Chapter Text
Rowan arrived at the Sundial Café twenty minutes after they opened. It was early still, early enough that he highly doubted if Kitten would be there yet, but he’d brought a laptop with him and he figured it was better to be too early than to be too late and miss her entirely.
He’d gone through two cups of coffee already when she walked through the door forty-five minutes later, hands shoved in the pockets of the hoodie he’d gotten her to go home from the hospital. Huh. She’d kept it, then. He’d rather expected her to burn everything he got her in case he’d somehow bugged it. (He hadn’t, of course, but he wouldn’t have blamed her for thinking otherwise.)
When she slid into the chair across from him, he smiled at her; she glared back. Right. She didn’t much like him in the first place, and last she heard he was plotting how best to kill her.
“You want anything?” he asked. “They make very good coffee here, though if you’re not already hooked on caffeine I don’t know if it’d be such a good idea to start at your age.”
“…sure,” she said. “I’ll get a hot chocolate, then, I guess.”
A few minutes later, when she had a steaming cup of hot chocolate in front of her and looked marginally less grumpy, Rowan shut his computer.
“I’m sure you’re wondering what I was thinking, back there in the warehouse,” he said.
“I mean—I don’t think you—you meant it. So yeah, I am.”
“Here’s the thing,” he said slowly. “You’re in too deep, I think. They’ve taken too much notice of you; I haven’t the faintest idea of how to extricate White Cat from their attention without a death to go off of. So that’s the thing. For them to be happy, White Cat has to die.”
“But you don’t mean to do that,” she said.
“Oh, I do. I told them I would kill White Cat, didn’t I? So that’s what we’ll need to do.”
She blinked, then narrowed her eyes. “I don’t—oh. Oh. You mean to kill White Cat, you said. You don’t mean to kill me. ”
He grinned at her. “I always knew you were smart,” he said. “And yes, that’s the essence of it.”
Kitten frowned, tapping the table with one hand, taking a drink of her hot chocolate with the other. “Is that why you called me fifteen?”
He nodded. “It’s a bit old for how you look, but for someone who’s not interacted with you much, not beyond the realm of possibility—and you act mostly from the shadows. You don’t exactly give out interviews. This way they won’t be looking for dead or vanished eleven-year-olds, I hope.”
“So how’s this gonna go?” she asked. “White Cat dies, I live, I’m supposed to… what, just shut up and disappear, let you do everything moving forwards? I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you.”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I have a few ideas, but they all hinge on what the Guild says to me and how it all goes down—I can lay them out for you later. But first—since we’re going to be working so closely on this little ruse, we have to if we’re going to have any hope of pulling it off—I thought I’d start with a show of trust. You don’t need to reciprocate it if you aren’t comfortable.” He held out a hand to her across the table. “I’m Rowan Rhodes,” he said, “and it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
Kitten looked just as suspicious as she always did, but she did gingerly reach back to take his hand. “…You can call me Katya,” she eventually said. “You’re not getting my surname out of me, though.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “Now, here’s what I’ve been thinking…”
Four days later, Katya stood on a roof, looking out over her city. This was the last night she would be able to do so; tonight, she was going to die. Well. Katya would be fine, but it would be the last time she was able to go out like this. Tonight White Cat would die, publicly and in view of at least three different cameras. Tonight the deception would begin in truth—she couldn’t back out of it after this point. That would be rather against the point, after all.
Only a few minutes on, she heard sirens, and turned to look across the rooftops—she knew where they would be, of course, but if anyone was watching she would have to put on a show.
That was all this was. One great big show. She drummed her fingers on her wrist—there was a device there, under her glove, to make it easier for Eclipse (she knew his name now, but this was easier when they were out in the field) to project illusions over her.
The sirens picked up in number, and Katya swallowed down her nerves before jumping into the air.
It was time to get this show going.
Eclipse was standing on a glittering platform in front of one of the city’s major banks, arms outstretched.
