 | ShatterStorm Productions
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| ShatterStorm Productions
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++Davie++
We’d been shadowing them all night. I had to admit that Dick was good. He was a shadow. It shouldn’t have surprised, since he cut his teeth on the dark side of Gotham.
An observational fluke had ID’ed a suspicious character that had led us to a truck that led us to waterfront plant that was rotten with age. After a breathless pause that was just short enough to keep us from figuring out how to act, they had come tearing out and we’d been chasing them for half an hour. Then, abruptly, they’d pulled over in a decent section of town and were idling there. Once again, just as we were ready to make our move, more players joined the cast, including two well-dressed men in suits.
“Oh shit,” Dick breathed and I stiffened with dread. That tone was never a good thing. “Oh God, it’s Jim Gordon. Harley must have gotten to him.”
Jim Gordon? The Jim Gordon? The night had just gotten a whole hell of a lot more dangerous.
As additional thugs piled into the flatbed truck, the concealing canvas frame was flicked back. There were barrels inside, lots of them if they lined the entire centerline of the truck they way they appeared to in the shadows. Through the binoculars, I couldn’t read the words, but there was no mistaking the hazardous materials stickers. The truck roared to life even as the additional bodies were clambering aboard and it lumbered away in a cloud of diesel smoke. Dick and I shared a loaded glance and scrambled for our bikes.
Just a few blocks away, we were forced to grind our teeth in frustration as familiar and powerful ex-police commissioner Gordon bs’ed his way past the security guard and into the New Gotham Waterworks.
“I’m going to hazard a guess that those chemicals aren’t for cleaning the pipes,” Dick growled as we crept for the fence.
It wasn’t just that Bat-crew that had the cool toys. Wisely, I had taken a page from their mythology and kept a suite of cool toys on me. Meta telepath or no, a girl was smart to take all the help she could get. The twins were brilliant and my collection had grown elaborate.
The kennel off behind the guard shack caught my attention. “Nightwing,” I hissed. “Hold up. They’ve got dogs.”
“Dammit,” he swore softly. The lull gave me time to pull out the little bag of goop that Ro had cooked up after a nasty run in with guard dogs. It splattered satisfyingly against Dick’s shoulder blade and I smeared it over his shoulder and down his bicep before running my hand over my chest. “Wha…?”
“It’s some concoction that screws up dog’s sense of smell. It’ll help, trust me.”
“It smells bizarre.”
I nodded. The vicious paste smelled like a farmer’s market; dirt, fish and lemons. It was faint, but noticeable. Whatever it was, it worked.
Like a ninja movie, we timed the lazy searchlights and dashed for the main pump house. A carefully tossed jumpline had us climbing for the roof. By the time we arrived, some three or four stories up, I was winded. “I’m getting too old for this,” I muttered and he muttered in sympathy. After all, the Boy Wonder was only three years my junior, so I didn’t make a sharp remark. “Hasn’t Oracle been awfully quiet?”
“I thought I heard something garbled while we were driving, but I couldn’t make it out.” Dick sounded unconcerned, and with my limited telepathic range, there was nothing I could do to assuage my worries. All I could do was focus on the mission. With Oracle monitoring three teams, she was probably just busy.
But that didn’t make my concern go away.
++Shan++
This wasn’t happening…
My life had fallen into the kind of chaos that made nightmares pale in comparison.
Boo had been taken by Doctor B, turned into a brainless minion by the greatest enemy of our new family. Barbara was beaten black and blue and bloody, Gabby was a limp pile on the stone floor, Ro’s helmet lay useless and empty on the Batcave floor and the fleas and the circus were gone…
And I was ready to just lose it completely.
Ro always told me that I was smarter and stronger than I gave myself credit for. Even now, I could hear her soft purr in my memories. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself, Squeakers. You can do anything you set your mind to.’
Could I stop her if I had to?
Could I?
