Chum

“I hate to tell you this, girls, but being really cool and threatening isn’t a crime yet,” Safeguard says, positioning their hands in front of their face in a way sort of loosely copying a boxing stance, but not curled into fists. “Once I actually hit you it’s fair game, obviously, but would one of you two mind terribly swinging first so that I have an easier claim to self defense?”

“Eat my shorts,” I bark back, while Gale is busy prying off Mudslide’s soda-soaked brown paper bag and tossing it into the garbage. “Do you think I’m that easy to provoke?”

“You’re wearing a wolf costume, so I figured it was a fair bet. What about you, telekinesis girl? Can you swing first, please?” Safeguard yells past me and at Gale.

“A little busy here, goth boy. Right now, you’re just a pest, not a criminal,” She yells back over her shoulder, spending most of her energy keeping Mudslide held aloft and squirming rather than let him touch the ground and use his powers. I was a little worried he’d be able to use them without contact, like Gale, but it seems more and more likely that he needs to at least be able to touch a solid surface to embed people in it. Without that, he’s just helpless.

“Can you keep a handle on Skidmark?” I ask.

“Yes, ma’am. Just be careful. Your job is to protect people and apprehend criminals, not get into slap-fights,” Gale responds. My face twitches a little at being called ma’am, and I focus my attention back on Safeguard.

“You sure I can’t get you to swing first, charge at me, maybe do something that implies you intend to cause me harm? It’d make this go a lot faster!” they yell back at me. “Not a boy, by the way!”

“No, I’m just going to stay here until the police get here, and let them take care of you. Got it?”

Safeguard squeezes their fingers together. “Shame.”

The floor rushes out from beneath me, getting pinched tight like paper being folded, retracting into itself like a bad special effect. Safeguard is in my face before I have time to really react, but their punches aren’t exactly strong or fast, and I step back before it can actually land in my face. “Good reflexes!”

I take another step back and steady myself. “Thanks. Hey, Gale, they swung at me, can I beat them up now?” I ask over my shoulder. When a response doesn’t come, I peek backwards only to be greeted by a sea of aisles stretching so far in the distance that Gale and Mudslide aren’t even visible anymore, or the windows at the front of the Walgreens. A fist connects with my mask and sends me one more step backwards.

“You’re getting distracted!” Safeguard taunts me. I can’t help the frustrated noise that resembles a growl from working its way up my throat as I impotently swing back at the empty air – Safeguard is already a meter away without moving an inch. “What did you say your name was, again?”

“Don’t toy with me. This is serious.”

“Is it? This is just practice for me. It’s hard to find a teacher that can keep up.”

I start running, something I’m very good at. My cleats don’t have great traction on the thin carpet that delineates the convenience store from the pharmacy, but I can still tell I’ve got the superior physical condition between the two of us. It’s only when I’m running for five seconds without making any progress that I stop. “Come on. Can you just do that forever?”

“Not sure. Wanna keep running and find out?” they reply, so I grab a can from the nearby shelf and slug it at them. It goes sailing through the air, getting a sudden burst of acceleration as they close the gap between the two of us, and I don’t waste time, running up behind it with my fists clenched. Safeguard closes the space, and the can bursts into a cloud of ash right before I tackle them onto the ground, sending them skidding along their back. They wave their hand in front of their face. “Clever.”

“What the hell was that? Why can you disintegrate things, too?” I ask, fumbling around my waistband for a zip-tie. “Shit,” I mumble, looking around the aisles for something I can actually tie them with, while Safeguard pushes at my chest to try and get me off of them.

“My powers can’t make proper duplicates of objects. They tend to dissolve into ash at the slightest provocation. Are you going to handcuff me, or what?”

I would be feeling extremely embarrassed if there was anyone around to watch this blunder, but the Walgreens is still swollen like a fat tick or blown-up balloon, so it’s just them, me, and the aisle. “I’ll let you go if you promise to go home and stop trying to cause problems on purpose in public.”

