moon_custafer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moon_custafer) wrote2006-11-30 10:53 pm
moon_custafer) wrote2006-11-30 10:53 pm
Entry tags:
Last Chapter of Supervillain
I tied up all the loose ends and even went back and worked in a subplot about Amanda's sisters' new scam at the last minute but the half-scale novel still clocks in at 24599 words, according to my counter. Oh well.
Stephen examined the photos of Vermin's wrecked lab; Assassin Bug had taken them the night before after Roadie had finally given up and acknowledged that there was no way he could fit into the tiny lair, even through the service entrance. Every so often he would note a detail that seemed potentially significant, and place it in Roadie's head for reference. The big tech was hunkered over a couple of cheap camera phones, a regular digital video camera, and a few of Vermin's gadgets they'd captured over the years. He picked up on of the phones and gazed at it, chewing his gum meditatively.
Victor was doing much the same thing, albeit in a less-glamourous location (a '99 Honda) and without the chewing gum; instead he bit his lower lip from time to time, and occasionally pushed his fingers through his hair and twisted them reflexively.
John Doe sat above the ceiling tiles of the recovery floor, listening to the two whining patients arguing with Dr. Park as she tried to convince them to stay where they were until their attacker was captured. Not only were they cowards, he thought, but they were vain enough to think they could do a better job of protecting themselves. No doubt they had sleazy dealings in their pasts and wished to avoid answering questions. Still, unsavoury as they were, they would do as bait - if someone was covering tracks, these two were deep, muddy ruts.
Dr. Park strutted out of the room as nonchalantly as she could, privately congratulating herself on having had Doug and André's clothing sent to the hospital laundry before she'd woken them to talk about their immediate future. She figured it would be another fifteen seconds before they noticed; if she could be round the corner and racing for the the elevator by then, they'd have to deal with Danuta at the floor's main desk, and nothing got by that woman. She smiled grimly, picturing Danuta's implacable face and Doug and André shivering and shouting at her in their skimpy paper gowns. As she approached the bend in the hallway, bearing to the right so she could duck out of sight round the corner as quickly as possible, a woman in dark glasses hurried to her side from the doorway of a nearby room.
"Excuse me, nurse?" It was the term 'nurse' that stopped Dr. Park in her tracks. She spun towards the visitor with a sharp word at the ready, noticed with a start that she looked vaguely familiar even with the sunglasses, and then everything around her brightened and spun until she was alone in a timeless white void.
Stephen sat on a faux-leather chair in the visitor's lounge, holding a video game in demo mode and pretending to play as he watched the door to Doug and André's room. Roadie had dispatched him to the hospital while he did some last-minute technical working prior to joining the guard. In any case Stephen was the logical person to keep a watch - a quiet boy, small for his age and hunched low in a visitor's chair, drew no attention at all an urban hospital.
A woman in sunglasses came down the hall and Stephen, after a split second of doubt, recognized Kestrel. Why had Roadie sent her as well? Perhaps the device was taking longer to finish than expected. He got up and wandered over, still pretending to focus on his game as he walked. He brushed against her and looked up to see that her expression was one of genuine surprise - and anger. Some instinct put him on the defensive from that moment, and when Kestrel smiled at him with false reassurance and reached into her purse, Stephen pushed all his recent nightmares, the glazed eyes and tiny bared teeth of Dr Vermin's corpse, into her skull. She reeled back, trying to flash him with the fone 2.0 in her hand, but Stephen had already averted his eyes and pulled away from her attempt to seize his arm.
"What is this!?" glowered Denuta from the desk. Normally cowing visitors came easily to her, but Kestrel merely thrust the fone in the nurse's face and pushed a button. There was a burst of light and Denuta slumped to the floor. Kestrel whipped back at Posterchild, but Stephen was on the alert; he ducked and sent screams and exploding shells into her senses. She shrieked like her namesake and shed her wig and glasses, flapping free of her coat, to wheel and dive at him.
THWACK!
"Ungh!"
The orderly in the lavender scrubs stood with her sneakered feet planted wide apart and the mop gripped in both hands. Had Kestrel been a baseball, Amanda's blow would definitely have been a bunt rather than a home run, but since the ex-superheroine was not made of string and rawhide, the crack of the mop handle across her midsection had at least succeeded in slowing her down as well as knocking her off course. Taking advantage of this, Amanda picked up the cleaning bucket, nearly-empty of Lysol, and inverted it briskly over Kestrel, neatly trapping her .
