Right. Once I had the idea for this — inspired by recent 'interim steps', I figured I should probably hurry up and write it before LordRoustabout gets to the 'real' version of events — so, I probably only had eighteen months or so to work with.
And, yes, I've put the title in Spoiler tags.
Someone was knocking on the front door.
Well, it was more like a heaving pounding, loud and solid against the wood. But, still… someone was knocking on the front door. And quite insistently, at that.
Dragging himself out of bed, he hastily threw on some pants and a half-buttoned shirt. Bleary-eyed, he staggered down the stairs. Because, someone was knocking on the front door.
Why they were knocking, he didn't know. So far as anyone else knew, the house should be long-abandoned. No one saw last night's arrival, finally getting into town shortly after midnight. No one should be aware, and yet… someone was knocking on the front door.
He wasn't worried. He wasn't feeling any threat or concern — actually, he wasn't feeling much of anything except tired, being woken up after so little sleep. By someone who was knocking on the front door.
"I'm coming, I'm coming! Hold yer horses!" he called out, shuffling across the hallway and undoing the bolts. The knocking stopped, and he opened the front door to see who had been knocking at this godforsaken hour in the morning.
"Mr Jack Slash? Brockton Bay PD. You're under arrest."
That woke him up, the surge of adrenaline blasting away the cobwebs of sleep as he looked at the uniformed officer standing in front of him.
"Police? Shouldn't they have send the PRT?" he chuckled irreverently, flicking his wrist — and the razor in his had — with casual ease as he twisted around to look back into the house. "Shatterbird!" he yelled up the stairs. "Change of plans. You should announce us now!"
Contemptuously, he turned back to the cooling corpse… only, it wasn't. A rather unimpressed, and very much alive, member of Brockton Bay's finest glared back at him.
"The PRT and Protectorate only deal with Capes. And Apeiron has assured us that you lot no longer fall under their jurisdiction."
No powers? He was getting no feedback from the blade in his hand. He no longer had a sense of where the rest of the Nine were, and his normally fine-tuned sense for opportunity or danger was conspicuously absent, in a way that even even Hatchet Face's aura couldn't cause. Without his powers, what would happen? What did this mean for his plans, his life — was it all just another elaborate lie? A sense of dizzying vertigo washed over Jack, and then… nothing.
"If some of you serve your time with sufficient repentance," continued the officer, "then it is possible that you will be allowed to regain your powers through a carefully-controlled trigger experience if you wish to join the Protectorate."
Jack took a step back. Powers, gone. No, not just gone, but blocked from coming back. Still, there must be ways to turn this around. Suddenly, several things happened at once. Shatterbird called out that she was having trouble getting dressed. Crawler bellowed with rage, screaming about something having happened to his body. And Bonesaw rushed out of her room, shouting frantically.
"They're gone, they're gone! Mister Jack, all my new toys are gone!"
"I'm sure they're not missing, poppet, you probably just forgot where you put them…" Jack trailed off, both because he could see his reassurances weren't working, but also because something was niggling at his memory.
Taking another step back, and looking out the window, he saw the crowds gathering around outside. Familiar looking crowds. Faces of people the Nine had had their fun with over the past two days, but hale, hearty, unharmed, and just as unimpressed as the Police Officer standing before him.
Jack took a step sideways. "Now, now, officer. I'm sure this is all just a big misundersta…"
Clang!
He fell to the ground, seeing stars and clutching at his pounding head. Squinting up, he saw a tall blond man in a well-tailored lab-coat drop a badly-dented frying-pan, of all things, on the floor and hold his hands out to the officer.
"He had a machete stashed on that bookcase," the man said, indicating Jack's destination with a sideways jerk of his head. "You should probably be being a bit more cautious."
"Ah, thank you for the assistance, Mr…?" the officer trailed off, with a confused expression, while placing handcuffs on the unresisting wrists.
"Mr? Oh! Yes, well, it's… huh. Formerly Sphere, more recently Mannequin, but now I guess now it's back to plain old Dr Gramme. I look forward for the opportunity to pay my debt to society."
As darkness descended, and unconsciousness beckoned, one last thought floated through Jack's mind. "It isn't fair!"
