The first thought Jackie had when she looked at Black Cat was 'how the hell did he get that costume past PR?'
"New guy's here, yadda yadda play nice yadda yadda show him the ropes of all the paperwork and stuff, he comes from an indie background. Eyes-only stuff, don't ask for what I can't tell, and if anyone wants to bitch they can go to big daddy Myrddin and complain." Brava flopped into the office chair at the front of the table, kicking off into a spin, boredom oozing from every pore of her ren-faire dueling costume. "Spiel 'em, Kitty."
The new guy stepped forward, hood down but head still covered by a skin-tight bodysuit, with yellow lenses that completely obscured his eyes. It wasn't that he was too generic (God knows she'd met some horribly dull figures in her career) but that the outfit practically screamed villain. All black, yellow as the highlight color instead of blue, a military theme on the vest, with the lone concession to a disarming appearance being the ears on a removable hood. That, and his costume was full-face, further distancing him from normal people. Maybe the 'don't fuck with me' vibe was what they were going for, and if it was top marks.
Jackie still thought it was poor marketing.
"Teleporter, line of sight. Anyone in a ten foot radius of my arrival point becomes unable to perceive me for three seconds." He delivered the words with all the emotion of a robot, and after a silence stretched on for long enough to become uncomfortable he took a seat next to Brazier.
Brava sighed heavily. "We're going to need to work on your public speaking, buddy. Anyone volunteer for that?"
Jackie whistled and Anomaly put his hand up. "I would be more than happy to-"
"Someone who hasn't accidentally destroyed a man's career on live television or doesn't communicate exclusively in whistles and flirting, please," Brava interrupted, playing her gaze over the other four capes at the table, eyes flat with disinterest behind the red Zorro mask. "And no, Stitchskin, you are preemptively banned from corrupting him."
A wet hissing noise slipped out of the tinker's mask. "Fascists."
Brazier shook her head, as did Rag Queen and Pioneer. Eventually Gauss nodded, turning slightly to make eye contact with the new cape. "Black Cat, if you would be willing to come by my office after this meeting?"
Cat nodded once and didn't speak. Jackie smiled and leaned back in her chair, already thinking of fall-back plans as she began to establish a lock on Black Cat. Meals were the obvious time to try and build rapport, but if his clipped speech was anything to go by he'd probably object to any invasion of his alone time. He wasn't a tinker, so sharing notes wasn't going to be a valid excuse. Plus, that was how she'd bagged Stitchskin, and using the same strategy on successive members would be weird. Their powers were different enough that mentorship wasn't really a viable excuse, and even if they were it'd be condescending beyond belief to come onto him while teaching him how to aim.
In a way, the unknown path was freeing. She had no easy roles to slip into, no grooves to follow, no expectations for what was about to come. Restriction bred creativity, yes, but it also stifled imagination, and too much freedom was restrictive in its own right. If you could do anything, you had to do something that used as much of that freedom as possible. Otherwise, what was the point? Calvin got it, and while Richard was about the most despicable piece of sentient garbage he could've possibly decided to saddle himself with Calvin had the right to make whatever decision he wanted.
Even if it was the wrong one and she was a better lay and a better friend than literally a serial killer.
The meeting went on and Jackie planned her approach, smiling all the while.
*****
"Desperado!" Stitchskin growled, one wing broken and flopping uselessly behind him.
She was already on it, gun tracing the car flying through the air and warbling angrily as she pulled the trigger and held. The green beam slammed into the vehicle-come-projectile and kept slamming, altering the arc well away from the rows of stopped cars, some still occupied, and directly into a designer clothing store. Shame that, but appearances had to be maintained. After exchanging the used power cell in her gun for a fresh one, Desperado smiled. Or not, as the case became.
"Oi, corpsefucker! You're my fight!" Hardhand charged forward, hand partially merged with a motorcycle and brought the metal around in a short, brutal arc. Stitchskin keened angrily and met the improvised weapon with a clawed hand, the impact of the two parahumans booming across the intersection.
"Get the civvies gone, then find this idiot's boss and break his knees!" Stitchskin shouted. His beaked mask split open, strands of purple fluid dripping from the gap and a cloud of lavender gas began to spew sluggishly out, hissing and leaving boils where it came into contact with Hardhand's skin.
Desperado whistled an affirmative over the com and used a burst of speed to get away, bunching her jaw against the stab of pain that came with moving at over a hundred miles per hour for a second or three. Once the sounds of Hardhands and Stitchskin duking it out became simply 'nearby' rather than 'deafening' she went back to walking, the blur of the world resolving into sense again.
