Gats.

Owl stalks down the hall until she fades into a red speck. The guard with my arm huffs and swipes her hood down. I squirm. She is tall, her wrinkled cloak rustling as it tumbles to her knees. Her blonde hair falls neatly to her shoulders and frames her eyes. I pull back. The other guard isn't particularly tall or particularly frightening, brown hair swept up into a loose ponytail and a sheepish little smile on her shaded face. Still, I find little comfort in either of them.

"Well," the blonde one says, "what do we do with him?" Her grip is tight, but there isn't any malice in the woman's relaxed tone. Granted, I'm not great at identifying that type stuff, but I'm not scared of her. She looks curious, her eyes bright and round, a quiet "hmm..." muttered under her breath.

The other guard holds up her hands. Signs. The gestures start fluid, but when she glances at me they become vigorous and jerky, like through the graceful movements, she's screaming. I try to move away, soft baby steps instead of the big, loping strides, but the guard never relaxes her grip. She hardly notices my struggling, it seems, just holds me like she's a mother in a grocery store engaging in serious conversation and I'm her derpy kid.

"Huh," the blonde woman says, "she is going pretty far, but... " A sharp pause. "Spleens."

The brunette gathers herself, her rounded cheeks flushed red, by drawing up one long breath. Her eyes practically glow, all angry flames and agitated blinks.

I cock my head. Watching and listening to the guards argue is like watching the Star Wars movies, trying to puzzle what the characters are saying with only the clipped words and pauses of one speaker.

"We can't... but there's some truth... we've talked about this before... well, yeah, I agree... no, I would never do that...even if she ordered..."

They're stiff as they glare at each other each other, their faces drawn tight with deep, sudden creases. As they're leaned toward each other, hands fisted, it's here I find enough strength to pull away, just out of the woman's grasp. I do it slowly, twisting my wrist like pulling I'm a key out of a lock. I can only hope they're too engrossed in their conversation to notice.

My knees are putty. My head feels like a bloated balloon ready to pop. As I flatten my back against a complex wall, ready to bolt, the blonde woman spies me out of the corner of her eye. I freeze. She snatches my arm and yanks me back into the hall.

Well, okay. "Snatch" and "yank" are strong words. More like taps me on the forearm and pulls me a twinge away from from the corner. But when you're trying to escape the clutches of a violent supervillain, everything feels like a "snatch" and a "yank."

"Hi." She smiles at me, leaning down with her free hand slid on her knees. I pull back, strands of white hair in my eyes and ruffled up in odd places. Out of nervous habit, I start to comb it down, my fingers caught in the tangles. I growl under my breath. Getting shot in the face is one thing, tangled hair is another, and there's blood on my fingers. That stuff's gonna get all in my hair, and oh, how yucky.

"I'm Sarah, and that's Ivy." The guard points over her shoulder and the brown-haired woman nods. I blink. Average, salt-of-the-earth names. I think they're the strangest things I've heard my entire stay here.

I glower. "What are you going to do?" My throat feels dry from my silence. The guard, Sarah, chuckles. Her friend does too.

"He speaks!" Sarah says, a big grin on her face. She throws Ivy a wink. "And he's British."

Ivy laughs silently and I wonder what's so funny about me being British. So I have an accent. I'm also a mutated cat-person-creature. I try to growl, but it comes out a purr, so now I'm trying not to blush. "Yeah, yeah, what do you want?"

The guard raises an eyebrow in mock amusement. Ivy signs something and Sarah asks,
"How old are you?"

I smirk out of habit. "I don't have to tell you anything, miss."

"Thirteen? Twelve?"

"Sixteen!" She grins at this, and so does the other guard. The complex is silent, eerily so,
and I grab at my face. I can't help tugging the bandage and touching the healing flesh. I want to go home. I need to go home.

"This is educational, right?" Sarah glances at her friend and Ivy nods. She turns back to me.
"You wanna see the lair?"

"No," I say under my breath, but I nod agreeably. I only come in two modes, really: save-yourself and sore loser. And besides, she thinks I look twelve. College kids say I look older for my age. Eighteen. Nineteen. Seventeen, at least. I mean, sure, I'm a little on the small side. But my face... 

I touch my swollen cheek and a creeping thought occurs. Maybe that's it. Maybe my cheek is so puffy from the swelling in my healing flesh I look younger somehow.

I go cold.

"It'll be great, I promise." She pats me on the shoulder, a comforting gesture, but I barely register it or anything else.

