Detective Steve Matthews sighed, grabbing the collar of his shirt and pulling it away from his chest to allow some airflow. It was a blisteringly hot day, and he’d rather be anywhere other than where he was right at that moment; standing in the sun outside of a convenience store that just got held up. The perp didn’t get very far, thankfully. Seven had been patrolling nearby and took the man down before he could make it across the street. Now Steve was just here to take statements and collect evidence in the summer heat. Or, more like he was there to supervise the beat cops as they did all of those things under the direction of another detective while he just stood around sweating. As if Captain de Vygon would actually let him lead his own investigation.
At least he didn’t have it as bad as Seven did, though. It couldn’t have been cool in that intimidating black armour, and he knew that the captain was breathing down her neck just as hard as his – probably even harder. Ever since those SWAT officers were killed a week ago, Seven had been moving differently; almost gingerly, as though she was hurt, or so Steve had noticed in their few encounters. It rose warning flags in the back of his mind. Something just wasn’t right about that whole situation. Steve didn’t trust de Vygon’s integrity at the best of times; he wouldn’t put it past him to beat his volunteer superhero for a mistake, especially one so extreme. The real question was, why would Seven put up with it? It just didn’t sit right.
Well, what was he going to do about it, anyway? He wasn’t a hero. He was barely a cop. Seven was an adult woman and a borderline supersoldier. He’d seen her flip a grown man over her tiny 5’3” frame and break his arm with ease. If she had a problem with how things were going behind the scenes, she could get herself out of it. The Union would take her in no questions asked if she wanted. It was probably just in his head.
Right now, the woman was standing some distance away, seemingly spacing out while staring through the window at the mannequins on display in a woman’s clothing boutique. She seemed to have relaxed some now that she wasn’t on active duty, antsily twiddling her fingers together as she examined the clothes. Steve walked over to her. He had nothing better to do, after all.
“Thinking about buying something?” he asked.
Seven jumped a little before turning to him. “S-sorry?”
“Are you thinking about buying something from here? You seem pretty fascinated by what they got on display.”
Seven looked at him, and then back to the mannequins, wringing her hands nervously. “Um, I don’t have any money. I was just… looking.”
No money? That was odd. Though, perhaps she just meant she didn’t have any on her. It didn’t look like her armour had pockets, to be fair.
Steve shrugged. “Still, you work hard. You should treat yourself. Why not come back after your shift is done?”
Seven stared at him, and though he couldn’t see her face, he could sense the confusion in her body language. She looked back and forth between him and the boutique a few times. “Uh… O-okay…”
The more Steve interacted with her outside of combat scenarios or de Vygon’s presence, the more he felt like there was something seriously weird going on. Her apparent personality just didn’t match the front she put up whenever she was working. If he had to guess, he’d say she almost felt like… like a sheltered kid or something. Where the hell did de Vygon find this girl?
A memory flashed through his head, but he shook it off. He’d heard it enough from the precinct counsellor; it was just a hallucination induced by stress and a lack of sleep, nothing more.
The awkward silence stretched on. Steve sighed. “Well, whatever. Do what you want. I’m gonna head back to the scene; I think the boys are almost done with the evidence.”
He turned and started walking away, hearing Seven’s footsteps following along behind him. He approached her because she’d looked a little lonely, standing there staring at the store like a puppy with a toy it couldn’t have, but now he felt bad about interrupting her privacy and ruining her quiet moment.
They got back to the scene. Steve busied himself catching up on the evidence that had been logged, while Seven milled around, as she was wont to do at crime scenes. A few days after her first appearance, a couple of fleeing perps returned to a scene that she’d already left and ruined some evidence before the police could stop them. Ever since then, she’d made a habit of sticking around to ensure everything went smoothly, unless there was another pressing issue that required her attention.
It was a few minutes later that things went awry. A loud crack echoed across the street and Seven flew backwards. All of the officers dove for cover and Steve was no exception; throwing his car door open and hiding behind it. There was a shooter, and if they had managed to knock Seven off her feet, they had to be packing some serious heat.
Steve glanced around. Seven was on the floor, but she was still moving. According to de Vygon, that armour of hers was bullet-proof. He hoped for her sake that was correct. She lifted her head, trying to get up, but another shot ripped through the air and sparks flew from Seven’s helmet as she was forced straight back to the ground.
Steve drew his pistol, taking a deep breath. He peeked through the window of the open car door, looking up at the roof of the opposite building. The sky was blindingly bright, but he could just about make out a figure perched on the edge. Light glinted from the scope of the sniper rifle in their hands.
