didn’t have powers; she couldn’t turn invisible or fly or lift a car above her head. But she had a gun and she wasn’t fucking afraid to use it. This wasn’t going to be a fight.
From around the left side of the building, light crept through the leaves and tree trunks and rain.
The tiny little dot—no more than a penlight—may as well have been blinding in the dark. It drifted around the corner at waist height, sweeping over the yard mere feet from her hiding spot, and landed on the door.
“Come on,” she thought, heart hammering in her chest. “Just a little bit closer.” Inch by precarious inch she raised her gun, pointing at the single glowing dot in the stygian darkness. She could barely breathe. Her chest felt it was underwater.
A branch cracked—
She blasted away in one continuous barrage of noise, shot after shot hammering her over the head with light and noise shattering the darkness. Muzzle flashes picked out a figure reeling back in black and red, penlight tumbling from it’s surprised hands—
Her instincts screamed and she dove to the side as something tore through the air. Whippy branches tangled and grabbed at her jacket and thorns bit into her palms. Adrenaline pounding through her veins screamed at her to move, but as the echoes of the gunshots faded she forced herself still. She waited in silence, hoping desperately…
“…you’re a sneaky fucking rat, aren’t you?” A man’s voice drifted out of the darkness, and her gut turned to ice.
Because of course. She knew that at least two of those shots had connected. For all the good that it did, apparently.
She wanted to scream in pure frustration, to throw the gun at his head and strangle him with her bare hands. Self-preservation kept her silent and motionless, low in the grass. Ahead of her in the darkness, another branch broke. Slowly, carefully, she stretched out one foot, inching forwards one single movement at a time—
Wind whipped above her head as something smashed through the trees at what would have been chest height. She heard the voice snarl.
“I know you’re out here somewhere.” The fact that he sounded pissed off was the only thing that kept her from giving up entirely. Maybe the gunshots had done something, even if they hadn’t put him down. Or maybe he was just annoyed that he was out flailing around in the dark like an idiot. Not that it mattered, because what was she supposed to do—
She stretched her senses to their limit; the stench of cordite clogged her nose. There had to be something. She wasn’t going to go out like this, like some kind of chump that popped a couple of shots off before the villain of the week splattered her across the wall—
She picked a familiar sound out of the dark.
Fuck it. If the plan doesn’t work, improvise.
Lifting the gun, she fired blindly at the taunting voice. The flash of light revealed just how badly she had missed, but she had eyes for only the stretch of ground in front of her and the side of the building. She burned it into her memory in the split-second lightning-flash, and then took off uphill at a sprint. Branches shattered behind her, the sound of a rock’s ricochet clattering to the ground.
Every instinct in her body screamed that she was about to run face-first into a wall or a tree, but she tucked her head and pumped her legs as fast as they would carry her. The world became a blind smear of sensation—wind whipping across her face, breath clawing out of her lungs, and then she saw a tiny pinprick of amber light appear to the right. A single dim bulb pulled her forwards mothlike to the flame.
A latch chunked. Leather squeaked. One last click told her she was ready.
She heard the cape threatening all kinds of sick shit as he came around the corner, and she took one last steadying breath. Then she flipped on the truck’s headlights and floored it.
It was maybe forty feet to the corner, but even with one hand thrown up to block the sudden glare the cape realized what she was doing. He leapt to the side—and chose wrong.
She jerked the wheel and smashed him into the side of the post office, pinned between two tons of steel and a solid concrete wall. The windshield exploded into glass pebbles and something in her collarbone screamed as she jerked against the seatbelt, but she fumbled the gun up with her left hand and pointed it at his head.
He twitched, and the entire car shook, thousands of pounds of metal bucking backwards an inch. She emptied the rest of the magazine into his skull. Even then, she could see them land like heavy punches instead of mortal wounds.
It was enough. Each shot rocked his head against the wall, and by the fourth he slumped over, eyes glazed. She clambered weakly out of the car and staggered into the post office. Gabriel was waiting for her, half-upright and every muscle tense despite his dangerous pallor.
“Got the fucker,” she spat out.
Out in the yard, a pair of looted keys to some kind of German sports car in hand, she eyed the unconscious villain as Gabriel finished leveraging himself into the passenger seat of their newly-acquired vehicle.
“We’re really just going to leave him?” Her fingers itched towards her stomach. Gabriel shot her a look. She shot him a look right back.
“He wasn’t going to let you go. Nazi piece of shit chased us all the way home.” Her partner grimaced.
“No. No, he wasn’t. Because we don’t have a team of fifteen other capes that will avenge us.”
Together, they stared in silence.
“This is such bullshit,” she finally said. “You know what, fuck this city. Let’s go home.”