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When they were one year old, they saw their mother for the last time. It had been planned ahead that the moment they weaned they’d be given away, and Eden never blamed her mother for it. Raising children is hard already, let alone something more than that. No, she didn’t blame her mother. Never would. If she was in the same position she wasn’t sure if she’d even let them stay long enough to wean. Then again, she didn’t think the way she was supposed to. Maybe she’d inherited it from her mother. More likely, though, that she’d inherited it from her father.
Now, her father, she blamed. She blamed him, and she blamed his Father even more. She wasn’t supposed to. She was supposed to love Him. She was supposed to be His servant, His holy child, put upon this sinful Earth to fight against the fallen. She was supposed to perhaps one day kill her brother, as Cain had killed Abel.
She didn’t understand it, truthfully. If He were so mighty, why had she needed to live at all? Could He not kill the fallen himself? Could He not have prevented the demon that impregnated her mother from doing so to begin with? Could He not have merely reached from the Heavens above and killed the cursed child in the womb? Could He not see that, of the two, Elliot was the kinder one?
Then again, perhaps he was kind because of her. She didn’t understand why the Lord had chosen to give the poor, cursed woman another child, rather than ridding her of the one she already carried, but she did understand that in sharing a womb, she had made her brother weak, and him, her. Perhaps, then, the souls had gotten mixed up, and perhaps he had the soul of the divine child, and she the soul of the fallen. Either way, it didn’t matter. Even if he had come out cruel like he was supposed to, she could never grow to kill him. Just as the Lord had looked down upon Cain for killing his kin, she would make sure the Lord would look down upon her for sparing hers.
When they were four years old, they were undeniably their own people, even if the Sisters seemed to wish otherwise. He was quiet like a winter’s night, rarely laughing and certainly never speaking. They’d given up on coaxing intelligible sound out of him, finding he reluctantly took to hand signs instead. Mostly, he kept to a dark corner, watching on with barely blinking eyes. He took to reading quickly, though. While most children couldn’t understand the written word until a year of life later, he found himself correlating the sounds he heard to the symbols on the paper soon enough. Once the Sisters realized it, they’d all murmured to themselves about it being the craftiness of the Devil within him.
In contrast, she was as loud and rambunctious as a fledgling bird, constantly under foot and asking questions about the world. There were the normal ones, of course, and there were the ones that got her the funny looks or the angered hush. The lack of answers only made those questions all the more interesting to her, and when the Sisters did not relent, she asked her brother to scour the bibles for her, and when that failed, she came up with her own conclusions, of which she had many. She also found she could test the veracity of these conclusions by speaking them aloud and watching how her caretakers reacted. Subsequently, she found that for some conclusions the satisfaction of knowing did not outweigh the risk of catching ire.
Not that ire lasted long upon her. She was the holy child, and any missteps were often forgiven with time. Another thing that set her apart from her brother, who seemed to always be in trouble despite his attempts to stay out of it. When she noticed this, or at least finally noticed it beyond her subconscious, she had brought it up as she was wont to do. She was told it was because, as a devil child, he was more likely to stray upon terrible paths, and therefore must be corrected more severely. She wondered if adults could need correcting too, and of that conclusion she didn’t speak aloud.
When they were seven years old, they had learned enough in their magics to make them of use. She had found that her magic seemed to flow through her body like blood, and like blood she would be weakened if she drained herself of it. Unlike blood, though, she could control where within her it pooled, pushing and pulling it from her wings and tail feathers to change their size, and gathering it at her fingertips to make flames dance along the digits. The Sisters quickly put her to work in lighting the candles and fireplaces, if only to keep her from practicing upon any scrap of flammable material she could find. With regards to her wings and flight, well, one can imagine how she lost most of her baby teeth.
Where her powers were all soft white and flickering lights, his were of the shadows and shade. His tendency to accidentally startle others was made far worse by his newfound ability to disappear and reappear moments later, several feet from where he started. He could do it anywhere, but it was easier if he was given the darkness, the very shadows seeming to wrap around him in an embrace and release him elsewhere. The furthest he managed was clear across the grandiose oratory, but he was sure he could go further, if only he was allowed to practice and given a dark enough space. Of course, when Eden suggested to him that he could bring his own darkness with him, and he discovered that putting a blanket over himself was indeed sufficient, bedding was suddenly banned from being taken outside of their rooms.