Hardhands was a brute in every sense of the word. Strong, tough enough to shrug off tasers, and with enough of a brain to be able to use his environment to negate small arms fire, he wasn't actually that big of a threat. No, the real issue would be whoever had hired him. Hardhands was a contract merc with next to no concern beyond where his next pay cheque came from, and that meant he never fought alone.
"Where oh where can my baby be?" Desperado half-whispered, half-sung to herself, scanning up and down the street. "The Lord took him away from me~"
A gas grenade flew through the window of the law firm next to her, rolling across the ground and spewing green smoke. Instinct had her blurring down the street, a short hiss escaping her as she caught herself against a sports car.
"Might want to get outta here, cowgirl." Desperado felt a smile stitch its way her face under the bandana, and as the cloud bulged and parted to reveal a scantily-clad horse-man it grew teeth.
Seabiscuit looked good with his shirt off. A lot of that was the tune-up he got after The Fiasco, and the rest of it was being the best damn person she'd ever met. His legs were digitigrade and fur-covered, with odd, alien hooves at the end of them. Slung over one shoulder was a messenger bag with strips of metal binding it, and his now-snoutish face shook itself once, over-long hair tossing fearfully. "Please, I don't want to see you two fighting again."
"She's gone to heaven, so I got to be good," Desperado shot back, lifting her gun and aiming over Seabiscuit's shoulder, waiting to reach out and find a target. "So I can see my baby when I leave this world~"
Another canister flew out, this time intercepted by an orange star that moved fast enough to be an orange line. This time the canister exploded into light though, and for a second Desperado was blind.
That was all the time Prospector needed.
She jerked her gun up and away from Calvin, gritting her teeth as she felt innumerable splashes on her skin and tasted half a dozen different chemicals while gas and poison cascaded down around her. Already some of them were working, lighting her nerves on fire and filling her mind with cotton and making her emotions go haywire, furious and depressed and lonely and hateful and vomiting as a million different signals went through her body at once, sending her falling to the ground in an uncoordinated heap.
"And you see, this is why you never send a thug to do a showman's job. I really need to stop asking the Folk for parahuman assistance, it's universally terrible." Through the haze of crossed wires she could hear leather shoes against pavement. Desperado managed to crack her eyes open, still sore from the flash bang, and looked up.
Prospector was dressed to the nines in a black suit, a tailed tuxedo with a string tie and a wide-brimmed hat, all patterned purple and green. A black domino mask covered most of his upper face, and what was exposed had a distinctly reptilian tint, just too much to ever be mistaken for a regular person.
He also had a bandolier of tinkertech slung around his hips, half-empty, and yet another one of his fucking canisters bouncing in his palm.
"I do say, you seem to be a bit under the weather there. I don't suppose you'd care for a little of my snake oil? It will cure what ails you, or you get a second sample free." Black eyes glinted behind the mask and lips twisted into a grin as he held the glass and metal tube up to the light. "I don't quite remember what this one does, but I'm sure it couldn't be worse than anything you're currently suffering from."
A hand came down on his shoulder, the nails black and shiny and the fingers too thick to be something that belonged to a human. With an effort of will, Desperado dragged her eyes away from the murderer in the suit and looked back to Seabiscuit.
"Prospie, no," he said, staring at Prospector. "You promised that you'd stop. Fight to disable, not to kill, and that once the fight was over you were done."
Prospector raised an eyebrow, idly prodding Desperado with his foot. "I think she still has some fight in her. What say you, whore?"
Desperado spat on the pavement. It tasted like peppermint, sweat, and yellow. "Fuck. You."
"Not for all the money in the world," he replied evenly, crouching down, canister in one hand, drawing Jackie's gaze. None of his potions were permanent. She focused on that thought, squeezed it hard enough to nearly shatter, and tried to hold down her hammering heart.
"Rich." The word was quiet, with the weight of a mountain behind it. Prospector froze, as did Jackie.
Slowly, they turned to look at Calvin.
He wasn't smiling, a situation that caused Jackie's lungs to spasm as she reached for a joke and Prospector's knuckles to whiten as his grip on the bomb in his hand tightened.
Calvin took a step closer, getting into Richard's personal space in a way no one else was allowed to. "Please. Don't."
Wordlessly, Prospector slipped the canister into his belt and stood, nodding once to the twitching and fallen cape. "Another time."
