Hey happy pride month! aroace representation should be treated with respect and a readiness to learn from those who aren’t aroace themselves.
There’s this habit in fandoms that contain aromatic or asexual characters to go “aroace people can still be in relationships and have sex” and then disregard their entire identity. Because yes, obviously we can, but there is more to those actions and intent behind them, and it becomes a wildly different experience for all parties than it would with an allo couple.
It’s annoying as a aroace reader to want to interact with those characters and then constantly be reminded that no one cares about us. It’s always a “right person” or a “learning intimacy” or changing their identity entirely, even when it’s canonical. And it becomes a running joke to me that when an aroace character is close to someone in media, their identity goes completely out the window in the eyes of the fandom. Because to be happy you must be in a romantic and/or sexual relationship, and they’re not allowed to be single.
It’s important to me that people understand this, obviously as an aroace person myself, but also because the perpetuation of acephobia and arophobia spurs from misinformation and misunderstandings. It also doesn’t help allos that we keep putting relationships above everything else, because then no one can be single and happy.
Im also not saying that you can’t ship aroace ppl with anyone else that is not my intent, just be more aware of if you’re accidentally perpetuating homophobia against the aroace community.
Its just stupid ig im posting this at 1am and may very much regret it in the morning
Summary: Being the youngest on the Z Team means sometimes you get overlooked, but how far would you go to prove yourself?
Pairing: Z Team x Teen!Reader
Warning(s): Blood, guns, implied human trafficking, unconscious narrator at the end
Words: 6,217
Note(s): This might be one of the longest things I’ve ever written
At this hour, the streets above felt abandoned.
Rainwater pooled in the fractures of the pavement, turning the broken asphalt into sheets of smeared orange beneath the flickering glow of old streetlights. Every few seconds one of the lamps buzzed violently, dimmed, then steadied again, bathing the block in a sickly, uneven haze. Somewhere deeper in the city, far below your feet, a train groaned through underground rails. The sound rolled upward through the concrete like distant thunder, low and hollow and endless.
The rest of the city still lived somewhere beyond this district. You could feel it faintly in the distance- sirens wailing several blocks over, the muted hum of traffic, music leaking from apartment windows- but none of it seemed able to reach this place. This section of the city felt stripped bare. Forgotten. Like the world had moved on and left these streets behind to rot quietly in the dark.
Cold drizzle misted through the air, fine enough to cling instead of fall. It gathered along the edges of your hood, dampened your sleeves, slid icy beneath your collar. Rusted chain-link fencing pressed against your shoulder as you crouched low behind it, staring toward the maintenance entrance across the alley.
The door looked older than the surrounding buildings.
Metal warped with rust. Paint peeled away in curling strips. Half the thing had been swallowed by shadow beneath a sagging overhang, and the weak security light mounted above it flickered just enough to make the darkness underneath seem alive.
Your heartbeat thudded hard beneath your ribs. This was a terrible idea.
Not “questionable judgment” terrible. Not “probably going to get yelled at later” terrible.
This was career-ending, hospital-visit, Invisigal-actually-strangling-you terrible.
You could already picture the look she’d give you if she found out. Arms crossed. One eyebrow raised. That exhausted older-sister disappointment that somehow hit harder than actual anger ever could.
And the worst part?
The thought of her being furious with you somehow still felt easier to stomach than the possibility of disappointing her.
Which was probably something you should unpack at some point. Preferably at a time when you weren’t illegally preparing to infiltrate a smugglers’ tunnel alone in the middle of the night.
You exhaled carefully, forcing the breath out slow enough to stop your nerves from spiraling, and pressed two fingers against the inside of your wrist. Your power answered almost immediately.
A low vibration spread beneath your skin, subtle at first before sharpening into awareness. Threads of movement began sketching themselves into your mind- not sight exactly, but presence. Pressure shifts. Vibrations through concrete. Heat dispersal patterns bending unnaturally through enclosed space.
Nothing immediately nearby. Good.
You slipped through the broken section of fencing and crossed toward the maintenance door, boots splashing softly through shallow puddles. Rust groaned under your grip as you forced the door open just enough to slide inside.
Darkness swallowed you the moment the door groaned shut behind you.
Not ordinary darkness, either. This was the kind that felt heavy. Suffocating. Thick enough that it seemed to press against your eyes the longer you stood in it. The faint glow from the street above vanished almost instantly, leaving the tunnel ahead as nothing more than an endless throat of black concrete stretching deeper beneath the city.
