Song Selection: Typical Story— Hobo Johnson

(I'm so sorry how different each of these songs is)

Despite their differences in approach, journalists and superheroes fit nicely together when it comes to crime-battling. The one, a bit more stealthy, orthodox, and vulnerable. Avery Jackson has had to fit into all social situations, meld himself into the kind of person people like the spill secrets too. He's had to work within the law to get evidence, has had to become the most persuasive person in the room. It's not so much finding proof as it is convincing people to give it to him, and then having to sit down, watch dozens of tapes, read hundreds of pages, listen to countless audio recordings, and find where everything connects. 

When he was working on embezzlement cases of city officials, he'd have walls of his house covered in copies of documentation.    He'd watch interviews, over and over, in front of his daughter. She'd sit with him, playing journalism, pretending her stuffed animals were "bad guys" and quietly grilling them, and he would kind of listen, wrapped in his own thoughts. How many years had it taken him to bring the city council's embezzlement to light? All soft persuasion and heavy research.

And Anna, Red Comet, mostly threw punches.

"Do you understand trick cuffs?" They were sitting outside the mall in Anna's red Mazada—she had quite an affinity for that color—Anna holding up a bag from Spencer's. Avery hadn't followed her in, he'd been planning in the book he'd stolen from the hospital waiting room.

"Not exactly." He presses up against the passenger seat, his heart pounding against his ribcage. He can't get the image of being tossed into the ocean out of his head, can't stop thinking about drowning. When she tears the box open and reveals shiny metal links, he flinches. He's only human, easily disposed of, he knows this.

"You have to trust me, look." She presses her thumb on a small lever on the side and they fall open. "Do you see?"

Avery nods and tries to crack a smile. It doesn't work, his mouth only parts open.

"I'm not going to let them kill you." Her eyes burn into the side of his face. 

He draws in a breath. Because he can see the black waters up to his nose. One slip, one mistake, he or the girl will die. He can only see his own demise because he can't imagine the alternative. "If it's me or Persephone, it's okay. I understand. Promise me you'll choose Persephone without hesitation."

"Don't talk like that."

"Promise me, Anna. It's okay."

She turns the key in the ignition. The sun had fallen, slipped down past the black clouds. Stars blink overhead, cool and impassive against that inky sky. It's nine, they only have hours to steal back the evidence. It's illegal, it's all illegal. 

But journalism didn't work. Monet's blog, turning over the dirt, didn't bring the mayor to justice. He'd pressed his faith into a system that would see his daughter's death and turn a blind eye, and he couldn't trust it anymore. 

 "How about we go to the mayor's home?" Anna offers softly, avoiding his plea completely. 

Avery doesn't push it, he just nods, silently. The mayor likely had many places to store the excess of documents, and maybe he'd already destroyed them. More than likely. But this is his only lead, and Avery is desperate. "You'll be look out," she says, and he nods again, his mouth suddenly dry. This might be a dead end.Probably is.

But they pull up to the big house, and park in the shadows of another mansion, fit between a Land Rover and a Mercedes. Avery eyes everything around him as if it comes from another world. The house itself is ugly to Avery, the columns, made to add a sense of grandeur to the home, are tacky, unnecessary additions, the big spiraling roof a Frankenstein of baroque architecture slammed on for added opulence that doesn't fit. Anna reaches over him, grabs clothes out of the back. She fits a white blouse and dark jeans over her lycra suit in seconds.

 She hands him the keys and steps out of the car. "Keep a look out," she says.

"Aye, aye." He salutes her, his dad-way of trying to lighten the mood. It doesn't exactly work. When she leaves, the night presses against the windows, squeezes in his aching chest. Time is slipping away. His hand trembles around his phone. A call hasn't come yet, so that's good.

A white van sails by the car. It parks across the street, and no one gets out of it. He watches it and the dark figure in the driver's set. A face, a glow of a phone. He feels his grip tighten around his own phone, but the person doesn't move so he doesn't either. They watch each other.

And then the sound of another vehicle, another van. He texts Anna, asks if she's okay. She says she's fine, so he only sits there, his heart banging, staccato-like in his aching chest. Someone gets out of the van. In the night, and in the shadow casts by the vehicles lined on the street, it's hard to make out any of the figures, they're all shadows to his tire eyes. He unclips his seat belt, trying to figure out if it's safe for him to get out of the vehicle.

The figure stands there, in the middle of the dark street. This figure, a silhouette. He checks the locks of his doors with his fingers, never taking his eyes off of the figure. It doesn't move. Just stands there, watching. Waiting.

His phone rings and his heart stops, his breath ripped out of him. He tears his eyes away from the figure and unlocks his phone. It's from 'Unknown.'

