Gats.

Swords don't stop bullets. Swords just don't stop bullets. I feel my heartbeat through my ribs. I mean, I know life doesn't stop for saying goodbye, or for dating or graduating. Life stops for stopping.  But as a bullet whizzes by my face, I feel myself tearing.  Powers are things, people are immortal, after all. Why can't I be immortal, then? Why can't I be a real super? The questions blur the corners of my mind. But then it comes to me. Nine lives. I'm a cat. I jerk the sword to the side, flicking the blade. It explodes in blue flames. An aura. My mind tears in a thousand different directions. Speed. Strength. Use the sword, the woman said, use the sword.

I flip, slashing at the blurs in the air. Ping. It's the only sound I hear. Ping. Ping. Ping. I put my trust in the sword, in Jupiter. My heart clenches in my chest. Faster, I think, faster, faster, faster. I let myself twirl, tumble, fly, the sword up to protect my face. The aura flows from the blade, trickling up my arms in a flurry of cold, like ice curling up my veins. The world swishes around me. Slows down. I feel my heart in my throat. I raise the sword and attack. So this is how it feels to be Heaven, to be a superhero. I launch myself into the air and slice at the blurs with the back of the blade. The world is still moving, the bullets still fly, but I'm faster now. I flip back and block hard with furious, sloppy strokes, just praying I keep the gunfire from hitting the escaping guards. Sarah struggles with a door. She pseudo-swears under her breath and rips the brass knob off the plane. 

It explodes open and she drags Ivy through. I hit the ground, gasping for air. My shoulders and arms ache, heavy like they're filled with cement. I can hardly keep them up, my lungs burning like they're stuffed with crackling embers. I could scream. Just keep going, I tell myself, just keep it up. You have to escape. The women race in front, me trying to back them up with the sword, them trying to forge the best path while Sarah dispatches the few people that get in her way. Sweat drips down my brow, my skin hot and clammy. The cat ears twitch madly, so fast they feel like flutters. I'm cutting them off, I think almost out of nowhere, no matter what Angel says about infection. I hate them and they're going away.

We slide through the hall. White walls. White floor. I hear a long sigh. "No one ever learns in this place, do they?" My blade hits the ground, my arms filled with sharp, stabbing pain. 

I can do this. I'm supposed to be able to handle situations like this, and yet, I don't know what it is I can do to do this. Owl leans against a wall, the expression on her face bored, her mouth drawn into a thin line and her dull working eye flicking to the floor every so often. She sizes me up, Sarah and Ivy crouched in fighting positions and ready to spring. It's a losing battle. "What do you think you're doing?" she asks. 

This is for escape, I think, and for Angel and Hev and even the guards. I draw in a shaky breath, lift the sword, and lunge.

Owl holds up her arm. The guards race past her and she doesn't even look up. My sword connects cleanly with her wrist. Slices right through bone like a katana to butter and I see it all in a flash. Blood, twitching fingers, a severed brown hand plopping to the ground. The sideways glance from an amused Owl. I'm about to lose my Hershey bar all over the floor. 

She blinks. Smiles coyly, the type of smile that takes a whole second or two to develop on her face. "You're a determined little one."

"I cut off your hand!" I scream. I'm done. I quit. That should've put her out of commission. That should put anyone out of commission. Why hasn't it? Why doesn't anything ever make sense anymore! "Why are you looking at me like that?"

She snorts, still grinning in a vicious sort of way, one that oozes a sense of victory, like she already has me clenched in her intact hand. I can't take my eyes away. Flesh and vein and bone, weaving in beautiful hexes from her wrist, all coming together in a few seconds to form another hand. 

My stomach drops. It must show in my face, because she chuckles as she approaches. "My turn," she says, unsheathing the dagger from her boot.

***

Fallout swings around in his cushy spinny chair as his page knocks, lacing his ankles together over the table and his fingers behind his head. He grins a little to himself, assured he looks like a total bad-ass as the page stumbles in, her hands trembling just a little around her binder. "Um," she says, "hi."

He lifts two fingers in a hearty salute. "I was doing work, you know," he lies. He's actually been playing checkers with himself for the past thirty minutes, which has become a strange past time of his. He casually scoots his foot across the table and knocks the game-board to the floor, listening with a twinge of a blush to the sound of dozens of little plastic checkers hitting the floor. The page stares blankly. "So," he says, raising his powerful voice to make himself sound much more like a scary supervillain than he feels, "what's the trouble?"

"Syndicate."

Fallout flops hard against the back of his chair, suppressing a groan. Of course. "Didn't I just fight with Owl a few months ago?"

The page looks down, her face flushed red.

"That was thirteen years ago, sir."

"Oh." Fallout sighs and shifts his wings under his jacket. "Everyone talks about how great it is being immortal, but for me, I can't even track time."

"You're seventy-six, Fallout." The page rolls her eyes and brushes back a strand of her coppery hair, sick of playing pretend subordination. "I'm approaching my three-hundredth birthday, actually, and I track time just fine." She smiles proudly, and Fallout chuckles. She looks like a teen, and a young one at that.

"What? Were you bitten by a vampire?"

"Maybe." Her shoulders hunch. She points at her canines and Fallout leans forward. They do look abnormally large. He snorts. The tension is so thick it almost mists up the room.

