ic Embrace the Silence (IC)

[Avenger Assembled]

"He was my best friend for ten years..." Carefully, Richard carried Ethan Keller into the protection of the bank, his face still pale and hands streaked with blood and dust as he exited. "They wouldn't have run," he said, speaking of FORCE OPS to the others, his tone with as much conviction as he might once have talked about the Freedom League. "They were heroes who fought to the end. That's what they've always been." He sat by Paige and put his arm around her shoulder. "At least Ma has to be safe. No way they'd attack Blackstone, it's the toughest prison in the world. For now." He looked up at the sound of a distant explosion, his face pale, and opted not to say anything about Paige's dad, or her little cousins who were probably somewhere in a deep bunker in Colorado. "We-" 

The gregarious speedster was interrupted, this time not by an attack, but by the arrival of a friend - in red, white, and blue, Lady Liberty was instantly recognizable as the patriotic defender of New York City, though usually not looking battered and bruised as if she'd been in the fight they'd all been in that day. "Oh, thank the Lord!" she called, heading towards 1-800-Justice and their new-found supervillain allies. "What's your situation here?" 

 

"Bad! Real bad!" Richard snapped, jumping to his feet. "The damn sky is tearing open, and Freedom City's heroes were too busy hiding to do anything about it! If it wasn't for Wail and his buddies, we-" 

 

"If it wasn't for all of you, they'd be spilling out into the New Jersey countryside right now," said Lady Liberty, efficiently shutting the upset Fast-Forward down by not engaging with him at all. "As long as you're holding the line here, we can keep pressing onto the portal at Freedom Hall. AEGIS and the Marines from Lonely Point are moving inland, but right now Lincoln is the cork in the bottle on the other side. The American countryside can be targeted by those raiders if you break." 

[Gizmo]

There was a long silence after Lady Liberty spoke, so heavy with tension it physically hurt at the back of molars and in the pits of stomachs. That aching numbness settled over the weary group like a a rising tide, cold and smothering until Jav spoke up. "Well. As inspirational speeches go, that..."
 
"Was bloody terrible," Yelena finished dryly, finishing wrapping a utilitarian field bandage around the worst of Keller's open wounds and walking back over to her teammates.

It was a weak joke, delivered without the energy left for wryness or wit but among 1-800-JUSTICE at least a sliver of that tension eased. They'd played out variations of this same conversation a hundred hundred times, whenever things looked grim. Jav breaking the silence with a quip, Yelena playing the grumpy realist with a stern rebuttal. They'd done more than fought side by side over the years, they'd lived their lives together through trials wildly fantastic and crushingly mundane, family in any way that mattered. Both turned without realizing it to look over at Keith, already knowing what came next.

"Good news for you," the broad-shouldered man told Lady Liberty, standing a little straighter despite the pain in every muscle in his back, "these tin can wearing, pointy stick throwing, murderous @#$%s picked the wrong damn neighbourhood to open their little peekaboo hole." Raising his voice just enough for it to carry throughout the bank, LaMarr continued, "This is Lincoln. And we're 1-800-JUSTICE. People here know what we stand for. We. Don't. Break."

 

Jav actually managed a wan smile as he glanced to the red, white and blue clad New Yorker. "You're taking notes, right?"

[Avenger Assembled]

Lady Liberty smiled faintly, returning Jav's look with one of her own. "It sounds like you have all the inspiration you need. I'd better heal those I can here, and..." A device clipped to her belt started beeping and the heroes started up, ready for a fight, but Lady Liberty's eyes were all on Paige. "...Hologram, isn't it? I remember when you and Fast-Forward robbed the Clocktower Gallery last year. Are you all right?" She walked right over to Hologram as if expecting the other woman to keel over at any moment. She pointed to her belt and said, "Some people who took a near-miss from one of those blasters took heavy radiation damage without any outward signs, so Daedalus rigged this up to detect people with high levels of Terminus radiation in their systems. If you'll let me help you," she offered gently, "I can use the Light of Liberty to get that stuff out of your system. You're only going to make yourself sick if you try and fight that way...." She approached Hologram, hands glowing a warm shade of yellow, her face full of concern and reassurance. 