By this age they had become quite sure of their favorites as well. The usual things, like favorite colors, animals, and caretakers. She was delighted by the vivid color of red, while he was partial to the deep purples and blues his power drew from. She liked the striking ferocity of the eagle, while he preferred the quiet thoughtfulness of the owl. As for favored caretaker, they were both in solid agreement that Sister Martha was the kindest, a soft young lady with rounded cheeks and a gentle tongue. Then, there were the more strange things children become enraptured with. Something about the letter “Y” intrigued him, perhaps it’s relative strangeness compared to the other letters, or perhaps the way it resembled the nose of a cat or face of an owl if you squinted. For her, the number nine was a small pleasure; the way it looped upon itself, the fact it was the last number before symbols repeated, and, most subtly, the way it became a sinful six when flipped upside down.
Which is why, when they were nine years old, the monastery burned down. She’d been certain for a while that she would like to do something special in her ninth year of life, and she had always been a curious soul. Particularly, she had been curious about the Lord, and a part of her had done it just to see what He’d do. Frankly, she somewhat expected to be smitten where she stood, nothing left of her but a smoldering patch of grass. But as she stood beside her brother, watching the building burn, no great bolts of lightning came down from above to rend her off this plane. Funny. Then again, the Lord hadn’t smitten Cain, so perhaps her punishment was the same as his, to live among man and roil among the other fallen upon the day she was struck down by some other means.
Her brother never asked anything about it. He knew it had been her, even if he hadn’t seen it. She’d awoken him in the middle of the night, speaking in a hushed tone to go outside and wait for her, and he knew how much she’d always wished to burn more than wicks set in wax. He also felt he knew why she’d done it as well, even if she’d always say otherwise. As he stared into the flames, he knew it was his fault. He couldn’t possibly articulate why, either through his hands or even his mind, but he was certain of it. Maybe it was that he’d poisoned her somehow, either in the womb or out of it. Maybe it was in the way she watched with uncharacteristic silence any time he was punished for a misdeed, mouth set in a thin line as his sins were laid bare. Maybe if he had been a better child, or had spoken for himself, or had somehow not existed at all, then maybe, maybe, maybe…
No one died. Everyone had gotten outside in time, and as firetrucks and police arrived, he knew the eyes were on him. Not the girl with fire in her blood, but the boy whose pale skin reflected the embers beautifully, as if he belonged in the center of those flames. When the police spoke to them, he stood in silence while his sister’s tongue sinned, and his gaze drifted to a woman in a suit dress, leaning against an unassuming little car. She spoke to them next, and said in a gentle voice that she was someone who worked with special children like them, and that they had to go somewhere new, now. In the car her tone was something different, her ask of if he had been the one to start the fire less of a question and more of a demand. His sister said he hadn’t in a way that was much too quick and certain, and something dreadful settled in the way the woman’s eyes narrowed in the rear-view mirror.
When they were ten years old, they got into their first real fight. Not with each other, no. They bickered as siblings do, but overall were quite peaceful towards each other, at least compared to other families. The fight had been with another child, someone mean and stupid, with a hurt heart and a name not worth remembering. After the fire, they’d ended up at a place called Dark Way Prep, a strange sort of boarding school that wasn’t like the ones Elliot had read about in his sparse non-religious texts. In the books there was always cruelty, but nothing the likes of which he saw here. The motto of this place seemed to be sink or swim, and everything felt upside-down.
They’d gotten into fights with their fellow students before, but only of the verbal variety, and it was Eden who did the most of it. She seemed to figure out how to survive here, and it was her quick wit, sharp tongue, and loyalty to him that kept him from becoming one of the children that didn’t appear in class one day, either temporarily or permanently. Well, it wasn’t all her. The teachers had an interest in his powers, saying they were useful, if he’d only figure out how to apply them properly. Unlike the Sisters they gave him the tools to work it out, and within only a few months of their arrival here was he constantly seen shrouded in black fabric, comforted with the knowledge he could slip away from trouble at any time.