Desperado flared her power, locking onto Seabiscuit for as long as she could force her eyes to follow him, and when the two of them finally disappeared from view she let the tag linger, a one-way connection, hoping that this would be the time he realized that she was better and come back, come home.
She stayed locked onto him until Stitchskin came by, bruised and battered, and injected her with a system purge, burning away the confusion and leaving only numbness behind.
*****
"Why?"
Desperado adopted an expression of innocence, pressing one hand to her chest incredulously. They were on patrol, heading through the less-public and more-dangerous sections of the city. Director Lastrone liked pairing up the public-hazard capes together and sending them out of the public eye, and frankly Jackie appreciated that. The glory-seekers like Brava and Brazier could have their masses, drown themselves in shallow praise, while she drank deep from the more difficult pools to plumb.
Cat huffed. "Don't bullshit. New guy ragging is over. Calling it now, out with the real reason."
Desperado shook her head, dropping the act, then lightly bumped into his shoulder. It was always at the crisis points that the greatest gains could be made, but if you screwed up you could ruin things permanently. It was like fishing, in a way, but if you screwed up the hook you actually got forced to deal with the results.
For a block they walked in silence.
Then Cat made a distressed noise, the whine of a dog kicked too many times, a hope lost over and over again until it was closer to reflex than feeling. "Can you just talk? I don't like these fucking charades. I don't get them, I don't want to be wrong, and I'm really, really tired of being burned."
Desperado ran her tongue over her teeth, thinking, scanning the area around them.
Then she stepped into an alleyway and waited.
Soon enough Cat was beside her, glancing nervously over his shoulder. "We're off our route. Please, give me something."
Desperado went deeper, farther from the main streets, motioning to her bandana and smiling encouragingly.
Cat shook his head, even as he followed her. "We don't unmask on patrol. Dee, why can't you just talk?"
Desperado rolled her eyes. Such a goody two-shoes. Once they were good and hidden, she pulled off her bandana and motioned for him to lean down, her back against a wall and arms wide. When he hesitated she grabbed his hand and pulled, fingers lacing between his.
She could practically feel his heart jump.
Slowly, Cat lowered his head, expression still obscured by that damn mask. "Okay, we're out of the way, now what-"
Jackie's hand snaked around to the back of his head and pulled, dragging his cloth-covered face into hers.
The kiss wasn't one. You couldn't tongue someone through a layer, couldn't convey anything of meaning with just lips and pressure. Jackie got a leg around his, rubbing calf against calf and thigh against thigh as she pulled him closer, trying to make up for the barrier. It wasn't enough, wasn't close to it, but beggars and choosers. No sense in jerking too hard too early, even if it was unsatisfactory to say the least.
Jackie smiled against the mask as she felt Cat stiffen against her. Apparently the stoic edgelord wasn't quite so unflappable after all.
Then there was nothing beside her, save for something her mark was drawing her eyes toward...
"-fuck?" Cat was talking, arms spread, nervous. She still couldn't see anything under that goddamn mask, but she'd worked through worse. Jackie spun her finger in a circle, smiling brightly and pressing her foot against the wall.
"What. The fuck." Cat turned away from her, pressing both hands flat against the wall, breathing heavily. "What. The actual fuck. Was that?"
Jackie snorted. "A really shitty kiss."
Cat spun around, both hands going to his head. "Yes! That I figured out!"
Jackie raised an eyebrow, smile firmly in place, waiting. Slowly, Cat put the pieces together. She could see them moment when he realized that yes, this was happening, it was happening to him, and that yes, he was reading things right. She caught the jerk of his head when he checked her out, the bob of his Adam's apple when he swallowed, and the shuffle of his feet.
Time to throw him a bone.
"Do you want me to stop?" she asked, ratcheting back the smile a bit, going from predatory to warm, lover to friend. After a second Cat shook his head, spinning on his heel and walking back towards their patrol. Jackie let him go, thinking.
This one was a little more skittish than she was used to. That or a lot worse at reading into things. Maybe, probably, both. More obstacles to overcome, more barriers to circumnavigate. A lesser woman, a lesser person would abandon the Cat and search for easier nookies. A more furious one would say 'damn the consequences' and try to kill Richard, claim Calvin for herself, and to hell with the rest of the world. A more depressed one would finally wrap her lips around the barrel of one of her pistols and pull the trigger.
Instead Jackie put back on her mask and Desperado walked back to the patrol.
*****
Jackie glared across the room at Richard. Richard glared back. They were both bound to chairs, struggling against tinkertech bonds, and in between them Calvin was pacing on his newly-acquired hooves.