The air hit you next.
Cold.
Damp.
Dense with the smell of mildew and rusted metal and years of stagnant water trapped where sunlight never reached. Moisture clung to the walls in uneven patches, slicking the concrete with a thin reflective sheen. Somewhere nearby, water dripped steadily into a shallow puddle with hollow metallic taps that echoed far longer than they should have.
Deeper below, old drainage pipes groaned behind the walls.
A slow rattle passed through them every few seconds, like the city itself shifting in its sleep overhead. The sound carried strangely underground- sometimes distant, sometimes unbearably close- making it impossible to tell how deep the tunnel system truly went.
Your hand brushed the flashlight clipped to your belt out of instinct, but you stopped yourself before pulling it free.
Too bright.
Too obvious.
Light would travel too far down here.
Instead, you closed your eyes for half a second and let your power unfurl quietly outward.
The sensation spread through your mind like cold water slipping through cracks. Awareness stretched ahead of you in invisible currents, gliding through the underground maze faster than your body ever could. Edges sharpened. Distances unfolded. Empty corridors bloomed into rough shapes inside your head as your senses threaded through the darkness.
Your footsteps echoed softly through the narrow maintenance corridor, bouncing off concrete in thin overlapping layers that made the tunnel feel larger than it was. The flood system beneath the city sprawled endlessly beneath your awareness, ancient infrastructure tangled beneath newer construction in uneven layers. Old maintenance routes intersected with modern storm drains. Rusted service tunnels disappeared beneath reinforced concrete expansions added decades later. Like veins beneath skin.
Voices drifted faintly through the tunnels ahead. Fragments of conversation slipped through the darkness in uneven pieces, carried strangely by the echoing corridors.
“...last transport already moved-”
“Boss said one more pickup-”
“After tonight we reroute south-”
Your stomach tightened so suddenly it almost hurt. You were right.
The realization hit like a jolt straight through your bloodstream. Adrenaline flooded hot through your chest and limbs so fast it left you briefly lightheaded, your pulse kicking hard enough to feel in your throat. For half a second your mind raced ahead of itself- every bad outcome arriving all at once. Invisigal was going to kill you, if the smugglers didn’t first.
You swallowed hard and moved forward anyway.
Carefully.
Slowly.
Keeping yourself close to the darker side of the tunnel where the weak overhead lighting couldn’t quite reach. Water dripped steadily from exposed pipes above, cold droplets splashing against the concrete near your boots in soft rhythmic taps. The farther forward you crept, the louder the sounds became- boots scraping concrete, muffled voices, the hollow slam of metal against metal.
The corridor gradually widened ahead into an old junction chamber.
Massive support pillars rose from shallow runoff channels like the ribs of something buried underground. Weak maintenance lights buzzed overhead with a constant electrical hum, several flickering badly enough that the room seemed to pulse between light and shadow every few seconds.
And there they were.
Six people.
Armed.
Your breath caught silently in your throat as you ducked behind one of the support columns, peering carefully around the edge.
The smugglers moved with the casual confidence of people who thought they were alone. Heavy jackets. Waterproof boots. Guns hanging loose at their sides like they’d been carrying them long enough for the weight to feel natural. Two unmarked vans sat backed against the old drainage platform nearby, engines still ticking softly from recent use.
Crates were stacked beside them in uneven rows.
Large enough to hold equipment.
Or people.
One of the crates shifted suddenly, just once. A small movement from inside.
Your entire body went cold.
The realization hit harder than you expected. Something sharp twisted beneath your ribs, anger slicing clean through the fear that had been clawing at you since you entered the tunnels. The panic didn’t disappear, but it steadied. Focused. Burned hotter now.
You slipped farther behind the nearest support column, pressing yourself into the cold concrete until the dampness soaked through the shoulder of your jacket. The pillar was massive up close, thick with years of grime and mineral streaks left behind by leaking water. Rust-colored stains crawled down its surface like old dried blood beneath the flickering maintenance lights.
Slowly, carefully, you reached beneath your jacket and slid your tablet free.
The screen’s dim glow immediately felt too bright in the darkness.
You angled it downward fast, shielding most of the light against your chest before cautiously raising it just enough for the camera to see past the edge of the pillar. Your fingers adjusted the focus automatically despite the tension knotting your hands.
Record.
Timestamp.
Faces.
Vehicles.
