Damsel[ed]: Some Rescue Required (#2 of the Damsel[ed] series)

Chapter Sixteen: Villain

Back in the Fibbs' household...

Juniper clenches her jaw, her muscles wound up tight with a horrible, horrible unease. Everything around her is going wrong. Sixteen years of holding up a fake reality, trying to give her children the highest quality life she possibly could, and it is all unraveling.

Outside the windows, tension rumbles through Starlight like storm clouds. Her children know nothing of it. She doesn't let them. No cable, poor internet connection, a school that isolates its students and skirts around the history of supers. Skirts around the history of her. Of Owl. Of Fallout and Cleo and Nebula and the other supers and the dark, bleak days before peace of the npw.

She slinks into the galley kitchen, her mind drifting to a thousand other places. Of course the now isn't so much different from back then. There's no denying the hatred, the animosity that lies under sweet little words and fake smiles. Starlight may worship them, there may be gossip magazines dedicated in their honor, but the world is not so onboard with supers.

"To them, we are prey, and they are predators," Mayor Delacroix of Old Newport declared, his fists trembling as he stamped his foot on the dias. "It is only in self defense we stay away from them. No personal bias.  What would precious little Starlight do without the supers it loves so much?" The crowd hissed and laughed, and the mayor swept his white hair into a neat, handsome part. "But look at their villain problems. We have to face the facts here, people. To be a supervillain, you have to be a super. In this day and age have to treat every super like a potential threat. That's how we survive."

Juniper sucks in a trembling breath. Delacroix made that speech a day ago.

As neighbors tramp through her home, dirtying up her furniture and growling angrily at the guard who growls angrily back, she finds her husband in the kitchen, the news turned up on his phone as he brews coffee on the stove.

The newswoman's clear, strong voice cuts through the pair's silence, sending tingles up her spine. "As raids continue from a mysterious source, Starlight City—and its ideologies—is under siege."

"Of course it is," Storm says flatly to the percolator. "It always is."

"Oh, honey." Juniper runs her finger over his sleeve, looking up at the man she's lived with for so long she can hardly remember a time before him, before the messes they got each other into and the hell they had to hide.

The coffee bubbles. Storm pours the steamy brew into a blue-rimmed teacup, his hands as steady as usual. The cutlery doesn't so much as clink.

"Starlight City is a complicated entity, a megalopolis spanning a fourth of the east coast. After its capture by a rogue villain-group known as 'Snare', a war ensued between the Federalist heroes and the rogue villains. Within three years, Starlight City became it's own entity, with major social, political, and economic differences from the rest of the country..."

Juniper shrugs. She's heard the basic history of Starlight hundreds of times. "I suppose when you're trying not to die, segregation and male supremacy have to take a backseat. "

Storm waves a hand at the phone and frowns, handing her a cup of black coffee. "We're in trouble," he says curtly.

"What do you mean?" Juniper raises an eyebrow. The two of them are always in trouble. He just motions at the white iPhone lying flat on the counter.

"The court has yet to decide whether superpowers are inalienable rights or whether the United States Law can take them away."

Juniper tenses up, a cold sweat breaking down her skin. This can't be happening. The last time it did was over half a century ago, when this type of cruelty and paranoia was allowed, encouraged, even.