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“No, no, no, no. No, we won’t be doing that.”
Colm reaches up to take Janelle by the elbow. Her wings spill shadowy energy into the dark alleyway. He always thought they smelled pleasant, like charcoal and oil. Janelle doesn’t respond at first, which more-or-less proves his point, and lifts a few inches off the ground. Colm rises with her, to his displeasure, and his legs kick pinwheels in the air.
“Coop, come on now.”
She comes back to the ground. No, flying hasn’t ever been his forte. He’s happy as a clam to use a team member as a spring board from time to time, but to dangle like a used tissue as Janelle darts through the air? Not really.
“I’m fine.”
“Yeah, you’re fine, I’m fine, we’re all fine. Doesn’t mean I want you to crash-land somewhere.” When she pulls a face at him, Colm drops her elbow. He puts both hands up in defense. “Really, I’m worried.”
And he is. Though she’d never admit it, Janelle can’t hold her alcohol worth a damn. He’s sat by her side as she’s vomited the contents of her stomach into a porcelain throne more times than he can count. Even now, she can’t quite seem to stand still. It’s a graceful stagger, though.
“Let me walk you home.”
The look she gives him is priceless. Colm titters.
“Hey now, I won’t be trying anything. It’d take a real idiot to try something with you.”
“You’d be surprised.”
Colm has never been particularly good at holding his temper, and now he’s drunk on top of it. “Well, hang on. Which men have been tryin’ to have one off with you? They won’t have any dicks left to piss with, when I’m through with ‘em.”
That makes Janelle laugh, and while Colm loves the sound of her laugh, he was being a little serious. This night’s been full of blood and bluster, but the sun hasn’t risen yet. Then again, why push the issue? She is her own woman, now—something that Colm has to remind himself with increasing frequency throughout the day. If she wants to date someone else…
Well, Colm would have a chat with them. A friendly one. Just to make sure things were clear.
Then, she nods. “Alright, then. Walk me home.”
She lives nearby, anyway. It’s a nice apartment, sensible. While Janelle was paid better than Colm ever was on the other side of the line, her gambling habits usually kept her accounts skint. She never was one for sentimentality, either. Colm’s vices might not have been as expensive, but the carnival didn’t pay as well as foreign governments. Poor little louts, the both of them.
The streets are deserted this time of night. When they do see a soul, they’re given a wide berth. Colm’s still spotty with blood, and people avoid Janelle in broad daylight. Nice little breeze going, too. Good to soothe the spirit. He’s also pleasantly full, but not in a way that makes him want to upchuck his burrito into the fine streets of Los Angeles.
Janelle can manage about three steps before veering to one side or the other. It puts Colm on overdrive, flitting so that he can make sure she doesn’t hit the storefronts or fall off the curb. He’s drunk himself, but that never seems to last long anymore. A full stomach is keeping him grounded, too.
“Mechaman, nnh? I wouldn’t have guessed,” Janelle says after a moment.
“Psh, yeah. How much money did you lose in that bet?”
“More than I will admit to you.”
Colm sighs in sympathy. “Yeah, I lost a fair wink as well. I’m going to be honest, I didn’t think he was still kickin’. Sure looks like he’s been on death’s door, though.”
“I think it’s… good, that he told us. Inspires some trust. Though I don’t believe Flambae will see it that way,” she allows, ploddingly. “Secrets would only breed strife. Now we know who he was, what he used to fight for. I approve of it.”
“Yeah, well. It’s not like he had anything to worry from you, anyway. I think you’d kill for the lad, after he kept you on the team.”
That isn’t meant with any derision, either. Janelle might be a hard person to read, but Colm’s gotten used to it over the years. For being a contract killer, she’s a woman of loyalty. Colm respects that a lot. God help you if you’ve wronged her, of course, but she has a code of honor and all. She didn’t need to do that. She chose to do that.
“You’re very fond of him as well.”
“Well, yeah. He kept you, ‘course I’m fond of him.”