When I was little, people told me everything was okay if it looked okay. If you smiled in the
pictures, if you held your head square and did your hair just like this, no matter what
you felt, life was fine. You'd fake it until you made it.

And now, I don't even have my pretty face or pretty hair to play pretend with. No,
everything isn't okay. I'm stuck here with no way to talk to anyone I love, bloody, weak, and disfigured. It's a lot, and that tanker of stinking sewage isn't an acquired taste. It isn't like algebra, something you learn to suck up and get over. It's jarring. Every time I glance down, I catch an eyeful of my wrists, still pink from being held up in straps, and my stomach churns. 

I level my eyes to the woman and her partner in crime, and all the furry, all the hate, all the desperate need to get out of here, I thrust into a shrug. A violent shrug.  "Whatever you want to do, ladies. I don't care. I'm all yours."

Giggles. The guard pulls me into the hall, and there's a slight bound in her step, a bit of a hop. Her friend follows, and Ivy's gait is a bit slower, a little more tentative. She sweeps her head side to side as if afraid someone will jump out and swing at her. I hold my breath.

 Once you discover people have scents, breathing becomes a delicate act you actually have to think about. Too long of a drag, and you get a barrage of ugly smells. Too short if one, and you get dizzy.

"So, this is the lair," Sarah offers, and with a few quick glances, I decide to take notes. I'm still reeling from the folksy smell this place has to it. So many people have passed here. Not that I can make each person's scent trails out individually, but the general smell for people is the same: earth and chemicals. The sharp, clinical kind. There's just something about us that exudes it.

"Uh-huh?"

She leads me through the white halls. "It gets cooler, I swear." She drops her voice, a guiding hand on my shoulder. "Owl is kind of boring. Not that she means to be. She wants to be professional, sure, all these white walls give the place a sort of neutral air, you know?"

I don't know. I just know this guard likes to talk, and it's almost soothing. The universe, my
universe, at least, has shifted forever on its axis, but supervillains still talk a lot. It's a
comfort, however little, that that never changes.

Ivy taps me on the shoulder, shooting me a smile. She rolls her eyes at her friend as if to
say, "isn't she ridiculous?"

"Hey!" Sarah tosses her head back like a horse showing off its shiny mane. "I saw that!" Grinning, she fishes a silver key from her pocket, jabs it into the keyhole of a gray door. Another guard stands a few feet away, arms crossed and scowly face set on permanent frown. He shakes his head when he sees us, but says nothing. I'm terrible when it comes to guessing what's on people's minds, but I take a shot he's thinking something along the lines of, "Kids these days..."

"This is cool. Isn't it, Ive?"  Ivy, or Ive, which is about as ridiculous a nickname as 'Gats,' nods. She, too, fishes something from the crisp pocket of her cloak. When Sarah finally flings the door open, Ivy slaps something cool and rectangular in my hand.

A Hershey bar.

There's a rule about never taking candy from strangers, butt he folks who made it have never been a starved cat-person trapped in a villain's lair with a chunk of face missing. It's food, damn it, and I'm eating.  I fumble with the brown wrapper and peel away layers of half-melted chocolate. I don't think of manners or polite eating; I'm starved. And If Angel saw me wolfing down chocolate like this, he would burst out laughing. He likes to call me a "dainty eater" because I use table manners like any sane person does. But I think he's past sane at this point, and I think so am I.

My chest tightens. I lick the chocolate off my fingers, and Ivy watches with something of a grin. And it's disarming. It isn't a smirk or a snarl or look of victory. And it isn't a cruel, mua-ha-ha , that was poisoned, you shall die shady smile either, like you'd expect from a supervillain. She's just grinning, like she's actually happy I'm eating, actually happy I'm okay, and I feel a twinge in my stomach.

"See, Ive knows its cool. Now, this is cool. Like, when I first started working here, I thought, 'meh,' but then I saw this."

Sarah the guard pulls me into the room and I blink a few times to make sure I'm seeing alright. It must be Owl's speciality to hide the extraordinary in the ordinary, because the stuff she hoards behind these shoddy plaster doors is, well, it's insane.

"Weapons," I say flatly.

"Lots of weapons," Sarah agrees.

Because they're everywhere. We stand in the doorway of an L-shaped room that spans as
far I can see.

