NPOV
Track: Dark Paradise, Lana Del Rey
I have the advantage once night hits; my suit melds with the sky while Sunburst remains perfectly visible in all his bright yellow glory. I'm not sure why he went with yellow, aside from the fact that it matches his powers. Where is the practicality in never being able to sneak up on me? Also, since when does anyone like bright yellow enough to make a whole suit out of it? I swear the guy makes no sense.
I enjoy the quiet that I get from not having his incessant mouth up in the air with me. I have to hope he never figures out how to fly; it's my only tangible advantage over him, aside from the fact that he's usually pretty inefficient at his job. He has the police on his side, he has security systems on his side, he has more painful powers on his side, he has the whole fucking city on his side.
But I have the skies to myself.
The secret to flight isn't anything too magnificent. Once I got my suit from Hecate, I figured it out pretty quickly. She had slipped me a comment about it when she gave me my suit: The soul soars at foreign sensations, Nico.
Turns out, foreign doesn't have to mean totally new, just not something everyday, either. For me, my 'foreign sensations' tend to be of the "happiness, joy, and excitement" genre. It's a little annoying to have to think happy thoughts every time I want to go anywhere. Some days it's harder to get off the ground than others.
For Sunburst? I don't know. Maybe he could fly if he tried something more doom-and-gloom. Has he tried self-loathing?
The clouds are calming. Down on the ground, constant anxiety looms over me; at any moment, someone could capture and imprison me. Up here, there's only me, the clouds for protection, and the endless stars above me. No threats, no danger, just safety and sky.
All good things must come to an end. I dive lower, searching the labyrinthine neighborhoods for the house I have so often watched. The victim this time is at a trial for the next several hours—he's an accountant, so he got called in to review some company's finances as a witness or something.
"Wait! Ghost King! Come down here right now!"
I startle at the sound and look down. Sunburst is sprinting on the ground; how did he know I was going to hit another house tonight? Whatever—not important. "Why should I?"
"Because I can't come up there, and I need to talk to you!"
"Well, I don't want to talk to you!" I mean, seriously. You'd think he thought he was my friend or something. Superheroes generally don't talk to their villain counterparts like this, do they? I don't exactly have a lot of experience outside of Sunburst.
"Why not?" I barely heard him; the wind had picked up and was now whistling numbingly in my ears. I picked up speed once I spotted the house I was aiming for. In the land of suburbs where all the houses look vaguely the same from a bird's eye view, I use the lawn decorations to keep track of which house belongs to my victim. This particular house has two pink lawn flamingos sticking near a squarish rock in its garden. I dipped forward.
"What are you—?" He saw the house I was going to and sprinted forward. I rolled my eyes. I dove down and landed perfectly in front of the house's door—but not before Sunburst just barely manages to make it to the door to block my way.
"Ghost King. Please, you've already broken into one house today. Do you really need to do more?" He's trying to give me his best puppy dog eyes, and there's something about the fact that he thought that would work that makes me actually laugh a little.
I try to shove past him. "Until I find what I'm looking for, I won't stop."
Golden strings of light shoot from his fingertips and stick to the doorway like spiderwebs. They multiply, and I have to squint against the constant glow. They don't look like something that is lighting up—they look like light itself. Like staring into the sun, if the sun was a grid blocking the door.
"I need to talk to you, and I'm not letting you into this house," he says. "If you try to make it past the light, it'll burn you—badly. So you need to listen to me."
Burns. This is the painful part of Sunburst's power. My shadows can't really do much except help me use brute force to win fights. His powers actually cause suffering. (And I'm the villain?)
I'm staring at the grid of light—who needs healthy retinas anyway—and trying to calculate how quickly they'll burn me versus how quickly I can open the door. Can I make it through? How bad would these burns be compared to what minimal experience I've had with his burns before? He usually does try to keep the dangerous part of his light away from me. (Yeah, nevermind, that's why he's the hero. He's supposed to capture me but he's too worried about hurting me to do it.)
"I think we should tell each other our names," he announces.
I startle. "What—? No. That's an awful idea. What's wrong with you?"