He’d thought about roughing the fecker up to make sure he made the right choice, but Colm figured that was a good way to make sure he got kicked. His heart goes out for Sonar, it really does. While Sonar was an uppity, pompous, drug-addled bastard, he was still part of the team well enough. He sent along a bottle of whiskey with Malevola for him, to help ease the pain.
Janelle pauses, long enough for Colm to look up. She has gotten drunk enough to forget where she lives before. Nevermind that they’re right around the corner; if Colm wasn’t here, she might very well sleep against the dumpster. Poor little bird.
“I’m… glad that he is our leader. I’m glad that you are on my team, Colm.”
His heart flutters. Aw, hell.
Colm’s still gone on her. He’s a long, long ways from lying to himself about that. Things had entered a dormant state when they split, when they fell out of contact. The moment she rang him again, though, Colm fell in love all over again. The kind of love that makes you feel sick to your stomach, the kind of love that makes everything else seem small. It’s a right pain in the arse that can be dulled with liquor, but he’s come to a sort-of peace with it.
Thing is, Janelle made him a better man. When you become a better man, you have to be a better man. Doesn’t work so well when you two are both villains.
“Awh, well,” he responds, face warm. “Where else were they gonna put you, eh? Only one team of villain fuck-ups around. Though, for the record, I’m pleased as punch that we’re on the same side again.”
The tips of her fingers brush against his shoulder, and Colm feels that heat through his entire body. Touching is hard. Reminds him of warmer days—when they first met, sure, but a thousand times after that. The weight of her on top of him, or her back against his chest, or her cheek atop his head while the TV played on. While Colm doesn’t put much stock in professional—he was, after all, in the carnival—he’s sometimes grateful for the forced space between them.
“I am, too. I’m only sorry for how long it took for me to get here.”
“At your own pace, Coop. Always at your own pace. C’mon, let’s get you up to bed.”
While the squirming touch almost makes him leave Janelle at the door, he does want to make sure that she doesn’t fall asleep arse-up in her entryway. They head up the stairs and into the main hallway. Easy to tell Janelle’s door from all the others, if only by the amount of scratchmarks on it. She’s less likely to pick a lock with her knives than she is to carve a hole right through it, but it charms him anyway.
Inside is the apartment, same as it ever was. It’s decorated in minimalist gray with a few streaks of black. Some broken knives are repaired in a workstation towards the corner. He brought the coffeetable over when she first moved in. Somewhere to put yer feet up, he had promised. After a long day’s work. There’s still scuffmarks on it from her boots.
Were one to walk into the apartment, they might say Janelle’s got no personality. That’s a laugh. She’s got a brilliant personality, better than most people Colm knows. Just a bit of a trick to get to it, that’s all.
Janelle starts to crumble when they head inside. She rests her shoulder against the wall. When she walks, one of her knives scrapes a long line through the paint, but she doesn’t seem to mind. Colm makes a mental note to fix it later. Or, at the very least, shake down her landlord.
She disappears into the bedroom, and Colm busies himself in the kitchen. He pulls her stepstool over to the sink, pours a glass of water. Colm plucks some Alka-Seltzer and a few painkillers from the bathroom. Janelle eats like a bloody bird sometimes, particularly in the morning, but he schedules a breakfast delivery for round-a-bouts 8 AM. The deliveryboy might get an awful fright, but it’d be good for her.
Everything settled, he sticks his head into the bedroom—
Janelle’s changing. She stands with her back to him, only in her tanktop and underwear. Doesn’t leave much to the imagination. A thousand scars line her body. Most of them happened within the last few years, Colm knows that. She was so bloody good at her job, she barely got touched. Being a hero hurts worse.
“Jaysus,” He holds up his hand to block the view. “Sorry about that. Just wanted to make sure you were settling in alright.”
“A gentleman. I don’t have anything to hide from you.”
Colm hears the sound of sheets rustling and the mattress creasing. “Well, someone on this team has got to be. Not all of us are young randy bastards.” In fact, thinking of Sonar in here fills him with such livid rage that his vision goes a bit red. He drops his hand, takes ahold of the doorframe. Janelle is laying on her side in the fetal position, just under the topsheet. “You keepin’ your makeup on?”