That is, if he saw the trouble coming, and that was what got them into the fight. People, especially children, will always look for someone to outcast, and even in a place of freaks there was no exception to this rule. His quiet, shy behavior and his sister's rampant attitude had made him a target, and it was during their limited outside time that it happened. His sister took any chance to stretch her wings she could get, while he felt blinded in the sun, and so they were apart, off in their separate pleasures. He was too busy watching a row of ants march past his patch of shade to notice the boy approaching, even with his heightened sense of hearing. He was hit hard and fast, a fist connecting with the back of his head and a strangled yelp escaping his throat. As the momentum of it laid him out on the ground, he rolled onto his back and propped himself on his hands, scrabbling backwards to get away while still keeping eyes on his assailant.
“That’s for the shit your sister said this morning,” The larger boy sneered, quickly grabbing Elliot by the shirt collar before he could wrap himself in his cape and reappear across the courtyard, “and this one’s for the shit she said yesterday!” His fist raised, and red eyes looked helplessly towards the teachers supervising. They’d noticed the scuffle, but were observing with what looked to be detached interest, as if they were watching a documentary or appraising a pound of meat at the store. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. In the books the teachers stepped in before it got bad. It was getting bad, so why did they just stand there?
Suddenly a white blur streaked past, slamming harshly into the bully, whose grip on the shirt loosened upon the hit. Elliot sat on the dirt, staring in disbelief at the two children sprawled on the ground before him. One was the boy, who had seemed much bigger just a moment ago, now howling with pain and confusion, and the other was his sister, hissing with equal amounts of pain and rage. She got to her hands and knees, turning her head to stare at her fellow student with a strange expression Elliot couldn’t place. On one hand, there was the twisted snarl of rage, but on the other, there seemed to be a sort of maniacal happiness beneath. Just as suddenly as she appeared, she leapt upon the boy, wings flapping for balance as he squirmed beneath her. Elliot could hardly see what was going on through the torrent of white feathers, only catching glimpses of burgundy red and thrashing limbs, as well as hearing horrifying screams of fury and cries of pain.
He barely noticed the teachers approach, just as frozen in place as when the police had asked about the fire. In a way that seemed eerily practiced, the adults split the scrabbling children, the boy a bloody mess with a mangled arm, and his sister hissing and spitting like a rabid cat, needing two adults to pin her down. As she finally stopped squirming, her face pressed to the dirt and mouth opened in a gasping pant, golden eyes met ones of red. Slowly her parted mouth turned to a loose smile, and her ragged breathing became a strange laugh, adrenaline crashing just as hard as it had spiked.
Neither of them remembered the immediate moments after, but they both remembered the Headmaster’s office. In another life, the man might’ve made for a wonderful, kindly principal, with all the visual hallmarks of one. Instead, he was the ruler of this hell disguised as a school, and the boredly stern look on his face matched. The siblings both sat in identical chairs before him, both still covered in dirt, and in Eden’s case, blood as well. Occasionally she licked at her lips or teeth, tasting the sinful liquid. It was different from the little cups of Jesus she had drank at communion, and she rather preferred this salty, metallic tang to the bitter burn that had been the life of God.
“Ms. Knight,” The man before them spoke in a deep rumble, and both of them startled some. “The boy you attacked. Do you know what you did to him?”
“I hurt him,” She replied, her usually boisterous voice seeming so small compared to his. “Badly,” She added after a moment, only barely resisting the urge to stare at the floor instead of at him.
“Very badly.” He confirmed, reaching onto the desk and picking up a paper, as if he hadn’t already read what was written on it. “You broke his arm. With a bite, might I add. It’s possible he won’t be attending this school any further.” Elliot was thankful he was already naturally pale, lest the Headmaster see how much that statement horrified him. He didn’t know what happened to the children who no longer attended class, but the rumors among the students were gruesome, and the teachers didn’t bother to correct any of them. These rumors had slim chance of being true, but the mere thought that his sister may have doomed another to such fates still left him ill.