"See how you like being fumigated", she began, when a crash and a howl of fear from the hospital room made her turn to the doorway just as it was filled by a figure in grave-eaten clothes and a sickening, expressionless mask. Doe threw a hard punch which Amanda's raised arm was not quick enough to deflect. It caught her in the middle of her rib cage and bent her double with painful gasps. Posterchild leaped at Doe, filling his mind with impatient explanation, but the vigilante swept him to the linoleum, unconscious, with scarcely a break in his movements. Keeping an eye on Amanda, who was still stunned and clutching her chest, he tipped over the upside-down bucket that imprisoned Kestrel. The feathered, deceptively doll-like figure crouched on her hands and knees, choking and droopy-winged - but her reddened eyes still glared through the water that filled them..
"Doe," she coughed, "this is none of your business."
"The Obscurant is mine. He's killed; killed scum, it's true, but the man is a murderer and he and his little friend (here he leered at
Amanda) are going to pay the piper."
There was a dreadful retching and gurgling. Amanda, finally able to draw oxygen back into her lungs, slowly recognized it as the sound of Kestrel laughing bitterly; and felt her stomach turn.
"You old, stupid man. This is nothing to do with your precious
Obscurant - everyone else already had that figured out."
Roadie found his way to Gradient City Hospital unexpectedly blocked, even to his little car, by barricades and lines of stopped traffic. Impatient, he got out and squeezed through the crowds around the hospital grounds, only to stop in horror at the sight of an empty city block where the hospital building had stood.
With one more gasping heave of laughter, Kestrel abruptly swelled to her human size, sucking in fresh air as her ribcage expanded. There was no question of her being weakened by the Lysol fumes now, and her wiry naked body instantly had Doe pinned to the wall.
"Vermin didn't die at once, you know, even after I crushed his windpipe. Do you know what he managed to say with his last breath? He said he'd always known I had it in me, and then he grinned." She spat. "Or maybe that part was just the rictus."
"Vermin never knew what he had."
“How did you?” asked Amanda, quietly. She wanted to keep eveyone talking, and besides, she was genuinely curious. Kestrel sneered up at her.
“Do you think I’m cute?” she asked. This was an unexpected line of inquiry, but Amanda stood firm:
“At this moment? I can’t allow as how you are,” she said coldly. Kestrel laughedagain.
“F5 must’ve thought I was. They made me their schools liason. Schoolkids! They couldn’t have sent this one out to shake hands with the kiddies?” She nodded towardsPosterchild’s unconscious body, “oh no wait, I forgot: he’s scared of people his own age and he barely talks. Kids loved me. They thought I was a cross between a pretty doll and the best pet ever. I can tear people’s eyes out!”
“I know - you tried it, the other night. So what you’re saying is they made you give safety lectures to kids and it turned you evil? Big deal. You should have been on the receiving end- every ‘Just Say No’ I heard in school made me want to go out and take drugs for, oh, about fifteen minutes after. They were just so lame. If I hadn’t been equally lame I might have got into some serious trouble.”
“Shut up! You don’t know anything!”
“Well let me try and guess - as part of your oh-so-hard being a hero to the juniors, you got a preview of Fone Fakers and thought you could improve on the idea? Reverse engineered fones from the footage?”
“The digital video and filters enhance the effects. I can take the city hostage; or I could just make myself Gradient’s new drug lord.”
“I don’t know that I agree with your use of the present tense and future conditional - other than that your future actually is conditional, from where I stand.”
“You’re right - you are lame. Do you think I can’t take out this whole room and then discover it a few minutes from now as the work of your boyfriend? Roadie will swear vengeance against the Obscurant for killing young Stephen, and his doctor friend in the next room, too - he’s sweet on her.” She took out her fone -“Oh yeah - it actually works as a phone, too, and the reception’s pretty good” - and mimed calling: “Sam,” she wailed in a mock-distraught tone, “It’s awful - Stephen called me but I got here too late and - and - you’ve got to get over here!”
"That may take a while" said Victor, "seeing as how at the moment the authorities are gathered in the parking lot trying to figure out where this building went." Kestrel angrily raised the fone but Victor touched it and it became invisible for only a moment, but the moment it would have flashed. All the cheeriness dropped from his voice.
"You killed someone I knew, and tried to make it look like I did it.” “Lady," he hissed, "if there's one thing I don't need, it's for people to think I kill my own. I don't expect you to understand that," he added, glancing at the still-unconscious Posterchild, “you don't seem to have so many scruples."