"It's not an awful idea!" he protests, and he grabs my shoulder in an attempt to get me to listen to him better—as if that will help. "Think about it. It would be so much easier if we knew each other's names."
"That's ridiculous. Absolutely not. To you, I will always be the Ghost King."
He frowns at me. He's coming up with a plan to persuade me; it will never work. I turn back to the door, shaking his stupid proposition out of my mind. His light grid pulses and shines—he's not ever going to take it down. If I want in this house, I'll have to take the burns.
I gather my courage—and then I surge forward, grabbing the door handle and pushing my way inside the house. The light burns. My skin reddens, then browns and blisters. I cry out as I fall to the other side, a grid of burns covering my body and my nerves searing. When I move, the burns scream—even movement so slight as breathing makes me want to die.
"Holy shit!" cries Sunburst. "I told you they would burn—why did you—! Ugh, nevermind." He drops the light grid and hurries inside the house. He falls to his knees next to me. "Let me see you."
If I let him get to me now, he could torture me. He could bind me with ropes of his light until my limbs are disfigured and dead. I gasp with pain when I have to blink—burns on my eyelids briefly touch and stick, and it hurts like hell to get my eyes open again. I try to get to my feet again so that I can fight him—I'm vulnerable right now; he's going to take advantage of that. He's going to—
He raises his hands in the air. "Man, you need to sit down. I can help you, but I need you to trust me."
"We're enemies," I croak.
"We don't have to be enemies right now," says Sunburst. "You can let me help you. I can heal you, Ghost King." He takes a deep breath and tries to take a step closer to me. I stumble backward, keeping my distance.
He's going to corner me soon. This room is small—just a stairwell. If I can get up the stairs, I might be able to get out the window and escape, but then I can't search the house—these scars will make me easily identifiable—and how will I explain them to my mom—?
Sunburst takes another step, and I try to back up some more, but my back hits the wall. I have to try and fight him—otherwise this whole thing will be a waste. I call shadows to my fingers.
"Ghost," he says—is that a nickname? "Take a deep breath. Calm down. I'm not going to hurt you. I just—" Waves of light tumble out of his fingertips, and I realize his hands are glowing softly. The waves are jumping up and down, vibrating, and they're heading toward me.
I groan. "Shit." I try to cover my head to protect myself, leaving the backs of my arms vulnerable to his attack.
The waves hit my skin, and my whole body goes rigid—except it doesn't hurt. It's actually...soothing?
I let my arms lower for just a second so that I can watch the light sink into my skin. He's never done this before. I guess he's never given me any major burns before, either. The light sinks into the skin on my hands, the blistering around my nails, and slowly, the glistening burns fade, the blistering calms and sinks, and the pain fades.
I'm frozen, a little convinced that if I move too suddenly, he'll remember how much he dislikes me, and that light will start to burn me from the inside out.
Now that I'm no longer running from him, he kneels next to me. His expression is kind and gentle, and his hands are careful with me. He finds every bit of skin that was exposed to his light. His right hand rests on my forehead, and the searing burns on the bits of exposed skin of my face—around my ears and eyes and the edges of my chin and throat—slowly fade.
"Better?" he asks.
I don't respond, I'm in shock right now. What is happening? This is not supposed to be happening at all.
His hand touches my chin, trying to get my attention. "Hey. Is it better?"
I blink at him, trying to piece together this puzzle, but none of it makes sense. He's not making any sense at all. "You healed me."
"You weren't supposed to actually burn yourself on my light," he tells me. "I thought you wouldn't be stupid enough to actually risk the burns. What could possibly be so important that you're willing to get awful burns like that just to get in the house? Surely this can't just be to cause chaos... Is whatever you want really this important?"
"I had to get in. I won't give up until I find what I'm looking for," I mutter.
He hums, as if that's a valid response. And then his hands are checking over me for any leftover burns. He got them all already, but I don't say anything as he runs his fingers over the bare skin around my wrists again just to make sure.
"I want to know your name," he repeats, and he's still kneeling next to me. This is the closest we've ever been without actively trying to punch each other.
"I can't tell you my name; you'll arrest me," I say.