After a moment of letting the twins steep in their terror, the Headmaster spoke again. “Most children are incapable of such feats. Most adults, even. Do you know how much pressure is required to break bone, Ms. Knight?”
“No, sir.”
“It depends on the bone and the person, but I assure you, it is far more than what the human jaw is capable of delivering.” He leaned forwards, hands laced together on his desk. “You are a very special young lady, Ms. Knight.” Both children blinked in confusion, glancing at their sibling subtly and only finding the other just as baffled as themself.
The imposing man leaned back again, a small and discomforting smile on his face. “You have a bright future with us, should you put in some effort and do your work.” With that, he turned to Elliot, the smile fading back to the prior impassive expression. “You, on the other hand, I am very disappointed with. You have wonderful potential, but no desire to put that potential to use. Your academic grades are perfect, but in the courtyard today you made no effort to defend yourself. I suggest such a weak display not happen again. Am I understood?”
Elliot quickly nodded, hoping his speed of response would make up for his inability to speak it.
“Wonderful. I’m glad we’re all in agreement. You may leave and groom yourselves. I will be making sure you have properly rid your clothes of any stains, Ms. Knight.”
“That’s it?” She spoke before thinking, only realizing the stupidity of it when the Headmasters brow raised and her brother turned to her with a look of horror.
“Would you have liked there to be more?” There was a faint snarl to the man’s voice.
Before she could say anything else, a pale, clawed hand clamped over her mouth, Elliot rapidly shaking his head “no” as he nervously dragged his sister from the room. Once safely in the hall the two had stared at each other with matching looks of shock, before bursting into nervous, terrified laughter, both feeling as though they’d narrowly escaped death.
When they were thirteen years old, they graduated from Dark Way, and were transferred into a new school with a lengthy title. The H.I.V.E. Academy for Extraordinary Young People, acronymed to H.A.E.Y.P. and referred to in short as simply the H.I.V.E. Academy. “H.I.V.E.” itself was an acronym, standing for the Hierarchy of International Vengeance and Extermination, blatant and unafraid of advertising what they were— a terrorist organization, through and through. The academy was one of their many methods of recruitment, finding any child with something special about them and instilling hatred in their little hearts.
Some students were willingly enrolled, a parent or mentor dragging their child into cruelty with them, or the child enrolling themselves in hope of a home. The majority were like Eden and Elliot, plucked away by false authorities. All were aware this wasn’t a good place, and all stayed anyway, for fear that there was nothing better for them, or for fear of what could happen to a defector. Worse yet was that most of them had found a pleasure in inflicting pain, and those that didn’t learned to pretend they did, and once you pretend something for long enough it often becomes truth.
One of the first things they’d had to do in this new place was choose an alias and shed their old names, the use of the one you were born with becoming forbidden. She chose one of irony, he chose one he could fit as many Y’s into as he could, and within a week it was almost hard to believe their names had ever alliterated each other at all.
They changed their hair, too, now that they were allowed to. He let his grow out, silky black draping over his shoulders. She took the opposite approach, pulling out the sparse white feathers on her scalp and shaving the brown curls into almost nothing. Her head hurt from the plucking, and she could barely recognize herself without her flowing locks, but she had grinned in the mirror at herself as if she’d just fled the pharaoh.
When they were fourteen years old, they got their first work, and with it their first real uniforms. They’d had uniforms before this, Dark Way making all the students dress as blandly and similarly as possible with few exceptions— just another one of the many small ways they stripped the children in their care of their former lives and prepared them for H.A.E.Y.P.— and the H.I.V.E. itself had a school dress code as well, though a much more relaxed one. So long as it was yellow and black and vaguely formal, it was allowed, with one student— Billy— even getting away with using his tie like a belt for the fun of it, and Kyd Wykkyd getting to still wear a cloak on the regular.