"Fuck fuck fuck how do I deal with this I'm not that smart I just say nice things and try to make the world better and how the hell do you get training for this it's completely ridiculous why on earth would this happen here and now and why can't they be in the same room without killing each other and if literally anyone else besides me had gotten these powers we'd be in much better shape but noooooooo, I have to be the voice of reason and ARRRRRRGH!" Both hands flew up to his face, then dragged down around his snout. "And now I'm also a horse."
He looked at Richard. Then he looked at Jackie.
Calvin took a deep breath, far longer than he could previously, and after a few seconds clomped over to Jackie, crouching down. It was awkward with his new legs, and after a second he gave up and went on all fours, still level with Jackie's chest.
"Listen. I'm going to ungag you. I need you to not scream obscenities, to not provoke Rich. Right? Can you do that? For me?" he asked. Behind him Richard struggled harder, and Jackie imagined she could see the anguish in his eyes as Calvin picked her.
Jackie nodded, savoring the slump in his shoulders as one of Calvin's hands reached up to her mouth and slowly pulled out the rag. After smacking her lips a few times, she looked meaningfully at her legs, then jerked her head back.
Calvin stood back up, crossing his arms. "Nuh-uh. No way. Neither of you are allowed to get free until we have a situation where you're not going to try and blow off his head and he's not going to try and rip out your eyes. And no, that doesn't mean you can do something equally horrible to each other that's not specifically head-blowing-up or eye-ripping. Or anything worse than that. Or only a little better than that."
Calvin sighed, turning around and walking towards Richard. "An artist, a businessman, and a bartender all walk into a bar, and the one pouring the drinks has to be the one who negotiates the deals." Calvin leaned down, heavy breaths parting Richard's matted locks. "Listen. You're on the same rules as her. No jabs, no talking unless I ask a question, just don't engage with Jackie. Alright? I'd really appreciate it if you could do this, okay?"
Jackie's stomach twisted at the sight of Richard's nod, the focus of his dead, green eyes switching from her to Calvin, who never knew when he was getting ripped off, when people were taking advantage of him. Every cell in her body as aching to yell, to tell Calvin that he was being played, that Richard was fucking with him and that she'd told him so, that he was bad news on so many levels it wasn't funny. It was more painful to keep her lungs still, to keep her face inexpressive, than it had been to take the fountain pen to the chest.
But Calvin had asked her to play nice, so she did.
Calvin walked away, turning his head in the complete opposite direction for just long enough to let Jackie and Richard get a glare each. "Okay, now let's talk this out. Like adults."
He pulled out a roll of butcher paper and gently pushed it across the ground, holding up a packet of markers. "You guys are going to talk. To me. One at a time. If you make a reasonable request, I'll write it down in your color. If you make one that we might be able to negotiate, I'll write it down on the side. If it's unreasonable, you lose your turn and nothing gets written down. Do those rules make sense?"
Jackie jerked her head into a nod.
Richard rolled his eyes. "If you insist."
"Jackie goes first, then," Calvin said, uncapping a black pen and making a t-chart. "So, first request."
"Sex. Every day," she said, pointedly not looking at Richard.
Calvin whined, his altered throat making it come out almost as a whinny. "Why are you like this? No, I'm not going to let you try and twist the knife anymore than you already have. We'll talk about sleeping arrangements later, but that level of monopolization of my time is completely off the table."
"Regular dates," Richard stated, also avoiding looking at Jackie.
"Thank you!" Calvin said, giving the bound man a thumbs-up as he scrawled down the point in one column. "See, that's the sort of request I can do. Next time though please wait your turn. It's not that I don't trust you, but..."
"You don't trust me. Entirely reasonable. I haven't quite earned it." The words made Jackie taste metal, made her consider blurring out of her restraints and to hell with the consequences. Could Calvin see that Richard was lying, just saying what he thought Calvin wanted to hear and not believing a word of it?
"You don't sleep with either of us. Not him, not me, not anyone." The words tasted like ash in her mouth, but Calvin nodded and wrote it down nonetheless. A muscle bunched in Richard's jaw and Jackie felt a small thrill of vindication. She'd lost the second Richard had stolen the initiative, the moment he'd gotten the first point on the board. Now she was on damage control, mitigating the effects of Richard's poison in Calvin's ear and trying to make him pay for every inch he took from her.