[Electra]

"Don't touch me!" Paige shrieked, lurching to hide behind Richard and away from the encroaching yellow light, actually dragging him backwards a few feet for good measure. "I mean... I'm okay, no problems here, well, of course there are problems, we have nothing but problems. We are in fact so far beyond screwed that the light from screwed will never reach us, but it's nothing that another dozen superheroes won't cure, right?"

 

She laughed, high and near-hysterical. "I promise you one thing, my little extra mojo issue is the very least of your worries. And where the hell is our inspirational speech?" she demanded. "We're not the superheroes! We don't even live here!" Paige could remember having this exact argument with Richard from the other side hours ago, but it seemed like she'd been a very different person then. 

[Avenger Assembled]

"Hey hey hey, let's all calm down!" Richard figured out what was happening fast, knowing the little secret about where Paige got her powers. "Starshirt, you never met somebody who lived through '65 before?" Richard had been about two years old when that happened, but calling on Freedom's history helped keep him from freaking out - and hopefully kept anyone from wondering what the supervillain was doing with powers derived partially from the monsters that were invading the area, and perhaps the entire world. "We're all fine here. Go help people. Archer's in there, he needs help. Go do your superhero thing." His arms around Paige, he watched as Lady Liberty headed inside the bank to treat the wounded. 

 

"We'll get this done, babe," he promised Paige. "You, and me, and our friends here, we'll fight these drone bastards and, and then we'll get far, far away from all this." He looked around at the half-wrecked city, acutely aware that it was only late afternoon, and added, "Back to Vegas, or London or Havana. Next time we're back in town, they'll have statues of us up around here! Wouldn't that be radical?" He smiled, doing his best to comfort his girl at a time when she seemed to need it the most. "Fast-Forward, Hologram, and 1-800-JUSTICE, the heroes of Lincoln!" 

[Gizmo]

Having just spent hours watching Hologram dismantle Omegadrone after Omegadrone while awash in sickly black energy it didn't take any of the members of 1-800-JUSTICE too long to make an educated guess as to just what had been setting off Lady Liberty's radiation detector. By the same token, having just spent hours fighting shoulder to shoulder with the self-proclaimed villainess against impossible odds none of them were inclined to make an issue of it. Wail wasn't particularly proud of where he'd gotten his own metahuman abilities and if ever there had been a day to risk drawing upon less savoury sources in desperation, there was not question that it was a day that had come. They could deal with any repercussions later, assuming there even was a 'later' for any of them.

"Don't know about statues," he rumbled, keeping one eye on the bank door as he turned to Hologram, "but if you're looking for work after all this..."
 
"We're trying to raise their spirits, not depress them, Keith," Jive cut in with an exaggerated drawl. He doubted the pair of would-be bank robbers had much interest in more honest work regardless, even if the current administration hadn't made it painfully difficult for them to make a living anymore. Given the threat they were facing down now, economic troubles suddenly seemed like quite the punchline.

[Electra]

Jive's comment actually drew a small laugh from Hologram, mostly for the absurdity of it all. "Hell no," she told them fervently. "Your job sucks. Hopefully today is an outlier in the bad day category, but I've been bumping up against your kind for decades and it looks like long hours and big danger and no compensation. Nobody even says thank you anymore, right?" She walked over to an overturned newsstand and began rummaging in the cooler, finding a few undamaged bottles of soda and carrying them over to the others. It wasn't a hot meal and a good night's sleep, but it was better than nothing. "I never understood why you guys didn't just flip 'em off and leave town." 

 

She opened her Coke and looked to the sky, still full of smoke. "Now I guess I can kind of see why," she admitted in a small voice, "but it's scary. We're staying and fighting, but that probably means we'll never leave." 

[Avenger Assembled]

Under normal circumstances, Fast-Forward would have taken this opportunity to sneer about how Freedom City's sheep had chased all the shepherds away, and so they had nobody to blame but themselves if they were sheared by two light-footed rogues. But after a day of the worst fighting of his life, of watching innocents who ran too slowly getting torn to pieces by monsters, somehow that joke didn't seem very funny. He tossed back the soda Paige had got for him and spoke, sounding not much like the brash quipper who'd been fighting 1-800-Justice that morning.