But these new uniforms were different. They were all their own, of any colors and cuts they wanted, at least within reason. Just like when making her alias, Angel went for irony. Something feminine and light, yet protective and calling to mind the garb of a Roman soldier. A snug, sleeveless red top, a skirt of pteruges (with bike shorts underneath, of course), a turtleneck to protect her throat with enough spare fabric to pull over her mouth and nose if needed, and shiny metal arm bracers with a helmet to match. She didn’t care about things like covering her face or hair, only picking a helmet for the Roman look and to protect her head. There wasn’t any point in a secret identity. Not when she looked like this, and not when she’d so quickly forgotten Eden Knight.
Kyd Wykkyd went for something much simpler, unlike his name. He had no need for anything elaborate, going for a gray full bodysuit, covered by black boots, black gloves and a silken black cape that caught the light with shimmers of purple. Like his sister, he had no need to cover his head, and like his sister he did so anyways, donning a cowl that sparked stupid debates among classmates as to whether it was meant to resemble a bat, a cat, or an owl. He had no need to carry weapons, and so his ensemble lacked any pouches, pockets, or clips. The less he carried, the easier it was to disappear into thin air.
They’d both found their own ways of fighting over the years. He already had claws of sorts, which he’d proudly used the second time he’d ever been picked on, but he also found how useful his teleportation could be. It had been an accident, really. He’d been practicing using a cloak to teleport objects with him, and had failed to properly cover a chair in his dark embrace, cutting it cleanly apart where parts of it had still touched the light. From there he experimented, and discovered that he could use even the softest of fabric as a blade, his teleportation offsetting whatever he brushed it against by only a hair— to devastating consequence, if he chose.
She, on the other hand, could force her wings larger than ever, bringing them together with enough force to crush steel and create a hurricane-like wind. She also found that the holy metals, silver and gold, could hold onto her magic, staying aflame even where there was no fuel. From this knowledge she created herself a rather thematic weapon, metal haloes with razor sharp edges, set alight with barely a twitch of her wrists. They clipped quite nicely to the belt of her new skirt, hanging there like a grim parody of Wonder Woman’s lasso.
The night went as well as a first job could, the pair given great advantage by being new and therefore unknown, guards confused and panicked by the strange attackers. The next day was their performance review, where they received a middling grade and the work of writing essays on every mistake made, and the two of them thought that homework was worth it if they just got to feel that rush of adrenaline again.
When they were fifteen years old, something in the school changed. No one could pinpoint what it was, the topic slipping away from the mind like a snake squirming out of your grasp. New students had come with this nebulous change, but that should have been nothing of note. New students came in constantly and it was never anything important, and yet this time was different. One of the new students was a broad, frightening girl with a nasty scar and a crackle in the air around her, who was worth remembering if only to stay out of her way. The other was a smaller girl, with a fierce look in her eyes and gossamer wings that hummed in a beautiful rhythm. In her first class of student-on-student combat practice, she was pitted against Angel— likely to test her skills in the air— and as Angel panted heavily on the ground with the taste of iron in her mouth, a strange, fluttery feeling arose in her gut.
This feeling didn’t go away even after her nose was set back in place and her electric burns bandaged, possibly even getting worse. Where she normally chattered at her brother over lunch or pointedly read a book in class, her gaze now wandered at every moment over to the other girl, wishing she could pin her in place to turn over and study like a museum specimen. Her observations didn’t go unnoticed, and frequently brown eyes met gold in uncomfortable glances. While most would nervously look away and pretend they hadn’t been staring at all, Angel only met the other girl's glares in the way a predator's eyes meet prey’s, awkward and hungry. It was only inevitable, then, that something would come out of it.
“I hope all the staring isn’t ‘cause I kicked your butt.” It was in the hallway between classes, after another lecture hall the two girls shared. The way Bumblebee said it was harsh, and was toned as if it was a threat of sorts.
Angel had only giggled a little, a tittering sound like birds bickering in the morning. “What if it is?” She’d asked, smiling with her head tilted slightly to the side.
Bumblebee scoffed in response. “Pissed you got a bad grade?”
“Who said I was pissed?” Her face was genuine, a sweet sort of curiosity on it, the same sort of curiosity with which a child might look at a particularly interesting bug. At this the other girl balked, looking at Angel with something unreadable before walking off to her next class without another word.
