It was stupid. The whole thing was fucking stupid. There were two pigeons yelling at each other out the window, the neighbor’s wreath thing she’d hung on the fire escape (who hung wreaths for Halloween?) was shaking the metal platform trying to knock itself loose for some reason or another, and there was a ghost trying to sweet talk its way into the apartment across the hall because it was too polite to just phase through the door. The whole thing had Robbie distracted, not thinking straight.
So when the broom started floating, he’d reached out to grab it with the intent of putting it back on the ground.
Only he forgot, apparently, that he had shit luck and that the world was intent on hitting them with the stupidest apocalypse he’d ever seen. So, one minute he was grabbing the broom to keep it from flying off and the next, he was twenty feet up in the air, clinging to the thing for dear life while Daisy looked up at him from the ground below. Robbie ground his teeth together, jaw tightly clenched and knuckles white around the broomstick.
“Are you seriously pulling the ‘I told you so’ shit right now?” He yelled down gruffly, swallowing as he glanced down. The thing was getting higher, and his stomach felt like a vice with how tight the knot there was. “Can I — Are you fucking with me? I’m a hundred feet in the goddamn air, Daisy. Just because I’ve got a healing factor doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt when I break every bone in my damn body.”
We would not break every bone, the Rider piped up. You are being dramatic. Let go, Reyes. If you control your landing, you can get away with only shattering your legs. I could have them fully healed in hours, at the most.
“I didn’t fucking ask you,” he grumbled under his breath. “We’re not letting go. We’re not breaking my legs.” Louder, so that Daisy could hear him, he added, “You’re not catching me. I’m pretty sure I’d break your neck, Johnson. Can’t you — I don’t know, get the broom down?”
“I didn’t say it like that!” Daisy tried to defend at first, but then she slipped back into a smile, crossing her arms as she put a hand over her mouth, trying to hide the absolute joy in her face at watching this all go down. “But I did tell you so.” If she was going to get in trouble for saying it — she might as well really say it, right? Shifting, she looked up at him, wondering if she should complement the view or not. Chances were, no matter what she said, he’d get even more pissed. So, she was happy to let him hover in the air for a while longer, laughing as he tried to figure out how the hell he was going to get down.
“Is this the part where I’m supposed to tap my foot and ask if you’ve learned your lesson? Maybe don’t touch magically imbued items because you think you’ve got a handle on it?” Daisy grinned, trying to hold in another laugh. “Get it? Handle?”
She hadn’t considered that he might actually feel everything on the way down., She had always assumed that the Rider had taken the brunt of anything, that whatever Robbie felt was just an echo of the reality. “Okay but you’re not taking into consideration that I could totally dampen your fall. If I can make myself fly across the city, then I can definably slow your fall.” She thought about it for a moment before shrugging and adding quietly: “In theory, at least.”
He was arguing with himself up there. The Rider must have said something to set him off because he looked just as annoyed as ever. Reminded her of the way he looked at her when she first showed up at his place of work in LA. That quiet anger that was on the edge of exploding. The Rider must have agreed with her.
“Don’t be a baby, Reyes.” Because taunting him was clearly the solution. “And I’m sure I could. But that requires more… finesse.” And Daisy was more of a baseball bat than she was a scalpel. “Jumping is your best bet. And I’ll slow the fall with a cloud of controlled vibrations.” She was bullshitting him, but there was a chance she could — and if she couldn’t? He’d heal.