“Fine words from the likes of you,” said John Doe, dropping the sentence like a lead tile on Victor’s head; “Ah no you don’t,” he said to Amanda, levelling a weapon that looked like a gargoyle’s hairdryer at her head.
“Doe,” Victor’s voice was quiet, “I have a small matter I would like to take up with you one day. Harm her and it will be a big matter. Meanwhile, you’ve heard this so-called heroine confess to murder, heard her with your own ears. Don’t you have priorities?”
Doe’s mask was impenetrable, but Amanda thought she saw his arm begin to waver, like a compass needle looking for north, when Kestrel shrunk, shrieked and lunged for his weapon. Victor leapt to pull Amanda below the line of fire. It didn’t matter. At the same moment , both Kestrel and Doe gave identical gasps and dropped, limply. Vistor, curled over Amanda’s back on the floor, looked over to see Posterchild sitting up. His gaze met Victor’s.
“You know the stuff that she put in my mind? I just put it back into theirs.” He picked up Kestrel carefully, and walked out of the room.
Victor was stooping for Kestrel's dropped fone when Amanda's hand closed firmly on his wrist.
"Sorry, can't let you do that," she said bring her foot down on the device with enough force to pulverize its chips and LEDs. Victor looked up at her sadly.
"I know," he said at last.
"There's enough back doors to this place for you to escape in the confusion, or you can help me get these people out of here." She picked up Danuta and headed for the stairs. Victor sighed and went room to room until he found someone - Dr. Park, as it happened. He heaved her over his shoulder and followed Amanda down to the lobby. Outside emergency workers were staring at the walls as they shimmered and reappeared, and the police were trying to keep back a confused and frightened crowd. Roadie came charging towards him and Victor flinched for a second until the big man carefully took over the carrying of the unconscious doctor he had brought down. Since she was starting to wake up this was just as well. He wasn’t in a conversational mood.
"Helen! Are you all right?" Roadie turned and pumped Victor's hand with nearly enough force to dislocate his shoulder.
"Thank you. You've -you’ve done a great thing here. Are there still people inside? How did this happen?"
"Um, I don't know. There was this high-pitched sound over the phone and a voice saying he was the Obscurant," lied Victor. "Glad I could help you out," he added before slipping away from the distracted superhero, "I'm a big fan."
A crowd had gathered around Amanda and the desk nurse and she was awkwardly trying to get through and take the woman to a waiting ambulance. There were few real casualties, of course, and no shortage of doctors and nurses as they poured bemusedly out of the now-visible building.
He caught up with her again in the evening, at the edge of the parking lot.
“Hey, famous girl,” he said, showing her the newspaper, “still got time for a coffee with one of your admirers?”
Amanda hadn’t had time to follow the news that day, and she anxiously looked over the paper in the hole-in-the-wall coffee shop down the block from the hospital:
KESTREL GOES KRAZY said the headline in inch-high letters.
“Not that I liked her much, even before I knew she’d gone bad, but knowing that the school safety lecture circuit was all it took to drive her round the bend, I have to feel a little sorry for her , having to look at that cheesy a headline.” There was a not-bad picture of Amanda, too, They were calling her The Caryatid.
“I balance buildings on my head? I’m not sure how I should take that,” she said. There was also a full page ad from The Forensic Five asking her to come forward and discuss a partnership.
“Wow. They –they want us to be superheroes.”
“They want you to be a superhero. You’d be good at it.”
"Couldn't you - change sides, as well?"
"I," Victor stopped and sighed. He'd thought a lot about this the last few days, and about how he was going to break things to her. "I don't think I ought to. I think maybe I'm meant to be John Doe's opposite number - the good supervillain, y'know?"
"More of your weird logic. Why do you always make these moral-issue things so complicated? They usually seem like a no-brainer to me."
"That's why you're the superhero."
"And you're my go-to information man on the inside."
"No!" he surprised himself with his vehemence. "No double-agent stuff. If I'm going to be an honourable thief, I can't sell out the bad guys either. Look, if the city is threatened again, well - you've proven yourself good at finding me - or I'll come to you."
"And what about..us?" Her voice was very small, suddenly.
"There's always the safe house."
"Your Bogaart impression leaves something to be desired," she tried to joke.
"No, really - no one but us knows about it - it's off the grid - and off the clock, if you ever need to be a normal person for a few hours."
"I don't think either of us could ever be normal." Amanda hugged him for a long time. Finally Victor pulled free, took her giant hand, and kissed it tenderly.