 

"You know, I'd have laughed in your damn face before today, but now...I don't think I'm really cut out for self-sacrifice, at least not without self-sacrifice that doesn't carry a steady paycheck. Jesus, look around. I've known Ethan Keller since I was fifteen and I watched him pick up his drunken 'mentor' and carry him out of a fight. He and his friends gave everything to this city, even when the people abandoned them. He is...probably the best man I know," Richard admitted. "And what did all that get him? Shrinks smirking about hero complexes, and, and..."

 

"And good men and women who died for what they believed in!" Fully healed of his injuries, the physical ones, anyway, Archer had emerged in Lady Liberty's company, bow slung over his shoulder. "And a lot more to come, if we can't get this done." His eyes were deep pools of grief, but his manner firm as he strode up to join the others. "Wail, Jump, Jive..." Archer was from Lincoln too, before he'd moved on to defend the city on his own, and young enough that he'd grown up with this trio of heroes among the champions he'd looked up to. "I'd be honored to stand with you today." 

 

Suddenly there was a distant boom and a low rumble, and a column of smoke suddenly poured over the horizon, fast and hot, from a distant fire. Nearly-simultaneously, Lady Liberty gasped, pressing her hand to her earpiece. Putting the pieces together fast, and realizing where that sound had come from, Fast-Forward bolted to his feet as the patriotic heroine said, "There's been a sighting of Omega, Lord of the Terminus, in Freedom City. In Blackstone Prison, just before..." 

 

"Ma!" The air slowed to a crawl, the darkened skies turning into a reddish-brown morass, as Richard put feet to ground - just as the first of the second wave came pouring out again. 

[Gizmo]

"Haha, may have been some flipping off," Yelena laughed at Paige's confusion, a little too loudly and with an edge of hoarseness but genuine nevertheless as she elbowed Jav in the side.

The polyglot snorted and covered one eye with a palm. "Oh hell, that charity dinner. You're just lucky Moore doesn't speak Ukrainian." His visible eye was surrounded by weary lines but this was a story he'd retold so often some colour seemed to return to cheeks. "Think you invented some new terms, anyway."

When Keller emerged, LaMarr clapped the younger man on the shoulder, somewhat more gingerly than he might have normally. The haunted look on Archer's face got to the broad-shouldered hero even amid all the horror of the day but the bowman was a soldier, focused on the task at hand for now. "Likewise. We'll stop them here. Won't let it be for--" He was cut off by the distant explosion and the fresh wave of death and terror spilling out into his home. "Move! Move! Move!"

[Electra]

Paige paused with the bottle raised to her lips, staring at the sky. "Is anybody else feeling weirdly religious right now?" she asked rhetorically as the Omegadrones spilled once more from the rips in the sky. "I feel like I should be praying." Instead she carefully capped her soda and set it on the ground, then grabbed Richard and kissed him for all she was worth. "I love you so much," she told him with great conviction. "If by some crazy miracle we live through this, we're getting married." With that settled, she stepped away, her hands and eyes flickering with black energy as she turned once more to the fight. 

[Avenger Assembled]

If they'd been tired before, by the end of the day they were damn near exhausted. The next wave through the rifts had been big, heavy drones that targeted the heroes directly. There were fewer of them than before, but their sheer physical power made them no less a threat to the embattled members of 1-800-Justice and their unlikely allies, be they vigilante, patriotic do-gooder, or an unlikely pair of villains in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe it was a blessing that the heavy-armored, spiky-bodied monstrosities were hunting them rather than the people of Lincoln, but it certainly didn't feel that way at the time. Faster than the rest, Richard found himself in a support role - charging in to yank someone out of the way before a swinging pike pulled their head off, throwing super-sonic punches that kept drones off-balance and set them up for an attack from one of the others. As awful as all this was, this was not his first battle, even if those other fights in retrospect looked more like turf wars than a real war. 