A dial-up tone plays back at him, starting to sound more like an otherworldly hiss than the dullness he'd always associated it with. "Hello? Hello?" He presses it against his ear, his heart alight with panic. "Please, answer me!" He looks out the window, toward the place where the figure had been, but he can't find it. Just the darkness and the faraway glow of the mayor's house, as if he'd never seen it at all.

The dial-up sound fades into a scratchy voice. "Look behind you."

Avery ducks and covers his head, dropping down to the vinyl car mats as quickly as he can. But he's a big man, 6'4 and mostly muscle, he can't squeeze between the seat and the jutting glovebox. No gunshots ring out. No sound at all.

And then the door flies off the car. Wrenched right off, exposing him to the night sky and the chill of the fall night. He reaches for his phone to call for help, his hand hovering over Anna's name in his contacts. He'd forgotten to put her on speed-dial, and calling the police had slipped his mind. They were the bad guys in the story, if they really had shot his daughter like everyone was trying to convince him they had. But he never pressed call.

The figure is all shadow to him. Before he can reach the steering wheel or jump into the driver's seat, he's dragged out onto the street by the collar of his shirt. The phone hits the ground and bounces. He reaches for it but it clatters under the car, the blue light cast by the screen flickering against the night sky.

Avery Jackson had always been able to fight back. A weight lifter, tall and wide and bulky, most people wouldn't mess with him, and if they did, he'd more than likely be able to punch their lights out. But supers broke the way the universe was supposed to work, and the hand tore him out of the car easily. Whatever kind of person could rip a car-door off its hinges could easily take him, and win.

And they do. He never sees the face of the person who grabs him. He only feels the press of their fingers against his neck, feels their warm breath on the back of his head. The pain of his dying daughter, the pain of this round-about mission he'd sent himself on, the pain split him open,  like the asphalt on his face, the torn-up skin.

"What do you want?" he tries, his voice as cool as he can make it, the sounds muffled by the loose grit and gravel caught in his mouth. But he knows what they want. They want him dead, because he's inconvenient now, now that he knows the inormation that his daughter does. But they have to keep Red Comet in line. That's the only thing keeping him alive, a thread.

They drive his head into the pavement, slam it down so hard he holds back a yelp. And the light behind his eyes goes out and darkness falls, like the night sky with its distant, distant stars.

***

This was a bad idea. She should've broken in, snuck around. But some part of her wanted to be civil, talk to the man before breaking into his damned house. 

But everything is painful, looking into the eyes of the man who had likely commissioned her imprisonment. Trapped by her cover of Anna Jaimson, mother of his son's once best friend, it's like being caught behind bars of a different kind.

"Percy said she left something in your office space." Percy's been there, she remembers. Her daughter had at one point said something to the effect of how "cool" it was that Max's dad had a copier in his office ("like a full-sized one, Mom! It's crazy!") which was when she realized that Carson's squareness had, officially, corrupted Percy. "Do you mind if I take a look?"

"Of course." The mayor smiles, and it looks almost kind on his soft, wrinkly face. He follows her up the stairs, his watery eyes trailing her, making her feel clammy, on edge. 

His office is all mahogany furniture and cream walls, three big monitors set up on the corner desk. And, pressed up against the wall, Percy's mystical full-sized copy machine.

Sitting on top of it, a scratched-up leather journal. Her heart plummets into her stomach. It looks like the one Avery told her to snatch. 

"Is that what Percy left?" The mayors' voice is cool now. Yes? No? Every possible answer is spinning, sickening. But one look at his face, the kindness ripped away from it all, he hardness behind the soft, baby blue eyes, and she knows it doesn't matter what she says. He knows who she is and why she's here. He's the one who had her powers drained, to never really quite be fully recovered.

"Cut it, David." She grabs the journal, clenches it in a shaking fist. "I know what the fuck you're up to, you...."

Sicko. Monster. POS. She'd invited him to so many dinners, socialized with him, all big smiles and easy laughter. And all the while he had absolutely despised her, had hurt her, and was more than willing to hurt her daughter. Hatred, a big ball of it, coiled up in her chest, live, hissing wires. Even with her powers limited, she could punch his skull in, press his eyeballs into his brains in a big spray of—

She stops. Can't think like that. Refuses, to the best of her ability, to take joy from the gruesomeness. From wanting to kill him. But she can't finish her sentence, because she's shaking. Because words can't describe the way hatred and rage twist up inside her. She can't describe wanting to murder. She can't, she doesn't dare, she doesn't want to.

"You know what I'm up to?" The mayor smiles sunnily at her. "I don't think you do. Take the journal, Red Comet. Hurt me. Tell someone. Go ahead."

She hesitates. "What's your game?" She wants him to monologue, she wants to understand, she wants to stop it. But he doesn't.

He just keeps that smile pinned to his face like a mask. There's something underneath, something shifting. "I think you have somewhere to be tonight."

And she can't help it. There's no restraint left in her, because her daughter's at stake. She lifts her trembling fist and punches him right in the fucking mouth.