"Don't let Wendy Witness get under your skin, ok? Everybody knows she's a bitch. Stand up to her and you'll be their heroine." And then he was out the door. Amanda followed him, but he had already vanished; there were many stationary objects in her building's untidy courtyard, and she couldn't tell if at present one fewer was visible to the eye.
Stephen examined the photos of Vermin's wrecked lab; Assassin Bug had taken them the night before after Roadie had finally given up and acknowledged that there was no way he could fit into the tiny lair, even through the service entrance. Every so often he would note a detail that seemed potentially significant, and place it in Roadie's head for reference. The big tech was hunkered over a couple of cheap camera phones, a regular digital video camera, and a few of Vermin's gadgets they'd captured over the years. He picked up on of the phones and gazed at it, chewing his gum meditatively.
Victor was doing much the same thing, albeit in a less-glamourous location (a '99 Honda) and without the chewing gum; instead he bit his lower lip from time to time, and occasionally pushed his fingers through his hair and twisted them reflexively.
John Doe sat above the ceiling tiles of the recovery floor, listening to the two whining patients arguing with Dr. Park as she tried to convince them to stay where they were until their attacker was captured. Not only were they cowards, he thought, but they were vain enough to think they could do a better job of protecting themselves. No doubt they had sleazy dealings in their pasts and wished to avoid answering questions. Still, unsavoury as they were, they would do as bait - if someone was covering tracks, these two were deep, muddy ruts.
Dr. Park strutted out of the room as nonchalantly as she could, privately congratulating herself on having had Doug and André's clothing sent to the hospital laundry before she'd woken them to talk about their immediate future. She figured it would be another fifteen seconds before they noticed; if she could be round the corner and racing for the the elevator by then, they'd have to deal with Danuta at the floor's main desk, and nothing got by that woman. She smiled grimly, picturing Danuta's implacable face and Doug and André shivering and shouting at her in their skimpy paper gowns. As she approached the bend in the hallway, bearing to the right so she could duck out of sight round the corner as quickly as possible, a woman in dark glasses hurried to her side from the doorway of a nearby room.
"Excuse me, nurse?" It was the term 'nurse' that stopped Dr. Park in her tracks. She spun towards the visitor with a sharp word at the ready, noticed with a start that she looked vaguely familiar even with the sunglasses, and then everything around her brightened and spun until she was alone in a timeless white void.
Stephen sat on a faux-leather chair in the visitor's lounge, holding a video game in demo mode and pretending to play as he watched the door to Doug and André's room. Roadie had dispatched him to the hospital while he did some last-minute technical working prior to joining the guard. In any case Stephen was the logical person to keep a watch - a quiet boy, small for his age and hunched low in a visitor's chair, drew no attention at all an urban hospital.
A woman in sunglasses came down the hall and Stephen, after a split second of doubt, recognized Kestrel. Why had Roadie sent her as well? Perhaps the device was taking longer to finish than expected. He got up and wandered over, still pretending to focus on his game as he walked. He brushed against her and looked up to see that her expression was one of genuine surprise - and anger. Some instinct put him on the defensive from that moment, and when Kestrel smiled at him with false reassurance and reached into her purse, Stephen pushed all his recent nightmares, the glazed eyes and tiny bared teeth of Dr Vermin's corpse, into her skull. She reeled back, trying to flash him with the fone 2.0 in her hand, but Stephen had already averted his eyes and pulled away from her attempt to seize his arm.
"What is this!?" glowered Denuta from the desk. Normally cowing visitors came easily to her, but Kestrel merely thrust the fone in the nurse's face and pushed a button. There was a burst of light and Denuta slumped to the floor. Kestrel whipped back at Posterchild, but Stephen was on the alert; he ducked and sent screams and exploding shells into her senses. She shrieked like her namesake and shed her wig and glasses, flapping free of her coat, to wheel and dive at him.
THWACK!
"Ungh!"
The orderly in the lavender scrubs stood with her sneakered feet planted wide apart and the mop gripped in both hands. Had Kestrel been a baseball, Amanda's blow would definitely have been a bunt rather than a home run, but since the ex-superheroine was not made of string and rawhide, the crack of the mop handle across her midsection had at least succeeded in slowing her down as well as knocking her off course. Taking advantage of this, Amanda picked up the cleaning bucket, nearly-empty of Lysol, and inverted it briskly over Kestrel, neatly trapping her .