“You see me here, don’t you?” he called to the police officers that surrounded the place. “You must understand that there is no way for you to safely retrieve both the bank’s holdings and my hostages.”
“Stand down, or we shoot!” one of the officers called—a captain, Katya thought he might be.
“And allow my glitter bombs to detonate? I think not,” said Eclipse. “Believe me, they’re not nearly as harmless as you’d think from the name!”
“Hey!” called Katya, flying fast towards him. “You know, I bet the detonator you’ve got there would only go off if you got shot up here. Would be real out of character for you to have it go off from a mere tackle like this!” And that, of course, was when she collided with Eclipse and sent them both tumbling off the platform.
He pressed something against her neck as they tumbled through the air together; it was cold for a moment, and then there was a sharp prick against her neck, and then it was gone. He squeezed her arm twice in quick succession. That was her cue—she disentangled herself and let him tumble across the plaza, landing lightly herself. This was a modified formula he was meant to have dosed her with—she would, supposedly, be having her toughness and healing drained away right now, but nothing else.
“Come on, Eclipse,” she said. “Surely you wouldn’t get taken out by a little thing like that tackle. You’re hardier than that.”
“We can’t all bounce back like you, Kitten,” he retorted, climbing to his feet. His costume, his ridiculous jester’s outfit, was slightly dusty but he was otherwise none the worse for wear.
She moved, so she was between him and the doors of the bank—she flew to do it, a movement so easy and casual it was honestly a miracle she hadn’t accidentally done it in civvies at any point in the past.
“If you want what’s in here,” she said sweetly, “you’ll have to go through me. Don’t tell me you’re scared of that idea.”
“Hardly,” said Eclipse. Then he set off one of his glitter bombs next to her, and Katya had to be quick to escape getting her costume more than a little singed in the blast. She scowled back at him, ears ringing a little.
“Careful!” she said. “These costumes don’t grow on trees, you know! D’you have any idea how much trouble it is to keep replacing these when you’re only a teenager?” There. Let that support Eclipse’s claim that she was fifteen.
“Maybe that could keep you out of my hair for a little while,” he shot back at her. “You can’t go running around as a superhero in your real pajamas after all—you would only do that in your special pajamas.”
“You really do care, then,” she said. “Only a true nemesis would call a costume pajamas.”
“Perhaps,” said Eclipse. “But would a true nemesis do this? ” And with that, he raised a hand, and flicked two fingers in a signal gesture.
How she managed to not react with more than a small laugh—there was nothing that gesture alone could do to her—she would never know.
“Right,” she said, “like a little gesture’s going to do anyth—”
The bullet slammed into her ribs, right over her heart, and even though she had her toughness and her healing, even though she knew it wouldn’t do her any real damage, she still gasped in shock and pain and stumbled back into the doors. She’d never actually been shot before, not like this. And she could feel the light touch of Eclipse’s illusion over her, knew that what she was feeling was not at all what everyone around her was seeing. Her costume was warm and damp at her back; the squib there had burst when she’d impacted the doors. Just as it was supposed to. It would be easier for everyone if there was a real bloodstain, even if the blood wasn’t actually hers, wasn’t actually from this not-wound.
She looked up, and made eye contact with the illusion of a girl standing on the other roof, sniper rifle lying beside her. The illusion smirked, saluted, then—a moment after the helicopters turned their lights on her—whirled and left Katya’s field of vision. The rifle was still there, of course. Just because Eclipse could rig it to aim and fire from a distance didn’t mean his illusion-girl was any more solid than usual.
The band around her wrist tightened again, and she knew it would be releasing the metablocker into her system now, followed by a sedative—neither she nor Eclipse had access to sedatives that worked against healing as good as hers, and they’d agreed it would be better to have her not struggling to fake limp unconsciousness.
So her vision was genuinely blurring, and she was still struggling to breathe normally with her deeply bruised chest, when the people arrived to try to save her life.
“Hey,” she tried to say, but her lips didn’t want to obey, and she fell underwater as all around her the people made a great shouting commotion.
