“Can you hear me?”

The deep voice swam into the troubled dreams I had been having, caught me, and dragged me up towards consciousness.

I opened my eyes and the world spun fuzzily in front of them, so I quickly shut them again.

“Good, you’re awake.”

That voice again. It sounded familiar, but it was hard to think anything because my head was still very fuzzy and uncertain of anything. I made another attempt to open my eyes, and although the world spun in front of them I clenched my teeth tight until it settled into place. There, leaning over my bed, was the red mask of Fireball, just a few feet in front of my face.

“Not you again,” I said, or at least that was what I tried to say, but my tongue was thick and heavy and my throat was full of mucus, so all that came out was an indistinct “Gah!”

“How are you feeling?” Fireball asked.

I would have pointed out the irony of him asking this question, when he was the one who had hit me with a fireball very recently, but I wasn’t quite ready to try using my tongue again. Instead I turned my attention to my body to take stock of how I was feeling. The answer was pretty darn terrible. Aside from the pounding in my head, there was a dull ache in my right arm, which I could remember having broken, and an overwhelming throbbing all over the front of my body. That would have been the fireball.

But I was alive. If there was anything more surprising than waking up to find a superhero taking care of me, the fact that I was waking up at all was definitely topping it. I remembered the feeling as the fireball struck me full force and how I had collapsed to the ground next to Sera.

Sera...I squeezed my eyes shut to trap the tears inside. Fireball wasn’t allowed to see those. Remembering her hand clasped in mine, so cold and lifeless, that pain was not dull, but instead a sharp thorn stabbing directly into my chest. All of the physical pain was nothing compared to that.

Why did this hurt so much? I breathed out slowly through my clenched teeth and tried to push any thoughts of Sera far below my consciousness. I was going to have to deal with Fireball right now and I couldn’t do that while thoughts of Sera’s death were distracting me.

Opening my eyes again, I found that Fireball had moved away and was now filling a glass of water from a pitcher on a table across the room. He turned back and smiled at me – actually smiled!

“Water?” He asked, holding the glass out towards me.

I eyed him, unable to come to terms with the fact that my nemesis was now offering me a glass of water as though I had just popped by his house for a casual chat. Still, maybe the water would clear out my throat and allow me to talk somewhat properly again, which was definitely a good thing. I gave a terse nod.

He crossed the room in one long stride and handed me the water. I took it, carefully not touching that deadly hand of his. As I sipped the cool water, I stared at him over the rim of the pink plastic cup. He was in full costume, which made me automatically raise a hand to my face to check my mask was in place.

It wasn’t. In fact, it wasn’t there at all.

I dropped the half full cup of water. It splashed all over the sheets before tumbling to the floor with a clatter.

“Yes, I’m afraid the doctor had to remove your costume in order to properly treat you,” Fireball said, with what seemed like an apologetic shrug. He ran one of his hands through his springy brown hair. He seemed almost uncomfortable, which was absurd given that he was entirely in control of this situation and I was entirely at his mercy.

I opened my mouth but he cut me off. “Don’t worry, he’s very discrete. He treats all my injuries and has never breathed a word of it to anyone.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“He had no right to take off my mask,” I snapped, and was relieved to find that my voice had returned to me properly.

Fireball’s pleasant expression slipped away for the first time. “You are a thief and a murderer. On the contrary, you have no right to complain.”

I opened my mouth to shout a reply, then shut it again. He was right, curse him. But that still didn’t mean that it wasn’t a huge violation to know that someone had revealed my identity while I was unconscious. Someone I did not even know had stripped away my carefully constructed supervillain identity, revealing Delphi to the world.

“What am I even doing here?” I said instead, changing tact. “And where am I?”

“You are in my headquarters,” Fireball replied. “I wasn’t about to turn you over to the police and the public hospital until I had gotten a clear idea of what is going on.”

He picked up the discarded cup and busied himself with pouring me more water. “Try to get some rest. I’ll be back later, but right now I have to meet with my...well, never mind who, but I have to make a full report about our showdown.”

“Wait, one of the Rubes is coming here?” I pushed back my sheets and tried to get out of bed, but this sent a blinding wave of pain across my torso and I fell back against the pillows, gasping for breath.

“How do you know about them?” Fireball asked sharply, even as he pulled the sheet back over me and adjusted my pillows to make me more comfortable.

I grabbed his arm. He stiffened and started to pull away, but something in my eyes must have stopped him. “They mustn’t know I’m here,” I gasped, my breath still short from the brief attempt at movement. Sera’s cold, dead face filled my mind’s eye. I had no doubt that if Fireball told the Rubes I was here they would see to it that I quickly succumbed to my injuries.

“And why’s that? Still got some of their money stashed in your back pocket?” His voice was light, joking, but his eyes were deadly serious.

A telephone rang before I could answer, filling the silence between us, and a red light over the door of my cell flashed.

“That’ll be him now,” Fireball said, pulling his arm free of my hand. I didn’t have the strength to keep hold of him.

“If you tell them I’m here, they’ll kill me. I wasn’t supposed to survive,” I said desperately, talking quickly before he could get out of the room entirely. On the rooftop I had thought I had resigned myself to death. But now I found I couldn’t quite accept it after all. Not like this anyway. A dramatic showdown with Fireball was the proper way for a supervillain to go, not a knife in the back in a hidden room where no one would ever know what actually happened.

Fireball paused at the door, his dark eyes boring into mine. He ran a hand through his springy hair again, and I wondered if he had ever set himself on fire doing that. I fought back the panicked giggle that wanted to emerge at that image that had popped unbidden into my mind. Pressing my lips together I just stared at him, willing him to believe me.

“Alright, I’ll keep quiet for now,” he said at last, turning his back to me and fiddling with the handle of the door. “But I want a full explanation when I come back, or....or else.”

And with that he was gone, leaving me with only a little grin at his failure to threaten people. It was clear the Rubes taught their superheroes something different. Threats had taken up an entire semester at the Academy.

I leaned heavily back against the pillows and took a moment to breath as I examined the room. Fireball didn’t have a lot of experience with supervillains if he thought I would just sit here quietly and wait for his return.

The only door was the one Fireball had just left through, but there was a vent on the side wall, close to the ceiling. It looked to be big enough to fit me, barely, if I could get up there. The whole room was about eight feet wide and eight feet long, painted all in white, even the floor. The only colour was Fireball’s red logo on the back of the door, a stylized ball of flame, just in case you forgot who your host was. Aside from my bed, the only other furniture was a small table beside the door, which held the plastic pitcher and cup.

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to think, which was difficult, because now that Fireball was no longer there to distract me every part of my body had started throbbing, trying to get me to pay attention to it. How could I get out of here?

Death’s Dancer would have scaled the wall and slid out to freedom through the ventilation shaft, or maybe just walked straight through the door. Sera...my breath hitched at the thought of her. Even just thinking her name in my head brought up a vision of her pale face, eyes closed, and her cold hand in mine. Sera would have simply talked her way to freedom.

I blinked away the tears. This wasn’t helping. What could Delphi do? Plain, stupid, powerless Delphi Dunn. What was a supervillain without a mask, superpowers, minions, and freedom? Nothing.

The tears welled up again and this time I didn’t try to stop them. The old mantra I used to whisper to myself popped up in my brain. Supervillains don’t cry. That only made me cry harder. I fumbled behind my back and managed to grab hold of one of my pillows, which I immediately stuffed in my face to muffle the sobs.

Part of my brain was standing back, silently judging the rest of me and warning that Fireball was going to come back any minute and find me bawling my eyes out like a toddler. But that part, the Death’s Dancer part if I wanted to put a name on it, had very little power anymore.