I don't like museums, except maybe the superhero museum because there's this big "room of love" dedicated to Nebula and Taurus, the husband and wife leaders of the superheroes of the golden age. It's a cool place to make out in and easy to break into, too. I've been there after midnight more times than I can pull off the top of my head, and I have a hunch the people who designed the room wanted teenagers to romance there, lying under the star projections on the ceiling and all. Kind of adds to the atmosphere, I suppose.

But this. This is not the place you romance some strange kid you met at a party twenty or so minutes ago or anyone else at. This is a place you marvel and mull. The walls are black. The floor is covered in a thin sheet of marble, veins of pink and white racing by my torn-up socks. I want to sit down to touch the polish under my fingertips. The ceiling is white, the edges frosted with gold leaf that weaves into patterns like olive branches at the edges. I squint.

"Cool, right?" There are wax figures. There are glass boxes and display cases and books. "A supervillain can afford her own museum, you know? A bit of a god complex, I guess. Starlight might have a beautiful superhero museum, but everything in it is a lie. Pretty lies. This is the truth, and it isn't so pretty, I suppose. But I like it."

"Oh," I say. I guess I'm not feeling so chatty, but there's a bitter taste in my mouth. Across
the room, in gold lacquer, a shiny plaque sits on the wall. Keep a secret, I'm not very good at reading. Sometimes Angel has to help me with my homework because I can't read it. The letters blur, I start writing words backwards, and the 'd's and 'b's all look the same. When I proof my fan-fictions, I find some of the oddest mistakes.

And right now, the letters on the plaque look like chicken scratch, my mind struggling to piece any sort of meaning from them at all, like reading from another language.

I step toward it, resting my hands lightly on a display case. Under the glass, a long, broadsword swabbed in velvet lies in a plain black sheath. "Like it?" Sarah whispers in my ear.

I forget about the plaque. I think I forget about everything. "Yeah, it's—it's nice."

She hops over the counter, her cloak billowing out behind, splash of darkness against the alread
black walls. My eyes narrow at the plaque, finally making out a flicker of meaning when I focus.

RED—STRENGTH
ORANGE—FLIGHT
YELLOW—ILLUSION
GREEN—HEALING
BLUE—SPEED
INDIGO—IMMORTALITY
VIOLET—ENERGY

Violet. Energy. I hold back a squeak, swaying on my heels with my hands grasping at the case for balance.

I'm not much of a squeaker, not usually, but violet. Violet like Angel's flames and violet like his eyes when they're glazed over with madness. I look up at Sarah, who presses the sword flat on the top of the display case.

"Please," I beg her. I have no more dignity left to spare, cat-eared and puffy faced as I am, so I'm not above begging. A guy does what he has to to survive. "Please explain this."

She glances back at the plaque and smiles down at the sword. "I'm not good at teaching history, you know? It's better to show it than to tell it."

She swipes her finger across the dull blade. Blue flames explode from the metal, glowing aura overtaking the sword. All I can think of is Angel's aura. He, Heaven, and me don't know anything of it, of how it works, of what it does. But that can change.

I lean in and skim my fingers through the flames. No heat. The blaze crackles and hisses, but if anything, my fingerpads feel cool at the touch.

"This is all that's left of Jupiter, the sixth superhero in Nebula's brigade. Owl killed him."

She taps her fingers against the blade and I swallow hard. "This is the last of his superpowers. His aura, distilled into its most basic form and forged into his weapon."

My stomach drops. I snatch my hand away and try not wretch. All I can picture, all at once, are those people who hunt down beautiful, rare animals and turn their skins into purses and rugs. I wheel back on my heels, clutching my stomach and trying to stay calm. But I can't.

I can't because out of the corner of my eye, I see a flash of purple. Shredded armor. A knight's helmet, hung over the neck of a pale mannequin. I turn toward it. The broken breastplate, the crumpled purple gauntlets studded with star patterns, the visor.

"Hey, cat!"

I'm too quick. I springboard off the ground and come to a full somersault in the air. I
hit the floor running and grab Heaven's visor, smearing my fingerprints on the cracked glass. Something so savage, so primitive wells up in me at the sight of her armor displayed in Owl's lair, like the trinkets Owl took from the superheroes she killed. 

"She isn't dead," I say when the guards find me. They both look the same all of the sudden, their faces pale, their eyes shady, their mouths twisted into frowns. I growl, still clutching the chipped helmet. "This belongs to Galaxy and I'm going to give it back."

***
Merry Christmas and happy holidays everyone! Chapter dedicated to MagicxWand, for letting me steal from her personality to make Sarah (though I think Ivy came out closer than Sarah did, but anyway...). Happy reading!