Alfred’s voice jolted me out of my daze. “Miss Shan!” Startled, I blinked at him, trying to focus on the present. “I need your help now. If you’ll collect Miss Gabrielle.” For a long moment, I had no clue what he wanted. Hell, I barely knew who he was. Then I saw he and Hel hoist the limp redhead up between them and everything became real.
Boo had hurt Barbara.
Not just hurt her, but hurt her bad. Me and Ro always knew that we were capable of sadism and violence, Doctor B had made sure of that at a very young age, but I could have happily lived out my days not seeing that potential in action. Barbara was badly bloodied up, and was showing some spectacular bruising on her fair skin. Hel looked sick and scared to death over her condition and my numbness began to fade. Gabby… I was supposed to be helping Gabby. She was moaning softly and trying to get her arms underneath her, hissing in pain from the effort. “Gotcha, Gabs,” I purred softly and reached down to scoop her up and hold her close to my chest. It broke my heart that she cried out in pain. “Shhhh, I gotcha, I gotcha,” was all that I could do to soothe her obvious agony. The trip to the extensive medical facility was spent in a brittle quiet.
While Helena and Alfred fussed over Barbara, I pulled out a cast saw and concentrated on buzzing off the shattered plaster from Gabby’s poor hand. A pony-sized dose of painkillers had brought her agony down to chattering sobs.
For the moment, all I could do was splint up Gabby’s hand nice and tight. Right now, Barbara was the priority. There were occasional murmurs from the gurney nearby, but Gabby and I were as silent as death. Even our breathing felt shallow and quiet. It was as if we were waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“She…” Gabby began quietly, but hiccupped to a halt, so I looked up from her hand to catch what she was trying to say. “She took the egg and the hard drive.”
“I know,” was all I could whisper hoarsely, because I was too stunned and numb to sound any other way. “All that’s missing now is me.”
There was little to say to that, but Gabby was determined to press on, visibly gathering herself to continue. “There… there was a message on the screen before Barbara sent me away to warn Alfred. Someone wrote, ‘I’m sorry,’ just as the Delphi was attacked. It’s… it’s gotta be that same ‘Fai’ that sent the newspaper clipping about the warehouse. I noticed that the system was quiet when I was down there, I’m guessing that it’s down completely.”
“Why would they attack the Delphi, as well as warn us?” It didn’t make any sense…
Unless… unless they were being coerced.
A memory surfaced from my stress and for the moment, I was lost in my past. Bug snuck out of her cell every night to get into mischief, or more often, curl up with me and Ro to sleep. She had been such a cute kid, all big gold eyes and soft black fur from her panther and fox genetics. Unlike me and Ro, she was far more ‘human’ looking, except the explosive brush tail that linked her directly to her fox genes. The last time I had seen Bug was the night we had escaped the lab. Doctor B had finally caught our ‘little sister’ out of her cage and had dragged her, whining and struggling down the hall.
That last act of brutality and my driving need to see the stars is what had finally made us desperate enough to escape. There was no way that Doctor B would have tolerated having Bug escaping as long as she had. I assumed that the incident had led to the seven-year-old’s death.
But…
But what if Bug were alive? Could she have been forced to hunt me and Ro all this time? Once or twice I’d caught a scent of my past that I had never believed. A gentle touch on my shoulder made me jump and stare into Gabby’s concerned eyes. “What is it?”
“There was another kid in the lab, number Twenty-six, only me and Ro called her Bug. She was brilliant with machines, a real savant. I’d always believed that Doctor B had killed her, and that’s on of the things that triggered us to escape. But now I’m wondering if she’s not that one that keeps helping us. There was a voice in the comms that sent us back here to stop…”
I couldn’t say it.
Couldn’t remember the homicidal psychosis in my sister, the person I loved more than anyone or anything.
The phone shrieking in the next room suddenly distracted all of us. For a breathless moment, no one moved. Then Alfred spoke calmly as he returned his attention to Barbara, “there are very few people that have the phone number for this manor. Perhaps it might be Master Dick.” I didn’t remember moving, but the phone was suddenly against my ear.
