Work Text:
It’s midnight. Flambae’s ten year old niece sits on the curb just outside a ballet studio, trying not to cry.
In fifteen minutes, the city will explode.
Ignacia has her mom — aunt — has Maryam’s spare phone in her hand. The screen pings on at full brightness because Maryam is a million years old, and for a brief moment it’s the brightest thing in her world. The kind of dark that lingers in a parking lot at night is suffocating. When she was really little and just sort of did things for the sake of mentally cataloguing what would happen and how the world works, she crawled under her ratty old ballerina-print comforter and breathed until the air was stale. When she stuck her head out, the bedroom air felt so cold and brand new.
She makes a mental note to throw away that comforter. No, wait. Maryam’s so weird about throwing anything away that she wouldn’t let her — it’s still good!
Whatever. She’ll burn it if she has to. She never wants to see a ballerina again.
She wipes at her steaming face and opens the messaging app.
Shahab
Are you awake? It’s Nacho.
i am now, wazzup
Don’t worry about it. Sorry.
na dw, i need to start waking up earlier anyway
seriously though, what’s up. did something happen at the danceathon
I left.
don’t you go on at 2 am
Level 4 goes on at 2 AM.
I’m in Level 1.
what
what do you mean
I got sent back to Level 1.
The teacher said she sent an email, but I don’t know what happened to it. I had to find out right before I went on.
She’s been watching me for a while now and I keep making the same mistakes. I’m wobbly. My arms swing around like wet noodles. I don’t stand right.
how the fuck do you stand wrong
Standing on your tiptoes is really hard.
Everyone else is doing pirouettes and shit and I can’t even stand on one leg.
And then she was all like “ooh you don’t need to do this just because your mom wants you to” shut up! You don’t know me!! I worked hard, I practiced, I did everything I was supposed to, and now you’re making me dance with a bunch of five year olds!
And I cried. In front of everybody.
I hate people.
are you ok
????
Are you stupid??
Sorry
I don’t know what that was. I’m just mad.
np
your mom’s taking you home?
Ignacia’s fingers hover over the screen.
He’s talking about Maryam, who’s not actually her mom.
She hasn’t brought it up because she knows he knows he’ll deny it, but he let it slip one night while she was pretending to be asleep on the couch.
“My coworkers keep calling her my kid. Still hurts to say that she’s not.”
“You know this is for her own good.”
Maryam, her “mother,” doesn’t have powers. He does, and so does Ignacia. When he was arrested, Ignacia would’ve been three years old. Young enough that pretending Chad was her uncle would’ve been an option.
But there are follow-up questions — namely, who’s the mother? Or how, really.
A dude plus another dude doesn’t make a Nacho, generally speaking, but “gay” is the second adjective she learned about Chad, preceded only by “pyro,” so the obvious answer is right out. A test tube baby? A clone? Some kind of transgenderism situation?
It’s taking her too long to answer. She doesn’t want him to worry.
Yeah. She’s on her way.
ok
here’s what you’re gonna do. the anger feels all burny right now but thats normal. eat something. sleep it off. you feel like shit tomorrow but thats normal too. anger takes a lot out of you. then you can figure out what to do
but DON’T do anything about this tonight
don’t do anything when your angry like this.
*you’re
stfu
one sec
(“One sec” turns out to be the last text Flambae sends before the Red Ring drags him out of his apartment.)
When Ignacia gets in the backseat of Maryam’s car, she doesn’t have to explain anything to her. She had already blubbered out the whole stupid story to her on the phone. The teacher. Her tantrum.
“But you didn’t set anything on fire?”
She kind of wishes she did. Maybe if she was dangerous they’d take her seriously.
“No.”
Presently, she watches the back of her mom-aunt-something’s head.
“What a fuckin’ mess,” Maryam mumbles. “Did you tell your uncle what happened?”
“Yeah.”
Maryam sighs.
“What? It calmed me down.” Maryam doesn’t have the fire and the flame, and the scar tissue on her hand is proof that her skin does burn. She never has anything to say for these moments other than a perplexed and profoundly unhelpful “Why are you so worked up?”
Because when people look at her Like That, tongues of fire heat her ribs from the inside. There’s a coal in her roiling stomach, smoke in her closing throat, steam from her orange eyes. Other times, it’s so quiet it could almost be mistaken for blood heat. A mild fever.
But the fire is always in her.
Maryam is quiet for a while.
“Did I ever tell you how I burned my hand? We’d boil eggs for breakfast. One for him and one for me. He always just reached into the water and pulled them out, and obviously, he was fine. I was too little to understand it. One day the timer went off, and I was in the kitchen, and he wasn’t. I was not fine.” She shakes her head. “He cried. A lot. Really beat himself up for not watching me closer. That’s the first time I realized that I can’t tell Shahab these things. He feels too much. He burns from the inside out and it spreads to everything around him. When my first boyfriend cheated on me my brother found him in a parking lot and kicked the shit out of him. Broke two ribs. The only reason he didn’t get arrested is because he held his burning hand an inch away from my ex’s lips and said that if he said anything to the cops, he’d make it so he’d never say anything again. Prison almost killed him, Ignacia. He can’t go back. You hear me? We can’t tell him things because we don’t know what he’ll do. Sometimes we have to protect people from themselves.”