“I prommy, officer,” they say. I narrow my eyes through my mask, and lift my knees, but I keep my hands on the ground in case I need to grab them. “I’m serious! Obviously you can keep up with me. We’ll call it a sportsmanlike draw.”

Slowly, I pull myself off from on top of them. I keep a hand on their arm and just as slowly help them to their feet. “You’re lucky I’m a good guy and that all the stuff I said to that other dude was a fib.”

“A good guy, lying? Perish the thought. I was in the bathroom, by the way. I couldn’t hear shit,” They reply, putting one hand on top of my own. “Let me go, now?”

I keep my hand on their wrist. “No, given the fact that you just tried to provoke me into a fight, I think what we’ll do is that I’ll escort you to the front where Gale is, the police will get here, I’ll tell them that you were an amateur hero trying to help us out, and you won’t cause any more problems. I’m being nice here,” I lecture, puffing my chest out and trying to sound professional, trying to channel Puppeteer and Liberty Belle the best I can.

“You’d do that for little old me?” Safeguard says, their hand curling up to grab my wrist from beneath. “That’s too sweet.”

“It’s what heroes are supposed to do. Show mercy and stuff like that,” I reply, straightening my back.

“And get duped.”

Even though Safeguard is scrawnier than I am, something I can feel in their pencil wrists, I won’t pretend they haven’t practiced fighting more. I don’t know what they just did with my wrist, but it went from them being in the wristlock to me, and then them throwing all their bodyweight in shoving me against the shelf. Once my face is in between two cans of soup, I get the extremely unpleasant experience of watching the aisle stretch out into the distance, and, along with it, fabricating dozens of fake cans of soup that immediately impact my face before exploding into a cloud of ash. It would be almost comical if it weren’t happening to me, a rhythmic lineage of soup cans clankclankclankclankclankclank-ing against my mask until it starts giving me a ringing headache and I’m forced to let go.

Safeguard goes sailing away, not even needing to move as I’m pulled along with the growing aisle once they’re no longer touching me. The clouds of ash float by with huge, big flakes like leaves that quickly break down and crumble into smaller and smaller stages, before decaying entirely into a thin, grey mist. I grab my head and pull myself out of the aisle, stumbling a little bit as I try to right myself. “That was a dirty trick! And definitely assault!”

“Being a superhuman isn’t about being strong, fast, or durable, wolf-girl. It’s about being clever. No matter how strong your powers make you, and I bet they make you pretty strong, you’ll lose every time to someone who’s mastered every facet of their powers,” Safeguard lectures me from yards away. I get into my best idea of a boxing stance as the ground beneath me snaps back to put us in swinging range of each other, throwing my punch mid-movement, only to come up with nothing but air as Safeguard bends down into a stomach-height shoulder tackle. “Even if all they can do is control a single grain of sand at a time,” they grunt, trying to make sure I’m pinned down with all of their body weight. One of their hands is pressing my face against the ground, and the other is trying to hold down one of my wrists, while my one free hand is trying to throw them off of me.

Then the pain comes.

An activity I wouldn’t recommend is “applying a cheese grater to your face”. I’d imagine that hurts. Another activity I wouldn’t recommend is “grinding your face against a carpet until it hurts”, which I imagine is similar to the sensation of the cheese grater in some respects. There’s only narrow slivers of skin visible from between my mask pieces and my face, but my ear and the entire side of my jawline is unprotected, as is my neck and hair. So, when Safeguard begins repeatedly expanding and contracting the carpeted floor beneath us, one could understand how my immediate impulse is to start screaming – one that I bite back, even as I feel the skin on the side of my face opening up and beginning to get friction burns. My hand manages to make contact with the collar of his costume, and I kick up with my entire body, abs and all, to throw him heels-over-head and get him off of me.