He might be the only person in the world who hears Janelle’s undignified snort. “To hell with my makeup.”
“No, no. I’ll never hear the end of it in the morning. Hang on a tick, I’ve got you.”
Some part of Janelle’s past life—well, her past past life, even before her villainhood—still holds on. While she isn’t the sort to cry in the mirror over spots on her face, Colm’s seen her eyes track them in her reflection as errors to be corrected.
Ballet sounded like a difficult life. While being in a carnival wasn’t always sunshine and daffodils, nobody ever much cared if he got a spot on his face or gained a few pounds. Janelle prefers to have ultimate control over herself. While Colm treasures her unguarded moments, he mostly just a poor sod that just likes seeing the love of his life happy.
Besides, Prism and Flambae will point out a zit, the dickheads that they are, and Colm doesn’t have another fight in him so soon.
Her mirror is smudged and stained with black shadow. Colm swipes the makeup remover and a rag before returning to her side. While his first plan was to place the rag into her own head, Janelle angles her cheek towards him as soon as he appears. He’s not a strong enough man to say no to that.
“Mask off, love—” He’d have a more subtle sensation if he’d been jabbed with a cattle prod. “Eh, sorry. Coop. Let’s take that off.”
And he does. Beneath her metal mask, Janelle’s eyeshadow are two black holes around her eyes. It’s dried onto her cheeks, too, and her lips are smudged from the night. While not one for makeup himself, Colm’s done this part a thousand times. He starts at her cheeks first. The cool solution makes Janelle’s lips part.
While Colm feels sober enough, he knows that he probably wouldn’t have gotten so close if he weren’t tipsy. He tries to do his heart some favors every now and then. Now, it only aches as he washes away his ex-girlfriend’s makeup with blood-dried fingers. She really is the most beautiful woman that he’s ever met, or will ever meet.
Eventually, he moves to wipe off the eyeshadow. Her eyes shut.
“Colm?” Her words are half-swallowed by the liquor.
“I’m not stingin’ you, am I?”
“No… no. Why did we… break up?”
So much for giving his heart some favors. He pauses, rag pressed against her eye, and tries not to let himself revisit a very unhappy memory. That memory always weighs his fists down, makes him numb. Makes him reach for the bottle, even still. If he drinks any more tonight, he will throw up, and he doesn’t want to do that.
“You know why we broke up,” he mutters, more brusquely than he intends. “I stopped bein’ a villain, joined the Phoenix Program. And you… and you… well, you couldn’t.”
Couldn’t feels like the right word. Colm had been feeling run-down for a while. Too many lost fights, too many stabs in the back. He had a girlfriend that he loved more than life itself, sure, but that didn’t fix everything. He’d been burying himself in a deeper and deeper hole, where no light could shine, and he didn’t see a way back up. Just deeper in.
Janelle made him a better man. Janelle made him be the sort of man who didn’t want to hurt people—the love of his life, included. And Colm knew that, if he kept burrowing, he would.
When Blonde Blazer showed up, and gave him a pie-in-the-sky opportunity, he took it. The same opportunity had been offered to Janelle.
She hadn’t.
It had been an oddly amicable conversation. No fighting, no tears. No shouting at each other. Colm had asked her to reconsider. She’d looked frightened—just for a second—and then said that she wouldn’t. That she couldn’t be good like Colm, that she simply didn’t have that sort of seed in her. She loved him, but they would always be on different sides. Incompatible sides.
That was that, then. A few years of their life, gone like that.
There had been tears after. Tears and a lot of booze. It’s a wonder they didn’t throw him off the team, because he didn’t go on a call sober for the first few months of his career at SDN.
Years of that, he received a phone call. 3:49 AM exactly, Colm will always remember. A week after that, Janelle joined the Z-Team.
“We’re on the same side, now,” Janelle murmurs.
What is she getting at? Colm takes the rag away, and looks at his fresh-faced ex-girlfriend. “Yeh, and?”