 

In a stolen moment between the end of the fighting and the work of getting people out of the partially collapsed buildings on the street and towards shelter, Richard found himself alone with Paige again, his eyes still cast towards the smoke rising from where Blackstone at once stood, a column of fire now against the hazy black sky. Doing his best to be practical, he focused on her and said suddenly, "Okay, baby. When we're all done here...let's get married."

[Gizmo]

"Hey, mazel tov," Jive called out, tucking into a roll and coming up behind a nearby half-wall for cover that had until recently been a whole wall. Opening his arms, he released a shaken and much the worse for wear tabby which landed unsteadily before scampering off away from where the worst of the fighting had just died down. "If you're looking for a wedding planner, I actually know this guy--" The offer was cut short as the polyglot, bent over with a wince, coughing violently. When he straightened, there were flecks of blood on his lips, which he wiped away on the back of his wrist.

A loud ZAM! drowned out his pained groan as Jump appeared several feet away, setting down a terrified Latino teenager with soot and dried blood smeared across his face and arms. Sparing a moment to direct the young man to the closest refuge point, the teleporter turned to the newly engaged couple. "Cline, there you are. Apartment complex to the southwest is coming down. Keith is bracing one wall but support structure is crumbling." Yelena's powers let her get into and out of spaces the others could not but the speedster was better suited for actually searching for trapped civilians in the first place.

"ANY TIME, 'LENA!" a booming though strained voice bellowed with impossible volume from the direction she'd indicated. His whole back and both arms pushed into the side of the failing building, Wail felt a small cascade of loosened brick fragments bounce across his head and shoulders. "Hnnh. C'mon, hold together, damn you, just a little longer..."

[Electra]

In a moment Paige and Richard were there as well, looking at a compromise building with way too many people still in it. "Go, go!" Paige told Richard, even as the black tendrils of her power extended  over Wail's head to try and help brace the building. Unfortunately there wasn't much strength in the mental projection, but it at least kept the rubble from falling on him.

 

She closed her eyes and concentrated with senses that were painfully sharp in the stench and din of the battle. Second floor east side, she sent to Richard, there are kids there. Third floor south too, I can't tell any higher than that. Too much noise. The cacophony was deafening to the inner and outer ears both. A small part of her wondered, if she lived through this, would she ever not hear the screaming? 

[Avenger Assembled]

Fast-Forward had clocked himself and knew his top speed, at least relative to the world around him. Running all-out, he could go Mach 50, fast enough that he could have launched himself into orbit if he'd been so inclined. When he ran into the apartment building, his feet barely touching the ground, he could have covered the entire building, down to every square inch, and all around it in less than a second. If everyone in there had been standing still, he could have evacuated the block between one of Paige's thoughts and the next. But they weren't all standing still - and speed couldn't solve everything.

 

The elementary school kids, two  who had barricaded themselves in their bedroom and whose door he finally had to accelerate open. Saved. 

Their mom, who must have been right at the window when the drone's blast had come through the glass. Gone. 

The maintenance guy who'd been trapped by a falling timber knocked loose by the earthquake. Saved. 

The moms and babies, a stroller group, who'd been hiding in the third floor stairwell. Saved. 

The family near the top, at what must have been an entry point for an Omegadrone he remembered Jive having taken down earlier. Gone. 
 

There were a lot of buildings that night. 

[Gizmo]

The darkness of descending nightfall didn't slow the Omegadrones down in the least and if Wail had to guess he would have ventured that they didn't need sleep, either. Even if they did there were apparently more than enough of them that the defenders of Lincoln wouldn't have been able to tell if the waves of oil-blooded invaders were taking shifts or not. They did, however, seem to be shifting their focus periodically to different sections of the city, leaving LaMarr with some semblance of a breather in which to tiredly contemplate the sleeping habits of cyborg killing machines.

 

Every part of him ached.  Not just the sore knuckles and throbbing bruises that came after a long, drawn out fight; that was a feeling which which he was familiar enough that it would have almost been a reassuring presence. This was the pain of muscles screaming from being asked to hold up collapsing buildings, a throat raw from screaming not just sonic attacks but anguished denials at coming across one more broken body too late, eyes burning from smoke and blood and tears. Trudging along to the latest temporary shelter they'd set up, one yet to be overrun, the broad-shouldered hero noted dimly that his right arm wasn't really working as well as he would have liked and realized with a grunt that he was leaning heavily against the wall next to him.