Crates.
Proof.
That was all this was supposed to be.
Get evidence, and get out.
Across the chamber, one of the smugglers barked out a rough laugh that echoed harshly through the tunnels, the sound bouncing off the concrete walls in distorted layers. Another man grabbed one of the crates and dragged it toward the loading ramp beside the van.
The crate scraped loudly across the ground, metal against concrete.
And from inside, a faint thud answered back.
Your jaw clenched so hard it hurt.
The tablet camera trembled almost imperceptibly in your grip before you forced your hands steady again. You swallowed carefully, trying to keep your breathing silent as adrenaline surged hotter beneath your skin.
Somewhere inside one of the crates near the loading platform, something shifted again, followed by a weak, frightened cry quickly cut off like whoever was inside had tried desperately to silence themselves afterward. The sound barely lasted a moment. But the second it reached you, your entire body locked up.
A child.
The smugglers kept moving like it was nothing. One of them laughed while shoving paperwork into another man’s chest. Another kicked the side of a crate impatiently hard enough to make the metal rattle.
You felt something hot twist violently in your stomach.
Your thoughts crashed together all at once. You were alone, outnumbered. Robert would probably suspend you. You could get hurt, you could get someone else hurt.
But underneath all of that was one unbearable truth: if you walked away right now, you were leaving a terrified kid inside a box.
Your power surged before fear could smother it. One second you were crouched in darkness, pulse hammering wildly beneath your ribs.
The next, the tunnel exploded open inside your mind.
Awareness tore outward through the underground system in violent waves, racing through concrete, metal, and waterlogged infrastructure faster than thought. Vibrations flooded your senses all at once. Every shifting bootstep rang through the floor like struck drums. Every voice became a pattern of pressure and resonance bouncing through enclosed corridors. The groaning pipes behind the walls, the dripping water overhead, the rumble of distant machinery several tunnels away- suddenly all of it existed inside your awareness simultaneously.
The smugglers lit up inside your perception like moving fractures in the dark. Six distinct pressure points mapped themselves through the chamber with terrifying clarity, their positions constantly shifting as they moved between the vans and crates. One leaned against the loading ramp. Another paced near the tunnel entrance with restless, uneven footsteps. A third carried something metallic that clinked softly against his belt every few seconds.
Adrenaline no longer felt scattered. It narrowed instead, sharpening every instinct down into something cold and frighteningly efficient. The fear was still there- hot and vicious beneath your skin- but now it moved in the same direction as your thoughts instead of against them.
You slid the tablet silently back into your bag, careful not to let the zipper scrape too loudly, then lowered yourself deeper behind the support column.
Your eyes drifted upward.
The ceiling overhead was ancient.
Corroded support beams disappeared into darkness above the junction chamber, several warped from decades of water damage. Thick maintenance pipes snaked across the ceiling in tangled clusters, some vibrating softly with pressure while others leaked steady streams of water down the walls. Rust spread across metal joints in ugly reddish blooms, and one of the larger brackets overhead hung slightly crooked, bolts barely holding it in place.
Old infrastructure.
Neglected infrastructure.
Fragile infrastructure.
Your mind started assembling possibilities almost instantly.
A ruptured pipe would create noise, steam, and confusion. Collapsed debris near the loading platform could separate the smugglers from the vans.
Maybe enough time to get the crates open.
Maybe enough time to get people out.
The plan formed with alarming speed.
You spotted a rusted emergency valve mounted along the wall near the upper junction line. The old flood system connected directly to the lower runoff chambers beneath the platform.
If you ruptured the pressure line…
You slipped from behind the support column and sprinted low across the dark maintenance ledge toward the emergency valve. Cold air tore past your face as you ran, thick with rust and damp concrete dust. Your breath came hard and shallow, pulled tight in your chest but never allowed to break rhythm.
Boots struck shallow water pooled across the path, each step exploding into sharp, wet impacts that echoed violently through the tunnel system. The sound felt too loud- too exposed- like the entire underground world had suddenly been given your location in clear, unmistakable detail.
Immediately, someone shouted.
“Hey-!”
You slammed your hand against the corroded valve wheel and forced your power through the metal infrastructure around it. The tunnel screamed.
A deafening burst of pressure exploded through the old pipes overhead as rusted joints ruptured all at once. Water blasted downward in violent torrents from the ceiling, hammering the loading platform hard enough to send multiple smugglers stumbling backward with startled shouts.
