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2020. A cold day in January.
(DANIEL)
Move, move, move: I need to move. The thing about fighting, I think—fighting like this, fighting with him, pushed from one moment to the next without any visibility of what’s coming after, wrenched from the wide outlook of the sky and shackled inside the pinprick focus of impetus—the thing about fighting is that immediacy is seldom my strong suit. I have always been taught to keep—keep it in. To pause—pause and breathe. I have taught myself: take a step back. Keep your face still. Think, and defuse, mitigate, hush, hush.
But not here. Not here.
“On your LEFT,” he warns, snarling, a split second before the hit comes; quick (not quick enough), I scrape by with a gasp, and block in extremis. The fist in my hand is knuckled and hard, then dissolves into water-grasp; suddenly it’s twisting my wrist, snake-like, and forces me to waltz around him, orbiting.
That I am: orbiting. Satellite to a dark sun, too far to burn (oh to burn…), too close to escape unscathed.
I brush that away. Don’t read that—you, Antoine, don’t read that. Don’t blush, either—you, Daniel, don’t blush.
Focus.
“Focus,” he echoes, whether because he plucked it out of my head or I caught it from his, I don’t know; but my eyes meet his eyes (fog-grey, sea-mist, changing with the light, dark now with challenge), and I clench my teeth.
Focus. He’s told you before: this is not a game. This is not a date either. I’m here to learn; I’d like to be here to win, too. I’d like to—I’d like to—
go for the throat and push him against the wall—
I shudder, I blink. Is this my thought?
wipe the smirk off his face and see him kneel—
Win. Just this once. I’d like to win.
2020. A hot day in June.
(ANTOINE)
Really, it’s like you timed it: from the billowing smoke and the burning ruin (hah), you step out like the conqueror you are, arms open, chin tilted; around you, in the street, on the block, in the sky, sirens are whining, people are screaming, babies are crying and all that jazz. Drama queens. Nobody died, did they? You struck The White Russian before it even opened, polite that you are.
The White Russian. Renown Michelin-star restaurant with ceiling frescoes and crystal chandeliers, officially. Decadent parties after hours, complete with ottoman and scantily-clad dancers, as long as you have the money to privatise the dining room.
And informally? Preferred pied-à-terre and headquarters of Lord Ember when he comes to visit.
You and Hollow Ground agreed. After last month’s taunts, it was high time to retaliate. A little destruction never hurts, especially when it becomes a backdrop to your rather dashing media shot of the day. Funny how the press was quicker on the scene than the fire squad. Looks like government services are as useless as always.
The fire is raging. The cameras are rolling. Your armor is whirring. All is right in the world.
“The car is waiting for you to your right, behind Angelino’s,” says Pelayo in your ear. “When you’re ready, boss.”
When you’re ready, boss. You’re not ready just yet. After all, the stage is yours. Image is power, and power is armor.
You smile inside your helmet; your voice distorters wrap around your words like a velvet tongue, turning your speech into the searing kiss of triumph. Destruction subjugates, victory compels: in the wake of Ruin, people will bow their head and long to follow:
“Citizens of Los Diablos!” you start, your grin seeping into your voice. “You…”
“Shut up and stand down, Ruin,” his voice stops you short.
You whip your head up. Out of the sky and into the light, Herald has arrived.
Herald has arrived…
And your grin doesn’t fade.
A cold day in January.
(DANIEL)
And to win I have one or two tricks up my sleeve.
Use your head, says Steel.
Use your terrain, says Ortega.
Use your POWER, says Antoine.
And I listen, listen, listen.
As he dives, propulsed by strength and skill, a sturdy force gunning for a tackle, I take to the air; his momentum, sprung, pushes him too far too fast to the raised wall of the roof-edge over which I hover, light as air. This is it, this stunning feeling, the unfathomable glory of weightlessness—this is why I truly exist here, in the skies, when my eye can see wide and far, when my body is only the abstract of flesh, and its limitations a dream confined to earth. Here, I am what I want to be, what I can become. Here, I meet his gaze, and I hold it close.
“And what are you going to do now, Hermes?” he flings my way, unbothered.
I smile a little; he still hasn’t looked away, a rare occurrence, a precious occurrence, as real and throbbing as physical contact. Gaze-caught. Heart-fire. My pulse is deafening, but as opposed to him, it doesn’t take any effort for me to keep his gaze. He’s struggling; I’m not. Harnessed to his eyes, I soar, up and up, out of reach, but not out of earshot.
“I’m going to use what you taught me, of course,” I say, sweetly, and—
L
U
N
G
E
RIGHT
for him.
The grapple teases a gasp from him, but no more than that; a moment of disequilibrium as my speed-weighted body collides with his, a moment of complicated sweet-ache as my arms close around his ribs, and I’m air-born once more; on my cheek his insult is a hot breath delivered between gritted teeth:
“Oh, that’s good, you little shit—”
“Don’t be a sore loser,” I laugh, chest light; in my head, slipped unaware, the image of blue eyes and dimpled cheeks flashes, projected in a kaleidoscope of telepathic force, disappearing in acid smoke when I initiate my attack move: with a sharp turn, not too far from the roof, I twist back and THROW—
“Fuck!”
