Chum

First, Jordan throws their prop gun at Mrs. Heartstopper, who ducks out of the way, clearly thinking still that it's some sort of black hole bomb that's about to go off. I twist my entire body in one explosive motion, hurling Scylla off of me and against the railing of the catwalk, which she hits with a loud, rattling thud.

Mrs. Xeno-whatsit dives towards Scylla protectively, eyes locked towards Jordan's fake gun, hugging her dog to her chest and curling up like she's expecting a grenade to go off. Mr. T-Rex grabs the table and flips it up, ripping it out of the floor casually like it's not a big deal, trying to shield himself from the nonexistent black hole that Jordan bluffed them into believing.

Actually, scratch my earlier mental comment. I don't think Mrs. Heartstopper was fooled at all. Her eyes are wide and her pupils huge, dilated to take in light, and she's already running towards Jordan. I find my loosest tooth, mentally clench, and yank it out with my fingers before throwing it at her, hoping to take advantage of the natural human instinct to flinch from thrown objects to buy Jordan precious seconds. I twist back around, yank these impossible-to-run-in pants off, and roll back up to my feet. Don't worry, I'm wearing boxers.

Mrs. Heartstopper's voice sounds slurred through the pounding, throbbing surge of adrenaline running through me, as I yank my shoes off. Several cigar boxes land on top of her, all of them bursting into a cloud of vision-blocking ash as they do, followed by the real one bonking her on the head, disorienting her for a critical moment. She clearly wasn't expecting me to be up this fast, the tooth bouncing off her forehead. Her hand reaches out halfway between Jordan and I, unsure which of us to go for, and then the catwalk buckles.

Jordan is above us, shifted up by a diagonal cut in space, something they've been experimenting with since vanishing that huge rock Aaron almost brought down on us what feels like forever ago. The catwalk's edge, now flat, jutting out, a smooth bit of metal, bonks Mrs. Heartstopper in the stomach through the force of her own momentum, and I wrap the pants around her throat from behind, twisting them into a vice and then taking two heavy steps forward. I yank, and she flies backwards, head curving down in a satisfying arc towards the catwalk while Jordan returns space to normal.

There's a stirring below us - since I'm pretty sure Jordan's little stunt just caused several dancing clubgoers to jostle into each other. Mrs. Heartstopper, blinded by my pants, begins to scramble like a cat under a blanket.

"People's elbow!" I shout, throwing myself backwards. No bullets, but I do see the whirring throughlines of tasers, wires spinning in the air, shooting towards me, each one narrowly missing. No, that's not true - I feel barbed metal penetrating my clothes, poking into my skin, but whether it's by miracle or my body going horizontal, not a single pair of electrodes hits me. The circuit doesn't complete. My elbow goes sailing down into Mrs. Heartbeat's stomach, and I feel it squish underneath me as I swing through.

I know not all the guards fired just from a quick headcount, and I know, or rather, I can confidently say that they won't fire their guns. Not in an enclosed space like this, where there's so many people that could get hit by the crossfire, not if they have any trigger discipline at all. I roll off of Mrs. Heartbeat and rip the two electrodes that landed out of me, feeling the blood come out. "Dylan!" I shout towards Jordan, grabbing hold of the railing.

Mrs. Xenomorph and Mr. T-Rex look dumbfounded. All of this happened in about fifteen seconds, tops, and I think they were still expecting to die dramatically in a black hole. Scylla is snarling, roaring, trying to rip my throat out. "Right behind you!" Jordan yells, grabbing the other side, and we both jump off the second floor.

The prop gun clatters uselessly behind us, against the table of booth #12, and the security guards try to lunge without falling off the railing, and Mrs. Heartbeat coughs up phlegm, winded by my assault on her gut, trying to reach out for my ankle, but I'm already gone. The ground sails up to meet us, and Jordan and I make the two foot drop onto the dance floor, landing on some hapless civilian's heads. "Sorry!" I cough, trying to pull myself up from the ground.

"You're fucking crazy," Jordan compliments, scraping themselves up from the dance floor while partygoers surround us, opening up a gap. Muttered words of fear and sympathy - are you okay? Where the hell did you come from? Oh my god, is a cape fight happening? I put my hands up and stumble a little bit, my ankles groaning in annoyance at the fall, while Jordan starts yanking me forward.

"Are you kidding? You threatened to shoot a dog. You can't call me crazy," I yell back, trying to be heard over the suddenly-loud music. Jordan looks up, and almost entirely hidden in the darkness, we see the three Kingdom operatives and their attendant security guards, totally useless, soar up into the ceiling.

"There. I just raised them up twenty feet. That'll buy us some time. We need to skeddadle," Jordan says, already stripping out of their uniform and tousling their hair.

"You guys really kicked a hornet's nest. Get out of there, now. I'll meet you around the back. The bouncers out front are already starting to lock the place down." Crossroads buzzes in our ears. Jordan yanks the buttons out on their waiter uniform and throws it out from under them, leaving only a white undershirt - but they keep the pants. I… don't do that. "Line's getting kicked out. Looks like the party's over for the night."

