AD ASTRA. | I.

( 'GHOST RIDER' )

Guilt is a funny thing. For some, it manifests as grief and sadness, others anger. For few, it breeds vengeance. For Loghan Crawford, however, guilt turned her to community service. 

Well, sort of. 

She took her guilt, and used it to fuel herself. She couldn't sit back letting things happen, knowing she could stop them. 

Loghan herself was different now. She was a new person. For one, she had powers now. But unlike before, she didn't live just for herself anymore. She worked hard to help others, even though it was so damn tiring. 

That's how she ended up chasing after a truck of arms dealers. 

The girl made a motion with her fingers, and the steel in one of the tires melted. The vehicle screeched against the road and the car swerved, but it kept going. She could hear the men getting their weapons ready and shouting at each other to prepare. 

She looked to her side to see her mentor and friend, Daisy Johnson, and nodded. Daisy, or rather Quake, in this scenario, raised a hand and blasted another tire of the car. 

The two were in pursuit of a group of outlaws named the Aryan Brotherhood. They had stolen some kind of weapon, and, as most gangs do, were probably going to use it. Loghan used her powers to pull carbon out of  the air and used it to create a spike. She shot the spike at one of the back tires of their truck. The vehicle screeched and swerved dramatically, eventually coming to a halt. Smoke came out of the bumper.

"Nice job," Daisy whispered to her before sending out a blast that shattered a nearby lamppost. 

"Get it, kill it, shoot anything that moves," the driver ordered. 

The guys in the back got out and started to look around. Loghan accidentally scraped her foot on the ground. A loud sound came from where she stood and one of them turned and shot at them. She lifted her hands in front of her and a layer of carbon formed, protecting them from the bullets.

"I take it back," Daisy shook her head. 

The man who was shooting at them turned when Loghan ducked behind a car. Daisy was there and she kicked his gun out of his hands. She turned him forcefully and punched his face before grabbing his shirt and slamming his head.

"Help. He got me, he'll kill us all," Loghan heard the man whisper as she walked up next to Daisy. There was blood on her hands and she was shaking. The man in the car took a gun and aimed it at a civilian woman who was hiding behind a car.

"Get back!" Daisy shouted as she went to get her out of the way. Loghan tried to summon her powers but she wasn't fast enough, resulting in a bullet lodging itself in her right arm. She cursed in pain as one of them got out of the car and dragged her in. She saw Daisy's face look out and she was getting ready to get her out of there but she signaled for her not to.

"What's a pretty girl like you doing getting mixed up with all this?" one of the men asked, grabbing her face.

"Don't touch me," Loghan growled, taking her face out of his hands. He grabbed his gun and pointed it at her again, this time at her chest. "I won't ask again," he grumbled. She wanted to use her powers but she was in too much pain. 

Then she heard it.

The thug turned his head to the noise coming from the car on the end of the road. He removed his gun, getting ready to drive again. "Maybe if you don't make any noise, I'll get us out of here and you can have a good time too," he smirked. Loghan was horrified, more than she had been in a very long time.

Then, the charger revved up again and came speeding at them. The man in the driver's seat yelled at someone in the back to shoot at it. The man shot at the car and it (literally) went up in flames. But instead of crashing, the car flipped and continued with the flames on it as if nothing had happened. 

When she saw that whoever was in that charger didn't have any intentions of stopping, she got down and stayed in that position as the two vehicles collided. She shrieked as her arm was pressed down from the force of the crash. Gasoline all around caught fire. 

The man climbed out, and dragged the driver out of the truck. 

She looked up and saw a man in a leather jacket. Except he wasn't a man. He had a flaming skull where a head would have been and she watched in horror as he grabbed the man by the neck, burning him to a crisp. Loghan screamed and his head—well, technically skull—snapped towards her. She whimpered as he came up and stood over me.

He stood there for a moment. He grabbed her arms and dragged her out of the car. She started kicking, but he didn't seem to care. 

He dragged her away from the blazing truck. He let go of her arms and stilled for another moment before going back to his car. 

She was shaking by the time Daisy came around. 

》》◆《《

Daisy and Loghan walked into the hospital. They headed in and locked the door. Loghan made sure to calculate the time they had before someone found out. She tuned in and out of the questions Daisy was asking him for a bit.

"Save him, please, before he gets burned too," he pleaded. This piqued Loghan's interest.

"You'll see your buddy again once you've healed up, just tell me..."

"No, no, it's too late for me. They say when burns you, he burns your soul. And a soul can never heal." Scott then stood up, and the blood puddle in the bandage grew. The monitors started beeping as he fell to the ground.

"He's bleeding out!" Loghan shouted, moving over and crouching next to him. "Scott, I need you to tell me who he is, okay?"