One of the other officers returned fire and the figure startled, backing up and taking their rifle with them. A huge pair of dark wings unfurled from their back and flapped, lifting them from the roof with improbable speed. Steve took aim and fired a few shots, but none of them met their mark. The figure was too fast, ducking and weaving through the air until they were gone from sight.
“Seven, are you alright?!” Steve asked, jumping out of his hiding spot to check on her.
Seven groaned, lifting her head again. The glass on the front of her visor was cracked, but it didn’t look like the bullet had gone through. Most likely, it ricocheted off the edge. He couldn’t tell where the first shot had impacted, but the woman didn’t seem that much worse for wear, if a little winded. “Y-yeah… I’m okay.”
“Come on, we might still be able to see them from the roof!”
Steve turned to the other officers. “Put out an APB! We’re looking for someone with huge black wings and a sniper rifle! They won’t be able to hide!”
The authority in his voice surprised even him, but it spurred the officers into action, scrambling to communicate with dispatch to organise a manhunt. With that out of the way, he turned back to the building the shooter was perched on, running towards it. Seven was back on her feet by now, right behind him.
She cleared the building in a single jump, disappearing over the edge of the roof. Steve wasn’t so blessed with augmented abilities, and as such had to painstakingly climb his way up the fire escape, activating muscles he probably hadn’t used in years. He was definitely going to be sore by tomorrow morning.
Finally, panting and gasping from exertion, he reached the roof, but it was too late. The winged person was nowhere to be seen. It was just their luck that their suspect would be able to fly. Still, they’d find them in time. There was no way someone with such an obvious power could hide themselves for long.
Seven was looking at the floor, where the shooter had been perched. Scattered around the area were a dozen long black feathers, no doubt left by their wings. Once again, Steve was hit by a memory he’d been trying to forget, of a night roughly eighteen months ago, where he’d seen an impossible sight that subsequently nose-dived his career.
~~~
It was a little past one in the morning on a cold winter’s night, and Steve Matthews was returning to precinct 23 to pick up some case files he needed to look over. It had been a long week, and exhaustion was clawing at him like a feral cat, trying to drag him to bed, but there was still work to be done. He promised himself that once he got back to his apartment, he would sleep and go over the files in the morning, and that assurance gave him the strength needed to keep going for these last few hours.
It was when he was just about to enter the precinct that it happened. The glass door flew open and Steve froze as he came face to face with the two girls running out. They froze in turn, staring him down. In the dim light from the street lamp, Steve could just about make out their appearances, and what he saw shook him to his core.
One girl was older; clearly an adult, and the other was probably in her early teens, if Steve had to guess. They were both dressed in identical black thermals and had shaved heads. The older one had a large pair of wings sprouting from her back, the feathers puffing up in anticipation. Both girls had the exact same face; one that should’ve belonged to a dead woman. The younger one’s eyes held a cocktail of fear, sorrow, and pain. In her older sister, there was only rage.
A small twitch of her feathers was all the warning he got before the older one was wrapping her arms around the teen, beating her wings against the cold air and disappearing into the dark sky, leaving Steve alone to contemplate the impossible thing he’d just witnessed.
~~~
Steve remembered how hard Captain de Vygon had tried to convince him what he’d seen wasn’t real. He remembered all of the counselling sessions he’d been forced to go to, all the cases he’d been forced to drop because of his supposed ‘unstable mental state.’ According to de Vygon, of course it had been a hallucination! Why else would both girls have had the face of a dead superhero? Rosalyn Garcia-Holmes was one of the most famous superheroes Tombguard had ever seen, and Steve had even met her a handful of times before her death thanks to his niece. It made sense that his brain would pick out her face to put on the actors in its mysterious play. It was all just in his head. Steve had even started to believe it himself. Now, however…
Steve looked over at Seven. She came from precinct 23, just like those two mystery girls. What face hid underneath that visor of hers? Why was everything about her so weird? Just what exactly was de Vygon doing underneath the precinct?
Seven was still staring at those feathers. A thought occurred to him; a pit opening in his stomach. If those girls had all come from the same place, there was every possibility that they knew each other. And now, one of them had just shot Seven with clear intent to kill. Regardless of what else was going on behind the scenes, that had to sting.
“Did… Did you know who that was?” he asked carefully.
Seven hesitated, but ultimately shook her head. “N-no. Captain de Vygon has spoken of a girl with wings before, but I don’t know who she is.”
Her voice was slurring a little. Steve frowned. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I-”
—
“Did you hear that?” Brianna asked, craning her head around despite the fact that she wouldn’t be able to see anything, anyway.