[Electra]

A particularly brave Red Cross relief team had set up shop in the shelter just a couple blocks back from the fighting, doing their best to care for and organize the refugees while the battle continued to rage. Paige had broken her watch and lost track of time hours ago, but sometime after dark the drones slacked off for a little bit and a Freedom City SWAT team rolled in to destroy any baddies that were still twitching and start erecting some barricades. She could see some of them looking at her as they passed, but with their blank bulletproof face shields, it was impossible to know what they were thinking. Not that she cared much at the moment. Drunk with fatigue and hungover from magic overuse all at once, she left the police to their work and staggered towards the smell of coffee and food. She could feel Richard somewhere nearby, but didn't even have the energy to raise her head and look for him. If she could just sit down for a minute and have some coffee, maybe she could pull herself together one more time. 

 

Dazed as she was, it took her a moment to notice the blanket someone put around her shoulders, or the hands leading her over to a folding chair. "Come on now, honey, have a seat over here. You look all done in." Paige raised bloodshot eyes and saw a middle aged woman in a red vest watching her with concerned compassion. "We'll get you something to eat and a hot drink and you'll feel better." 

 

"Thank you," Paige managed to rasp as the volunteer stepped away. She closed her eyes and huddled into the blanket, glad that it covered what was left of her ruined uniform. The cute and snugly-fit bad girl costume that had been so perfect this morning seemed like an obscenity under the flickering of the generator-powered emergency lights tonight. Right now she couldn't remember why she'd put it on, or why she had wanted the money in that bank, or to disrupt the lives of the staff and customers. All of that belonged to someone else, and all tonight's Paige wanted was to be holding onto Richard and to not have to fight anymore. Which was too bad, came a faint and irreverent echo from inside her mind, because the bank would probably be very easy pickings about now. 

 

She must have dozed off a little, because the next thing Paige knew, the volunteer was back with a hot grilled cheese sandwich, a bowl of tomato soup, and a cup of coffee, along with a handful of wet-naps. "Here you are, honey, and careful of the hot cup! Our doctor is doing triage right now on Clark Street, but I'm going to see if I can get a medic to bandage up those cuts for you."

 

Paige blinked in surprise and raised a hand to her face, only now registering the stinging pains dotting her skin. She dimly remembered flying glass from a drone that had burst through a window nearly on top of her, but she hadn't realized she'd been cut. "Thank you," she murmured again, ducking her head and concentrating on getting the worst of the grime off her hands. 

 

"No, thank you," the woman replied, her voice suddenly much softer as she studied Paige. "We know what you're doing out there, what you've been doing all day, helping 1-800-JUSTICE and keeping the robots at bay. It's horrible that it took something like this to get the heroes back, but I'm so glad you came back for us. Thank you."

 

There was a lot that Paige might have said, maybe should've said, but instead she just stared bemusedly as the volunteer gave her a quick squeeze on her less-injured arm and went back to work. Thoughtful, Paige picked up her sandwich and began to eat. 

[Avenger Assembled]

Between the ticks of a clock, Richard ticked off the points in a life now falling apart. Blackstone was still in flame, patrolled by swarms of Omegadrones so vast he couldn't even get close. Providence, empty - either evacuated or worse, there were no signs he could tell in the few seconds he had to search. In a dying city, carnage frozen all around him as he ran back to where he'd left his girl and his companions, his badass criminal career seemed like a hollow lie against real slaughter, against real disaster. There was so much happening, and he wasn't fast enough to stop it, not even fast enough to run away. By the time he got back to Lincoln, the thoughts of abandonment, of simply grabbing Paige and running, had faded beneath the weight of the burning city around them. A lifetime of horrors - and he'd had time to see them all in the seconds it had taken Paige to get her hand stitched up. 