Ignacia says nothing as they pull out of the parking space.
Just as they’re about to turn onto the road, there’s a noise and a light in the distance. “What the hell is that?” Maryam says.
All of a sudden, for a couple of seconds, it’s daytime. Like someone just flipped the lights on, but outside. A thud. The car shakes. A thousand little particles hit the windshield as a dust cloud rolls over them.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” says Maryam, gunning it, trying to — well, she probably doesn’t even know what she’s trying to do. It doesn’t matter much anyway.
Two seconds later, the parked car next to them explodes.
When Ignacia’s ears come back to her, she is upside down. The car has been blown onto its roof and the windows are broken.
Somehow she manages to get out of the car, kicking the crumpled remains of the window with her pink slippers and crawling out onto the asphalt. Black grit bites into her knees and the palms of her hands.
Maryam is dangling from her seatbelt, still at the wheel. Blood trickles up her face from a dozen little cuts. “Mom,” Ignacia says, because she can’t think of anything else to call her.
She groans. Oh, thank god. “Wh’happ’n.”
Footsteps in the distance. Ignacia only gets to feel relieved for half a second before she hears gunshots.
“Mom, we have to go.”
Her eyelids flutter over the whites of her eyes. She says something incoherent, and her arms do not move.
Ignacia reaches into the car and opens the buckle, lowering Maryam as carefully as she can. It’s easier than it’s supposed to be, she realizes. She vaguely remembers something about how most supers are stronger than regular humans. She vaguely remembers something about mothers lifting cars off their children. Shit, aren’t you supposed to not move people who have been in car accidents? Something about broken spines?
She hears guns again. She supposes Maryam won’t have to worry about her spine if she’s dead.
Ignacia may be newly blessed with the strength for it, but her mother-aunt-whatever just doesn’t fit in her skinny arms, so she grabs her by the back of the shirt and tries to haul her to her feet. “C’mon, c’mon, we gotta go—”
Voices in the distance. Little red lights through the dust cloud.
“I mean, gosh,” Uncle Chad had said one night, a couple beers deep. “If you don’t want people to think you’re evil, stop puttin’ red lights on all your shit. It’s fuckin’ — s’basic color theory.”
Ignacia takes the woman she grew up with and stuffs her under a Toyota Corolla like she’s hiding her dirty laundry, and then she crawls underneath it too.
Boots. Boots. Boots.
“Search the area. They need another pyro at the refinery; supposed to be one ‘round here.”
Ignacia tries to stay calm. Optimistic. Just because they’re looking for her doesn’t mean they’re going to look under this car—
Boots stop in front of the car.
Ignacia suddenly remembers that her eyes glow and presses her face down to the ground, trying to block out any hint of light.
She lies there for a long time.
Maybe it was too dark down there. Maybe the Red Ring did see them, but thought they were dead. Maybe that person did see her and chose not to drag a screaming child to her death. Maybe they didn’t look at all.
Ignacia will never know. After a short eternity, she looks up, and they are gone.
They emerge into a city that’s been covered in a layer of settled dust. It looks the way snow looks in cartoons. The sky still occasionally flashes to daytime as Ignacia drags Maryam’s limp body across the parking lot to the dance studio, her heels making two streaks on the ground.
The dance studio is dark. It’s almost quiet, but as she approaches she can hear the other kids crying.
Ignacia tries the door, and someone shrieks, but the door is locked.
“Miss Barnes?” she whispers. “Miss Barnes. It’s Nacho.”
She hears people shifting inside, but no one calls out to her, and no one unlocks the door.
Maybe they didn’t hear her. She taps on the glass.
“Miss Barnes, something really bad happened and my mom is hurt. You have to let us in. Miss Barnes. Please, they’re looking for me. They’re looking for pyros, and I don’t know what they’re going to do, and she’s bleeding a lot, and I — I — I just need somebody to let me in.”
“What did you say?”
She tries the door again, shaking it in the metal frame. She’s starting to feel lightheaded.
“You said they’re looking for you.”
“...Yeah?”
“Maybe if… maybe… they’ll leave us alone.”
Boots. “What’s that noise?” spoken in the distance.
“Let me in.”
There is nothing.
Boots.
“LET ME IN!”
She thinks she hears the metal warp and creak. She thinks she feels the handle begin to melt beneath her fingertips. She thinks that if she shakes the door hard enough, pulls strong enough, burns hot enough, she can save Maryam, and she can save herself.