"Hey, we're gonna leave now. Thanks for helping me up," I say to a pretty, concerned-looking girl, blonde hair, blue eyes, who pulled me up from the floor when we landed. She gives me a weird look - pity? And flashes me a thumbs up. Jordan drags me towards the back, near where the bathrooms are, but I break away for a second.

"What are you doing?" Jordan hisses.

"I need my purse," I reply, scrambling up to the bartender. It must be such a sight to this old man, who last saw me dressed in an entirely different outfit, not bleeding, not missing one of my front teeth, and not covered in a thick sheen of gross sweat. Well, I know it must be a sight to him, because his eyes bug out. "Hey! Thanks for the drinks. I left my purse here. Do you have it?"

"Uh," he stumbles, reaching behind the bar to lift it up. Aww, he kept it safe for me? That's sweet. He didn't need to do that. "Here you go, ma'am. Do I need to call someone?"

"Best not to. Ciao!" I cheerfully reply, baring my full row of teeth now for the first time to him. He flinches back, and I grab the purse by the handle, smearing my bloody palms against the bar as I go as if to mark my presence. I can smell the trail of where I went, all the flecks of blood I've scattered about, and as Jordan bounces on their heels, I join back up with them, leaving a shocked, gawking bartender behind.

"Lead the way," I order, as Jordan grabs hold of my wrist again and tugs me into the bathroom hallway. They turn around, wave a hand, and the world snaps into place in a different way.

The bathroom hall begins to shunt itself closed, pushing people out of the way. "Out, out, out, run, bitches, there's a cape fight happening!" Jordan yells, throwing the people waiting in line for the girl's bathroom into near immediate disarray. The bathroom door vanishes as Jordan cuts it out of 3d space, and that really gets people moving. Conversations break apart, panic begins to set in, and I feel… kinda bad about it? Jordan kicks into the employee's only section, slams their foot, and then taps three numbers into the keypad on the door to open it. "I watched an employee get in while I was pretending to wait in line at the bathroom. Don't question it."

"I won't," I say, as we scramble through the storeroom and out the back door, bursting into the cold night air. Jordan's hands twitch, and their nose bleeds a little bit, suddenly giving me a view of their vascular system. "Are you okay?"

"Shaping two spaces at once sometimes gives me a nose bleed. Don't question it," Jordan answers, the alleyway wobbling in front of us. Crossroads suddenly resolves into focus, I think as Jordan remembers that we're trying to meet him. He looks sweaty and uncharacteristically nervous but unscathed, grinning like a maniac - a sort of grin that I don't think I've ever seen before on him before.

"Brilliant. You two are insane." He pants, out of breath from running. His braids all bounce over his head while he rests his hands on his knees, and Jordan twists their fingers up, trying to figure out an angle that they could cut this alleyway at that follows their enclosure rule. "I hope you got some good information out of that, because all I could see was the future rapidly flicking between a firefight and a fucking dinosaur, and I'm just extremely glad neither happened."

"I don't think I've ever heard you say fuck before," I muse, leaning against the nearest dumpster.

"It's a special night. Come on, we need to get moving while they're still reeling," Crossroads says, while Jordan is still figuring out angles for their power.

"Huh? Oh, right, let's go, boss," they say, after a distracted moment to themselves.

"So then, Sam yelled 'People's Elbow' and fucking… atomic elbow dropped the bitch!" Jordan repeated excitedly to the conference call - the rest of the Young Defenders included, with Crossroads driving us home, situated firmly in the front seat. "It was so fucking prime."

"You're the one that made me watch all those old WWF recordings," I remind Jordan, nudging them in the elbow.

"Right, but what did you actually learn?" Rampart asked, his voice crackling through the phone line. Jordan leans against the window, staring outside as the fancy, compact buildings of Center City begin to give way to West Philadelphia. This isn't a surprise to us - Crossroads mentioned taking a big, circuituous route in case we ended up being followed, and it's nice to just… Decompress. I've had some stressful nights, but most of them were stressful from survival or stressful from overstimulation. Very few of them have had the misfortune of being both at once, like tonight was.

"Crazy motherfuckers…" I hear Crossroads mutter under his breath in the front seat.

"Okay, so," I take a breath, leaning in a little closer so I can be better heard. "There are three people we met there. Mrs. X and Mrs. H who I think we knew about, that's Mrs. Xeno-whatchamacalit, and Mrs. Heartstopper, we're calling them. Mrs. Xeno-durgle can do something with animals and mad science, she said 'mad science, bitches!', and she had a dog that was like… twenty five years old and double the size of any greyhound I've ever seen. And Mrs. Heartstopper tried to shut my heart off. That's her power."

"Dr. Xenograft," Crossroads mumbles. "Dr. Xenograft. She's… known to us. I guess she got recruited by the Kingdom at some point since she last got involved in supervillainy. Mrs. Heartstopper is new, though." He repeats, louder this time.