 

He was unaccountably quiet when he rejoined the others in their makeshift shelter, somewhat brokenly reporting on the conditions in the city before he walked a slow, careful way over to Paige to join her - without a word, he put his arms around her and closed his eyes. They'd been in bad places before, in those awful few months after her family's murder, but nothing like this. A moment's rest was all they could get - but that moment could last, and last, and last. As the pair blurred like a hummingbird's wings, he finally said, "Get some sleep, Paigey. We'll get through this." Across from them, Archer was slowly, methodically restringing his bow, his dark face a mask of control with only his eyes showing what he'd seen that day 

 

An exhausted Lady Liberty, barely able to speak, walked into the shelter and ungently laid her hands on Keith, her glowing energies briefly suffusing him as she healed the worst of Wail's wounds. For the healer and powerhouse, who had had the power but not the time to save everyone, this had been a long day's work. Without another word for the other heroes, she went around healing the rest - finding the energy to reassure the children and families, at least, that everything would be all right. "We'll get through this, all of us, if we stick together. You couldn't be in better hands." 

[Gizmo]

"Tsk, you know that tough and invulnerable aren't the same thing, right?" Jav chided as he rose from his seated position against one wall and walked over to examine Keith's arm once Lady Liberty had had a chance to use her healing power upon it. Muscle and bone had mended back together for the most part but with layers of dried blood and grime from collapsing concrete caked across it the limb was still a fairly gruesome sight.

Letting Jive inspect his arm without resistance, LaMarr managed a tired smirk. "You always say that but I'm still standing." Admittedly, that was a bit surprising given the amount of punishment he'd forced himself through in the previous long hours. He'd tested the limits of his super-dense frame and muscle tissue in the past but never for so long at once. The superhuman healing had put him back in mostly working order, he supposed, but he couldn't say it felt much different through the haze of aches and deep burning sensations. "Like you're one to talk, anyway." Indeed, the martial artist had borne the trials of the invasion without the benefit of durability beyond that of any other normal human, though at least he'd managed to get out of the way of more blasts and falling debris than Keith could claim.

With a ZAM! that somehow managed to sound tired, Yelena appeared in the shelter, holding a pair of bottles in each hand, her fingers cupping the necks. "Rescued these before a roof fell on their brothers," she explained, setting down a red wine along with two other bottles and prying the top off of the vodka. Taking a drag from it herself, the teleporter walked over to the silent Archer and held it out to him. "Perhaps a toast, yes?" The suggestion was a little softer than her normal tone. It hadn't been so long that the former mercenary had forgotten what it was like to lose teammates in the field, to find oneself abruptly outmatch and outgunned.

[Avenger Assembled]

"Never cared for the Russkie stuff," said Archer, his tenor voice tight with pain, but he took the wine despite all that. "Was never the bottle," he said as if speaking to no one in particular. "It was loving the bottle more than what was outside it. Doesn't matter now anyway." Despite his words, the marksman's hands didn't so much as flutter as he took the wine bottle, carefully worked out the cork, and raised it to toast with Yelena. "For everyone. All of us." He met the eyes of the civilians they'd been protecting, many of whom would have scorned Lincoln's most active defender only twenty-four hours earlier. "We'll get through this." 

 

-

 

The next morning, an aerial emergency took Lady Liberty from them. "Damn, they're going into the stratosphere! On my way, Thunder!" she shouted into her commlink before taking off, her form silhouetted against the rising sun. Whatever she was doing up there was hardly visible to the ground-bound heroes in Lincoln, and with a faint sigh Fast-Forward began the work of helping with evacuations - at least until there came that familiar sound, that screaming roar like a thousand damned souls as Terminus-powered engines roared towards Lincoln. 

 

Except that this time, even as the heroes formed up again for what felt like the last battle of their lives, it wasn't drones anymore. The circular hovercraft, wasn't it, Richard thought, was piloted by six figures still in Blackstone orange, its spiky, twisted armor showing its unmistakable origin in the same forges that had produced the Omegadrones whose wreckage now coated the battered neighborhood. At the sight of the small band of heroes defending the bank in front of them, the pilot of the craft, recognizable as the villainous Ver-Man, a filthy rat creature and cold-blooded murderer, directed the hovercraft right at them. 