“Hello?”
“Hello?” It was a deep male voice, the kind that movie stars would kill for and something about it sent shivers down my spine. “Who are you?”
“Ummm…” I was at a loss for words. It was supposed to be God-damned Nightwing on the line! Not some strange man who sounded annoyed that some stranger had picked up the phone at Wayne Manor. Unless… unless the voice belong to who I thought it belonged to. Wonderful, that’s all we needed right now… goddamned Batman coming to the rescue.
Later, when I had a chance to reflect on events, I would be surprised at my behavior. At present, I felt my stress boil over. This was my fight, not some stranger who had left his city like an unwanted illegitimate child. “We’re busy trying to save the whole god-damned city! Now go away!” I growled and slammed the phone back into the cradle. Great, that oughta send him running, nimrod…
Bouncing over to the diagnostic machine hooked into Barbara, I took a long look at it. She was stable, that much I could see, but her systems were running on turbo. “I cannot understand why her vitals remain so elevated.” Alfred mused in a thoughtful tone that didn’t quite cover his concern. Man, her metabolism was off the charts. Her body was sucking down the IV bags like an injured racehorse. Immune system spazzing like it was being directly attacked… A thought occurred to me. Her immune and metabolic systems might not be reacting to attack, but stimulation. Furiously tapping at the machine, it stared at me like I was nuts. A deep breath, a guess at how Ro would have done it, a patient set of instructions to the machine in a language it understood and I was golden.
“Good God Almighty,” was all that I could mutter in shock and crossed myself with the Holy Sign. “She drank them! Of all the insane, brilliant…”
This time, I ‘ported without thinking, which was stupid, because I might end up in a wall or something someday, but I struck it lucky this time. In the Batcave was my goal, scattered from the fight between Ro and Barbara. Thankfully, there were some in backup canisters in the toppled chemistry set. Guesswork would be enough here, as the nanites would only use what they needed. I hardly realized that I was murmuring under my breath as I dumped the thick saline into an empty IV bag I found. “Sodium, silver, gold, tin, zinc, potassium, magnesium, copper… Sweet. I think I got my own colloidal mineral solution.” Holding up the bag, I eyed the thick liquid inside the clear plastic. “Liquid multivitamins on the house, fleas. Better than anything off the shelf, lemme tell you that much!”
++Alfred++
The teleporting was a bit… startling to say the least. What on earth had Miss Shan meant by, ‘she drank them’? Before I could formulate a coherent thought through my worry, Miss Shan had returned in a teleporting flurry. Before her feet had even touched the floor, she was lunging at the IV pole, which I took in a strong grasp for safekeeping. All of that young woman’s energy was likely to cause an accident. Honestly, I did not even notice the clear bag of liquid in her hands until she abruptly removed the tube from Miss Barbara’s IV.
“Miss Shan!” I exclaimed indignantly and she flinched as though expecting to be struck. In an instant, she rallied and flashed me a stubborn and desperate look.
“She drank the nanites, Alfred. There’s no other explanation and it would have been the only way to keep them from…” Her stuttered pause and the accompanying wince of pain spoke volumes.
“Wait,” Miss Helena suddenly barked. “She drank them?”
“Yes,” was Miss Shan’s short reply as she attached Miss Barbara’s line to the bag in her hand. “They need to eat so that they don’t take what they need from her. Give ‘em half a chance, and she’ll be as good as new. Hell, after being programmed to fix Babs’ back, she’ll probably be better than new.”
“But… the program wasn’t done,” Miss Gabrielle unexpectedly added. A very peculiar expression came over Miss Shan’s face, somewhat a cross between a scared young woman and a self-assured scientist.
“They’ll refer back to their basic programming without a powerhouse to relay specific instructions. They know the blueprint of the human body better than any doctor and are smart enough to make basic extrapolations. With the Delphi down and the circus gone, we can only guess what their last instructions were. Keep your fingers crossed that they do their job and don’t get too creative, because I can’t stop them. Without a recognizable means of communication, no one can.”
