[ 11 ]
STARING AT THE fireproof gloves on his hands, Wildfire released a huff, kicking his bound legs onto the interrogation table. The Crux Agent questioning him rolled his eyes, running a hand along his unshaven jaw before sinking back into his seat.
"You know what-" Wildfire leaned forward, reading the name on the Agent's badge. "-Gerald, I can't believe you. You take my power, my dignity, the very ambrosia running through my veins, and chain me to this chair like a common criminal. Is this how you treat all of your superheroes? Huh?"
Had his hands not been immobilised, he would've poked the man in the chest for dramatic appeal, but given that they, in fact, were, he settled for a shove of the table. Because it was bolted to ground, it did not, in fact, move - but the tension was there.
Gerald sighed, crow-foot wrinkles in the crinkled corners of his eyes as he shut them. Maybe he thought that blindness would help, but it didn't, not when a stubborn teenage boy was still sat in front of him, all the same. The light made everything look as if it were cloaked in a fine layer of flame, the lamp pointed in Wildfire's face as if the Crux interrogation room were a crappy police drama, completed with two dumb cops - Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, he'd christened them, sitting on seats drinking white mocha frappes.
Not particularly the most intimidating setup, but it could've been worse. He shuddered at the thought of a newbie interrogating him, with all of their academy swagger and nothing else. Sasha's voice rang out in his head, the ripple of waves on sand, and he suppressed a smile.
"Because you don't have any swagger, do you?" she asked drily. The image of her eyes, the shimmer of sunlight on the sea, looking up at him through dark lashes, the flames from his hands illuminating her face, sent a pang of nostalgia through his blazing heart. How...sweet it had been back then, a year or so ago, before real worries formed problems. To live in solitude, act like Semper's anarchy wasn't happening on their very doorstep.
"Are you listening to anything I'm saying?" Gerald asked, fury flooding his already heavy features - nose, chin, brows.
Wildfire kissed his teeth, feet smashing against the floor with a crash that made him restrain a wince. "No, not exactly. Why? Did you say anything important?"
Letting out a roar of aggravation, Gerald pounded his fist on the table, causing a stack of papers to fall to the floor with an echoing thump. The other cop - Crux agent, rather - dove to pick it up before Wildfire could catch a glimpse, but his eyes stuck on a stray sheet before the man could tidy it away. All he had time to read was the very first sentence, a photo of himself at his most recent UN meeting looking back at him with fire in his eyes.
NAME: JASPER "WILDFIRE" LEE
That was all he needed, really, to go completely berserk. All his life, he'd been denied a name, but here it was in font-size-12 Calibri, clear as day. Even when they were gone, the crisp black letters imprinted in his mind. His cool demeanour melted away with the fire that tore through his skin, and as he burst through his holdings, the agents screaming like schoolgirls confronted with a spider. That was to say: shrilly, annoyingly and far louder than necessary.
Actually, it might've been a little bit warranted, given that every inch of his skin was glowing like a goddamn furnace. The molten metal of the table reflected his face, and Wildfire caught sight of his own eyes, two blazing orbs that looked plucked straight from the pits of hell. No - maybe not hell. He was a good guy, after all. More like Yellowstone, spraying volcanic rock into the air and burning a path of destruction in the Earth's very core.
"You lied," he hissed, but his voice was not his own. It was, to put it lightly, monstrous. Slamming Gerald and his friend against the wall with a terrifyingly strong arm each, Jasper watched them gasp for air, before sliding to the floor, clawing at their burnt throats, faces blue.
The door bowed to him, leading him out to the Special Prisoners wing of the Law Enforcement department. A familiar face met him as he walked through the hallway, ignoring the stares of guards, too scared to touch his burning flesh and watching Sash with pure enchantment in their glazed-over eyes.
She was singing, but it was not beautiful, not in the same way as always. It was the scrape of stone on stone, the grit of hungry waves smashing against cliff faces and tearing them apart. Ocean storms, hurricanes. It was not beautiful, but he found himself captivated nonetheless. Her hair, long and loose and lingering on the porcelain skin of her neck, didn't burn under his touch as she pulled him closer to her.
Wildfire felt her heartbeat, raging and inhuman, but there nonetheless, under his fingertips as he traced his fingers along her jaw. He knew that he wasn't in his right mind - but who was, really? Sasha wasn't, either. But they didn't care, not as he slid her against the wall, her song ceasing as her lips, smooth and cold, grazed against his mouth. Ice and fire together created something new, something even more glorious.
It was ichor, flowing through their veins and connecting. Delicious cold travelled through his body, blood freezing as he pulled her closer, blazing hands in her charcoal hair. But he froze as quickly as he'd been set alight when her body tensed, those arctic water eyes staring out, widening. Wildfire tore his hands away, following her gaze until he caught sight of Narcissa and Finn.
Behind Narcissa, a huge hole had been knocked through the wall, while a golden guard with a shout carved on his face stood nearby. As he moved towards them, the hole revealed part of a wall, two interrogation rooms mirroring the one that Jasper had sat in mere minutes before. The carpet sizzled underfoot as he walked, but he paid it no intention, glowing eyes turned towards Finn.
Had gods walked amongst men, Finn Johnson would've been one of them, without a doubt. Perhaps he was one already - it wouldn't have been much of a shock to anyone. But his Achilles' heel was on plain display in the form of a slash on his chest, where golden blood soaked through the grey material. The wound wasn't deep, but he was bleeding far too much for it to be safe.