Lights flickered violently overhead, and one shattered completely. Darkness swallowed half the chamber.
“What the hell?!”
“Pressure breach!”
“Grab the crates!”
You vaulted down from the ledge before your survival instincts could talk you out of it, landing hard against the slick concrete below. Pain shot through your knees immediately, but adrenaline drowned most of it out.
One of the smugglers spotted you instantly.
“There!”
You ran anyway.
Your power pulsed violently through the enclosed tunnels, feeding you movement patterns faster than conscious thought. You ducked beneath a swinging pipe before it crashed overhead, grabbed a loose metal cart with both hands, and shoved it directly into another man rushing toward you.
The cart slammed into his legs hard enough to send him crashing sideways into the flooded concrete.
You reached the nearest crate and dropped beside it, fingers fumbling violently at the external latch. Locked. Of course it was locked.
Gunfire cracked behind you like a whip snapping through the air. Concrete erupted near your shoulder in a violent burst of gray dust and shattered grit. The wall didn’t just chip- it blew out, spitting fragments the size of gravel and razor-edged flecks that rattled against your jacket and stung your exposed skin.
A hot sting traced along your arm where something grazed close enough to feel like a warning rather than a miss.
Another shout echoed through the chamber.
“Don’t let them get out!”
Your hands trembled once- just a brief, involuntary betrayal of nerves- before you forced them still. Your eyes began scanning the tunnel floor in sharp, searching snaps as your awareness flickered outward again, involuntary at first, your power brushing the environment like an extended sense being dragged across rough terrain.
Metal debris.
Your gaze locked onto it immediately.
A length of reinforcement rod torn free from the wall, jagged at both ends where it had snapped rather than cut. Rust bloomed along its surface in flaking orange-brown scales, and one end was bent into a rough hook from whatever force had ripped it loose. It lay half-concealed beneath scattered rubble near the base of a support column, as if the tunnel itself had tried to forget it existed.
You moved fast.
Boots splashed through shallow runoff water as you grabbed it, fingers closing around cold, rough metal. The moment your grip tightened, pain bit into your palm from the rusted edges, but you didn’t let go.
The smugglers were repositioning. Shifting like trained weight across the chamber, boots scraping and splashing through shallow runoff as they began to re-establish angles, sightlines, control. Their voices carried in clipped bursts- short commands, irritated confirmations, the rough edge of people trying to force order back into a situation that had just been violently disrupted.
They weren’t panicking yet.
That was the worst part.
They were responding.
Coordinating.
Trying to seal the cracks you had just blown through their operation in a matter of seconds, like the entire room hadn’t just turned against them.
Your breath caught halfway in your throat as the realization sharpened into something colder: freeing the crate wasn’t the end.
If you opened it now- if you forced the lock, wrenched it free, and let whoever was inside spill out into the tunnel…
They wouldn’t organize. They wouldn’t understand what was happening. There would be no moment of recognition, no breath to steady themselves, no direction to follow.
Only motion, raw, panicked motion. They would run.
Blind bodies stumbling into darkness they couldn’t see, pouring out into a narrow underground corridor that was already a choke point by design. Disoriented. Terrified. Cramped together in a space that turned every direction into a trap and every sound into something louder than it should be.
Straight into gunfire. Straight into shifting lines of sight. Straight into the hands of men who were already losing patience, already tightening their grips on their weapons, already looking for anything that moved wrong.
Your stomach lurched violently, as if something deep inside you had been yanked out of alignment and twisted into a new shape. For a split second it felt hard to tell where panic ended and instinct began, like your body had stopped agreeing with itself.
Your grip tightened around the rod until your knuckles whitened, as the weight of it grounded you, solid and unforgiving.
Your power surged outward again, more controlled this time: less searching, more mapping. Angles. Distances. Blind spots between support columns. The rhythm of footsteps. The timing of reloads. The brief, telling pauses where attention flicked elsewhere- seconds where someone checked a crate, adjusted a grip, glanced toward a sound that wasn’t there.
Slowly, carefully, you lowered your stance behind the column, keeping the rod angled at your side.
“Okay,” you whispered under your breath, barely audible even to yourself.
You’d been trained by people who treated the impossible like bad weather-annoying, sometimes dangerous, but ultimately something you just moved through.
Phenomaman, who could level buildings if he sneezed wrong. Coupe, who could end someone’s life in so many ways you couldn’t count them all. Punch Up, who could suplex a fridge. Waterboy, a literal human geyser.