On that note, we could only remain vigilant of Miss Barbara’s condition and prepare as best we could for the upcoming battle.
++Casey O’Rourke++
In twenty-six hours my life had turned into a Stephan King novel. First, visited by Jim-freakin’-Gordon and that Detective Reece. Then the blonde whack job had wandered in and every pair of eyes she met turned that poor fool into some kind of twitterpated slave to her whims.
Except me.
Why I had been spared was a mystery, but I was almost envious of the brainless minions that came and went. They were a diverse lot, scum and street trash of all walks of the nightlife, slick and slimy alike. The blonde hurricane that was Harley Quinn, orchestrated the chaos like an orb weaver spider. I’d been piecing the story together with a honed set of observational skills. There was no mistaking that her style reminded me of the Joker. Ah yes, the deadly nemesis of the Bat-crew, now safely ensconced in Arkham Asylum. Bet the once-respected Doctor Quinzel had some kind of direct connection to him…
Another scream echoed tinnily from the little TV next to Harley’s throne. The poor kid had been screaming for hours and her voice was getting hoarser and hoarser. “Argh,” Harley cursed and shook clenched fisted at the ceiling. “No finesse, no talent, no clue. If you have to make them scream, at least earn it, for God’s sake. There are so many great ways to hurt a body, so many subtle ways to make them scream. Why use a machine? Such a waste…”
She’d been critiquing the torture session since before the screaming had begun. It was horrifying. What the hell were they doing to her?
“Knew I should have installed that surround sound,” Harley grumbled and the screams abruptly choked off. “Oh damn! Stupid failsafe. It always shuts that thing off when the screaming gets good. That’s okay, right Meowth?” The strange woman covered in white fur and sporting a tail that danced like an agitated cobra blinked placidly at the madwoman. Harley chuckled and ruffled the fuzzy hair. “I need more popcorn anyway.”
++Doctor B++
Ah, this girl was going to make a fantastic addition to my body of knowledge on the Human sub-species, or Metahuman. The intensity of brain activity was like nothing I had seen before. She must exhibit some kind of mental enhancement then. All that Harley had been able to tell me was that the girl could throw things with a gesture of her hands.
Abruptly, her screams hit a crescendo that was ear splitting. I spotted Twenty-six wincing and was infuriated. Since her cells had begun splitting, the little freak was a failure to me. How I hated being reminded of my failure to create a mutate of my own. An abrupt slap the head returned her attention to her work on the computers. “Shut it down,” I snarled. “The rest of the experiments will have to wait until she’s regained some of her strength.”
++Harley++
Everything was going exactly as I had planned.
So why did I feel like someone had spoiled the punchline?
It was maddening, really, and I was already insane, so I knew how maddening maddening could be. “Bet it’s ‘cause I’m here, and not out causing chaos myself.” I grumbled sulkily and flashed a dirty look over my shoulder. For once, Casey O’Rourke had no spiteful comment, but merely yawned. Realizing that I was glaring, she straightened up and gave me her attention.
“Why are you here and not out there babysitting the minions?” Casey asked curiously, her tone just sarcastic enough to grate. Keeping her alive to record my memoirs was starting to look like a stupid idea.
“I’m supervising,” I growled and it sounded like a dirty word. Had I lost my edge? Was the thrill of madness and chaos gone? Was the romance over?
This patience thing sucked.
I had to just sit here while my hypnotized pets were out having all the fun. I didn’t even realize that I’d tightened my grip on the soft mane I’d been stroking until the white kitty whined softly. Unfocused violet eyes peered over the edge of my deck-of-cards throne, her expression curious and a little confused. “Such a pretty pet,” I cooed softly and ran my fingers through the silky hair again. To bad I couldn’t keep this sweet kitty with the big claws and mean teeth. Not to mention that handy teleporting thing. The crimes I could pull off…
A strange sensation on my wrist jerked my attention back to my new pet. It was a soft, scratchy touch, leaving a faint trace of wet that grew cool. It was her tongue, lightly trailing over my pale skin, rough as a lion’s. “Silly cat,” I admonished, thrilled and scandalized at the animal gesture. “What are you doing?”
