Chapter Text
Everyone is going to be so pissed.
BigB walks back inside his house and sits down on his couch, burying his head in his hands as the tension inside of him finally breaks. Lizzie, Cleo, Ren, all of them are going away for years, and they aren't anywhere near the level of power that would let them break out. Prison isn't the worst; BigB has never been there, but he knows people who have and it's— well, from what they say, it's better than being dead. They'll survive. He believes that, if nothing else.
And, the best part, BigB isn't going anywhere! He's getting off of this one scot-free, unless the watcher decides to count every individual case of robbery as a different crime, which they probably won't. It's not like he can pull off anything like that alone, being able to do what he can, and the Watchers probably care a lot less about putting people behind bars than keeping the supply chains intact.
He feels dirty, despite it all.
The empty glass is still sitting on his table, and BigB gets up to move it to the sink, for a lack of anything else he wants to spend his time on. BigB should probably get rid of the bird talon soon; it's not like he has a use for it anymore. All that stuff can do now is get him in trouble.
His chest is tight as he washes the cup. It's not a very intellectually demanding action, of course, so BigB's mind wanders. Considering the speed of that watcher, everybody else has probably been taken into custody by now. It probably won't be that bad for them. Probably.
And— obviously— it's not like their little arrangement would've gone on forever. The Fairy Fort, a name that nobody besides the four of them knows, wasn't sustainable long-term. It was four people, two of whom happened to have incredibly useful powers for doing low-commotion theft, yes, but four people. They would've gotten unlucky, eventually. They would've gotten caught, inevitably.
BigB doesn't need to pretend like this was anything more than a strategic alliance that went sour. They successfully defended themselves a few times over the last couple of years, and being a part of the Fort was fun, but now it's over. BigB shouldn't have to care anymore.
He dries the glass and puts it into a cabinet, and then immediately takes it back out. Just to have something to hold onto.
It's…BigB actually needs to be packing right now. When the rest of the Fort gets out of prison, which might be sooner than later if they break out, he knows at least one person who'll be gunning for his head. He should move away from all of this! Go somewhere else! The other side of the country, maybe.
Something is building inside of him. He moves around his house in a kind of anticipatory fervor, though BigB can't quite grasp what he's waiting for— what he wants. His bedroom, his bathroom, the porch, the kitchen, BigB flits through all of these spaces, never staying inside a room for more than a second, until he ends up in the basement.
Say, doesn't BigB have trackers for them somewhere around here, from that one time a cape spawned in a weird space-breaking labyrinth over the area?
It only takes about ten minutes to dig them out of the depths of his basement storage and turn them all back on and— hey!
Everybody's still in town.
One hour later, BigB is standing outside of the vacant building next to the bar with a backpack and a growing sense of trepidation. He pulls out his phone, with little USB devices all plugged into it via a tiny converter cord, out of his pocket, just to double check. All three of the little glowing dots are fixed inside this one location, same as they were when he left his house.
Breaking in is a very simple affair that begins and ends with gadgetry. BigB phases himself into the interior of the building, which is mostly dark and empty. A few minutes of searching reveals some kind of ID scanner embedded a foot off the ground, and BigB's got another device for that. He's making use of everything today.
He sees his first actual person in the dimly-lit hallway that opens up after he fools the ID scanner. They're in some kind of security office, and they don't seem to be all too alarmed by the sight of a guy carrying enough cape-tech for a small team walking down the hallway.
BigB guesses that makes sense. A place used to house powered criminals probably also gets its fair share of heroes walking in at all hours of night to drop off people and/or gear. Missing Ren sorely, he just beats them up and steals their stuff, finally putting them out of commission with some standard-issue injectable sedative they all lifted from a hero supply company a few months ago.
Within the security office, BigB finds a desk, with a computer hooked up to a security camera system. It takes an inconvenient amount of clicking around, but he's able to delete the last fifteen minutes of footage and (inadvertently) turn the recording system off by duplicating files until the software's storage hits capacity and aborting the automated process to free up memory. He would've preferred it if the security officer also had access to whatever and wherever the jail was so that BigB could just hit an 'unlock' button and go, but needs must.
Now armed with the security guard's ID and keyring, BigB waltzes in through the security checkpoint and into a stairwell. There are no maps to be seen from the top of the stairs, much less labeled ones, so he just scans in for the next door he sees and walks inside. The first real floor of the building, as BigB can parse from the tiny windows in the doors that line the halls, seems to be solely dedicated to conference rooms— half of which are occupied— bathrooms, and vending machines.
He slinks back out into the stairwell, narrowly avoiding being seen by a group of people exiting a meeting. Wary of getting minced to pieces for infiltrating their headquarters, BigB (calmly!) flees down the stairwell, passing out of earshot around the fourth flight and only stopping once he reaches the bottom.
There, he finds not a door, but a doorway, blocked from the outside and inside by a familiar purple gleam. If they were going to jail capes anywhere, it would probably be here, right? A bubble would block most forms of entry or exit by people who could escape other kinds of restraints, and it would be solely controlled by Watchers.