"See how you like being fumigated", she began, when a crash and a howl of fear from the hospital room made her turn to the doorway just as it was filled by a figure in grave-eaten clothes and a sickening, expressionless mask. Doe threw a hard punch which Amanda's raised arm was not quick enough to deflect. It caught her in the middle of her rib cage and bent her double with painful gasps. Posterchild leaped at Doe, filling his mind with impatient explanation, but the vigilante swept him to the linoleum, unconscious, with scarcely a break in his movements. Keeping an eye on Amanda, who was still stunned and clutching her chest, he tipped over the upside-down bucket that imprisoned Kestrel. The feathered, deceptively doll-like figure crouched on her hands and knees, choking and droopy-winged - but her reddened eyes still glared through the water that filled them..
"Doe," she coughed, "this is none of your business."
"The Obscurant is mine. He's killed; killed scum, it's true, but the man is a murderer and he and his little friend (here he leered at
Amanda) are going to pay the piper."
There was a dreadful retching and gurgling. Amanda, finally able to draw oxygen back into her lungs, slowly recognized it as the sound of Kestrel laughing bitterly; and felt her stomach turn.
"You old, stupid man. This is nothing to do with your precious
Obscurant - everyone else already had that figured out."
Roadie found his way to Gradient City Hospital unexpectedly blocked, even to his little car, by barricades and lines of stopped traffic. Impatient, he got out and squeezed through the crowds around the hospital grounds, only to stop in horror at the sight of an empty city block where the hospital building had stood.
With one more gasping heave of laughter, Kestrel abruptly swelled to her human size, sucking in fresh air as her ribcage expanded. There was no question of her being weakened by the Lysol fumes now, and her wiry naked body instantly had Doe pinned to the wall.
"Vermin didn't die at once, you know, even after I crushed his windpipe. Do you know what he managed to say with his last breath? He said he'd always known I had it in me, and then he grinned." She spat. "Or maybe that part was just the rictus."
"Vermin never knew what he had."
“How did you?” asked Amanda, quietly. She wanted to keep eveyone talking, and besides, she was genuinely curious. Kestrel sneered up at her.
“Do you think I’m cute?” she asked. This was an unexpected line of inquiry, but Amanda stood firm:
“At this moment? I can’t allow as how you are,” she said coldly. Kestrel laughedagain.
“F5 must’ve thought I was. They made me their schools liason. Schoolkids! They couldn’t have sent this one out to shake hands with the kiddies?” She nodded towardsPosterchild’s unconscious body, “oh no wait, I forgot: he’s scared of people his own age and he barely talks. Kids loved me. They thought I was a cross between a pretty doll and the best pet ever. I can tear people’s eyes out!”
“I know - you tried it, the other night. So what you’re saying is they made you give safety lectures to kids and it turned you evil? Big deal. You should have been on the receiving end- every ‘Just Say No’ I heard in school made me want to go out and take drugs for, oh, about fifteen minutes after. They were just so lame. If I hadn’t been equally lame I might have got into some serious trouble.”
“Shut up! You don’t know anything!”
“Well let me try and guess - as part of your oh-so-hard being a hero to the juniors, you got a preview of Fone Fakers and thought you could improve on the idea? Reverse engineered fones from the footage?”
“The digital video and filters enhance the effects. I can take the city hostage; or I could just make myself Gradient’s new drug lord.”
“I don’t know that I agree with your use of the present tense and future conditional - other than that your future actually is conditional, from where I stand.”
“You’re right - you are lame. Do you think I can’t take out this whole room and then discover it a few minutes from now as the work of your boyfriend? Roadie will swear vengeance against the Obscurant for killing young Stephen, and his doctor friend in the next room, too - he’s sweet on her.” She took out her fone -“Oh yeah - it actually works as a phone, too, and the reception’s pretty good” - and mimed calling: “Sam,” she wailed in a mock-distraught tone, “It’s awful - Stephen called me but I got here too late and - and - you’ve got to get over here!”
"That may take a while" said Victor, "seeing as how at the moment the authorities are gathered in the parking lot trying to figure out where this building went." Kestrel angrily raised the fone but Victor touched it and it became invisible for only a moment, but the moment it would have flashed. All the cheeriness dropped from his voice.
"You killed someone I knew, and tried to make it look like I did it.” “Lady," he hissed, "if there's one thing I don't need, it's for people to think I kill my own. I don't expect you to understand that," he added, glancing at the still-unconscious Posterchild, “you don't seem to have so many scruples."
“Fine words from the likes of you,” said John Doe, dropping the sentence like a lead tile on Victor’s head; “Ah no you don’t,” he said to Amanda, levelling a weapon that looked like a gargoyle’s hairdryer at her head.