“Tasting you,” Ro said simply. Oh, this was too good. Too curious to resist, I leaned over to see what it was about this woman that had tamed the mighty Huntress. She kissed like she was grooming you up for exclusive mating rights. My toes curled in pleasure at the slow attention she paid me in that deep kiss, the low rumble of her purr the best damn vibrator on the planet. Definitely needed to see about keeping this pet for myself…
++Dinah++
There comes a time when all you can do is run. The pain battering my body was battering my body to the point where I was almost numb. Any control was long gone.
Like a trapped animal, I had to gnaw off my own leg to escape. Or, in my case, telepathically retreat until the agony stopped.
One way or the other.
I didn’t know where to go, I had never explored my own mind like this. For what felt like an endless moment, there was blissful nothing. No sense of space, or gravity, and absolutely no pain.
Then a pulling, falling sensation and I was dropping lightly into a crouch. As I stood, the environment began to build itself like an animator drawing a strip of film. Low, rolling hills, buzzing insects, waves of golden wheat, and a great and endless span of crystal blue sky. It was… Opal.
After the horrible childhood vision that I now knew were of Helena and Barbara, I had felt very alone and scared. A vivid dream of curious and playful coyotes led me from my room and into the moonlit fields.
I danced and played with the lanky tricksters, excited to have playmates that understood me and didn’t judge me. Tag and chase and wrestling, the games were a nightly occurrence. Some days I was so sore and tired that I had to wonder if it was real or fantasy. Had I even the house? If not… then where did the soreness and tiredness come from?
This place where I was now was the coyote’s den. Here, I had slept in safety with pups and parents alike. Years had passed and the hill looked small and lonely. When had I outgrown this safe place and my animal friends?
“You didn’t.”
The soft woman’s voice startled me so badly that I whirled and went sprawling. Laughter peeled out over the quiet fields and I looked up into warm amber eyes.
“Hi Sunhair. I’ve missed you.”
I was flabbergasted. She looked like a coyote, but was built like a person. Furry and bipedal, she straightened up and the distinctly coyote head cocked off curiously.
“Grandfather Coyote was the best Trickster and Shapeshifter this world has ever known. Are you surprised that I have the same abilities?”
Then I noticed the ear. The lazy left ear, lolling like a broken tree, too tired to stay upright. This was the frisky pup that had constantly tackled me to chew on my fingers and clothes and covered me in slobbery kisses. The fact that she suddenly looked like a tall woman in a really good movie monster suit was redundant. I was up and throwing myself into her arms before I was aware of it.
“Left Ear!”
She smelled just like I remembered her parents smelled, wild and free. Her hug was solid and uninhibited, lifting my feet from the ground and swinging me around.
“I missed you.”
And then… I was her. Racing across the fields, the wheat whipping at my face, the dry earth hard and comforting under my paws.
Storm clouds gathered behind me, snarling and crackling.
I was afraid.
Back there was pain and torture and no escape. Ahead was suddenly endless water… a vast ocean, now the other wall of my prison. The land was gone, only a crumbling cliff under my scrabbling paws.
A dog howled.
A long, piercing cry that rallied me. I knew that voice from somewhere, somewhen.
Gathering the strength in my wiry coyote body, I leaped with all I had.
There was a pause, a stretch, a pop.
It seemed familiar, as did the colorless canyon of concrete and glass. Intellect and instinct were at a stalemate. There was no one here who could help me. They would never see me, never hear me. But… there was one person who would… dark eyes, dark mane.
The dog howled again.