"And there was another guy who I'm calling Mr. T-Rex. I'm not sure how Sam figured it out, but he can turn into a dinosaur," Jordan adds.

"Oh, Sam's your name?" Blink asked, their avatar glowing on the screen. Jordan thumped their head with their hand.

"You know, if that was hidden information, you should've stopped me before I said it like fifteen times," Jordan drawls, pinching the bridge of their nose in annoyance.

"It's okay, I don't mind. Anyway, yeah, it's… Well, Mrs. Xenomorph or whatever mentioned something about her powers only working on animals, and being curious about if they worked on Mr. T-Rex, so, it's sort of just an assumption there. Crossroads, you said you saw dinosaurs?" I reply, shrugging my shoulders, not making too much a huge deal out of it.

"I was trying to figure out if it was a Carnotaurus or some other theropod. I guess T-Rex makes about as much sense as anything else," He answers. "But paleontology has never been my strong suit."

I nod. "So, that's what we're dealing with. Oh! Right, they have a code of conduct? Mrs. Heartstopper could say it by heart but the other two, I don't think they cared as much. Mrs. Heartstopper was really serious about the whole thing. She was real gangster. And their security guards were totally useless because they had us completely surrounded, which meant they couldn't shoot without hitting something else," I continue.

"Is that useful information?" Jordan challenges.

"I think so, actually! I don't think the security guards are as on-the-know. At least, maybe not all of them. But I don't really have any evidence to back that up," I reply, sighing and stretching out over the back of Crossroads' beaten-up old car. The puncture wounds on my hand have already started to fill up and finish healing themselves, while a fresh, new tooth is growing out of the gap that the old one left behind. I wince quietly as I poke it with my tongue.

"Hey, what did you throw at Mrs. Heartstopper anyway? You threw something at her. What was that?" Jordan asks.

I grin, showing off the gap in my teeth with my tongue. "I pulled one of my loose teeth out."

Everyone besides me groans in disgust, mostly exaggerated, except Playback, who cheers. "Fucking awesome! That's our Bee!"

"You're such a weirdo," Gossamer says, just loud enough for her phone mic to pick her up.

"Oh, I'm the weirdo for thinking the tooth stunt is cool but Bee's fine casually flinging her teeth at people?" Playback snarks back.

"Yes," Gossamer replies. The call goes silent. For at least a minute or two, filled only with the noise of Crossroads' car engine, old and greasy, whining for attention. I watch as Drexel's campus crawls by along curved side roads taken at a neat 25-35 miles per hour, in strict accordance to traffic laws.

"Well, this is all extremely valuable information. A basic knowledge of who we're up against gives us a huge advantage in preparing countermeasures, not to mention the fact that they barely learned anything about Bloodhound. Plus, I'm not sure it'll be easy for them to understand Safeguard's powers either. We have all the cards here. I think outside of a little public chaos, I would call this an unambiguous victory," Crossroads lectures, as we pull onto the highway and start going 65 the hard way back towards Tacony. "No broken bones or gunshot wounds this time, Bloodhound?"

"None, sir." I reply proudly, rolling over the phrase in my head. Unambiguous victory. After weeks of perilous near-victories, of bruises and dislocated joints and literal knives stuck in my literal back, it feels good to just… win for once. I catch Jordan smiling out of the corner of my eye, but I don't say anything about it. I could tease them about how it felt good to be a superhero, doing superhero things, instead of being a dark and brooding antihero, but for Jordan, I don't think much actually changed. I don't know if it's worth the ethics fight we'd inevitably have over it.

"Oh, Bee! Did you get the opportunity to use any of my gadgets?" Gossamer asks, after about ten minutes of near silence, outside of the old dadrock that Crossroads was listening to on the radio.

I glance at Jordan, and then at the phone on speaker. "Uh… No, I. I forgot my purse at the bar and only got it on the way out."

"Bee!" Gossamer yells, peaking the audio against a brick wall. "Come on, I worked all week on those!"

I flinch from the phone's speaker, laughing awkwardly. "I'll use them next outing, promise!"

"You better!" She harrumphs, to the quietly amused chuckling of the rest of the team. And Jordan.

Is Jordan part of the "team" now? Well… It's a little blurry. For now, they're a "temporary collaborator". And we'll cross the rest of that bridge once we get there.

By the time Crossroads drops us back off at our hideout, I'm about ready to pass out. The thing they don't tell you about regeneration is that it's exhausting. Or maybe that's all the running around I've been doing, and the elbow drop, and the overstimulation… either way, I'm ready to collapse. Jordan and I don't speak as they fumble for the keys. We just shuffle into the Wolfcave (trademark pending), take our respective couches, and collapse.

Jordan falls asleep before me, by inches. I hear their snoring, and it pulls me down under with them, bringing me into the black abyss. When I go, I dream about my teeth falling out, and then dying.

It's oddly comforting.