“Hear what?” Viv replied. They were sitting together on a rooftop, enjoying a lunch break from their patrol. Not that there was really much to be patrolling for, especially not for a support hero and rescue hero, but it was a good excuse for both of them to get out of studying for a while, and enjoy the warm summer’s day. That reminded Vivienne that Maddie was probably about due to be dragged out of the house again, as well. Rosie would kill her if she let her wife rot inside all summer, and they hadn’t really done anything since Rosie’s death anniversary aside from hang out and play video games together.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Brea frowned. “Sounded like gunshots. Over in that direction.” She nodded her head down the street, her shoulder-length braids swishing back and forth with the movement.
“Should we go check it out?”
Brea shrugged. “If you wanna. I’m not too keen to get caught up in a fight or something, though.”
“We’ll just have a look from a distance,” Viv said. “If it’s something we can help with, maybe we can step in, but we’ll see.”
“Alrighty then, sounds good.”
The two of them stood up and Viv took Brianna’s hand. In an instant, the scenery changed and they were about two kilometres down the street. Brea shuddered - she still wasn’t very used to teleportation - as Viv looked around. There were a few police cars parked a ways away, and she could just about make out two people on a rooftop nearby.
“So?” Brea asked. “Anything interesting?”
Vivienne squinted. “A couple of cop cars, and… I think that’s my uncle? And that new hero that works with the police, too. They’re on a roof. Doesn’t look like anything dangerous is going on anymore.”
“Y’know, I’ve been wondering what that new hero’s deal is. I’ve heard a lot of weird rumours on the radio. What’s her name again? Seven?”
“Yeah. Maddie and I met her a couple weeks ago. We didn’t really get to chat though, because de Vygon showed up and swooped her away. Wanna see if we can say hi?”
“Might as well. Not like we’ve got much better to do. Just… warn me before we teleport next time, please? I know I can’t actually see that we’ve moved, but something about the way the air pressure pops just throws me off.”
“Sure, sorry about that.” She took Brianna’s hand again. “You ready?”
Brea took a deep breath and nodded. Vivienne focused on the empty space a few feet away from her uncle. She did a countdown for Brea’s benefit and as soon as she reached zero, Viv flipped the switch in her brain and the space that she was focusing on appeared under her feet. She turned her good cheer up to eleven and announced herself to the two police officers.
“Hey guys! What’s-”
Seven whipped around and a wave of darkness spilled from the seams in her armour, barrelling towards the two of them. Viv stumbled backwards, waving her hands.
“Wait, wait! Friendly!”
The wall of shadow stopped inches from her face, dissipating into the air. Seven didn’t drop her combat stance though, watching them through her visor like a hawk. Speaking of which, her visor looked seriously messed up. The opaque glass was spiderwebbed with cracks, coalescing at a point near her temple. Also, it sort of looked like there was a hole in her armour, right above her heart. What the heck happened here?
“I-it’s just me! You know, Vivienne? We met one time? Oh yeah, and this is Brianna, she’s my friend. Hi, uncle Steve!”
“Yo,” Brea said.
Steve sighed. “Hello Vivienne. This is a crime scene, you can’t be here.”
They must have startled Seven something fierce. Her whole body was shaking. Viv frowned, ignoring her uncle.
“Are you okay? You don’t look well.”
The woman finally dropped the combat stance, putting a hand on her chest. “D-detective… I… I think the first shot pierced my armour…”
Steve whirled around. “What?! You said you were okay!”
“I- I thought… The shock must’ve… It… It hurts.” Her voice cracked into something almost like a sob at the end. Vivienne’s gut wrenched.
“Uncle! There’s a first-aid kit in your car, right?”
Steve blinked, taken aback. “Y-yes, but-”
“Brea, get her to lay down. I’ll be back soon!”
“You got it,” Brea replied.
Viv turned to Seven. “You can trust us, alright? I know first-aid; I’m studying to be a nurse right now. It’s going to be okay. We’re gonna fix you right up. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Seven nodded shakily. “O-okay…”
Vivienne jumped into action, grabbing her uncle’s wrist and teleporting him down to where the police cars were milling. He barked some orders at the other officers as they made their way to his car, relaying the situation and telling them to inform Captain de Vygon while Viv opened the trunk and grabbed the first-aid kit. She wasted no time teleporting them back to the roof-top, pleased to find Seven already lying on her back. Brea was holding her hand, speaking softly to her.
“Do you want to take your helmet off?” she asked. “You might be able to breathe a little easier without it.”