Midas caught his eye, giving Jasper the signature grin that he'd become accustomed to in the years of knowing him. An picture of a young boy, with huge brown eyes and an even bigger smile, emerged in his mind, and he watched the image of his best friend disappear as the real, seventeen-year-old version of Finn fell to his knees and fainted.
Even when he was unconscious, he was still graceful as ever, a lion, waiting for the unworthy to try to attack. But no-one did, Sasha's song subduing the Crux agents and guards, forcing them to stand in their positions with that glazed look in their eyes, slaves to her will. Slowly, Jasper felt himself regaining his humanity with each breath, felt his blood stop boiling and heart stop pounding so deafeningly in his ears.
He felt the power sink from his body, leaving him weak as he grasped the flames that danced in his palms. The feeling was as usual - a faint tickling, nothing less and nothing more, maybe a slight warmth. His skin didn't burn. The fire, after all, couldn't turn on itself, he thought - a naive thought, in hindsight. But he wanted to believe it for a little while longer, so he let it be.
Beside Finn, Narcissa was feeling for a pulse, her eyes hollow as the power rushed out of her, too. From the look on her face - relieved, if somewhat exhausted - told Jasper that his friend was still alive, for now. For now was not a pleasant verdict, but it was better than dead. He jumped as cold arms encircled him, her breath colder breath against his neck. Sasha was still humming, barely restraining the guards. Wildfire could see their eyes moving, pupils dilated in terror as they realised what was happening.
No pity rose up within him. He'd had his own fair share of being a prisoner in his body. They didn't even have the fear of setting themselves on fire to worry about. Still, he found himself thinking, he hadn't imagined the recognition on their immobile faces. Unsurprising, since every person in Semper City who watched the news or didn't live under a rock knew the heroes of Project ORDER.
No, it wasn't recognition on their faces. It was waiting.
Something wicked this way comes.
Sasha stopped humming, taking a deep breath. The guards shifted, and her lips, which he'd kissed so freely a short while before, formed a single word.
"Run."
Narcissa saw it, and she hauled Finn's body into her arms as if he were just a rag doll, his long limbs limp, arms wound around her neck. The speed that she was moving at was incredible, and he half-expected to see a cloud of dust beneath her feet. Normally, he would've made a joke about the Flash, but even Wildfire knew that now was decidedly not the time.
Footsteps behind them warned them of either Sasha or a guard, and his stomach dropped when she appeared from behind an office door, panting, icy beads of what looked like water dripping from her skin. That meant there was someone else behind them, he realised frantically, noticing a hobbling old man in a janitor's uniform.
Using the last of her energy, Sasha sang a few notes, and the old man promptly turned in the other direction, looking like a windup toy as he banged his head on the wall.
~•~
WILDFIRE REMEMBERED the first time that he had seen Sasha. He'd been woken up in the early morning, when the sky was still bleeding red, still without the croak of the birds. In Semper, the birds didn't chirp. Even they seemed to know that the city held nothing for them, but as everyone else, they stayed anyway. Maybe it was because there was no escape, not really, from its iron grip, or maybe because they found themselves drawn to its allure.
Big city dreams could come true, people were told, jamming their keys into their rented apartment doors before realising that the keys were just for show. The locks clattered to the floor, and the lie came undone, giving way to terrible truths. Nowhere was safe in Semper. Crux helped solve some of those problems, but what Semper City really needed was a rebirth.
But to be reborn, it needed to die first.
That death came when the Air Force One jet landed on the outskirts of the city on the 14th of June, when they were all thirteen. Wildfire had been sitting with Finn in their shared room, testing out a new pair of fireproof gloves that had been developed recently. It was the day before their routine injections, where the serums that had amplified their powers were administered. With every injection, their powers became stronger, the Grandmaster had told them, before needles were plunged into their veins and neon lights blurred their vision.
It happened every month, and the pain never got better.
Four Agents opened the door, lasers scanning their retinas and swabs of DNA being extracted at the speed of sound - another one of the Grandmaster's breakthroughs. The two boys knew them well as Agents Pratt, Drakov, Patel and Maserashi, the people that had been assigned to their security detail for years. Crux's brightest and best, in peak physical and mental condition. Wildfire couldn't help wondering whether the Grandmaster had prodded them with some sort of serum, too, or whether that was just how they'd been trained.
Sometimes, they seemed more like robots than people.
The Agents led them to the control room after passing through seemingly countless doors, where the Grandmaster sat, his usually colourful robes faint in the dim light. Finn and Wildfire bowed, but the old man only nodded towards a chamber to their right, where a girl their age was in floating in a tank, suspended by the invisible holds that the boys knew were there.
The Grandmaster spoke, his voice quiet yet radiating power. "Sasha Elizaveta Sperova. Thirteen years old. Sister of Usnayan piano prodigy Petra Yemila Sperova. She was raised on a farm in a village in North Usnaya, close to the Serbian border."
Sasha was very pretty, though Wildfire knew that Finn would tease him to no end if he said anything.
"She will be the third member of Project ORDER, following the disappearance of Narcissa Regina Corvus. Now-" the Grandmaster's sleeve slid down to reveal aged skin and an electronic...thing that Wildfire had never seen before on his arm.
"Show us what you've got, Miss Sperova."
He pressed a button on the watch-like machine, and her eyes snapped open, revealing irises that shone with the frost of the northern winter in the greenish light of the tank.
A shiver went down Wildfire's spine despite the heat burning in his body.
[ end ]