The negotiations took hours. Part of that was Calvin trying his best to find compromise, part of that was Richard trying to twist the words into something that would give him an iota more power, and part of that was Jackie taking the time to think out how best to hurt Richard without being noticed by Calvin. She lost more than she won, giving ground over and over again in desperate attempts to drive a wedge between the two of them and failing every time.
When Calvin left, it was with Richard. He promised to call the police, to give them the code to her cuffs. When she didn't respond, he gave her a hug.
That helped. A little.
Jackie didn't talk to the police when they released her. She didn't talk to the Protectorate member, to the Ward that snuck into the interrogation room, to the PRT agents who tried to get Calvin and Richard's names out of her. She didn't give them, couldn't give them. That was one of the agreements. She couldn't tell them about what, precisely, she was involved in, what had happened, what was happening, anything at all.
Instead, she asked to see the director.
Eventually a woman came in, tall and gray-haired with sunken eyes and looking more tired than anyone else Jackie had ever known. She collapsed into the seat across from Jackie, and for a minute they both just sat there, appraising one another.
"What do you want?" Director Lastrone asked, staring at Jackie like she was a paperclip. Inconsequential.
"To join." When the words didn't arouse so much as a twitch, Jackie leaned forward. "I've got powers. Speed, making shit, a lock-on-"
"Marketing will talk to you shortly. Legal will sort your affairs out. So long as you haven't done a life-worthy crime, we should be able to take you." The words were delivered with all the enthusiasm of a customs official.
Jackie nodded. After a second the Director stood back up, physically pushing herself out of her chair, away from the table, looking for all the world like a puppet under the hands of a child who didn't quite understand how to properly imitate life. Brown eyes stared into Jackie's own, unreadable, then turned away as the Director stalked out of the room.
Only then did Jackie let a vicious smile spread across her face.
Richard was an asshole. More importantly, he was an asshole with little regard for the rules of society and people he didn't care about. She'd promised to stop trying to murder him, to leave his civilian ID alone, to never break anything unfixable. On the other hand, if someone else were to wring his neck, throw him in a cell and mysteriously lose the key, and if that was all just the long arm of the law coming around and punishing wrong-doing Jackie could hardly be held responsible for that. You reap what you sow, and Richard had sown an awful lot of misery.
She still didn't have a concrete idea in mind. She never would. Jackie was a doer, not a planner, someone who chased and chased and only knew why she was chasing after she'd caught it. That, and plans always failed at some point. Better to stay mercurial, to stay mobile, and take advantage of situations as they came.
She'd hang Richard with the rope he gave her, and once he was gone Calvin would be hers again. All she had to do was execute.
*****
Eli slept heavily.
It was cute. She could get up, pulls the sheets completely off of him, go take an extra-long shower, and when she came back he'd still be there, drooling on the pillow and lying on his side, the erection pressing into the mattress somewhat spoiling the picture of innocence. Really, the main barrier between him and a warm bed was finding the time to smile. You could find a member of the Protectorate that wasn't a Case 53 who was less than a seven, but you'd have to try.
Watching him stir was nice too. First his brow would furrow and his shoulders would hunch, a reaction to the cold. Then he'd curl forward, in on himself, and a genuine frown would come across his face. At some point he'd shake a little, and after that he'd get up, going smoothly from dead asleep to alert in less than a second. The first time he'd woken up with her in the room it'd prompted a teleport, one she responded to with a hug aimed at the lock her brain insisted was there. That was the only time she'd been late to the morning meeting, and also the morning they'd discovered that no, they didn't have time for another round before the morning meeting.
Jackie sighed against his neck, drowsy thoughts giving way to harsh reality. Eli was a temporary lay. He was a good one, more interesting than any of the other Protectorate capes and a damn sight better than the idiots she'd gone home with from a bar, but she wasn't sure how much he understood that. When she'd joked about him making up for their late arrival, she found a cake in the breakroom the next day. She'd talked to him after that, explained that she liked things fun and light. He'd agreed, agreed that neither of them were committed to anything, that it was just light fun. It still felt like a different language though, like they were both operating along different axes, and after wrestling for the right words she gave up and pulled him to her room to try a different method of communication.
Jackie hated words. She was convinced that, given half the chance, everyone else would too. Everyone had different definitions for everything, sometimes small enough to ignore and sometimes certainly not. You could sleep with someone and sleep with someone, you could fuck someone and you could fuck someone, and in both pairs of identical statements you had the two same, opposite definitions. If that wasn't proof enough of the uselessness of language, Jackie wasn't sure what was.