And you’d stood next to them anyway. You'd trained beside them. Shared the same drills, the same impossible standards, the same suffocating silence before everything went wrong on purpose just to see if you could survive it. You’d failed beside them too- repeatedly, embarrassingly, in ways that left bruises on your pride long after the physical ones faded.
You’d been corrected mid-motion. Yelled at mid-thought. Dragged through simulations that broke your sense of time, your sense of direction, your sense of self, until everything blurred into collapsing scenarios and impossible choices made under pressure that felt too sharp to be real.
You weren’t them, you never were. But you’d been forged in the same fire anyway.
A smuggler drifted into your peripheral vision near the next support column- too close, too exposed. Half-turned, distracted.
He was shouting something toward the loading platform, voice sharp and irritated, trying to wrestle control back out of the chaos you’d already cracked open. His rifle hung loose across his chest, strap slack, muzzle pointed nowhere useful. Not ready. Not even thinking about you. His attention was fully forward- locked on movement that wasn’t you, on problems that weren’t about to end him.
The smuggler’s awareness resolved in your mind like a cone of blind focus, a forward-facing tunnel of attention so narrow it might as well have been a straight line. He wasn’t scanning. Wasn’t listening. Wasn’t even braced. Every ounce of his perception was pointed away from you, absorbed by the loading ramp, the crates, the noise of his own collapsing operation.
He had left a gap in reality.
And you stepped directly into it.
Three controlled steps. Close enough now to see the moisture on his jacket, the tension in his jaw, the way his finger hovered nowhere near his trigger because it had never occurred to him he needed it there yet.
Then you swung.
The reinforcement rod cut through the air with a low, brutal whistle.
Impact landed with a sickening, dense thud, metal meeting bone, not sharp enough to be clean, not soft enough to be anything but final. The sound didn’t echo so much as die in the space between the pillars.
His body reacted a fraction too late.
Then everything shut off.
His legs buckled without ceremony, knees giving out like they’d been unplugged from reality. He dropped straight into the shallow water with a heavy, uncontrolled splash, sending a ripple outward across the puddled concrete as his rifle slid off his shoulder and clattered uselessly beside him.
You were already moving before the body finished hitting the water.
No pause. No hesitation. No space for doubt to catch up.
The world narrowed into motion lines and angles as you cut across the edge of the chamber, slipping along the stacked crate line where the light broke unevenly between flickering fixtures overhead. Two smugglers stood there- too focused, too comfortable in their own system to realize it was already collapsing around them.
One of them was kneeling.
Hands buried in restraints, checking bindings with mechanical indifference, like this was just inventory and not human weight he was handling. The other stood a few feet away, scanning the tunnel with visible irritation rather than caution: jaw tight, rifle hanging in a lazy half-ready position, attention bouncing between noises instead of locking onto threats.
Your boots barely whispered against the damp concrete as you slid behind the crate stack, staying low enough that your silhouette never fully rose above the jagged edge of the cargo. The air here was thicker- metal, dust, old water trapped in wood and rust- but even that couldn’t mask the faint, involuntary scrape of the reinforcement rod against your leg as you moved.
But neither of them reacted.
Not yet.
Their attention was still lagging behind reality, still trying to assemble a coherent picture out of chaos that was already moving past them.
The kneeling smuggler first.
You came in from behind him without announcing yourself to anything in the room. The rod hooked into the side of his shoulder with a jarring impact that twisted his upper body sideways, yanking him off balance before he even understood he’d been hit. The sound he made was small- more surprise than pain- cut off immediately as you followed through.
A second strike.
It landed against the back of his helmet with a dull, collapsing force that drove his head forward and erased whatever control he’d had left in his posture. His hands spasmed once against the restraints he’d been holding, then stopped.
The second smuggler reacted a heartbeat later.
Too late to matter.
He turned, weapon rising, trying to force aim into a situation that had already moved past the point where aiming was useful.
You stepped inside his line of fire.
Close enough that the barrel couldn’t fully track you without dragging his whole body with it. Close enough that distance stopped being his advantage and became yours instead.
The rod came up fast.
It met his wrist with a sharp, ugly crack that echoed through bone and metal alike.
His grip broke instantly.
The gun dropped from his fingers, hitting the concrete with a hollow clatter that felt louder than it should have.