As soon as Kitten stumbled back into the door from the force of the bullet, Eclipse hopped back onto his floating platform, and hastened away. The police should mostly focus on Kitten, but he’d just had her shot (and that had taken a greater act of will than he had expected it would; even knowing that it would do no more than bruise her, that it couldn’t seriously injure her, his mind had been awash in things that could go wrong) and they wouldn’t exactly be feeling kindly towards him either.
He had three points of focus: himself, Kitten, and Kitten’s shadow doppelgänger. The doppelgänger was essential if he wanted to be able to bring Kitten in later—there had to be an accomplice, visible at the same time and in the same place as Kitten.
As for himself, the moment he was out of sight he cloaked himself invisible and turned his focus onto Kitten. She had to look injured, had to stay looking injured, had to convincingly pass for dead. With the sedative they were using, it would slow her breathing and heart rate a dangerous degree; but he’d diluted the metablocker. It should be too weak to let the sedative do her actual harm.
He watched her get loaded into an ambulance, followed that to the hospital, followed them to the hospital morgue—his floating platform was actually really quite fast and he could keep himself invisible easily enough while moving—and all the while he kept up the dynamic illusion of her grievous wounds, and all the while he kept up the minor, subtle illusions he’d been using on her face and body the whole time. She looked ever so slightly older than usual, today, both in face and body—and, importantly, no one who saw her would think she was anything but a cis girl. That was critical, for no one knew that White Cat was transgender, and if things stayed that way not only would it preserve her personal comfort, it would also mean no one would be looking too closely at an eleven-year-old trans girl when trying to figure out which civilian it was that should be dead.
When finally they had declared her dead, stopped trying to resuscitate her, left her in the morgue—Rowan nodded.
It was time for him to steal a body.
Katya woke in a soft, warm bed. She could breathe deeply without any pain; whatever inhibitions the metablocker had imposed on her healing, they were gone now.
She had been in this room only once before, but she recognized it right away; this was Rowan’s bedroom, and it was where she had fully expected to be waking up.
“Hey, Kit—Katya,” he said. “Sorry. I suppose I should get out of the habit of calling you that, shouldn’t I.”
Katya subconsciously touched her chest—just left of her sternum, over her heart, where they’d agreed to have her be shot—as she sat up. “Did it work?” she asked. “Do they trust you?”
He nodded. “We’re in,” he said simply.
She gave a long deep sigh. “Thank God, ” she said fervently. “I wouldn’t—wouldn’t have wanted to do all this, just to have it—you know. Not convince anyone.”
“I know what you mean,” said Rowan, smiling slightly at her. “I’m glad it worked out, too. Are you ready to join forces with your erstwhile nemesis to find out what really happened to Crescent Moon, then?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Like you could stop me anyway—I don’t want to be part of your petty thefts, though, if it can be helped. I got into this whole thing to help people, not hurt them.”
“We’ll do our best,” said Rowan. “But in the meantime… welcome to the dark side, Katya. Or should I call you Starfall?”
“Katya’s fine for now,” she said, rolling her eyes a little. “But I suppose I’ll have to be Starfall, from now on, when I’m in a mask.”
“Your backpack’s right where you left it,” Rowan said, getting to his feet. “I can make you something for breakfast—you like pancakes?”
“I—yeah,” said Katya, and Rowan nodded and left her alone.
Soon enough she’d be going home from her alleged sleepover with her friend (who was, allegedly, Rowan’s niece, not Rowan himself, of course) to her parents, who loved her and knew nothing of the second half of her life she’d made for herself. Soon enough she’d be just Katya again, a normal girl.
But she was also going to be Starfall. Starfall, who would be able to go all the places White Cat had been barred from, who would finally be able to get to the bottom of exactly what had happened to Crescent Moon, who could learn just how deep the corruption truly ran.
For now, though, she had a breakfast to eat and an ex-nemesis (trusted ally, if perhaps not yet friend) to talk things through with.
Katya shoved back the covers and swung her legs over the side of the bed. It was time to begin the day.