Blog of a Teenage Superhero

Chapter Thirteen: What Comes Around...

First things I do when I wake up: roll over and vomit. With my splintered ribs, I'm lucky I don't spit up a heart-valve. Masquerade squats over me. His mask is dented where I clocked it, that upturned, slender grin sneering down at me. He clenches his rope. It's still glowing this bright red that hums like an electric sign.

Half of it is wrapped around my wrists, which are crossed in a neat pile on my knees and secured with a few hasty knots. I sigh at him. "I can break chain, you know."

"I know," he says, stretching one arm out far behind his head. He sounds like a grumpy kitten. "You okay?"

My mouth is filled with the taste of bile and blood. The warehouse around me is warped, the edges of my vision edged with white. The chains sparkling, the reek of acid fumes burning. I wink one eye shut, my skull pounding, pounding, pounding like there's a spike driven through my brains. "Hmm," I say with a shuddery laugh that shakes every fiber of my tentative being. "Death Warehouse, tied hands, uh, no. Stand back, please?"

"Hmm," he copies, free hand stroking his chin. The dread is palpable in me, this thick sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I shudder with each breath. It hurts. Like my own ribs are tightning inside me, crushing me under the seams. It occurs to me I might be in serious trouble. Like, hospital trouble, internal bleeding trouble. To this, I can only shrug. "Onyx, I'll tell you right now, I don't want this to happen to you. The others had it coming, but you..."

"Hmm?" I arch an eyebrow under my sweaty mask. 'Hmm,' has become the one word I can rely on in this travesty. It hurts less than a sentence, and it sounds vaguely defiant if I make it. I stare over his head, working out the mental math as the fog settles.

 I couldn't have been out for more than a few minutes, not enough time for him to move me out of the warehouse, just enough for him to do a crappy job of tying my hands together. I wriggle my fingers and roll my wrists. Pshaw. This should be a pinch. Or at least, it would be if I could move.

"It's like torturing Robin. And not even Tim Drake, more like the Burt Ward Dick Grayson one from sixty-six, you know?" He flourishes with the one hand, nearly knocking his hood back with a wave of his pinkie finger. "You're just too cheesy."

I used to have a cat I would talk to. A lot. I didn't have any friends, okay? And this, this is how you talk to a cat. Disjointed rambling. Awkward monologues. Expecting silence, but pretending you're having a conversation.

I get fancy with a "Mmm-hmm." His voice is familiar in that way I can't place, but deeper now. I cock my head to the side, listening for the awkward pauses, the skips in his speech like scratches on a record. He must be talking into something, a voice muffler, perhaps, because his breathy "purring" is gone. Now his voice is remarkably even, the phrases clipped, mechanical. It's less awkward, at least.

The hooks wobble and clink, rubbing against each other with the low squeal of tarnished metal. They'd be pretty if you ignored the brown splatters on the hooks. Which I can't. Red was here. Red was hurt here. 

"I tell you what," Masquerade says with a flick on the side of my mask. "You just leave, okay? You don't tell a soul what you saw."

"And what's in it for you?" I ask with a sidelong glance at the ropes. Tears burn on my lower eyelid. The extra five words draw so much air the pain reignites in my side. Like, like a steel claw is digging through the long white bones inside, wriggling through the soft flesh. Doesn't add any fresh material to the I'm-a-hero-who-knows-what-she's-doing campaign, for sure.

"Well, I drowned a girl a day ago." His head tilted, the top of his hood flopping forward, he offers a small shrug. I can just make out a few wisps of hair peeking out over his mask. It's darker than I remember it. I'm so caught up in memorizing every detail, the scratches over his left eye, the grit streaked over the bridge of the mask's non-existent nose, the sickly slow way he breathes when he runs his fingers over the imprint of my knuckles on the wood. Plastic? I hardly notice his reference to me. And even when it clicks, I'm not scared. Can't find any molecules in my body that aren't knocked up so high on my pain they contain the capacity for actual caring.