"Hey, I hate to mess this up, but we need to go!" Daisy hollered, grabbing her and making it towards the window. Then she jumped out of the window. "Dammit, Daisy," Loghan grumbled, quickly looking behind herself to see the nurses calling for help. She sighed, "I hate it here," and jumped after her.

》》◆《《

"That's it there," the man named Robbie pointed, then proceeding to reach into his pocket. Loghan didn't trust him; there was something up. He was wearing the same jacket as the demon-savior from the night before. It couldn't have been a coincidence. "You live around here?"

"No, we used to. Me and my sister, we're just in town for a couple of days, soaking up the sun," Daisy said.

"Strange place to spend your vacation," he said from behind them. Loghan heard the jingle coming from him tossing keys in his hands. 

She knew it. 

Daisy seemed to come to the same realization and they both stopped walking. "Not a great neighborhood."

Loghan turned around and Daisy followed her actions. Robbie lunged forward but she pushed him back with a blast. He hit the side of a van, and Loghan could tell they had pissed him off.

He got up and reached for a piece of pipe lying there. "So," he said as his eyes shone a crimson shade and the pipe lit on fire. "You got the devil inside of you too." He ran forward, and instead of waiting for him, Daisy ran to meet him in the middle.

The pipe fell, and a small fire had started. Daisy and Robbie exchanged punches, and Loghan felt useless just sitting there. It was a pretty fair fight, until Daisy flipped him and held him by the throat against the side of an RV.

"You shouldn't have gotten involved," he said.

"Serial killers always complain when you try to intervene," she fired back. Loghan walked up next to her silently and watched the scene unfold in front of her.

"I only kill asesinos who deserve it," he defended. "Its vengeance, Chica."

"For what? You killed a detective," Daisy said.

"He had blood on his hands," he answered, to which Daisy responded by punching him.

"A teacher," Loghan listed. 

"A pedophile," he stated before hitting his head against Daisy's, catching her off guard. That made her angry. Daisy blasted him back, causing him to crash into a pile of crates. 

"You don't get to decide who dies."

He shook his head. "I'm not the one who decides." Loghan watched as his skin burned away revealing the same flaming skull she had seen the night before.

The man who they had come to learn was called the "Ghost Rider" grabbed a pipe—a bigger one this time—and it went up in flames. He raised the weapon but Daisy disarmed him. Desperate to do something, Loghan used her powers to try and separate the two.

"Hey, you might wanna step back, D," she shouted at Daisy. She got the message and nodded before focusing on fighting the Ghost Rider. It took a lot of concentration, but Loghan managed to pull hydrogen from around them and moved it between them. "Now!" She yelled as she pulled some above the fire on his head. The explosion pushed them both back, but he got up first.

Loghan gaped as he grabbed a structure and tried to crush Daisy with it. She managed to hold up, but they were both pretty strong. He crouched down beside her.

"Do it," Daisy panted. "I deserve it." He stayed there a moment, but then stood up and walked away.

"Daisy!" Loghan ran over and lifted the structure off of her. As she strained, she saw the Ghost Rider lingering. As soon as he saw her peering back, he left.

》》◆《《

They sat in the van, and Loghan had my computer out. She was reading  an article about her little sister, now known as Lucille Stark. In the time Loghan had been MIA, Tony Stark had announced her as his biological daughter and proposed to their mother, who obviously said yes. 

She was happy that her sister finally knew who her father was, and that it was someone she liked. But she couldn't help the slight burn of jealousy thinking about her parents. 

Loghan was adopted, and despite being twenty-one years old, she still knew nothing about who her biological parents were. Whenever she tried to ask Catherine, she was met with a wall of excuses. 

"So, why are we here again?" Loghan asked, scrolling to the bottom of the article, unconcerned with what people had to say about her sister's outfit a few days ago. 

"Apparently Reyes has a brother. Look," she said. Loghan's gaze shifted from her computer. She watched as Robbie helped a boy who was in a wheelchair into his car.  The boy laughed and smiled. 

"What's his name?" Loghan questioned, pushing thoughts of her own sister to the back of her mind. 

"Gabriel, like the angel. Ironic, since his brother is a serial killer," Daisy scoffed.

"What do you think he is? I don't think he's Inhuman."

"We can't rule that out because of what happened with Dr. Garner," she replied, watching as the two Reyes' left.

"Right, the man who was hired to help Inhumans but ended up trying to kill them," Loghan said, returning her attention to her screen.

"Its a little more complicated than that, but yes," she confirmed. 

Apparently, Garner was the one who evaluated Inhumans before they got registered. After he went through the mist, he became an Inhuman hunter, that came out once in a while. It was as he was transitioning between human and more than that. She shuddered, remembering the pictures Daisy had shown her of Lash, his counterpart.

"So, we gonna go at it again?" Loghan asked her, referring to the Ghost Rider.

"Yeah, but first we need a plan."