Super•Villainous

Act 3: XLV

I sighed. "Are you sick? What's wrong with you?"

Because I knew he couldn't be injured. Not with me around.

My brows furrowed at his continued silence, and I edged closer, finally bringing my unclenched knuckles to his forehead, half expecting his eyes to fly wide and for him to swat me away, but he didn't.

For someone so frequently cold to the touch, his skin burned. Sweat glistened at his temples, and although my dad never taught me how to take a pulse, I held two fingers to Atticus's throat, where I imagined his jugular vein to be, and found his heart to be thundering abnormally fast.

"Just great," I muttered, and drew away to scour our surroundings for anything useful.

A random hodgepodge of items scattered a long, narrow strip of platform, before the ground dropped off completely. I knew without looking that I'd find rusted tracks laying beneath a thick coat of dust, had I chosen to investigate further. Of the items, I discerned a rolled up sleeping bag and plush mat to go with it, a bag of clothes, and tightly concealed containers of nonperishable food. The pre-prepared essentials any person might want should they be forced abruptly back into hiding.

I didn't think the stuff had been there long, however; certainly not as long as preceding his first foray into hiding. What was more, the place looked utterly unlived in. He deposited everything recently.

With Atticus unconscious, I felt comfortable rifling through his pockets to see what we had to go off of. I had my own wallet, but no more than the single twenty in cash my dad always forced me to keep on hand "just in case". To use my cards would be the equivalent of sending up a flare denoting our location, so I hoped Atticus brought more money to the table than myself.

And he did, a few hundred in twenties, along with a few watches and other niceties I expected he planned to pawn for quick cash, should things become particularly dire.

For a supervillain of dubious criminal history, his morals proved far stronger than mine. In his shoes, I'd simply shadow walk myself directly into a grocery store past closing time and take what I needed.

Then, my hand closed around a familiarly shaped rectangular object: a cell phone. Cursing violently, I barely resisted the urge to toss it on the ground and stomp the shattered remains into sand. Unfortunately, that wouldn't undo the damage already done. Feeling uncommonly civil, I merely powered off both of our phones and hoped that would be enough, though the knowledge of the information already gained by the cellphone companies didn't sit well with me. We couldn't stay long, and yet Atticus didn't seem to be going anywhere any time soon. In spite of everything he'd done, a myriad of conflicting kindnesses and cruelties, I couldn't leave him, either.

Our fates were tied.

That in mind, I kicked over the sleeping bag and rolled him onto it for extra comfort, because the ground was dirty and cold and I liked to think someone would do the same for me.

Then, I parceled through the spare clothes stored elsewhere on the abandoned platform. It all fit several sizes too big - his size, presumably - but I preferred jackets on the baggier side anyway, so I tugged on the first one I touched and slipped beneath the wooden planks blocking the exit into the outside world.

Few were around to see me in that late hour, but I still moved with caution, head ducked low and hood pulled up, wandering a straight path down the road to prevent myself from becoming lost. It soon became clear we were still in the city. I recognized the ugly architecture, denoting the more recent developments, even if the streets themselves remained a mystery to me.

A nerve-wracking amount of time later, spent half-expecting Tempest to swoop in and haul me off to a prison cell, I stumbled upon a 24 hour pharmacy, and bought medicine, water, and snacks from an exhausted looking clerk, who I suspected wouldn't have batted an eye if I walked in dressed as Shade himself, and then returned back to the subway grate. Admittedly, it took approximately three times as long as it should have to find my way back, since I walked right on by the boarded up entrance without realizing it at first.

I crawled inside well past midnight, utterly drained.

I barely had the opportunity to stand straight before hands grasped me by the shoulders, slamming me into a wall, a forearm pressed to my throat.

"I thought you'd run off for good. Sold me out."

My spine just about leapt out of my skin at the unexpectedness of hearing his voice, tired and rasping as it was, let alone finding my back abruptly met by chill brick.

The surprise wore off. Instead of shoving Atticus away, I crossed my arms tight over my chest and stood my ground, mocking. "You thought I might be a Super sneaking in here and you chose to approach this problem with hand to hand combat? Turn them into a popsicle or something next time. You must be sick to forget you have superpowers."

I thought he'd come to his senses and pull away by that point, but he lingered.

"I am not sick," he said, in contrast to the feverish glaze to his eyes, and the unnatural dilation of his pupils therein.

He shuddered beneath my palm when I relented and reached around his arm and felt his forehead again, just to make sure I hadn't imagined his high temperature earlier. "You are sick. Don't be stubborn. Unless you're shivering because I repulse you so much, in which case, you are the one holding me in this position. Not the other way around."

"I'm not sick," he repeated. "I overextended myself. My body can't take the strain of using so much of my power at once. That's all. I'll recover soon."

"You're not sick. Your body is just doing the exact same things it does when it is sick. Silly me for making that mistake," I drawled, so he could hear what he sounded like. "Look at me." I tilted his chin to meet my challenging gaze. "Do you hear how ridiculous that sounds?"

His eyes held mine only a moment before they dropped lower, trained elsewhere. Then, as though just noticing how his lacking attention betrayed him, his eyes shot back up to where they were meant to be, and he grimaced. He backed away all at once, fingers clenching and unclenching at his side.

"I fear I'm going to soon regret becoming a pawn in whatever game you are playing," he said.

Swallowing down the unexpected swell of disappointment in my gut - what had I been expecting, exactly? - I returned, "I had that same thought about you a few months ago. It's only fair you feel the same." I dug around in my jacket pocket for the medicine and tossed the palm-sized plastic container at him, which he caught with almost frustrating ease, his reflexes honed to ward off things far more dangerous than a few pills. "Here. They should help with the fever. Take it or don't, I don't care, but you need to recover fast, because although I turned our phones off, I remembered to do so too late. The location data - it will lead them straight to us eventually."

I didn't wait to see if he actually took the pills. I crossed over to the bag of clothes and fashioned it's contents into a pillowing bean bag chair of sorts against the wall to bring me more comfort, which I then fell into with an unladylike grunt of exhaustion.

"You should use the sleeping bag," Atticus said. "When I recover I'll find us another. And I'll transport us somewhere more comfortable. A vacant hotel room, perhaps, until we figure out our next move."

Shimmying myself deeper into my nest of clothes, I laughed unkindly. "Don't start acting chivalrous now. You tossed me over your shoulder like a sack of potatoes back in the woods."

"I had a reputation to maintain."

And he called me dramatic.

I said, "I don't plan to sleep tonight. Someone has to keep watch, just in case. Better you take the sleeping bag. Your body seems to need the rest more than mine - and don't even try to convince me otherwise. Go to sleep, or else."

Seeming to understand that I needed a few hours to have an existential crisis by myself, he reluctantly agreed. Only after I heard his breaths deepen into the steady rhythm of sleep, I pulled out the first of the two files I sacrificed so much to recover.