She creaks her eyes open, stares at him through a narrow slit in her dark eyelashes.
“My heart will always be yours.”
His knees nearly give out.
“Fu—Janelle,” he complains. It isn’t fair. It really isn’t fair, a man can only withstand so much. If he remembers all the nights they shared, with Janelle murmuring beautiful nothings in his ear, then he won’t be showing up to work tomorrow. They’d always had a flirtation with the romantic; Colm struggles to remember the man who slipped poorly-written poetry in Janelle’s suit. Janelle would have killed any person he asked, without hesitation, just for the sake of love.
He had to put all that aside when Janelle first joined the team. She was fragile, Colm could tell. Practically ignored him for the first little while, and he didn’t even blame her. He just helped where he could, introduced her to the team, and hoped everything would work out.
It had, and he’s found some kind of peace. But now?
Just as he’s trying to calm the raging grease fire in his head, Janelle’s hand cups his cheek. She guides him forward, and Colm’s lips part, before—
Before he stops.
“You’re scuttered, darlin’,” he murmurs. He traces his hand along the curve of her cheek, shakes his head. “Ain’t gonna have this talk when your brain’s in the pickle jar.”
Beneath her half-closed lids, her gaze has gone steely. “I’m fine. I mean it. I’d say the same thing to you in the morning, Colm.”
“Then…”
It’s a hard choice. Despite it all, Colm doesn’t think he’s an especially good man. He doesn’t think anyone on the Z-Team feels that they are. While he doesn’t view his sins and successes as tallies, he’s cracked a lot of skulls and un-cracked precisely zero. Part of him wants to give in, to throw his worries to the wind. She might not love him tomorrow, but she loves him now, she’s coming onto him now.
Still. It’s Coop. It’s Janelle.
“Then tell me in the morning, alright?”
He hopes that she does; he fears that she won’t. He supposes that means he’s making the right decision now, even if it hurts to pull his hand away from her face.
“I’m going to head out. You get some sleep, eh? Long night, you deserve it. I’ll see you tomorrow. Make sure to—”
Already, Janelle’s eyes have fallen shut. She’s let her hand fall back on the sheets. Colm’s taken one step away, before he hears Janelle groggily mumble: “Stay?”
She holds her head just enough so that she can point with her chin to the other side. “Over there. Plenty of room.”
Colm really doesn’t know if he should. While he’s confident enough that Janelle won’t try anything else—she isn’t the type to hit her head against the wall, over and over—he isn’t sure whether he’d be able to bear it. After all, Colm hasn’t slept next to her in years. He can still picture everything clearly: her nightmares, her tosses and turns, her soft, groggy hums.
Janelle says, “I still want to talk to you.”
That about seals the deal, he’s afraid. Colm sighs.
He climbs onto the other side of the bed after pulling his shoes off. Most of the blood has dried, at least. Colm undoes his suspenders and undoes the top few buttons of his shirt. As drunkenly passing out goes, that’s better than he usually manages. He is acutely aware of Janelle curled up next to him; if he put out his arm, he could caress her back. He doesn’t. But he does think about it.
Get ahold of yerself, he accuses. His head hits the pillow; he folds his hands against his stomach. At the very least, he is tired. A long fight, a nice dinner, shitty liquor. All of it means that tomorrow will probably hurt like a motherfucker—
Janelle might give it a few more reasons to hurt.
But, right then? He’s comfortable. The woman he loves is nearby, and nobody even died. Well, nobody that he liked died.
Could be worse things in the world.
“That was a good taco place,” Janelle tells him.
Colm smiles, despite himself. That’s what she wanted to talk to me about, was it? “Yeah. Yeah, don’t think I’ve seen it around before.”
“We should go again.”
“Yeah, ‘course we should. See how it fares in the light of day. It reminded me of—do you remember, do you remember that food truck we saved once?”
“Mm. Yes. Malevola refused to remove it from the roof until it served us lunch.”
“That was good grub. What was, what was that thing you had again…?”