“Shit, that hurts,” I bite out to nobody in particular. I clap my hands together and shove my index finger’s knuckle into my mouth to try and make sure I don’t yell. I keep thinking why it might not be a good idea – I could get backup from Gale if I scream loud enough, but then she might not have the energy to handle helping me and restraining Mudslide – and the nightmare visions start back up. Worst case scenario, we lose control of Mudslide, Safeguard does something stupid with their powers, we all get buried six feet under and die? No, no, not happening. Nightmare visions over. I have to stop this myself. I bite down on the back of my finger, scraping it with the edge of my teeth, worrying the uncovered fingertips with my canines. “Is that the only trick you have? Cheese graters?”

“Oh, you want more tricks?”

“Yeah! Show me how clever you are!”

Safeguard giggles. I hear them mumbling something about bait, and bite down on my fingertips harder, index and middle. Then, space snaps back, and we’re in each other’s faces again. I’m sure Safeguard was expecting a lot of possible responses, since they seem like the kind of person who tries to ‘plan for everything’. I’m sure none of those plans involved me spitting.

I spray a fine mist of saliva laced with my blood onto their cloak as they try to tackle me again, not even bothering to dodge. I grab their collar again and watch as their silhouette blooms in my mind’s eye while my blood soaks into their stupid cape. “That’s disgusting. Can’t even fight properly anymore?” they try to taunt.

“No, I just needed my blood on you,” I reply, before twisting my entire body at the hips and wrenching them into the shelves, slamming them against the soup cans. They stumble sideways and quickly make distance while I get to my feet and wipe my knees with my non-bloody hand. It doesn’t give me any magic reaction time, or any sort of substantial physical advantage, but it does remove one thing that I hadn’t even considered until now. Safeguard’s big, billowy outfit, all black, has some sort of important tactical use – it disguises their movements, the way they’re moving everything besides their arms and hands. Underneath it, it’s much harder for someone like me to distinguish any motion in their shoulders, torso, legs, hips, neck. Plus, being able to tell where they are without needing to look at them offers some benefits, like letting me run away.

I think there’s a term for a fake retreat, but it doesn’t come to mind readily, as I look for the clearance aisle. Feint? That’s what I’m doing. I hope that I am allowed to cause some minor property damage in the process of apprehending a supervillain, because I’m about to, finding two plastic shovels with twine handles and just biting right through them to get to the twine. Thank god for summer clearance, but also, plastic tastes gross, so I can’t recommend anyone else try this if they need twine in a hurry. I can see Safeguard at the edge of my blood sense, poking, prying, afraid now that they know that my powers might’ve just started working. I pretend not to notice that they’re sneaking around, feeling my “radius” wobble and distort strangely as they try their best to get around me without me seeing.

I don’t care. I’m just harvesting twine, tying them together in quick shoelace knots, and getting a thin rope together. They should know better than to make a dog angry.

“What do you do with all that spit, wolf-girl? Is it going to explode in ten seconds? Does it light on fire?” They shout from behind the shelf I’m directly in front of. I watch them through my blood sense, continuing to break the dozens of shitty clearance plastic shovels they have available just for me to use. It’s not like anyone else will be buying beach equipment on mid-August. They’re climbing up the shelf from the other side. I pretend to not notice them peeking over the edge, assuming they’re going to try and squash me like a Mario enemy.

I wish I knew how to tie a slipknot, or something that I could easily hog-tie them with, but I’ll just have to be really fast.

The next couple seconds play out in what feels like slow motion. First, the shelf ratchets itself about twice as high. Then, Safeguard vaults over, hangs for a split second, and pushes off to try and land on me. Thus, I step sideways as soon as they let go, and let them fall straight down. It’s only about four feet, but I don’t want to get stepped on or let them get one up on me from any height, and as soon as they land I’m on them like butter on bread. “Fuck!” I hear them shout, bending down into a somersault and grabbing for their ankles while my hands go sailing over their head, ersatz rope in hand. “Right. Dog theme. Blood. You can smell me now,” they scuttle forward, popping back up and beginning to stretch the space between us again. “What an uncouth power. Gross!”

I grit my teeth together, feeling them interlock into a bone-hard mouthguard. “Bite me,” I snarl, lowering my head and charging straight at them. They step aside, shrink the space, and whoosh past me, beating a fast retreat elsewhere.