"Probably," he agrees. "Maybe not, though. I want to know what you're looking for that's apparently so important that you'll walk through burning light for it, but we'll come back to that. If I tell you my name, will you tell me yours? Just first names. Like a trade. This way, it's fair."
"No," I say.
"My name is Will." He's smiling at me—his mask hides the majority of his face, but I can still tell what expression he's making most of the time because I can see his mouth and the very small area around his eyes. "And you are?"
I've had enough of this. I push myself to my feet, leaving him kneeling on the ground. He watches me head down the hallway on the other side of the front door.
"And you are?" he repeats, as if I hadn't heard him.
"And I am searching this house," I tell him. "Call me what you want. I'm not telling you my name. You face no risk by telling me your name. But if you know my name—I could lose everything. If the police arrest me, I'll never find what I'm looking for."
He groans and jogs to catch up with me. I'm going through the kitchen just like last time—check for anything that might signal that my sister is here, check for any keys to locked doors, check for anything.
Sunburst—or, I guess, Will—catches up to me and grabs my shoulder. "I'm serious about this. We've known each other for like a year, and I'm so sick of having to call you Ghost King all the time. If you don't tell me your first name, you're not going to like what I call you instead." You would expect a comment like that to have some sort of anger behind it, but with him, it's more just layers of mischief.
"Whatever it is, I've been called worse. I'll survive," I tell him. There's nothing in the kitchen; I checked every drawer, and there's nothing but cooking utensils and such. I circle the island just in case there's any sort of suspicious storage within the island countertop, but there's nothing. I huff and try to head to another room, but once again Will is in my way.
"I could call you 'Death Breath,'" he says, and he laughs at his own joke a little. "I could call you 'Mr. Dark Lord.'"
"Yeah, yeah, very funny," I tell him. I slip past him, noting that he's doing an exceptionally bad job of stopping me today. Maybe he feels bad about the burns.
"I could call you 'sweetheart,'" he calls after me, and I freeze.
Very slowly, I turn around to face him again. "What?"
He's grinning and leaning on the granite countertops, tapping his fingers—he's having fun with this. "I could call you, 'Buttercup,'" he offers. "I could call you, 'Sugarplum.'"
"This is awful," I say, and I mean it. "Kill me. I mean, seriously. God, just kill me."
"Honey pot? Baby? Cupcake?"
I bury my face in my hands. How can anyone withstand this torture? "Burn me again. Punch me in the face. Anything but this."
"You can make it stop by telling me your name. I only want your first name," he reminds me, his tone filled with false innocence. "I could..." He pauses, thinking. "I could call you 'Kitten.'"
"Fine! Fine. Holy shit, you're awful," I tell him. "That is actual torture—do you know that?"
"I don't hear you telling me your name, Kitten," he teases, and I am getting very close to committing my first homicide.
"My name is Nico!" I cave. "Will you give it up now? My God. That's the worst thing to ever happen to me. You're fucking ruthless."
A small, satisfied smile lifts his lips. I'm already thinking of places where I could hide the body—or I could just throw him into the ocean. He deserves it at this point—a burial is too respectful after this atrocity.
"Great," he says. "One mystery down, only like a thousand left to go. Let's move on to what you're looking for?"
I ignore him and finally return to searching the house. Leaving the kitchen, there's a small dining table with some wooden chairs surrounding it. There are a few newspapers scattered on the table, some headlines about the CEO of some diamond company being accused of embezzlement. Eat the rich. I move on.
"Is it something you lost, or is it something you're trying to steal?" Will asks, following me. He's not even trying to stop me from going into any of the other rooms now. I pass a bathroom, a closet, and a sunroom. I enter the sunroom.
"Hey, Nico. Don't make me start calling you 'Kitten' again. I will do it." He's leaning against the doorway now, his eyes tracking the way I move around the room. I'm checking the bookcases again just in case of secret doorways or something. There's nothing—it's just a sunroom with a couch, a coffee table, the regular old bookcases, and so many windows. I'm at a heightened risk of being spotted here, so after ensuring the bookcases are not anything special, I'm ready to leave this room and go upstairs.