And, even if the rest of the Fort isn't behind this barrier, something really valuable probably is instead.
BigB slings his pack around his shoulder and rifles through it, eventually pulling out one of his two finished shields. Tentatively, he pushes it across the floor so that it gradually edges into the wall of the bubble. Very luckily for him, whatever internal logic dictates the barrier's shape has it flowing from the top and not the bottom, so when the shield crosses the threshold, it clears the doorway entirely.
Unluckily, the alarms go off seconds after he crosses through to the hallway on the other side. Someone must've found the security guard. He carefully maneuvers the shield into the hallway with him, only returning it to his backpack after making a turn that places him out of view of the stairwell.
So…creepy hallway!
The whole building so far has been fairly dim, but the lights in here are almost non-existent. A single fluorescent tube at the turn in the hallway serves only to paint everything in shadow. Nonetheless, BigB keeps moving forwards, even as he almost falls into a pit and has to fumble for— among all possible things— the rungs of some kind of metal ladder built into a wall. He sidesteps onto a catwalk with a hole cut through it to accommodate the ladder, and peers over the railing to the floor below.
Instead of cells or anything reasonable like that, all BigB can see is some kind of weird grey tank, like the kind he's been using to maintain the talon. He really hopes this isn't where they store the clones. As he tries to decipher whatever this room could possibly be for, God walks in, accompanied by one of her angels.
The Watcher, the actual Watcher, glows just like she does in the news. She's like a tiny sun, instantly making the rest of the room visible to BigB. Another watcher trails behind her. When she speaks, the human voice that emerges and echoes up to BigB's ears is almost disappointing.
"Is it ready?"
"Well," the lesser watcher— Grian, it's Grian— says, "it will be. Soon. I can't really make it grow any faster. We used up a lot of resources making the last bird."
BigB presses a hand over his mouth, muffling his reaction. Slowly, he begins to open his backpack, edging the zipper open one tooth at a time. Below him, the conversation continues.
"Quickly, I hope. Our intervention was not enough to stop whatever is growing here. We have to prevent it from reaching fruition."
"Not to be rude, but, what exactly is the 'seed' here?" Grian asks. "If you have an idea of who's doing it or where, I can track them dow—"
"It isn't that simple. The makings of this world and its future present themself to me, though the details are forever obscured. These…extensions, imbued with me and shreds of my power, seek the makings of this country's destruction, better than you or I could, and destroy them. They are our best solution to date. But fate twists still."
BigB inches the seal wide enough so that he can reach inside, and closes his hand around one of the talon grenades.
"The end of what I have built approaches. I can see it, see it here. If the element of doom cannot be discovered, then the entire town must be destroyed. Better safe than sorry. Consider it a mercy— amputating a diseased limb."
It's as the Watcher finishes delivering that last line that BigB makes his decision. He doesn't know what kind of doom the god of this country has seen in his town, but he'd prefer it not be razed to the ground. His hand is sweaty around the weapon, and his eyes flick to Grian, dwarfed next to his great-great-grandma. He doesn't think there's a way for him and BigB to walk out of this situation alive, and if it's between Grian's life and BigB's…
Well, sorry.
He pulls the pin. Counts to two seconds, trusting that the noise of his movement will be lost in the cacophony of people and machinery that the Watcher must be experiencing.
And BigB lets go.
The bomb falls through the air, through the thin barrier the Watcher is keeping around herself and her subordinate, just long enough for them both to dart away to opposite sides of the room. It doesn't make a difference. He ducks entirely behind the metal beam just as the grenade goes off.
Sound rips through the room as the talon shards explode in every direction, surely ripping through both Watchers and piercing their organs despite the barriers. Light bursts from one side of the room as something happens, hopefully the Watcher dying. All that power, packed into something the size of his fist.
Then, the room begins to collapse around him, walls surely blown out by the bomb. He scrambles back as the catwalk he's clinging to begins to slip downwards, trying to find somewhere safe as rubble begins to fall.
…
BigB crawls out of the ruins of the bottom floor, bleeding and scraped to hell and back. He feels like a live-wire, still trembling and surging with nervous energy despite the ordeal he's just been through. He killed his boyfriend. He killed God. He killed a fucking god with a homemade grenade and a good angle. He could do anything.
When he opens the door to the rest of the facility, it's completely abandoned. They must have evacuated everyone.
BigB walks through nigh-identical halls and up grey stairwells until he reaches the front door, and then he's outside again.
The sky above him is blue for the first time in his entire life, purple tint fading away as the barrier over Watcher Country dissolves into thin air. He'll need to flee, of course, an unguarded land like this is ripe for taking over, and he's certain the half- and quarter-watchers are beelining to this place to investigate the assassination he just pulled off. But for now, BigB stares into the dark blue of the night sky with rapt attention.
It's beautiful.