If ignoring her words had been meant to reduce Angel’s interest, it failed spectacularly, and soon she graduated from merely staring across the room to sitting beside her and even trying to talk. At first, Bumblebee had continued to ignore it, only occasionally giving her looks of annoyance, but just as the wolf exhausts the elk, Angel finally started getting responses back. Within only two months of Bumblebee’s arrival, she was just as much a part of Angel’s world as Kyd Wykkyd was, the nephilim seen as frequently with one as the other. Angel had never been one for friends, really. Before this she would have been proud to say she was a loveless person, only feeling affection for the other half of her demonic duo. Now, though? The concept of a best friend, as childish as it was, floated on the tip of her tongue.
Only best friend, though, of course. It wasn’t like she didn’t know there was a greater possibility. She’d always known about men loving each other, given that it was one of many sins to memorize, and it was only fair to extrapolate that women could do the same. She certainly didn’t have any setbacks about the idea of being one of those women, either. If anything, it excited her to have yet another avenue to defile her image in the eyes of the Lord. No, what kept it as friends wasn’t fear of God, or even a lack of desire— fuck, did she desire— it was a fear of rejection and disgust. Pleasant dreams of possible futures were always torn apart by a look of horror, or a sneering laugh, or something just as miserable, leaving Angel alone in her bed and wishing her imagination would let her pretend, just once.
She thought that by keeping things quiet she could stay like this forever, never going further but never losing it either. She eventually discovered that even silence wasn’t safe, something her brother had realized at five and now she at fifteen. It was a week before the dance, and two weeks after she’d given away her real name, her childhood, her soul. Angel had hardly noticed the change until it was too late, once more in a hallway after class.
“So… goin’ to the dance?” She’d sidled up to Bumblebee after lecture, having been separated during class, the more studious of the two having randomly developed a habit of sitting between other students, leaving no room for Angel.
“It’s compulsory.” Came the reply, short and to the point. The dance was meant to be just another lesson, one in espionage and how to act in a formal setting, but all the students treated it like a typical high school dance, and the teachers were just kind enough to let them have this one modicum of normalcy.
“Yeah, but, I mean are you going-going? Like, are you actually gonna have some fun for once, or…” As they walked past, her gaze lingered on Stone and Jinx, who were awkwardly talking about a similar topic.
Bumblebee caught where Angel was looking, and her lips pressed into a frown. “If you’re asking if I’ve got a date, then no, and I don’t plan on one.”
“Yeah, uh, me neither.” It felt like anything she had thought to say beforehand was falling apart in the face of the other’s unusual monotone. “Y’know, it is a Sadie Hawkins dance, or whatever. Turn the gender roles on their head and all that. Maybe we could go together, really make things weird, right? Bet that’ll make some of the boys twitch.” It was a small dip in the waters, a joking suggestion. It was as friends, only as friends. Unless, maybe, just maybe, Bumblebee reacted with something more…
Suddenly she stopped walking, and Angel stumbled in surprise. “I’m not goin’ with anyone,” Bumblebee snapped, “I’m doing the bare minimum to get the grade, and then I’m going back to my dorm. Like how I’m going back to my dorm right now to study, and you should too. There’s a test tomorrow in anatomy.” After finishing curtly she began to walk again, a determined pace that Angel had to jog a moment to keep up with.
“We could study together! Isn’t it on efficient methods of murder? I actually pay attention to that stuff, I might be able to help you out!” There was a sort of beg to her voice, one which she’d deny if ever asked about.
For a moment, Bumblebee looked pale, something flickering in her face, before steeling back to its hardened glare. “No. I’ll be fine on my own. Thank you.”
Angel stopped and stood still, blinking in confusion as she watched her friend walk away. She remembered, then, that a week ago Bumblebee had admitted to having killed before. Maybe she was offended at the idea she’d need help on the test? But that couldn’t be it. She’d been weird all week, suddenly going back to the cold shoulder, and Angel didn’t know what she’d done wrong.
