Chapter 3 Past #2
I pull my lips back into a snarl, wolfish and white, incisors bared.
It irritates me that my mind seems to have decided this man even deserves a warning this blatant.
I know what this man is, and I don’t fuck with heroes.
They’re like drug addicts. You can’t fucking trust them to look after themselves, let alone move through that kind of life without dragging everyone around them into their shit.
Some of the Liquid Onyx survivors of my generation, the ones who were saved from Obsidian Inc.
, have suited up and become vigilantes, like comic book characters ripped right out of the pages.
I watch them on the news sometimes, and it makes me feel sick just to look at what they’ve allowed themselves to become on behalf of a world like this one.
The kind of world that deserves superheroes is the kind of world where the creation of them would never have been allowed to happen in the first place.
“Who are you?” Aaron asks, words croaked out through a soft mouth surrounded by dark stubble.
I take a few steps back from him warily, watching to see if he’ll be stupid and chase after me.
But he plays it smart and stays exactly where he is, looming protectively over the mutant children.
The thought that those kids might wind up strapped into multi-coloured suits and sent to save the unsavable is almost enough to make me wish I’d left them in that burning building.
It’d be easier on them to die here and now than it would be to try to make sense out of all this brutal chaos they were reborn into.
“Not a problem you want to have in your life,” I answer him and start moving backward with more purpose, ready to turn around and sprint away.
Aaron doesn’t follow me physically, but he tracks my movements with hawklike focus, and when I pass some invisible line that only he can see, he whips out a gun faster than I can blink between shallow breaths. Aaron doesn’t say stop; his weapon does that for him just fine.
“Who are you?” he repeats with a more aggressive undertone this time.
One good thing about heroes is that they tend to think justice is more important than survival, that the necessary elimination of any threat, no matter how known or unknown, is less tangible than how they feel about it.
I jerk my chin at the children. “Try not to let these ones turn their trauma into a nighttime hobby, huh?”
Aaron’s finger is on the trigger of his Sig, and he’s staring at me unblinkingly, that stubborn line of his brow and grim set to his mouth indicative of a man willing to shoot if he has to.
But that’s the key thing in all this. If he has to.
I’m gone before Aaron has the chance to come up with a response, darting off into the night and out of range. I find my bike down the street, thankfully unharmed, and climb on, riding away from the building on fire behind me.
What a fucking waste of some well-planned B likely he did from day one.
There are times when I’m watching him from on top a roof or from a parked car that he turns pointedly in my direction.
At first, his reactions are calculating and tense as if he’s assessing a threat.
But then, for some reason, he seems to come to the abjectly insane conclusion that I’m not one, and his response to my mild stalking transforms from suspicion to amusement.
I can’t decide if that’s a bigger indictment of him or me.
…….
The third time we come into contact, it’s face-to-face again, and I suspect not at all by accident.
I pick up on someone tracking me partway through an op in Ireland, where I’m planning to break into another Obsidian Inc.
lab, hoping to find more information about the new Liquid Onyx chemical, like who the hell created it, and who I have to kill to make sure not a single other person gets turned into a mutated weapon for OI to use.
FISA attacks the OI facility much like they did before, when I’m elbows deep in their servers. This time, Aaron comes looking for me. I can tell by the way he steps into the half-destroyed lab that I was, at least partially, his target for tonight.
“You know,” I say drolly, twirling a snapped bit of wire between my fingers, “this is starting to feel like you have a little bit of a crush on me, Senior Agent North.”
Aaron’s blank slate of an expression doesn’t slip when he replies, “Is that what you’re reading into this, Dr. Rohan Stone? A need to get your attention?”
It doesn’t shock me that he knows who I am. FISA has a whole file on me, both because I’m the Stone heir and due to my Liquid Onyx blood. I’m considered a high-level threat to national security, so at least some people in the British government are sensible even if Aaron, apparently, is not.
I roll my shoulders in a slow shrug. “You’re an experienced man of the world, Agent. You’d know that the easiest way to a boy’s heart is wanton property destruction.”
Aaron scrutinises me from across the burning lab. He doesn’t appear concerned about the crimson flames and black smoke rising up all around us. Aaron North is not a man who values his life overmuch, it seems.
As someone who spent their entire life adapting and fighting to survive, I find his lack of self-preservation rankling if not outright offensive. Suicidal tendencies are the mark of the privileged, and I don’t indulge those who practice them.
Aaron must sense my low-level aggression because he doesn’t make any move toward me.
“This,” he gestures at the wrecked lab, “isn’t just for you.”
“That’s right, Agent.” I smirk at him wickedly. “Treat ’em mean. Stoke that insecurity, and soon I’ll be the one chasing you.”
“You came after me first,” Aaron points out. “Stalked me for a whole week last month. Felt your eyes on me everywhere.”
I inhale harshly, dragging my mouth down into a sardonic moue. “Worried I took pictures of you naked? Don’t panic, I only posted the tasteful ones online. The straight-up filthy pics are just for my own personal use.”
Aaron doesn’t let my baiting distract him from his intended purpose for confronting me tonight. “Dr. Stone, it’s come to our attention that you and your father have parted ways. Violently. As such, I’d like to recruit you for a position within our agency.”
His offer isn’t unexpected. I figured that was the point of all this. FISA is well-known for turning enemies into assets.
“And if I say go fuck yourself?” I ask with faked nonchalance, this time taking a few steps toward him, the menace obvious in the predatory slope of my movements.
Aaron tilts his head slightly to the left, staring me right in the face, unflinching. His eyes are a startling golden brown, almost amber, contrasting with his darker skin, now shiny with a thin film of perspiration.
The heat is starting to feel oppressive in here, my chest becoming damp and tight with it, the biting smell of scorched metal itching at my sensitive nose. I resist the urge to tug my hood down due to the unpleasant feeling of my hair soaked with sweat.
“I’m not here to arrest you,” Aaron says, like it’s really that simple. “We just want you to help us prevent Obsidian Inc. from ruining any more lives.”
“I have my own plans for dealing with OI.” And my dad. “I don’t need a sidekick, especially a whole pit crew’s worth.”
Aaron is unperturbed by my easy dismissal. “I think you’ll find that our goals, for the most part, align.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yes,” Aaron says, his voice taking on a harsher quality. More intense. Almost angry. “Liquid Onyx is back. We want to find every trace of that chemical and destroy it.”
And there, right there. His steadfast propriety glitches. His mouth tightens, and his gaze seems to darken even more, the shadows of all that redacted information from his file coming back to haunt him.
I don’t know if it’s the notion that it would enrage my dad, because sometimes I’m just that much of a basic bitch, or my unwise interest in Aaron North’s tragic origin story that has me agreeing to sign up with an agency I was raised to despise as much as Aaron was likely raised to respect it.
“You should know,” I warn him. “I don’t work well with other people.”
Dad stopped giving me a lab team because I kept using my power on them whenever they got too far into my space without permission, which, incidentally, is a thing they would never have from me.
I worked alone at Obsidian Inc., and I’ve worked alone since I left.
The idea of having to be part of a unit and answerable to my colleagues already has me chomping at the bit to rebel against those constraints.
Aaron offers me the first smile I’ve seen on his face since we met, and it’s a cruel, serrated thing, malicious all the way along and wicked sharp at the edges. “Okay, but. How are you at working under people, kid?”
Right, so there’s a monster thrashing around somewhere underneath all that muscle and stoicism, then.
My mouth hooks up into a mean curve, both sides, teeth nowhere left to hide.
You know, this might actually be fun.