"Don't be cruel," I tell Will. "I already told you my first name, which is kind of a big deal. Isn't that enough? Can't you just, like, go to the police now and never bother me again?"
"There are so many issues to address in that statement that I don't know where to start," Will tells me. I slip past him into the hallway—I've now searched the entire first floor, so it's time to head up to the second.
I take the steps two at a time. "You know, if you're not attempting to stop me from searching the house, you could go home. There's nothing stopping you. I could walk you to the door, even."
I hear his footsteps continue behind me, and I sigh. Of course I'm too unlucky for him to actually leave.
"I can't leave you alone to do whatever you want in someone's house," he says.
I reach the top of the stairs. I'm on something like a balcony within the house, overlooking the front door. A white wooden railing keeps people from falling off the edge.
The balcony also serves as a short hallway. Going down the hall with the railing on the right, there are two doors on the left. I open the first one, and it's an office. I go inside.
"Why?" I say over my shoulder to him. "Because I'm such a big bad villain?"
"Yes, clearly!"
I tighten my jaw and fight the pang of sadness in my chest. I have the distinct feeling that this is not how my story was supposed to go—when I was a kid, I had always been so keen on becoming a superhero. I think the universe might be laughing at me.
Whatever. I'm on this path now. I know where my Fate String is headed—first, Hazel. Then prison. I've made peace with it. I understand what my purpose is—I have to save her, no matter the cost to me.
"You told me I could go home if I'm not going to stop you," Will says. "Have you considered that that applies to you, too? You've been doing this every day for a year. You've never found anything. Don't you think it's about time to give this up?"
"As much as I would love to never see your stupid mask again, I can't just give up. That's not an option." The office is boring. The desk is mostly just financial reports from the same diamond company—Underworld Ores—from the newspapers downstairs. Judging by all the red in the printed Excel sheet, the company isn't doing well. Probably something to do with a stealing CEO, I muse.
I leave the office and go back out to the hall to check the next door.
"Nico, please, just go home and maybe tomorrow you can go back to breaking into people's houses. Or an even better idea: stop breaking into people's houses! It's evil. And illegal."
I roll my eyes and push the door open. This one is a bedroom. It's mostly reds and grays, and the lighting is a little dim. I can kind of appreciate the aesthetic, actually. If vampires existed, this accountant would definitely be one.
"Nico."
"What?" I throw open the accountant's closet doors, but it's just another boring closet. There's a plastic tub at the bottom, and I flip open the lid just enough to see that the contents are just more printed Excel sheets. I close the lid again. Not important.
"What are you searching for?" Will repeats. "It's got to be something valuable, right? I mean, you got some pretty awful burns for it. But it's not money or anything like that, or you would have just taken it from the other houses."
I'm done with this house—and this boy. I've searched all the rooms of any interest at this point anyway. At the back of this bedroom, there's a pair of closed black curtains. I pull them open and then get the window open.
Alright, time to Peter Pan this shit. Think happy thoughts. Be optimistic! It even sounds sarcastic in my head.
I take a deep breath and try again, seriously this time.
You'll find Hazel. You're not a villain. I levitated off the ground a bit. You'll see Bianca again some day. You aren't a villain. I was flying now, but before I could fly away, Will grabbed my ankle and pulled me back down.
Sirens pierce the distance—one of the neighbors saw me in the window. Now my nerves spike—why does Will always do this at the most horrible time? Maybe he really is attempting to arrest me today, despite all his niceties earlier.
"Will, I don't have time for this," I hiss.
"Guess you're going to have to take me with you, then." He grins and holds onto me by the waist—and I am suddenly very glad I have my mask on to hide my red face. God, he's so embarrassing.
I try to shove him off me, but he holds tight and does not let go.
"Shit," I say and try again to shove him away. His grip is made of steel, and the police are getting closer—and he's right, I have to take him with me to another location, and I can get him to let go of me once we get there.
"I hate you so much," I say, and then I lift off the ground again and take both of us out the window.
Word count: 3582
Only a few really tiny edits again in this chapter :) I hope you're all doing well!
Yours,
Sunny
they/them