“Doe,” Victor’s voice was quiet, “I have a small matter I would like to take up with you one day. Harm her and it will be a big matter. Meanwhile, you’ve heard this so-called heroine confess to murder, heard her with your own ears. Don’t you have priorities?”
Doe’s mask was impenetrable, but Amanda thought she saw his arm begin to waver, like a compass needle looking for north, when Kestrel shrunk, shrieked and lunged for his weapon. Victor leapt to pull Amanda below the line of fire. It didn’t matter. At the same moment , both Kestrel and Doe gave identical gasps and dropped, limply. Vistor, curled over Amanda’s back on the floor, looked over to see Posterchild sitting up. His gaze met Victor’s.
“You know the stuff that she put in my mind? I just put it back into theirs.” He picked up Kestrel carefully, and walked out of the room.
Victor was stooping for Kestrel's dropped fone when Amanda's hand closed firmly on his wrist.
"Sorry, can't let you do that," she said bring her foot down on the device with enough force to pulverize its chips and LEDs. Victor looked up at her sadly.
"I know," he said at last.
"There's enough back doors to this place for you to escape in the confusion, or you can help me get these people out of here." She picked up Danuta and headed for the stairs. Victor sighed and went room to room until he found someone - Dr. Park, as it happened. He heaved her over his shoulder and followed Amanda down to the lobby. Outside emergency workers were staring at the walls as they shimmered and reappeared, and the police were trying to keep back a confused and frightened crowd. Roadie came charging towards him and Victor flinched for a second until the big man carefully took over the carrying of the unconscious doctor he had brought down. Since she was starting to wake up this was just as well. He wasn’t in a conversational mood.
"Helen! Are you all right?" Roadie turned and pumped Victor's hand with nearly enough force to dislocate his shoulder.
"Thank you. You've -you’ve done a great thing here. Are there still people inside? How did this happen?"
"Um, I don't know. There was this high-pitched sound over the phone and a voice saying he was the Obscurant," lied Victor. "Glad I could help you out," he added before slipping away from the distracted superhero, "I'm a big fan."
A crowd had gathered around Amanda and the desk nurse and she was awkwardly trying to get through and take the woman to a waiting ambulance. There were few real casualties, of course, and no shortage of doctors and nurses as they poured bemusedly out of the now-visible building.
He caught up with her again in the evening, at the edge of the parking lot.
“Hey, famous girl,” he said, showing her the newspaper, “still got time for a coffee with one of your admirers?”
Amanda hadn’t had time to follow the news that day, and she anxiously looked over the paper in the hole-in-the-wall coffee shop down the block from the hospital:
KESTREL GOES KRAZY said the headline in inch-high letters.
“Not that I liked her much, even before I knew she’d gone bad, but knowing that the school safety lecture circuit was all it took to drive her round the bend, I have to feel a little sorry for her , having to look at that cheesy a headline.” There was a not-bad picture of Amanda, too, They were calling her The Caryatid.
“I balance buildings on my head? I’m not sure how I should take that,” she said. There was also a full page ad from The Forensic Five asking her to come forward and discuss a partnership.
“Wow. They –they want us to be superheroes.”
“They want you to be a superhero. You’d be good at it.”
"Couldn't you - change sides, as well?"
"I," Victor stopped and sighed. He'd thought a lot about this the last few days, and about how he was going to break things to her. "I don't think I ought to. I think maybe I'm meant to be John Doe's opposite number - the good supervillain, y'know?"
"More of your weird logic. Why do you always make these moral-issue things so complicated? They usually seem like a no-brainer to me."
"That's why you're the superhero."
"And you're my go-to information man on the inside."
"No!" he surprised himself with his vehemence. "No double-agent stuff. If I'm going to be an honourable thief, I can't sell out the bad guys either. Look, if the city is threatened again, well - you've proven yourself good at finding me - or I'll come to you."
"And what about..us?" Her voice was very small, suddenly.
"There's always the safe house."
"Your Bogaart impression leaves something to be desired," she tried to joke.
"No, really - no one but us knows about it - it's off the grid - and off the clock, if you ever need to be a normal person for a few hours."
"I don't think either of us could ever be normal." Amanda hugged him for a long time. Finally Victor pulled free, took her giant hand, and kissed it tenderly.
"Don't let Wendy Witness get under your skin, ok? Everybody knows she's a bitch. Stand up to her and you'll be their heroine." And then he was out the door. Amanda followed him, but he had already vanished; there were many stationary objects in her building's untidy courtyard, and she couldn't tell if at present one fewer was visible to the eye.