Seven shook her head. “Not allowed to let anyone see my face…”
“Well, I’m blind, so I won’t be able to see it anyway. If you’re more comfortable with it on, that’s fine.”
Seven reached a hand up, and for a moment Viv thought that she would get to see the face under the mask, but all she removed was her mouthpiece. Her lips were chapped and dry, and the surrounding skin was discoloured with fading bruises. Her bottom lip looked like it had been split recently. She and Steve shared a look. Clearly, he was thinking similar thoughts.
If Seven never took her helmet off when she was out, where had she taken those hits?
Viv tried to ignore it. That wasn’t important right now. She knelt down at Seven’s side, examining her abdomen.
“We’re gonna have to remove your chestplate to get a good look, Seven,” she explained. “Don’t worry, help is on the way. We’re just gonna make sure you’re as well as you can be until they get here.”
“Latches ‘re under the armpits,” Seven replied, slurring slightly. Without the electronics in the mask obscuring it, her voice was soft. It had a rough sort of cadence that reminded Viv a little bit of Rosie, only without the hispanic accent.
Viv followed her instructions, finding the latches and pulling the chestplate off. If the state of what little she could see of Seven’s face had shocked her, then she definitely wasn’t prepared for the state of her bare torso. She sucked in a breath, and heard her uncle curse quietly.
Below her armour, Seven was wearing nothing but a sports bra, leaving very little to the imagination and filling Vivienne with some very conflicted emotions. On one hand, Seven was fucking sculpted. She looked like a goddamn greek statue, and the sight of those sweaty planes of muscled, tanned skin were leaving Viv a little breathless. On the other hand, it looked like someone had used her abdomen as a punching bag, leaving a tapestry of colourful bruising across every inch of aforementioned skin. What was even more concerning than that, however, were the two sloppily stitched-up cuts intersecting each other on the upper-left side of her belly. They were too clean to be anything other than intentionally made, and clearly the patch-up was far from a professional job. Vivienne didn’t know what to think about any of this, but it was giving her a distinctly bad feeling.
She pushed all of those thoughts down. Now wasn’t the time. Seven was her patient, and right now all that mattered was finding and assessing the damage from the bullet she was presumably shot with. Thankfully, it wasn’t hard to find at all. A large patch of blood had saturated the cotton of her bra right above her sternum, surrounding a very obvious hole.
The fact that she was still conscious and alive meant that the bullet had most likely been slowed down enough by her armour to be stopped by her sternum, but Viv doubted that the bone remained entirely intact in the process. It was a marvel that she was still able to move about in the way she had. Either Seven was very used to pain, or she was still bursting at the seams with adrenaline. Based on the state of her body, it was probably a mix of both. The only certainty was that she needed a hospital. Until professionals arrived, Viv and Brea would just have to do their best for her.
Step one was to find the bullet. If it was deeply embedded in the bone, there wouldn’t be anything they could do for her now aside from slowing the bleeding, but they might be able to remove it themselves if it just impacted the surface. There weren’t any major blood vessels in that area, so they could probably do most of the patch-up work on site.
“Brea, can you check how deep the bullet is?” Viv asked.
Brianna nodded, moving her hand closer to Seven’s chest. Two of her fingers disappeared, turning into thin wisps of smoke that then drifted daintily down onto Seven’s body. The smoke wafted around searchingly until it found the hole, sinking into it and examining the interior painlessly.
“It seems like it’s just below the surface of her skin. Doesn’t feel like it’s fragmented or anything. We shouldn’t have any problems removing it here.”
“Cool,” Viv replied, pulling on some gloves from the first-aid kit and searching for a pair of tweezers.
“Don’t worry,” Seven muttered. “I’ve got it.”
Vivienne was about to protest when blackness began to seep across Seven’s skin from the shadowed edges of her armour. It travelled like a liquid, remaining flush with her body as it slipped under her bra and amassed in the bullet hole. Seven tensed up, balling her fists and clenching her teeth, clearly trying to power through the pain of whatever she was doing. Viv was a little too distracted by the mouth-watering sight of her tensed abs to question it. After a few seconds, Seven relaxed, her body deflating with a sigh as a flattened, gore-covered bullet rose from the hole, lifted by a pillar of shadow, before being discarded and rolling away down the side of her chest, leaving a trail of red on the cotton in its wake.
Viv blinked. “Where the hell did you learn how to do that?”
“‘s not the first time I’ve had to pull shrapnel out of myself,” Seven replied.
Well then. Just another thing to file away under the ‘weird and concerning things about this new superhero’ tab in her brain.
Vivienne took a second to get her brain back in order. This next part was important.