So she worked with things everyone understood. Jackie dealt in sideways glances, in half-lidded gazes, in a whole spectrum of different smiles that could say everything from lust to livid except that (unlike the words) no one would ever mistake one for the other. A touch on the arm was a better signal than any cipher or M/S password, a subtle posing more provocative than any amount of poetry. She could get through a day with fewer than a hundred words if she tried, and she'd personally never had any trouble making it clear what she wanted.
And then she met Eli.
Slowly, gently, she kissed the flesh in front of her, one hand tracing idle patterns over his stomach while the other squeezed him tighter. He didn't get it. Not quite. She wasn't sure what the baffle was between her and him, what complications prevented understanding, but with Eli she always needed to think a little harder, work a little more to make sure he got the message. It was a good kind of work though, exercise for her mind, and a welcome challenge after months of stagnation. She'd be lying if his over-reliance on words wasn't part of the attraction, just as she'd be lying if she didn't abuse his form-filling skills to their fullest extent.
Eli shivered slightly in her arms. Jackie began to hum, patterns turning to gentle rubs. Soon enough the shudders went away, replaced by shorter, sharper breaths.
He was waking up.
"Morning," he whispered, one hand creeping around to join hers. She drummed her fingers in response, smiling. For a while they lay there, mutually enjoying the sensation of having another human in the same bed. Jackie had learned that not everyone could do that. Some had tried to fill the air with words, with platitudes. Some had wanted to get up and get on with their lives, treating the bedroom like some separate dimension, disconnected from the real.
None of them had been given a second night.
Calvin understood how to enjoy silence. The two of them could lay down on a couch, barely touching, and let hours pass with nothing happening. It wasn't a matter of willpower, skill, or action. If anything, the act of trying to be quiet invalidated the whole exercise. Instead, Jackie would sit back and wait, letting the moment overwhelm her. The game would end when she started thinking outside of the moment, where her mind wandered onto other subjects, when the moment stopped being enough.
Eli was kind of similar, in a way. He didn't talk much, and while it was clear that no small amount of that silence was the fear of saying something wrong, there were also the more comfortable stretches, the ones where he was willing to simply sit down and enjoy what was happening to him. He would let her drape over his shoulders, laugh at nothing, and settle down in his lap when she needed a seat.
It wasn't the same. Calvin had a habit of trying to introduce her to other people, of trying to bring her into larger groups where the silence could never last. Eli was needlessly skittish, too worried about the potential loss of a risk to even consider the potential gains. They were the same sort of person, each with their own little flaws and flavors, just different enough that she'd never be able confuse the two.
"We should probably get up. Actually get up, not just be awake," Eli said quietly.
Jackie snorted in disdain, nonetheless pulling her arm out from under him and sitting up, swinging her legs over the side of the too-thin bed. After stretching, she stood up and started walking towards the bathroom. The water started running before she was halfway there, and when she peeked at the frosted glass there was a pale form visible through it.
Jackie smiled, then opened the stall door and stepped into the slowly-growing cloud of steam.
They weren't the same but variety was the spice of life, and if Calvin could put up with Richard's body count he could put up with her particular method of killing time.
*****
"Fifteen minutes," Cat said quietly.
Jackie rolled her eyes at the reminder. Like she hadn't read the rules for the interview a million times. Like she didn't have the terms and conditions of meeting Calvin practically memorized. Like she hadn't come clean to Eli about what Calvin meant to her in order to get his backing on this.
The PRT agent at the door checked their ID, got their M/S passwords, and only after receiving independent verification from Director Lastrone does she let them in.
"Fifteen minutes," she said. Jackie would've scowled, but Calvin was in sight.
"Hey." He was sitting on the other side of a table bolted to the floor, brute manacles chaining his hands down and similar shackles around his feet, dressed in an orange jumpsuit with the word 'villain' in black down the side. He was still smiling, and behind her bandana Jackie couldn't help but reciprocate.
She took a seat in a metal folding chair while Cat stood behind her. There were cameras in every corner, but so long as she kept her focus on Calvin's face, ignored the trapping around them, she could pretend like things were normal. "Hey."
He glanced at Cat, then back to her. "Who's this?"
Jackie shrugged. "Black Cat. Trustworthy."
"Someone you've slept with." The words weren't a question but she nodded anyway. Calvin sighed wistfully, looking back to Cat. "You're lucky to have caught her eye."
"Sometimes I wonder about that." The words are light but Jackie winces at the ease at which he says them, the forced casualness that makes her feel wrong inside.
"Prospector." The name brings Calvin's eyes back to her, and she puts on her most professional facade as he shakes his head.