—HIM to the ground.
No time to think, not anymore; he hits the roof but doesn’t waitstopbreathe; no, fast as a snake he grabs the edge of my shirt before I can float away and SINKS me back to earth, where I am—what’s the Baudelaire line?
How limp and weak, his wings clipped, the poor floundering creature—
He, but a moment past so lordly, flying in state as the king of the sky!...
“Is this really the time?” Antoine snorts with an open-hand slap to the side of my head, and it’s not, it’s not the time, because I see stars, and the poems fly straight out, and I try to gain some distance, but it’s—
—too late, and he punches, augh, once, twice—too hard, hard enough for a gulp and a wheeze, Christ, Daniel, come on, winning, remember? It’s time to get up get out get high—
“Shut your brain up,” he’s advancing again, and I can see it, twitching like muscle in his hard thigh, I can see the kick coming, I can see the kick hurting, “and keep moving.”
So I don’t. I hold up my hand instead.
2020. A hot day in June.
(ANTOINE)
“My, my,” you throw to the skies, advancing over the rubble, “and what are you going to do if I refuse, little hero?”
In your mouth, the provocation is coated with a decade of dust and memories, rough like sandpaper, yet as sweet as youth. Once, you were the little hero. Hero or villain, you were always the winner, though.
And so the cycle continues: you’ve called him this before, too. A year ago, he flinched. Today, he tilts his chin up and looks at you from his heavenly throne, a beautiful silhouette of lean strength against the hellish decor of the havoc you wreaked. And then, between his teeth, with a hiss not unlike the ones you can coax from him with your mouth rather than your crimes, he retorts:
“Take you down, of course.”
This shiver of excitement, it’s not his, not only his. It’s yours, yours first. On the heels of delight, your laugh is a silken threat.
“Please. Let me see you try.”
And so it begins.
You know that move: his soaring higher to gather momentum, ready to take you flying. You know that move, but his face, his thoughts are nothing like the ones you’re used to, nothing like the rolling hills of his meandering when together you play-act, when together you play-fight. This—this is not a game. Today, the projection of his mind is burning sunrays, bereft of fluttering: a scorching, beaming heat, as focused and violent as a magnifying glass tilted to the light. Flint to the eye. Spark to the touch. Oh, he hates you, he hates you right now. He hates you and he wants to win.
He's ready.
But not ready enough.
Your heart twists, but your smile stays on. You can’t deny it, you admire this, him, now, you admire this willpower you have honed and encouraged, the stunning scalding slicing focus of his battle-ready mind. But the odds are not in his favor, not like this.
After all, you know him, but he doesn’t know you.
And so, just as you expect, gorgeous, arced and poised, he D
I
V
E
S
as you dodge,
unfair and swift, just a centimeter to the right, a brush away from his hand, dodge and duck and dance, so close, too far, a sparkling snicker when he swears under his breath, a merciless STRIKE when you hit him straight to—no, oh, he’s gone before you connect, throat intact. Now, that’s interesting. Is this newfound quickness a result of his powers, too? He knows by now that he needs to keep his distance: your strength is too deadly a threat, and against it he can only wield speed. Well done, Danny.
Daniel.
Herald.
Herald. Remember that.
In mind and body, you take one, two, three steps back, and taunt him with a cheeky hand. Just don’t let him fly you to the sun, Icarus. You know the fall hurts a little too much, even for your liberal taste.
“Looks like Little Lord Fauntleroy worked on his technique,” you whistle, as if you weren’t the architect of his progress.
The glare he throws you is withering. He’s not Ortega: if you want to banter, you’re going to take a few hard truths to the teeth—
“Looks like Los Diablos’s favorite edgelord is not much more than a clown in armored tights when he can’t throw his upgraded fist around,” he spits, and with aquatic grace alights just out of reach.
Edgelord? Come on now. If the press picks that up, it’s going to be a nightmare to shrug off.
“Oh you are a little shit,” you huff, and take the bait he’s dangling in front of you: moving in, moving close, you hit first.
He was waiting for you: you know that, you remember that, you picked up on that. Mixing, merging, telepathy and synchronicity and intimacy swirl, a heady prism of answering reflexes. He was waiting for you, but it’s no matter: you’ll get him as soon as he makes a mistake, and mistakes he always end up making. Quick now, sure now: you throw your fist once, twice, you turn, you duck; in front of you Herald is barely more than a will-o'-the-wisp, so light he flows through the air like a sigh, dodging your blows without breaking a sweat.
What the fuck is he doing? You’ve seen this before, the way gravity impacts his speed when he manipulates his own weight, but he never was so efficient on the rooftop; you need to step up your game, NOW.
Finally, your boot connects, heavy with the power of your exoskeleton, a shuddering SMASH to the chest; for a second, you’re almost scared of what you’ve done, propelled as you were by frustration, but when your heart misses a beat, it’s not because Herald collapses: no, no, it’s because your kick has dissolved into weightlessness. Freeze-frame. Fuck. Your eyes meet and he grabs your ankle and—and and AND…
You don’t have time to grapple with your environment: instantly you are lifted, a ragdoll thrown to the storm; immediately you hit the ground again, and feel the blow knock you askew from teeth to coccyx. You don’t let it slow you down: you crawl away and jump to your feet. Your armor pulses orange; the Rat King chitters, a vibration in the depths of your hindbrain. You shake it off. You fucking shake it off.