“Alright, well… Are you okay with me lifting your bra so we can patch up the wound?”
Seven waved a hand that flopped limply back to the ground. That wasn’t a great sign. “Go right ahead.”
Viv took a breath and ripped the metaphorical band-aid off, lifting the garment and looking only at the bloody wound on her chest, refusing to let her eyes drift anywhere else. Time to do her thing.
“I know I said we’d do our best for you here, but you should really go to a hospital just to be safe. The risk of infection here is pretty high,” Vivienne explained as she gently rubbed the wound down with an iodine wipe. Brea kept hold of Seven’s hand, whispering comforting nothings to her to distract her focus away from the pain Viv was no-doubt causing.
Seven shook her head. “N… No hospital. Not allowed.”
Oh boy. It just got worse and worse with this one, didn’t it?
“Do you at least have some sort of medical facility you can go to?”
Seven nodded, so at least that was one less thing for Vivienne to lose sleep about. She pulled out a bandage and placed it over the wound, deciding it was safer not to stitch it up here in case she missed anything that the actual doctors would need access to treat. With that done, she pulled Seven’s bra back down into its place.
“Well, that’s about all I can do for that right now. Is there anything else I can help you with?” Viv asked.
Seven let out what was probably supposed to be a considering hum, but it ended up sounding more like a groan. “Mm, I dunno… Thanks for your help, though. You guys’re nice. And you’re really pretty, too.”
Brianna barked out a laugh as Viv’s insides got caught in a vice. “O-oh. Um, thank you.” She could feel her face burning with an obvious blush. Stupid redhead genes.
“What about me?” Brea asked, smirking.
“Yah, I meant you, too,” Seven clarified. Her voice was slurring a lot now. “I really like your… your face. ‘s nice.”
Brea was trying to act cool, but Viv could still see her dark complexion deepening from the blush on her cheeks, too.
Steve - who had walked away once Viv removed Seven’s bra for the sake of her modesty - made his way back over to them. “Seven, do you have a concussion? You’ve been acting a little strange.”
“Oh, uh… Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
Viv groaned. “Of course you do. How do you even know?”
“My visor can check for it… That bullet hit me in the head pretty hard, so the first thing I did was get it to check.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?!” Steve asked.
“A lil’ bump‘s no reason to stop working.”
“We should take your helmet off to check. It might be pretty serious,” Viv said.
Seven shook her head again. “Not allowed.”
“Seven, I’m not kidding! You could be in real danger and we’ve had no idea this whole time!”
Steve sighed. “It’s fine, Vivienne. You’ve done good. Her medical team will take care of the rest. Speaking of which…” he trailed off, glancing over the edge of the building. “Looks like the cavalry’s here.”
Everything moved quickly from thereon. A group of people ascended up the fire escape with a stretcher and carefully laid Seven out on top of it. They were about to make the painstaking journey down when Viv just offered to teleport them. It would be dangerous taking her down the fire escape, and the quicker Seven got some proper medical attention for her head, the better. It wasn’t long before she was bundled into the armoured van and driven away to wherever her supposed ‘medical centre’ was, leaving Vivienne, Brianna, and Steve alone on the roof.
“Yeesh,” Brianna said, breaking the silence that had fallen over them. “That girl has issues.”
Steve shook his head. “Everything about her is just… giving me a bad feeling.”
“I’ll say,” Viv replied. “Did you see the state of her torso? Those bruises were awful! Not to mention the cuts…”
“I’d suspected something like that. The way she’s been moving recently, it was obvious that she was in pain. And I’d bet good money that Andreas de Vygon had something to do with it. He practically has her on a leash.”
The name made Vivienne’s blood boil. That man was truly scum. He’d tormented the Union for years, harassing and slandering her and her friends. Why any superhero would choose to join him was beyond her. That being said, the more she learned about the mysterious woman, the more it seemed like it might not have been a choice after all.
“There’s gotta be something we can do, right?” Brea asked, voicing Viv’s thoughts. “If de Vygon’s mistreating her, surely there’s someone we can tell about it to get her out of his hands?”
“He would just cover it up,” Steve said. He let out a breath, rubbing his face with weary exhaustion. “Look, the only thing I know for sure is that that woman is strong enough to take down the entire precinct if she wanted. If she had a problem with how she was being treated, she could get herself out of it. De Vygon might have influence, but he’s just a normal man when it comes to power. Seven could easily kill him if he angered her. We’re probably just looking too much into it. Those injuries could easily just be from combat training or something.”
Vivienne sighed, looking out over the city in the direction Seven’s medical team had left in. “I hope you’re right, uncle. I really, really do.”