He stumbled back half a step, trying to recover, trying to reorient, trying to turn panic into action.
You didn’t give him the chance.
One strike.
Then another.
Controlled. Efficient. Finalizing.
His shoulders hit the crate stack behind him with enough force to rattle the contents, and then he slid down slowly, as if the strength had been drained out of him in pieces rather than all at once.
Silence rushed in behind them- abrupt, unnatural, almost violent in how complete it was. For half a second, the tunnel felt like it had forgotten how to produce sound at all.
Your chest rose too fast.
Then fell too fast.
Air dragged in sharp and shallow, scraping its way through your throat like it didn’t quite belong to you yet. Your heart hammered hard enough that it felt less like a rhythm and more like something trying to force its way out through your ribs.
Okay.
Okay.
Still breathing.
Still upright.
Still in one piece.
Still not dead.
The thought landed strangely- too simple for how loud everything inside you felt.
A laugh tried to surface anyway. Half disbelief, half pure adrenaline release, the kind that threatened to spill out without permission because your body had nowhere else to put the pressure. It rose in your throat before you could stop it, sharp and slightly hysterical in the back of your mind.
You swallowed it down hard.
Forced it back into silence where it belonged.
Your jaw tightened instead, muscles locking as you dragged the breath back under control one painful inhale at a time, holding yourself steady in the aftermath of motion that hadn’t quite finished echoing through your system yet.
Then your earpiece exploded into life- static tearing through the silence like a whip crack directly against your skull.
“Kid.”
One word.
That was all it took.
Your entire nervous system reacted like it had been yanked by a wire. Your breath locked mid-inhale, muscles jolting so hard you nearly lost your footing. The reinforcement rod dipped in your grip for a fraction of a second, and only pure reflex kept it from clattering against the concrete.
Invisigal.
Her voice came through again, threading itself through the static like a blade wrapped in silk. Low, furious, and terrifyingly calm all at once.
“…Please tell me you are not currently inside the tunnels.”
A gunshot cracked from deeper in the tunnel.
This one was closer than the others, too close.
Concrete detonated near your feet in a violent spray of dust and chipped stone, the impact punching a shockwave through the floor that rattled up your legs. The tunnel didn’t just echo it- it multiplied it, turning a single shot into something that felt like it had come from everywhere at once.
You flinched hard this time. Your body dropped low without permission, shoulders hunching as another shot followed- then another- ripping through the space where your head had been half a second earlier. The air itself seemed to snap and tear as rounds stitched across the wall behind you, carving bright, sparking impacts into old concrete.
Dust filled your vision instantly, thick and choking, turning the flickering overhead lights into smeared halos of orange and white.
Your pulse spiked so hard it blurred your hearing.
Another shot cracked, and you rolled behind the nearest support pillar, ears ringing as rounds slammed into it with dull, violent impacts that vibrated straight through your bones.
“Kid.”
Invisigal’s voice cut through the chaos again, sharper now. The calm was still there, but it had thinned, like glass under pressure.
“What is happening?”
“Contact- multiple armed hostiles,” you said, forcing the words through the pounding in your chest. Another shot punctuated the sentence, forcing you to duck lower instinctively. “I’m in the lower tunnel system. They’re engaging-”
A burst of gunfire cut across the corridor, forcing you further into cover as debris rained down in a stinging cascade.
You swallowed hard, then added the part that mattered most.
“-I need backup.”
A heartbeat of static passed.
Then Invisigal, quieter, dead serious now.
“Stay alive,” she said. “I’m coming to you.”
“Copy-”
The word barely made it out clean, you didn’t even get the chance to feel relief.
A gunshot cracked through the tunnel like a hammer hitting bone.
Your body moved before thought ever had a chance to form direction- pure reflex taking over, snapping you sideways on instinct alone.
A fraction too slow.
The shot found you anyway.
The impact didn’t feel like a single point of contact. It felt like something entering you, not hitting you- an abrupt, merciless violation of space and flesh that detonated through your shoulder and rewrote every signal your nervous system was trying to send at once.
Then the pain arrived:hot, immediate, and violently alive.
Not a clean line of injury, not something your mind could neatly place or categorize. It was force translated into biology: heat blooming outward in jagged pulses, raw pressure spreading through tendon and bone like something had driven itself through your body and kept pushing just long enough to remind you it could.
Your jacket didn’t matter. Your skin didn’t matter. Even the sense of “shoulder” stopped feeling like a coherent concept and became a collapsing point of sensation, overloaded and screaming.