 

"Die for Omega!" Ver-Man cackled. 

[Avenger Assembled]

The fight against the Quisling supervillains was brutal - the already-murderous thugs who had sold their soul to the all-too-real Devil tearing Freedom City apart seemed to have grown harsher and colder, as if they had given away some real part of their basic humanity. Pushed to the limit by the crisis, the heroes didn't quite descend to the level of their enemies - but it was a near-run thing. When it was done and the ships were smashed and the would-be Annihilists (as they'd called themselves) either unconscious, fled, or buried under tons of debris, Fast-Forward found one still conscious - a man he didn't recognize at all, not in generic prison garb, but who had shown enhanced strength and toughness before Wail had shouted him through several parked cars. "Hey! You!" He woke the tattooed powerhouse up with a super-speed punch that smashed his bald head into the concrete. "Where's Clock Queen? What happened to the other inmates at Blackstone!? Answer me, dammit!"

 

The man opened his eyes and responded with a brutally graphic suggestion about Clock Queen's fate, and with his eyes burning with fury, Richard raised his hand with the clear intent of putting it through the former prisoner's head - even though clearer heads could tell he'd been bluffing. 

[Gizmo]

"Cline!" Yelena appeared in a flash next to the speedster, flesh and blood hand restraining his shoulder. The teleporter's hair had become uneven, one side partially burned off before Jive had taken down the pyrokinetic who'd taken her by surprise. "Enough! He is not worth it." The traitorous inmate began to speak again and Jump's cybernetic limb lashed out in a brutal backhand that sent him bouncing off of the nearby curb to fall insensate again, followed by a string of Ukrainian cursing that would have given anyone fluent grey hairs. By the time she finished it was clear that she was holding onto Fast-Forward's shoulder more for support to remain standing than to hold him back.

Drawn to the commotion, Wail jogged over, hands caked in debris well past the elbows from digging out survivors and more horrifyingly frequently bodies from the collapsed structures surrounding the site of the latest battle. Looking over at the tattooed Quisling and the expression on Richard's face he quickly deduced what had happened. "Man, hey. Listen." LaMarr's voice was still deep and resonant but had begun to develop a hoarseness that sounded terribly out of place coming from the broad shouldered hero. "Your moms, she's fast like you, yeah? And tough; way I heard it she used to go up against Big Blond back in the day, right? No way does she not get somewhere safe when this all goes down." The reassurance rang a little hollow despite his sound logic; so far they hadn't found anywhere that could honestly be called safe.

[Electra]

Paige looked up from where she'd been taking a five-minute sanity break, a few precious moments behind her mental walls and away from the fear and pain of the masses surrounding them. Being able to pinpoint survivors under debris was a valuable skill, but being inside the minds of the trapped had her a few shuddering breaths away from a claustrophobic panic attack. Assuming they all lived through this, she suspected she wasn't going to like the dreams she'd be having for awhile. The sound of renewed fighting and shouting drew her attention, making her pull herself once again to her feet. 

 

"He's right, baby," she told Richard as she made her way over. "Your mom's got amazing survival skills, and she'd know better than to get anywhere close to any of Omega's goon squad." Paige shot Wail a grateful look as she wrapped her arms around her new fiance. "She probably lit out right over the bay and didn't even go into the city. Once everything's cleared up, we'll hear from her from Canada or some tropical island with no extradition." She  sniffed and rubbed the side of her hand against the nosebleed that had been a pretty constant trickle for hours. "I wonder what the Freedom League is doing now," she mused, sounding almost wistful. 

Edited August 6, 2014 by Electra

[Avenger Assembled]

Richard took a long, shuddering breath, fighting back the urge to cry - especially with Wail and especially with his girl right there watching him. It had been a long, long time, especially for someone whose perceptions of time were sometimes at their slowest. "She...she doesn't know we were back in town, yeah." He looked around at the ruined city and made an admission that was, in its own way, painful - for all that he was doing nothing more than reciting facts he'd known since he was a child. "If something big happened, she wouldn't stay and fight unless she was cornered. She'd just take off someplace else." He wasn't sure what that was either, not with everything the way it was - all across the world, as far as Lady Liberty's updates had been able to tell them of the events in the rest of the city. "But at least that means she's safe, and she's away from...all this." He waved a hand around at the place that he was beginning to believe might be their tomb. 