 The page scowls and slams the ratty blue binder down all over his papers and the comic books. He would tell her that Owl is even older, approaching eight-hundred if he checked correctly, but he doesn't say anything. In truth, the age difference between him and his once close friend/lover troubles him deeply. In a world of villains and heroes, monsters and immortals, Fallout is still young, not even at the end of a natural life cycle. Owl, his page, and the other immortals left in Starlight know things he could only guess, and every time his age is brought up, he grows a little red. Seventy-six years on Earth and the other villains see him still as an immature youth. Ridiculous. "How interesting," he opts for instead, cupping a hand over his mouth in a fake yawn. "I have a vampire working for me. What is this about Syndicate?"

She flips open the binder, revealing pages and pages of papers along with a sleek screen tucked into a leather binder. "Places are being attacked."

"Most currently..."

"The local Food Lion."

Fallout howls. His chair tips back and he hits the floor in a heap, gasping like she punched him in the stomach. He even tears up a little, his limber muscles throbbing with fresh pain. "Food Lion? Why should I care about Food Lion?"

The page huffs. "Because two of your guys were there buying Snickers Bars and got pinned on the crime."

Fallout stops laughing. "What?" She nods. He wipes imaginary dust off his jacket and rises to his feet, slowly, a little grandiosely. Holding his head up, he asks, "Why is this?"

She meets his eyes. He notices a sprinkling of freckles on her nose, a hand propped on her hip. "Law enforcement—"

"No more superheroes?" he asks, an eyebrow raised. The city used to teem with them, even with Galaxy taking over. How can they all be gone?

"No, sir. Not a one."

This sends a shiver crawling up from the very tip of Fallout's spine. He has tried to get rid of the heroes for years. Villains hate heroes. Heroes: judges, jury, and executioners. Heroes, intimidating and unquestioned. Heroes, the ultimate decider of what is 'good' and 'right' and  what is 'wrong' and 'bad.' Even the police cower before them.

He remembers when the first wave came in the fifties, a brutal force of government militarization that tore the city apart with no consideration on the heroes' parts for the damage they caused, no consideration for the rights they squashed. Villains weren't villains until the heroes meddled, and now nothing in the world could make them who they were. Fallout's fists clench. He can never be the ordinary man he had never been, the ordinary man he had desperately wanted to become. Now he's over seventy, looks younger than forty, and has to deal with his followers getting arrested on a Snickers Bar run. "Not a one," he repeats hollowly.

But the heroes are gone for good it seems and after years and years of trying to meet that end, he feels an eerie hole grow in his chest. How can this happen? The heroes are gone, and nothing has gotten better, not really. Now Owl and her dumb organization have taken over and the heroes that would've fought back, on his side, are no longer. He plops down in his spinny chair, muttering softly under his breath. "What does Syndicate want?"

The page shrugs. "Your son, probably. And doomsday, I suppose?"

"Doomsday." Fallout mulls the word over his tongue. "I don't think that's it." He closes his eyes for a second, thinking back to the decades that passed before. He may only by seventy-six, but those years still only feel like they happened months ago. He shakes his head. "No, no. It's Starlight she's after, not doomsday."

"Isn't that the same thing?" The page's voice cracks. "This is the one place where supers can live without..." She waves her hands, tossing her glossy bangs out of her eyes. Fallout shakes his head, a pang in his chest.

"Not anymore."

"What do you mean?"

Fallout flips through the binder she set down for him, skimming the reports with a student's apathy. He feels his jaw tighten. "Are you blind?" he asks, but it only comes out a whisper. He can't find the energy to shout. Fallout may be young for an immortal, but he's old for a regular man and awfully tired.

"Oh," the page adds, glaring up at him. "Your son."

Fallout runs his fingers through his hair. His sons. Of course. Poison has been a real pain lately, a moody figure acting behind his back and attacking the other boy without any permission. Normally, that's just a kid being a kid thing, but it's different for Poison, a budding supervillain with powers that can cause serious damage if misused. And as for the project one, Fallout and Owl's shared child. Part killer, part mush, if what he's seen and heard doesn't deceive Fallout. "Oh, man, oh, man." He huffs. "Which one? What are they doing? Oh, yeesh, why can't a man just have two normal kids?"

The page rolls her eyes again, but a small grin spreads across her face. "I think every dad says that."

"I don't know any dads with two teenage boys who seduce women and throw things with their minds," Fallout says with a long sigh. "And they hate each other, which I guess is understandable. I know they hate me."

The page opens her mouth to negate him, but then she shrugs. "What can you do? Anyway, I got a text from Ceres."

Ceres is the only young man with a bit of sense of in his head, the only one Fallout can trust, even if the boy was once a superhero. "Yeah?"

The page glances at the ceiling, struggling with names. "Katris, Poison, and Angel, Luce, well, they're kind of in a conflict, down at the market between Old Newport and Starlight. Ceres is in trouble."

Fallout curses under his breath, adjusting the collar of his jacket as he paces around his desk. "Alright, then. Let's go."

He has to step in, that he knows, but he's curious. Which of his boys will win? His wings rise against their bindings, the feathers prickling. 

One thing he knows for sure, they both have hell to pay.