In contrast, her brother was doing well in making friends, despite his odd demeanor. Just as Angel had pressed herself into Bumblebee’s life, a boy of the alias Billy Numerous pressed himself into Kyd Wykkyd’s, and from there introduced him to See-More and Private Hive. No longer were his only options of lunch and study partner his sister or none, and slowly he was more likely to be seen trailing puppy-like after See-More, rather than his twin. It had been a fine arrangement when Bumblebee was still herself, but now that she had grown cold, Angel found herself selfishly wishing her brother was as unlucky in love as she.
She never acted on this selfishness, though. She wasn’t a good person, and was proud to say so, but she’d be hard pressed to steal happiness from him. But yet again she learned that silence wasn’t enough to keep a ship stable, and it was at the aforementioned dance that he’d left his friends to stand beside her in the corner, quiet as ever without even a single word from his hands or a look on his face. Neither of them said a thing to each other the entire night, instead watching their classmates make fools of themselves and saying goodnight at the end with a hug.
Not much later that year their world fell apart again, this time from no work of hers. Someone else had sparked the flame, a metaphorical one this time, and the siblings both came to the conclusion that hurt wasn’t as fun when they weren’t the ones inflicting it.
When they were sixteen years old, their lives were rather different. No longer were they each other's shadow, instead now living far apart. The splitting had been mutually agreed upon, both wanting to find who they were without the other. Supposedly. The truth was, being alone was a horrifying prospect to Angel, but her brother was attached to his friends, and their little group had an opening after Private Hive left— something about a traumatizing incident with a witch. She could’ve joined too, if she’d really wanted. Jinx knew better by now than to even try telling her no, and they were already more than a quintet with Billy joining in as well, the team name now outdated. But Angel was bold, not dumb, and she knew she’d only clash and make the others miserable. So, when they’d met up with their old classmates at the bar, and she saw how her brother looked at See-More, she gave up on the idea of ever being a criminal duo with him. He’d have listened to her, if she’d asked him to stay, and that same selfish part of her wanted to so badly, but instead as the drinking drew to a close she said goodnight to her brother in a way she hadn’t before, a way that was more of a goodbye than a promise of seeing him in the morning.
It wasn’t long after they’d split that she’d gotten the invitation. More specifically, he had gotten it and given it to her. She’d made herself rather hard to find after the academy collapsed, her thefts more for survival than fun, and her living spaces anywhere hidden and sheltered she could find. The only one who could consistently find her was her brother, always knowing where she was by some subtle connection, visiting often with check-ins as to her health and reminders to charge her communicator so he could actually text her, damn it. Whoever this “Brain” was, he clearly knew this aspect of her life, and had sent her invitation to the Hive Five, knowing they'd get it to her.
She’d read the pretentious letter with a glare, her brother standing nervously to the side as she scrutinized the details. It said that they’d heard of her from the fallen academy's records, and that they believed she had potential. They wanted her to come to Paris, France, in some sort of recruitment drive, discussing the details of membership there. It felt like a trap, gathering all these villains in one place, but she’d heard of the Brotherhood of Evil before. Another terrorist organization with a blatant name and no real goal other than hate. They were legitimate, the big leagues, the sort of thing the students of H.I.V.E. were supposed to aspire to be hired by. Her brother and his little posse were going, of course. Jinx wouldn’t miss this opportunity for the world, and the boys tended to idly follow her.
In the end she’d sighed and said, “fine,” because transportation was already fully arranged and she might as well see what the old bastards were planning, even if she had no intention of getting involved. The memory of overbearing teachers, miserable group assignments, and a vile little worm in her head were still fresh on her mind, and even if her current circumstances were shit, at least she had no one to listen to.
Her opinion changed later that month as she flipped through the dossier she’d been given moments ago, boredly skimming the files on various young heroes. Some she was familiar with, be it from the news or fighting them personally, but most were no one she’d ever heard of, and therefore no one of importance to her. She was about to snap the file shut, give it back, and walk away, when she flipped the page to a familiar face. Immediately she stilled, staring at the sharp brown eyes and determined press of lips. After what seemed to be forever, she closed the folder and stepped forward, asking what was needed from her to gain membership.
