Snippet #2803405

It was a cold, crisp, and clear night. The type of night that people could enjoy. Couples were walking the street, using the cold air as an excuse to steal each other’s body heat and warm clothes. Kids played tag, their air forming small clouds in the air as they laughed. Noise spilled on to the streets from balconies above as friends sat and drank a wine or a beer and put the world to right, staring at the stars. It was an entirely unremarkable evening for most, it seemed.

But not for all. Cerys could feel it in the air. Maybe it was just her own anxiety, her own apprehension about the evening. But it felt like something was going to happen- something big, something that would disrupt the peace everyone else seemed to be feeling. But they needed to do something. They couldn’t just sit idly by. They couldn’t just fade into the shadows and disappear like that.

She made her way across town to the location she’d received. She’d been suspicious at first, but when she’d heard that a number of other heroes had gotten a similar message, with the same location, it began to seem more legit. She was still apprehensive, but at least she knew she wasn’t going alone.

The location was a large, apparently abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town. It did at least appear to be structurally sound, but was unlikely to have any ideal vantage points for her to shoot from. She could still shoot from ground level, but she always had an advantage with a little bit of height.

She wasn’t enough of a fool to just waltz in, though. So instead, she waited just out of sight, waiting for somebody she at least vaguely recognised to arrive, and pulling on her mask.

Atticus didn’t particularly want to go to this meeting or whatever it was. He’d planned on spending the evening watching some movies or maybe getting some work done on his showreel. Or hell, going out for a few drinks. But Lucy was dragging him along, and he apparently wasn’t getting much of a say so in the matter.

Even if he didn’t particularly want to be there, that didn’t mean he wasn’t going prepared. He’d retrieved his gun from the hidden panel in his wardrobe. It’s weight felt strange, alien, but he wasn’t optimistic that things would end peacefully, and he didn’t want to be dependent on his knife. And if he was leaving the house, he would be damned if he wasn’t leaving well dressed. So he wore his usual suit, the holster for his gun concealed beneath the jacket, his mask tucked into one pocket and a knife in the other.

He’d been getting the messages too, of course. Somebody knew that he could have chosen to save his uncle, but instead chose his chance of freedom. Somebody who lorded that over him and threatened him to stick to the shadows, the shadows he only occasionally stepped out from. He would have been perfectly happy to just lay low, to disappear and shed Icarus. But not everyone could do that. The few people he could call “friends” in the villain community couldn’t do that, and they shouldn’t have had to. So that was why he hadn’t put up too much of a fight when Lucy told him he had to come.

“Abandoned warehouse. Seriously, could they get any more cliche?” He remarked quietly as they approached, pulling on his mask. “They should have just put up a sign, ‘this is definitely a trap’!” He added, frowning beneath the mask and instinctively putting his hands into his pockets to wrap around the knife.