"I'm keeping my mouth shut. Sorry." Calvin leans back in the seat, spreading his arms as far as he can. The jingle of chains makes her wince, and he winks at her. "Don't worry about it. They're pretty comfortable, all things considered."
"I've taken a look at your rap sheet," Cat interrupted. Jackie twisted to look over her shoulder. Cat was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, but his voice was soft. "Property crimes, lots of them, but relatively few physical engagements. When you did get into fights they were short and fast, with a minimum of personal and property damage. As a Protectorate member I can't make any promises, but informally you have a good chance of probationary membership instead of jail if you cooperate."
"Does this make you the good cop?" Calvin joked.
Jackie shook her head, leaning forward, clasping her hands together. "Give him up, you go free. Go wherever you want, do whatever you want. Just not with him."
For a minute the three of them were silent, looking through the glass at one another. Jackie felt a twitch in her leg, an urge to bounce her knee. She gripped her knee, focusing on the pressure, keeping her gaze on Calvin's face.
Eventually, he shook his head.
"I'm not leaving him," Calvin said quietly, staring at his cuffs. "He's puts up a good front, but he really doesn't have a lot behind it, you know? A monolith when he needs to be, but as soon as the door to the outside closes it all falls apart."
He looked up, straight into Jackie's eyes. "You can handle yourself. You could do it before me, you can do it after. He can't. That's why I went with him, why I'm not with you now. I trust you to hang in there. Him? He'd be gone in a week."
"And the piles of corpses in his wake?" Cat asked neutrally.
Calvin winced, and Jackie could've shot Cat for making him frown. "Trust me when I say this is nowhere near as bad as it could be. If I wasn't there to remind him about the heat killing brings-"
"But the best is with him not out there at all." Calvin didn't respond to that, and this time Jackie did turn around to glaring at Cat, drawing no visible reaction. "What would it take to get you to turn him in? Again, I can't promise anything, but knowing where to start might let him avoid the 'cage."
Another silence stretched out, long enough that Jackie had to fight the urge to turn around and check the clock, check how much Calvin-time she'd spent being useless and not enjoying his company. She'd called in a lot of favors to get this meeting. Prospector had demonstrated both the willingness to assault PRT HQ's to get people back and the chops to pull it off, and delaying Calvin's departure for a max-sec parahuman detainment facility had been almost unacceptable.
If Jackie left this session with nothing to show for it, she wasn't sure she'd be able to get a repeat performance ever.
"Could you get him complete amnesty?" The question was so quiet Jackie almost missed it, and when the words did make it through her brain she had to fight the urge to hiss at the thought of Rich getting off scot-free. "A full pardon for everything, everything you know about and the things you don't. An ironclad promise that if we come in you don't jail him, don't fine us, nothing. Can you let it all go?"
Eventually, Jackie shook her head. Quietly, softly, Cat said, "No."
Calvin smiled, rueful and sad. "Then I don't think you've got anything I want. Thanks, but I'd like to spend the rest of my time catching up with Desperado. Mind giving me some-"
The wall exploded.
Desperado had her gun out and up before the dust had settled, seeking targets. She was alone, but help would be on the way in minutes, tops. All she had to do was hold out until they had the numbers advantage again, and Prospector would be screwed. She flicked open a utility bullet and fired, letting loose a blast of air.
Then she saw the body.
Calvin was lying on top of Prospector, limp, motionless. A knife handle stuck out behind his left ear, bleeding only a little, and a few feet away Cat was standing with one hand shaking before him.
"I didn't mean to," he whispered quietly.
Jackie snapped her lock onto Eli and fired.
The tag moved. She fired again. Jackie was dimly aware of Richard flipping Calvin over, searching for a pulse, finding nothing. The com in her ear said something. She tore it out and fired at the target again. It was getting farther away, gone out the hole in the wall, so she switched over to the penetrator cartridges, the ones that could bore through engine blocks and multiple buildings. The lock kept moving, too fast for her track.
She waited.
PRT agents filtered into the room, foaming Richard, who was screaming for a medic, for someone to fix Calvin, to bring him back from the dead. That cut off when they covered up his face. One of the agents put a hand on her shoulder. She let him, lowering her gun, waiting.
The target stopped.
Jackie's arm lifted smoothly and she shot again.
They tried to foam her. She blurred, the pain a distant thing, flying out of the hole Richard had made in the wall. As Jackie hit the sidewalk and started blurring towards the target she took inventory of her ammunition. Nonlethal for the most part, confoam rounds and hardlight, enough to subdue non-brutes and little more. A few incendiaries, one more penetrator clip, and a few other odds and ends. Hardly enough to wage war, to hunt down a murderer.