When they were seventeen years old, their roles had reversed. She had finally settled, resting her wings in a small, dying city in Pennsylvania’s tiny portion of the Delaware Bay. Her lair was scrappy, nothing more than an abandoned apartment complex, overgrown with weeds and meant to be demolished years ago, but she’d made it hers. She patched up enough walls to have a warm spot to sleep, and by some miracle the water still ran— a rare nice result of Steel’s mess of an infrastructure system. It wasn’t some luxurious Lexcorp tower, but it was somewhere to stitch her wounds and daydream of electric touches and shimmering elytra.
He, on the other hand, was rather adrift. Angel hadn’t seen Jinx’s dramatic entrance for herself, having recognized the turn of battle and fleeing before she could be caught; long before the witch and her new partner had arrived. She’d heard of it, though, and had felt oddly vindicated by the situation. Not happy, necessarily, but vindicated in that she’d always been right to dislike the girl. That vindication was short-lived, though, as when she’d murmured about having had a bad feeling, Gizmo had snapped in his shrill voice that she was no judge of character herself, and while she’d snapped right back at him, she knew sickeningly that he was right.
The boys tried to stick together without their leader, but in the end it didn’t work out. Gizmo and Mammoth managed to stay a pair, but the other three went their separate ways, rarely partnering when hired for the same job or when one needed a certain task done that only another could complete. Angel was secretly rather glad he was working alone, her brother getting caught far less frequently now that he could move in silence as he was always meant to, no teenage bickering to set off alarms. That said, she offered for him to come to Steel with her, saying she had more than enough room and more than enough work, but he’d only shook his head and wore that same fondness in his eyes that he did in that bar a year ago. He’d been in California for almost half his life now, and Jump held the only people he’d ever truly known aside from her, even if he was no longer on a team with them. She was pretty sure his other reason to stay out West was that, just as she could read him, he could read her, and he saw that same sort of fond look in her eyes when she described her new arch-nemesis.
That year her criminal record grew more serious, starting gradual with bigger heists, jumping into arson and mob affiliations, and finally reaching a dramatic crescendo with a murder. It wasn’t the sort of murder they learned about in class, no efficient tearing of a throat or spectacular room filling mess. It was simple, yet gruesome, and so strikingly hers. A man, dropped from nearly a hundred feet in the air, body shockingly intact given she could hear the grisly thud from all the way in the sky. She’d made no effort to hide her crime, no effort to pretend it wasn’t hers asides from a coy dance around the topic later the same week. She was proud of her work, and proud of the way others looked at her a little differently after.
When they were eighteen years old, they both finally confessed. His was a peaceful type, snuggled on a couch with a cloudy-eyed boy who felt his hands as he signed out the words, who smiled and said, “no shit, dummy,” and kissed him with the idea of one day doing something good together, when they were too old to act like this and the thrill of the chase had lost its fun.
Hers was a grisly type, covered in a brilliant red and gasping for air through the nausea of a concussion. It was her first time playing with explosives, never paying attention in classes on them and finding out her own way that the safe distance was definitely not that. The two girls had laid out on the concrete, both grappling with the realization they’d survived and so had the other. While Bumblebee greeted this realization with shuddering breaths, Angel greeted it with a laugh, one maniacal and loud despite the lack of air in her lungs. It finally ended in a fit of wheezes and coughs as she rolled onto her side, propping herself on her elbow and staring at the girl beside her, looking through teary eyes at the beautiful shape. Bloody saliva dripped from her mouth, and she was certain she’d broken at least one rib, and she was even more certain that the iron on her tongue wasn’t only coming from a shattered tooth but from her organs as well, bubbling up with each gagging cough.
Finally, her breathing steadied into a ragged, wheezed rhythm, and the tears came more from pain than from an inability to breathe. She laughed again, only a little this time, something less of a violent, clashing bark, and more of something human and joyful to be alive. Then she had said, “Oh, God, I think I love you,” and Bumblebee had said, in a similarly hoarse voice,
“Only think?”
At that, Angel had laughed again, laying back down as another fit of coughing came on, and shakily taking the hero’s hand in hers as the sound of the boys calling out drew closer.