Oppenheimer –– the real Oppenheimer, used to spar with her back in the old days. He was strong, and his powers were so interesting to her. The way he could soak up so much energy – any kind you threw at him. A punch would only make him more powerful, a bullet wouldn’t do anything but ensure you a very painful night. Ira got stronger the more you tried to hurt him. And it made him a difficult foe to face.
She’s never tried to turn him to stone before.
She doesn’t know, really, if that counts as energy. Powers can have such strange limitations sometimes, and the weirdest things can work or not work, depending on who you’re facing. It was all semantics at the end of the day. It’s like a dance, figuring out what’s going to work and what isn’t.
But she gets distracted from her dance by Dark Wing, by Ozymandias. She catches sight of them, out of the corner of her eye. The two people she probably loved most in the world right now. The past and the future in the same room. Her past, and her future. The fight doesn’t seem like it’s going well. The bullets in the stunner doesn’t have any effect on Ozy, and she should have anticipated that. He was all decay, right now. His powers active because that was what someone else had decided for him. They had reduced him to this, to a tool, to the thing that could suck life away from the world.
She hesitates, only for a second. Oppenheimer seems pulled, he wants to leave, wants to follow after wherever Sam went. He won’t follow her now when she moves.
So she lets him go. She thinks they can find him later. And she can’t let Dark Wing get hurt. That’s the one thought in her head. To save them, to protect them, to not let Ozy touch them.
Medusa moves quickly, and reaches them when Ozy is reaching out to touch Dark Wing’s skin, to grab them by the neck.
She pulls Ozymandias away from Dark Wing by the half decayed fabric of his clothing. She pushes him away to make space between them, and puts herself in the middle. She’s ready to lash out, ready to turn him to stone in a glance. But when he straightens, he looks at her. And looks, and looks, and looks. Medusa hadn’t managed to push him far, too gentle as an instinct, unwilling to actually hurt him –– but she would, if she had to. If she needed to hurt him to save Dark Wing, she would do it.
He shifts towards her, ragged movement for a second, and her breath sticks in her chest. He looks the same. Practically the same as the last time she saw him. With his beautiful face, and his kind eyes. There was feeling behind them now, but it was a distant and unknowing kind of feeling, it wasn’t right. Still, she doesn’t move away when he shifts towards her. Better for him to focus on her than Dark Wing. And she doesn’t move away either, when he reaches up, when his hand hovers over her cheek. Delicate fingers make contact, and nothing decays.
So she reaches up and touches him too. A goodbye, in a simple press of her hand against his chest. “Ozy.” She says, a whisper. And then: “It’s okay. It’s all okay.”
“I’m gonna take you home, it’s okay.”
cw: violence, neck snapping, zombie death, blood
It all happens so quickly. One moment they’re looking over to Katherine, checking to see how she was faring in her own fight, and the next she’s standing between them and Ozy, trying to protect them from her former lover’s decaying touch. Even though they know she was far stronger than them, they can’t help but feel their heartbeat pick up when they see Ozy reach for her, his hand ghosting over the curve of her cheek before it finally touches it. They nearly jerk her away from the touch, but she seems confident Ozy wasn’t going to hurt her, and in the end her confidence seems to pay off.
It isn’t until that realization hits, that the Ozy standing before them now had regained some fragment of his humanity, do they realize this was their window to finally subdue him. Stepping away from Katherine, they slowly walk over to where their stun gun lay on the ground, and look over to her briefly to make sure she was okay with them doing what they were planning to do next. Once her confirmation is given, they carefully step behind Ozy, whose attention was so stolen by Katherine, he didn’t seem to register what Malik was doing in the interim since Ozy’s eyes locked with Katherine’s.
Looking over to her, they check one last time that she was ready for what was to come next, before they fire two shots into Ozy’s side. He drops instantly at the second shot, and Malik swoops in to help catch his weight before he hits the floor. Once Malik has a good hold of him, he looks back up to Katherine, their lips turning into a weak smile now that their grisly task was completed.
“We should head-”, they begin to say until suddenly they’re interrupted by the sounds of fighting from out in the hallway. They wonder briefly if it’s Covert, but the fight sounded far more brutal and heavy-handed than one they would have expected Covert would have found himself in.
Still holding on to Ozy, they brace for whatever battle would soon find its way to them, as the sounds of the brawl grow closer. Soon enough, a body comes crashing through the door, it’s form rolling into the room. They don’t recognize the person at first, although their costume screamed 80s superhero. It’s just as the body begins to stir, when suddenly the doors swing wildly open again, and a blur of motion races into the training room and towards the undead hero.
The resulting collision ends with the sickly crunch of bone as the blur of motion slows to reveal V, and his foot coming down hard on the hero’s neck while his hand gripped their head upright, resulting in the hero’s body going limp immediately.
It’s a shockingly violent sight, despite the nature of the night so far. But it wasn’t the violence necessarily that was shocking, more so the person dealing it. They’d seen V fight before, and knew he used his speed to make his blows particularly devastating, but this violence was far beyond what they’d ever seen him display before.
V doesn’t seem to notice they’re in the room at first, as he doubles over to catch his breath. He looks like absolute shit, his hair sticking to his forehead, drenched in sweat, and his clothes were splattered with blood in varying places. He looks like he has had to fight tooth and nail through every floor of that place just to get as far as he’s come.
“V” They say after a moment, quietly so as not to alarm him too much.
They can see V’s shoulders sag the moment he hears their voice, before he turns to look at them, revealing his face half splattered with blood as well. HIs shirt had been cut open on various spots too, as though someone had come at him with a blade, he seemed to have a few slash marks from the weapon used, but nothing looked too serious, thankfully.
V looks between the three of them breathlessly for a moment, gaze drifting from Malik, down to Ozy, and finally over to Katherine before he lets out a shaking breath. They wish they could give him more time to collect himself, they’d known V for a decade now, and could see how much he was fighting off not falling apart at the sight of his salvation. But that has to wait until later, and knowing V, they know he’ll understand.
“Can you help me carry him?” They ask instead, before nodding their head down to Ozy. They’re only halfway through the question though before V begins walking over beside them and slings one of Ozy’s arms around his neck.
“The way back to the elevator should be clear,” he says quietly before looking over to them, and gives their arm a small squeeze as they help redistribute Ozy’s weight.
Once they and V have secured Ozy between them, they look over to Katherine, letting her know they were ready to follow her out of the building and back to the meet-up point.