“No, actually, I think our time here is running out. It was a good fight! Maybe next time you’ll be more interesting,” Safeguard taunts me, beginning to run towards the back of the store. That’s weird – the back? Are they trying to escape out the pharmacy window or something? Either way, they’re not a fast runner, and they can’t get out of range of me fast enough as I grind my heel into the ground, spin ninety degrees, and grab hold of their cape.

They swat back at me ineffectually while I gain on them, skidding along the linoleum parts of the floor in my cleats like a skateboard skitching on a car. I gain inch by inch while they round corners desperately, trying to unhook me from their person so they can expand the space and shake me. “Get off of me!” They shout, trying to fling me into an aisle’s shelves, grabbing merchandise and trying to hit me with it. It doesn’t take more than a couple seconds of chasing before I can grab hold of their costume’s collar, so they stop moving and drop to the ground, sending me rolling and tumbling and wrenching my hands loose from their outfit. They step onto my stomach, then my pelvis, big, heavy boots pressing down into my hip bones, and flee into the bathroom once more.

I need to take a second to breathe. Pain rockets through me, and I can already smell the bruise preparing to form in my hip, where the thigh meets the pelvic bone. A groan escapes me, hissing and wheezing out, but I know that nothing inside has been crushed hard enough to bleed and start pulling myself up from the floor. “You already know I can smell you!” I shout. “Unless there’s some secret passage, going to the bathroom is just going to put you in a corner. I can wait here all night!”

I stumble towards the T-shaped junction that leads to the bathrooms – one boys, one girls, and past them, employees-only rooms. “Do you think I’m so shy I won’t go into the boys room to chase you?” I ask to their peeking face, helmet plainly visible through a crack in the bathroom door. They’re not even trying to hide.

I don’t need to charge into the bathroom. I’m just going to walk, taking it slowly – after minutes of scuffling and slapfighting, getting stepped on with their full body weight was easily the most painful thing they’ve done, and I don’t even think they really thought about it very much. I stand in front of the bathroom door, hands on my hips, rope in one hand, blood in the other. “There’s nowhere to go, Safeguard. You’re cornered.”

“So are you,” they say, and I try to turn around only to be met with solid wall, shoving me forward, much closer than it was a second ago. Safeguard grabs my ankle and yanks me into the bathroom, and I grab onto the door frame, trying not to fall and slam my head on something. The last thing I need right now is a concussion. I kick my foot out of Safeguard’s grab, and bring my knee up to slam it into their helmet with a satisfying krak!, sending them stumbling backwards into the bathroom stall. The back of their helmet hits the stall with a dull thud, and they go sprawling on the dirty tile floor, the bathroom door shutting behind me. “Checkmate.”

I want to say “what are you talking about?”. That’s what I intend to say, at least. The piercing sound of police sirens fills my ears as soon as the bathroom door clicks shut in its latch, and then the walls start closing in, suddenly squeezing me up against a sink and a urinal, with Safeguard pulling themselves underneath a bathroom stall, visibly squirming into it. I hold both walls, trying to force them back like this is some sort of mechanism and not space itself shrinking around me, and for a second I feel it – the resistance – so I assume there has to be some sort of physical component to Safeguard’s powers that can be pushed back against. But none of that matters when I’m struck with an overwhelming wave of nausea.

“I told you, I’m going to bring the ceiling down on you. I meant it,” Safeguard says, sounding serious for the first time as the ceiling starts lowering. “Did you think my powers only went one way? Bad assumption.”

There are many things that I would like to say at this moment. I would like to tell them to shut their trap, to stop lecturing me, to be quiet and go quietly. I’d like to tell them many things, but none of them are coming to mind as the ceiling continues shrinking on me, beginning to scrape my head, the sinks pressing up against the bathroom stalls. Metal strains against metal. I would like to say, and do, many things, such as turn around, open the door again, and leave.

Instead, I start screaming.