Maybe she imagined it, though. Or maybe it just wasn’t enough.
You do not understand fire. You do not understand yourself.
“There she is!”
Ignacia turns around to see two red-glowing men with their guns drawn.
“C’mere, kid. Make this easy. Show us your hands.”
Anger is the body’s manner of protection. Chemicals that set your blood aflame and propel you to fight for your life.
Ignacia steps forward, clear of Maryam’s body slumped against the door. She holds her hands out. She can’t feel it, but her palms are glittery with blood, dust, and broken glass.
“Alright. C’mon.”
The fire is the same.
She should feel conflicted, right? That’s the right thing to feel. But instead a strange serenity passes over her at the same time as a sheen of cold sweat.
“Why is she smiling?”
It protects us. Its love is constant.
“Fuck.”
And all must burn.
“GET DOWN—”
Coupé glides on the thermals of a city on fire. Her eyes flick over the streets, searching for civilians; the ant-sized specks running from the Red Ring, not moving forward to fight.
She doesn’t see anyone running in this parking lot, but she does see something odd.
There’s a semicircle of scorch marks in front of a door. She could almost mistake it for Flambae’s handiwork. Two figures huddle in the center. There are no police cars in the lot, and Robert confirms that no one has been dispatched here. She descends.
The smell hits her before anything else.
She has worked with pyrokinetics before. One of them was named Misha, and Misha was addicted to heroin. Supers are dangerous on drugs in general and heroin in specific, because heroin’s most distinct quality is that it becomes air for the addict. You might get high the first few times, but as the disease progresses you must take more and more heroin in order to simply feel normal. An addict with heroin is at their baseline. An addict without it feels as though they are dying.
They made him go without it when he went on missions. A pyrokinetic that feels as though they are dying is at their most powerful.
One day Misha walked into a room and decided to vaporize his employer. Unfortunately, Misha could not burn hot enough to do this instantly, and at first all he did was reduce the man to a heap of cracking bones and boiling fats. Then, as he continued, the heap cooked, and then charred, finally nothing more than black carbon. Like what you find in your oven.
Misha then put two fingers inside of his mouth and activated his powers.
Coupé did not work with him again.
Whatever assailants had arrived have long since been reduced to carbon, but the two civilians inside the semicircle remain.
One is an unconscious woman in pajama pants. Clutching her is a little ballerina that looks up at Coupé with orange eyes.
Flambae’s niece, her memory helpfully informs. She’s seen her at the office, doing her homework in the break room.
She also remembers that Flambae has never killed anyone.
There are more civilians inside the building. Inside the ballet studio. The door was locked.
Coupé doesn’t ask why the door was locked because she doesn’t know what kind of person that information would turn her into, but as Malevola arrives to evacuate the civvies, the ballet instructor offers it anyway.
“There were more kids inside,” she says. “Dozens more. I couldn’t risk it. I did what I had to do.”
There’s pleading in her eyes, like she wants Coupé to agree with her, confirm that she did the right thing.
Coupé is silent. Moral dilemmas are for other people — or rather, moral dilemmas are for people, and she is a weapon. Considering these questions in the field will only jam her.
She does stare at the ballet instructor in what she hopes is a neutral manner. After a time, the teacher turns to the portal and leaves.
The civilians inside the building were sent to an evacuation center — one that’s hopefully outside the Red Ring’s zone of attack — but the unconscious woman needs medical attention, so Malevola opens a second portal. Paramedics come through, place her on a gurney. She’s stable.
As she lingers at the portal, the niece says, “I think I did something really bad.”
Malevola looks at the pillars of ash, at the niece, and then the pillars again, and says, “Shit.”
“You did what you could,” Coupé says. She stops just short of saying “and everyone is safe,” because the niece might count those pillars of ash among “everyone,” and that’s not a discussion that needs to be had right now.
The niece’s face remains as blank and flat as copy paper. After a time, she goes through the portal too.
“Coupé, status,” Robert crackles through her earpiece. “I don’t have eyes on your evac, but you’ve been down there for a while. Everything okay?”
Coupé and Malevola make eye contact. They’ve both killed a number of Red Ringers tonight; there are laws in place that protect them from prosecution for such things.
(Coupé tries not to think too hard about the fact that “supervillain” is a designation that makes it legal for you to be murdered. She tries not to think about how her coworkers — friends, even — who play video games and hang out at bars and go to their niece’s dance recitals — were, at one point, legal to kill.)
(That way lies madness.)
But legality is not the concern here.
Flambae’s ten year old niece is a killer. Because of the ugly actions of a handful of weak and frightened people, Flambae’s ten year old niece was forced to kill.
This could destroy her. This could destroy him.
Malevola nods. Coupé turns on her mic.
“All is well,” Coupé says, and with one swing of her broadsword, Malevola annihilates the evidence.