Head swinging in that direction… the colors were blinding where they poured like paint through the storefront window. Without hesitation, I ran for the colors, ran for the hills and cloudless skies and sparkling waters I remembered being safe.
The world around me shattered.
++Davie++
As a telepath, I had heard and seen some truly strange things. Fluffy howling urgently from deep in my psyche was certainly one of them. The ‘dog’ was mental construct, an artificial companion for the twins when they were visiting the foreign territory of my mind. Fluffy certainly wasn’t a separate, intelligent entity.
Except that Fluffy was calling to someone.
Flabbergasted, I froze and turned my gaze inward to stare at the unfolding events the way a driver in downtown might stare at a parade of cartoon elephant. There was no context, no sense of…
The walls shattered.
Like a sledgehammer to glass, she slammed into my mind and our psyches went down in the proverbial tangle of arms and legs.
Time slowed as I stared up at my companion. Like a mad sculptor, or a computer-morphing program gone wild, Dinah kept changing from her familiar features, to an elongated canine face, tongue lolling with stress. It was a coyote, I realized with a jolt. A cascade of fractured images washed over me as powerful as an avalanche. A laboratory, banks of computers, a gurney with straps, a scarred woman almost familiar, an enormous black man with gentle hands, agonizing, fiery pain that was like liquid glass in my veins. There was a mournful girl with soulful gold eyes, and the icy blue glare in an arctic cool face that I remembered all too well.
Dinah scream-howled, torn away from me by the shattering force of the pain being inflicted on her. Sucked back through the hole in my mind like debris taken by a tornado. Immediately, the tangle of millions of unshielded minds began to leak in, the roar like the ocean during a storm.
Shaking off my paralysis, I hurriedly put everything I had into weaving the jagged hole shut. All that chaos would drive me insane. Blocking out other’s minds was a skill I leaned before I could speak. I was probably learning it in the womb, to block out the roar of minds that would have included the woman who gave birth to me all those years ago. Only when the jagged rip in my inner self was repaired, did I become aware of other stimuli. Hands on my head and hip, the ground unforgiving beneath me.
“Davie!” Dick hissed urgently. “Dammit, snap out of it!”
He sounded terrified.
Sensation was trickling back into my physical body like a limb that had been starved of its blood flow. “Dick?” Yep, that slurred, drunken syllable had been my voice all right. My throat was sandpaper, my tongue a chunk of shoe leather in my mouth.
“Oh, thank God,” he breathed. “You scared the hell out of me when you collapsed and started screaming bloody murder. I had no idea what to do; it looked like you were going into convulsions. The guards will be here any minute.”
Now that feeling had returned, I felt like the worst end of a traffic accident. “Dinah,” I rasped hoarsely. “She sent out a distress call.”
“Hell of a distress call.”
“I have… I have to go.” It was hard to tell who was more surprised by my comment. You didn’t just up and leave your partner, now matter how new and sometimes annoying they might be. “Dinah needs me. Doctor B has her, which means that she has Ro too. Those twins are my family and I’ll damn my soul to Hell before I turn my back on any of them.”
Dick regarded me soberly. There was a long moment of complete understanding between us and he nodded. “I’ll catch up as soon as I can. Hopefully, Oracle will get the comms back up soon.”
“I’m sorry, Nightwing.”
“I understand. Really, I do. Go help them; I’ll hold them off here. Just give New Gotham’s finest a call to hit this place.”
“You got it.”
Now it was a race against time to get the hazy information that Dinah had risked so much to get to me back to the rest of our team.
++Helena++
Dunno what drew me to the roof. Some primitive tug to the animal part of me let me know that I was needed. Leaning over Barbara’s still body, I kissed her forehead. “I’ll be back soon, love. Shan needs me.” It was torture to leave her side, but I could almost hear her fond, chastising tone for hesitating.
‘Go to it, pack alpha.’
The memory of her voice was enough to get me moving. Gabby was peacefully asleep nearby, deep within the grip of painkillers. I ruffled her luxurious blonde curls as I slipped out.