 

The rest of the day after that battle was spent in rescue and disaster relief, the small group of Lincoln defenders now doing all they could to save lives even if looked like the world itself was ending. The skies were still an ominous red and sirens and explosions were audible even as they worked. The battle had passed them by for now, giving them breathing room enough to make sure the other inhabitants of Lincoln were still breathing.

 

Another long day was coming to an end, the red skies turning black overhead save where fires lit the clouds from below, when it happened - Wail, with a little assistance from Paige's weak telekinesis, was lifting a heavy, overloaded truck that had been smashed into the asphalt and blocked an evacuation route, trapping those residents who wanted to make their way out by car and to the cordon of National Guard around the town as fast as they could. It was some safety, anyway, more than they had there. Then there was a noise like the wind, and a blur of gold and blue: and suddenly they weren't alone anymore, the truck lifted into the air and over the head of the man they'd all grown up watching, admiring, believing in. 

 

Without a word, the Centurion effortlessly moved the truck out of the way and set it down along the side of the road. With his face now clearly visible, the Man of Adamant was almost shockingly battered and bruised, his blonde hair almost brown from soot, his invincible skin cracked and bleeding along one side of his face, his hands bloodied at the knuckles. "The road is clear," he told the small convoy of civilians, who in their cars and vans looked small against the broken city. "You can make it out of the city and away from the wormholes, and no more harm will come to you." For the first time, he looked at the heroes, villains, and vigilantes of Lincoln. "There won't be any more attacks tonight. Do any of you want to go with them?" 

[Gizmo]

There was a palpable silence before anyone really registered that the Centurion had asked them a question. The blood on his face looked completely out of place; LaMarr realized after a moment that the idea of the Centurion bleeding had legitimately never crossed his mind. It was Jav who finally piped up, sauntering over with forced nonchalance that covered the slight limp he'd been sporting for the past several hours. "C'mon, big guy. Do you?"
 
Yelena snorted flatly, crossing her arm and refusing to even look in the direction of the opened roadway. "Honestly. Can teleport. If I was leaving, I would be gone." Huffing, she went about her business.

Not entirely concealing a small smile, Wail looked up at the blond paragon, rolling his shoulder to loosen up the muscle that had been straining to support the truck. "There you go. I know you cape wearing brothers don't always think too highly of 1-800-JUSTICE but you know we don't lie down while we're still on the clock." Moving to stand next to Jive he gave the Centurion a solemn nod that communicated respectful thanks despite the jocular tone of his words. "You just knock the fool behind all this out. We've got Lincoln covered."

[Electra]

Paige just stood and stared for a minute, all but gaping at the sight of a legend in the bruised and bloody flesh. Despite decades in the metahuman arena, she'd never actually seen the Centurion in person, she'd never been counted nearly enough of a threat for him to take notice of. She wasn't entirely sure he noticed her now, or that she wanted him to notice her. Yesterday morning, in another lifetime, she'd still been a villain who robbed banks for fun. Maybe it would be a wise idea to keep her head down and stay out of sight. It would definitely be a wise idea to take the offered retreat and find someplace with no Omegadrones, no hurting humans, no noise at all, until her brain stopped feeling like it was going to melt out her ears.

 

She listened to the members of 1-800-JUSTICE and their easy bravery, feeling envious and small all at once. She still didn't think she understood what drove people like that to be heroes when it went against the law, public opinion, and every tiny bit of common sense. But they were absolutely certain that what they were doing was right, and that it mattered. If she wound up on the wrong end of a power pike tonight, could she say that anything she'd ever done had really mattered? Paige was still chewing on that unpalatable question when suddenly the Centurion's gaze was on her, locking her in place. She swallowed, tasted blood, but was used to that by now. "I... we... we're going to stay." She told him, her voice firming up a little as she spoke. "If there's no attacks tonight, we can regroup, maybe help out at the shelters. People still need help." Straightening her back a little, she asked, "Are you all right?"