Blog of a Teenage Superhero

Chapter Thirty: Buyin' Time

Finn wriggles against Max's crushing hold. He thinks of Monet and of how helpless he felt in her an inescapable embrace, how she could've snapped his neck and spine with a quick squeeze. How awful, to know so viscerally that your fate is in the hands of another. Even if she loves you, and Max, Finn knows, does not love him.

He offers the boy a pet on the head, dragging his fingers through the flaxen brown hair with a few quick scratches. Max is bawling, his sobs like muted screams, his fingertips digging dents into Finn's bony shoulders. But Finn feels no sympathy because when he shuts his eyes, all he can see in heart-clenching clarity is Kai's face, the terror burning in his round black eyes. The way the boy held on to him when the henchmen yanked Finn from the car. How Finn's fingers just brushed the tip of his chin and how he wanted to tell him something...how much the boy meant to him...what he felt...

Max pulls away, slowly, eying Finn with the villain's usual calculating cold that once pierced through the gray contacts and made him look dead behind his mask. In the reflected light of his tears, his eyes look black. And Finn, though blood is dripping from the corner of his mouth and his vision is swimming, can piece together through the pain and fog that it means something bad. Something sickeningly wrong. He coils his knee to his chest and kicks Max once in the stern. In the next second, he drags the heel down the armor, slams it right below the leather belt buckle where the tread finds easy purchase.

The villain gives a high-pitched squeal of a yelp and recoils against the cabinets in a ball, gasping for breath. Finn only plays him a quick glance; there is no such thing as fighting dirty in a struggle against the kid who killed your best friend. Above the sink, he squints and finds the dirty square of glass that marks a window. Rain pings off the plastic frame, a hardly audible plink of drizzle now the clouds have begun to clear. He holds his wrists to his face, the cheekbone scabbed over from a scrape that had come from having his head shoved into crushed stone.

Panting, he crouches low on his knees and springs on to the steel sink, stumbling into the bowl with a resounding CLANG! The strainer at the bottom of the drain cuts his knees and pain tears through him like whiplash, his fingers struggling with the locks on the window. His heart heavy, his only thread clinging him to this reality and this desperate play at escape are five words: He will not break me. He owes Kai that at least, to beat this killer at his own game.

The window rises with a scream of stripped wood against corroded plastic. Desperation surges inside him so fiercely, when he reaches the rusty mesh screen out with his teeth. He scrambles clumsily out over the back of the house, his shirt torn against his belly and his skin pocked with small scars  that the wires leave as they drag against him.

But Max recovers quickly. Just when Finn draws in a lungful of the chill forest air, crisp with the fresh after-rain smell, hands pull him back by his coattails. The desperate boy wriggles and kicks and screams, so desperate he thinks his heart might explode if the villain won't just let go. Tears burn in his eyes. "You've taken everything from me! What else do you want?" The words sting and tear, but are, for the most part, useless.

Max pulls Finn back into the kitchen and flings him against the cabinets. The knobs dig into the back of his head, jarring a scream from him as he slumps back down to the tile floor, his hands useless to protect him from the senseless violence. His body curls instinctively into a ball on the floor as he lies shivering. He can't break me. I won't let him break me. 

Finn smirks, the edges of his lips pulling up painfully. "I hope you're happy." He tries to shrug, blood pooling in the crevice between his collarbone and neck.

As Finn trembles in a sniveling heap with that fake grin, Max realizes something about the haughty boy, how vulnerable he is, how afraid. The emotions surging to his head, loathing, hatred, hurt, pity. His hands are shaking, slick with sweat and stained with tears. How much of him is left? What happened to the kid who told Monet that he wanted there to be "some line you don't cross.'" Where is that line? Can he be redeemed? This thing he's become, who hurt everyone he loved, who finds enjoyment in seeing the suffering of the kid before him, who knows he holds his heart in his hand and wants to crush it.

Max is on his knees, considering this, knowing he can kill the boy, and that he will, while he wonders anyway if there's any hope for him, or if he's so far gone that this kid will only be the first broken by his hand. 

Finn twitches, slurring through a mouth full of blood: "At least I'll be with Kai...at least...at least..." He can't think of anything else to say. Sometimes courage falters. Sometimes people are scared, don't wanna fight, don't wanna die. Sometimes, in their perceived last moments, they allow the armor of cynical language to slip. They stop fighting the fear and let it crawl up all over them, realize it isn't funny. There's nothing sarcastic left to say. They see everything they could've been, the person they could've become, every last, stolen tomorrow.

Finn sees Monet. He misses Kai.

'Stop,' he wants to beg, 'please, let me go. I just want to say...just want to find him... tell them...'

I miss him. I love him.

Instead, choking on grief, Finn says, "Go ahead, and hurry it up, will you?"

Max grits his jaw, shaking. "I—I want to torture you."

Finn shakes his head, his breath holed in the aching hollow of his chest. A prisoner, both of this deranged boy and of his own body. "You're just putting it off..."

"Why do you want to die?" Max's eyes are wild. He seizes Finn by his fragile neck and slams him up against the pantry doors. Finn hangs, limp, his eyes watery and his expression vulnerable. He looks hurt. 'I miss him,' he thinks, 'I miss him.'

Feet away, grass crunches as it hits the floor. Max hears it a fraction of a second before the sputter of an engine and the crunch of sheet-metal. He opens his mouth to tell Finn how lucky he is, but the fear washes over him, an icy trickle through the hot, sweaty cushion of his costume. He pulls Finn of the door, harsh light bathing the kitchen in a sickly white glow. The boy kicks and cries and Max drops him. All the villain can feel at once the pain churning through him, layers of it, the strangled cry of grief in the back of his throat.

"Let's go, Masquerade."

His heart beats double time. The low, gravelly voice. The once familiar warmth. "Monet—"

Farther, from the living room: "Now!"

"Where's Finn?" asks a shaking boy's voice. Finn can't believe it, can't breathe. And then his eyes fill up and spill over with tears. Not of fear, not of grief, but of joy: pure and undiluted. He laughs. "I'm here!" he cries, lying prostrate on the floor. "In here...Kai...I'm..." He feels the cool brush of Max's cape before glancing Monet's scuffed sneakers.

"Finn!" she squeals.

And Finn, in his happy delirium, passes out.