Harley was going to pay for this.
An orange extension cord accompanied me on my climb to the open air. The blazing sun hurt my eyes as I stepped into the afternoon. And a strange, high-pitched buzzing assaulted my ears. The reek of solvent drew me across the roof to my partner. “Shan?”
Abruptly, the buzz dropped in pitch before starting up again. Some kind of power tool would be my guess. The noise, smell and extension cord led me to her. It looked like some kind of ramshackle sci-fi workshop had thrown up all over my roof. Shan was hunched up around her battered helmet, running the spinning head of some little tool over it. The metal was grinding away to silver beneath the spin and making the annoying noise.
At my feet was what looked like a paint can, only the spatters of color were too thick for mere paint. “It’s a liquid latex base,” Shan supplied in a flat tone as the little tool fell mercifully silent. “Alfred says it has a armor capabilities and that he used this color on the Robin suit. There’s no time to properly fix this thing, and it’s taken three bullets in as many weeks. All of the other cans had dried to blocks, and this color seems appropriate anyway.”
Holding up the helmet, I could see that Shan had already begun painting messily. It was a deep, bloody crimson, like the viscera from a heart-deep wound. It had oozed like blood or thick tears over the stark lines of the helmet, turning it into a terrifying horror-house mask. While I watched, Shan popped open the can and smeared the stuff haphazardly into the grill that would rest over her nose and mouth. “So it’s warpaint,” I said suddenly and Shan’s hands stilled.
“Yeah, I guess it is.”
“I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
A quick trip downstairs to the armory was just what the Huntress ordered. If we were gonna do this, we were gonna do it right. Ro had dropped her helmet in the Batcave and somehow Alfred had found the time to get it to the armory, where it sat perched on a skinny rack. The flat alien glare of it chilled me and I ruthlessly shoved my emotions into a deep hole so that I could function.
Harley was going to pay for this.
I slowly took up the helmet and felt its weight for the first time. I really missed my playmate, and I missed Barbara, and I never thought my life could be so quiet without Di around. This sucked. Once more, I tried to shake it off, or at least focus it into something useful. Later, after all this was over, I could break down and spaz over what was happening. Right now, I had to be strong and focused.
Amazingly, it worked. So I gathered up the great suit that Alfred had made me, all of Shan’s bulky gear, and headed back to the roof. After a quick detour to my rooms, where I forced myself not to look at the bed in fear of my memories, I gathered up my favorite black leather trenchcoat, and was back in the sunlight.
Dusk was approaching by the time we were satisfied. Little had been said in the few hours we’d been at this. When Shan suddenly yawned hugely, I realized how damn tired I was. “Nap,” I ordered and when Shan looked like she might object, I stared her down. “Nap. We’re useless if we’re exhausted. We’ll grab some blankets and go sleep in the infirmary for a few hours.” Shan scowled for a moment, but silently began to gather up the modified armor.
To Be Continued…
This song choice has little to do with the lyrics, but the rich build up of intensity as the song progresses. If you haven’t heard this song, what rock do you live under? If you don’t recognize this song by the title or, worse, the Gaelic lyrics, I believe it! Go and download this, or better, buy the album. Imagine a despondent Shan and Helena preparing for battle against Harley and the tall, furry woman and blonde teen they both love. The evocative score will move your emotions across the scale.
Ca fhad e o
(repeat)
Siul tri na
stoirmeacha
Gabh tri na
stoirmeacha
Ca fhad e o
Tus na stoirm
Ca fhad e
Tog do chroi
Siul tri na
stoirmeacha
Tog do chroisa
Gabh tri na
stoirmeacha
Turas fada
Amhare tri na
stoirmeacha
How long is it since
(repeat)
Walk through the
storms
Go through the storms
How long is it since
The start of the storm
How long is it
From beginning to end
Lift your heart
Walk through the
storms
Lift your heart
Go through the storms
Long journey
Look through the
storms