“Experimenting with your powers, are you?” you ask, casual, as if your scapula wasn’t screaming for a massage and six days of physical therapy.
“You have no idea.” Serious, intent. No distractions. In his mind you see only you, you, you. And then, because his mind is always his downfall, you see: his next move. And this one you know.
A cold day in January.
(DANIEL)
“I want to try something,” I offer.
He arches a brow, but lowers his fist. I breathe in; before I close my eyes, I take in his body, his stature, the way he stands, the beautiful width of his shoulders. It’s not hard to draw him feature for feature inside my mind; he comes to me, often, unbidden, and each detail I have committed to memory a long time ago.
Is that weird?
I’m just a visual learner.
For a long moment I have to feel my way inside my own head, a white hand in the dark of myself. But in the end I find it: the center of gravity. The pull. The force. The eye. Not the one that keeps me on the ground or allows me to soar; no, the one outside, elusive, temperamental, barely seen and vanished again. I don’t—understand it well. I don’t. Not yet, anyway. But I do know that if I pluck it just so—
“Are you doing this?” he gasps, far away, beyond the inside dark.
“You can feel it, can you?” I whisper, eyes closed still.
“I—”
Heavy, heavy, heavy is his body, heavy as a stone, heavy as a star, heavy as a world entire; under my feet the roof is thin-cracking like a porcelain plate; and when I open my eyes, Antoine is looking at me, resisting the pull, the push, the weight, bending despite himself, his bones turning osmium-heavy.
“Downforce,” he says.
“Yes. I think so.”
He’s thinking, thinking fast, I see it in the way his eyes flit from one side of the roof to the other; I know this look, the hunted look, the hunting look. If this is an experiment for me, it is a reality for him; and he’ll find a counter-attack before he lets himself fall to the ground. Before he lets himself crumple.
Before he lets himself lose.
“Don’t worry, I can sto—”
Too late.
With a grunt of pain, he throws himself forward, rendered sluggish with his own weight; and with his own weight too he SLAMS into me, using my attack to bash us both into the ground, heavy enough to SPLIT the concrete under us.
My lungs whine. No air. Under him, no air. Not just because of the weight, but I push that thought away. In the dark of myself I have let go of the pull, the force, the eye. The laws of the world tilt back to normalcy, and with them the weight of Antoine on me. I exhale, hard, and despite the pain, I chuckle.
“Didn’t like that very much, did you?”
I thought he would spring up: but no, he stays there, raised up only by a hand, and searching my face with a seriousness I don’t see often. So close, I can see the texture of his skin, the shadows in the eye-fog, the glinting of his piercings, the worry-wrinkle between his brows, the line of his clenched jaw. So close, I could…
I could. Almost.
But of course, I don’t.
“No. I didn’t like that,” he says, a little harshly. “But that’s good. That’s… very good. You have to work on this.”
“I am,” I smile, and quick, as if burned, he looks away. He doesn’t reply; instead, he jumps up and holds out his hand.
I swallow, throat-locked.
And I take it.
For the first time, then, I clasp his hand in mine not to hurt, not to parry, but to connect. He lifts me up, and I close my fingers around the bruised ridge of his knuckles, loathe to let him go.
Not so fast.
“Thank you, Antoine.”
“Shut up,” he says, but he’s looking at me still, and his thumb glides inside my palm. Lingers there. Lingers there, long enough to speak of heat.
2020. A hot day in June.
(ANTOINE)
Downforce. Of course. You should have expected this. Why didn’t you expect this? Get your head back in the game, Duman. You know Daniel. He’s clever. And that’s clever too. Of course it’s clever: with an armor like yours, downforce is going to fuck you over and leave you for dead in the fucking dust. You have no time to think. You have no time to breathe. You only have a split second to act.
Now, ACT.
As gravity increases, as the allyship of metal and bone turn on you from within, you launch yourself toward him with a snarl, and use his attack against him: satellite to a golden sun, too close for your own good and yet too far for your taste, smashed and weighted by the pull, you smash and weight him too, the entire excruciating heaviness of yourself a collapsing building, trapping him under the debris of you.
How accurate. You were a catastrophe waiting to happen to him. Now you do.
You can feel his surprise, though he doesn’t gasp, and doesn’t try to dodge; instead, quick enough to alarm you about the extent of his skill, he reverses gyrokinesis and lets himself hit the ground; he’s light, lighter, light enough to float away; but he doesn’t. He stays under you. Like a faulty speaker, his mind scratches and screams, jumping, rewinding, tripping over warped words and serrated colors, a migraine bursting at the S E A M S—and spilling now. Spilling onto his face, into his voice. His mouth hard, his gaze hard, his face hard, his hands hard around your helmet, holding you fast and close.
“Antoine,” he says, like he has said many times, when he was Daniel and not Herald. “It’s you. Antoine.”
It’s you. Antoine. It’s you.