It would have to do.
When Stitchskin caught her, hours later, after she'd lost the ability to blur, when she was staggering forward on torn muscles and hate, when he tore a hole in space and pushed her through the rift, she was almost glad for the blackness
*****
"Hey."
Jackie examined the latest batch of ammunition. Matter-destabilization, short duration, mostly useless on its own. Follow it up with anything, though, and you could get through just about anything. It was good enough. She pushed the rack of munitions aside and pulled out a tablet. Now that the anti-brute tech was done she could work with Gauss on her pistols.
"What do you think of the velocity enhancement effect? I know you mostly focus on magnetic-based movement but this seems close enough to your wheelhouse to be worth looking at."
Ariel walked stiffly to the other side of the table, standing with her hands held before her, like she was afraid of touching anything. After a moment she sat down, meeting Jackie's gaze.
"I would like to talk about your assignment to Brockton Bay," she said slowly.
"What about it? They have a Nazi problem, I can tinker up a solution in short order." Jackie turned away, pulling out a sketchbook. Metal was a theme, and with what was effectively a magnetic tinker right next to her there might be something she would whip up right off the bat that could tilt the odds in her favor.
"Are you going to be able to work with Black Cat again?"
"Of course," Jackie said, blinking away the sudden lock her power gave her. When she looked up Ariel had her brow furrowed and mouth set firmly in a frown.
"Convince me," she said.
Jackie sighed. "It would be unreasonable to expect Cat to have engaged Prospector with anything less than lethal force. Seabiscuit jumped in front of him of his own accord amidst a cloud of dust, which combined with the disorientation following a teleport would make it extremely difficult to double check the target. Furthermore Seabiscuit had been sandbagging hard, and as a result was not restrained properly. It was a tragedy, but ultimately one based upon reasonable actions."
"Straight out of the mission report," Ariel said, shaking her head. "Convince me that your emotions are settled."
Jackie narrowed her eyes. "My side bitch killed the man I love. That's never going to go away. I can, however, maintain a sufficiently professional demeanor to not shoot him at a meeting."
Ariel stared at Jackie for a long moment, then dropped her head into her hands and groaned. "They need the back-up. You need the fight. I really, really want to say no anyway. Give me one reason to ignore my instincts."
For a long moment Jackie was silent.
"If I do not get some closure on this, I will go insane," she said quietly.
Ariel processed that.
"Will you promise not to hurt Black Cat in any way?" she asked.
Jackie nodded, expression carefully neutral. "I promise that I won't hurt Cat."
Ariel let out a breath with a huff of air, shaking her head. "Fucking good enough."
After sketching out designs for taser bullets that conducted through metal they really shouldn't be able to, Ariel left. Jackie kept up the mask for a few minutes, calmly going through her own master/stranger detection process. Paranoid? Certainly. But when you were planning treason paranoia was just good sense.
Once she was sure no one was looking around her workshop, she pulled out the black-market laptop, clicked through half a dozen redundant security tests, and checked her one-use inbox for news about Eli Shane.
She wouldn't hurt Cat. Words were precise, like scalpels. Twist them, even slightly, and no one could ever understand what was going on. More to the point, Jackie Avendeena paying a visit to Eli Shane wouldn't be against Protectorate policy. They couldn't prevent independent citizens from interacting with one another, couldn't stop them from walking into an apartment building for a friendly visit. It would give away the game to any villainous thinker worth their salt, and there were enough of those that it was a needless risk. Besides, if things came to a head they could always just fire one of the capes involved.
That would be fine. Jackie would be done with her work by then anyway.
Once that was done, Jackie closed the laptop, secured it in a box with a lock she was fairly sure was unbreakable, and went down to the shooting range. Her thinker power covered for a lot of that, ensured that she could track a single target for miles. It took time to apply to unfamiliar targets though, and building up the muscle memory helped with draw speed.
She nodded at the quartermaster as she checked out a revolver, roughly like her tinkertech pistols, and one hundred rounds of ammunition. She stepped into a specially-cleared range, tucked her ears into the muffs carefully, and settled her heart and breathing.
In. Out.
Jackie tied a belt across her hips, staring down the range, at the concentric circles of the target, not seeing them. Once the holster was secure, she put the revolver in, carefully, and let her hand rest gently on the handle.
The rest of the night was filled with the crack of gunfire.