“Kid?! Talk to me.”
Your body tried to fold around it, to cut through the pain with unconsciousness.
You didn’t let it.
A sharp inhale ripped through your teeth as you forced yourself back upright, vision still stuttering at the edges. The tunnel swayed slightly- lights smearing into warped streaks of orange and white- but you anchored yourself on instinct alone. Boot soles scraped against wet concrete as you dragged your weight into something resembling balance.
Another smuggler was already moving.
He came in from the right side of the tunnel, stepping over debris with a rifle raised higher now- no more hesitation, no more confusion. His posture had shifted completely: shoulders tight, weapon leveled, eyes locked on where you shouldn’t have been standing anymore.
He corrected for you mid-step. You corrected faster.
Your power snapped outward again, ragged this time, threaded through pain instead of precision. The tunnel flickered in your perception: angles, distance, motion paths- all of it filtered through a haze of screaming nerves and forced focus.
He was aiming center mass, but you weren’t there anymore.
You staggered forward instead of back- closing distance on purpose, turning his advantage into a constraint. The shot went wide, cracking past your shoulder.
Your good hand came up fast. The rod didn’t feel like an object anymore, it became an extension of the momentum already carrying you forward, pulled along by instinct and pain and the desperate clarity of survival. Your body didn’t pause to refine the motion. It simply completed it.
The smuggler barely had time to register the movement before you were already inside his space again. His eyes flicked toward you- too late, too wide, realization lagging behind action by a fraction of a second that suddenly mattered more than everything that came before it.
The rod connected with the side of his head.
Bone met reinforced metal with a heavy, sickening impact that traveled up your arm and rang through your shoulder even over the pain already there. The sound was dull and final, swallowed quickly by the tunnel like the environment itself refused to hold onto it.
His weapon slipped from his grip mid-collapse, clattering uselessly against the concrete as his shoulder hit the support pillar and failed to hold him upright. He slid down it in a loose, uncoordinated descent, leaving a faint smear of damp fabric against rusted metal before dropping fully into the shallow water at your feet.
For a moment, there was nothing but the tunnel’s damp breathing. Then, footsteps.
Fleeing.
They came from deeper in the chamber, beyond the stacked crates and overturned debris- fast, uneven impacts against wet concrete, splashing through shallow runoff with no attempt at silence. Whoever it was had stopped trying to control the situation entirely.
The rhythm was wrong for confidence, wrong for coordination.
It was the sound of someone who had decided that staying was no longer an option.
A crate shifted somewhere behind them as they shoved past it. Metal scraped loudly against metal in a panicked collision, followed by a sharp curse swallowed immediately by distance.
Then more running.
Harder now.
Faster.
The pattern angled away from you instead of toward you, retreating deeper into the tunnel system, boots hammering a desperate path through branching corridors you couldn’t see but could feel through your power, fractured awareness slipping past your grip as the figure widened the gap with every second. The sound grew thinner as it moved farther down the maintenance artery, footsteps bouncing off concrete in increasingly distorted echoes until they started to blur into the tunnel’s natural noise again.
The silence after the running footsteps didn’t feel like relief.
It felt like a vacuum.
Your grip tightened on the rod again without thinking, knuckles still white, shoulder screaming in dull, delayed waves that came and went like the tide. Your vision kept trying to tilt sideways, but you forced it back into place each time, blinking hard against the haze creeping in at the edges.
The crates were still there. Stacked along the drainage platform, half-lit by the flickering overhead maintenance lights. Some were marked. Some weren’t. All of them looked identical now: metal shells, dented corners, industrial locks bolted on like afterthoughts.
Each step felt heavier than the last, boots dragging slightly through shallow water that had started to feel too cold, too far away, like it belonged to someone else’s body. The rod hung in your hand, no longer a weapon so much as a tool you were too exhausted to put down.
The first lock came into view, and you swung. The impact rang out sharp and ugly in the enclosed space, metal screaming under force as the lock bent inward but didn’t fully give. Your arm recoiled on instinct, pain flaring hot through your shoulder, but you forced it again anyway.
Second strike, harder this time. The lock snapped.
A sharp metallic pop echoed through the crate as the mechanism failed and went slack, hanging crooked from the latch.
You didn’t pause to process it, you couldn’t.
You moved to the next one. Another crate, another lock, another swing, another strike.
Metal buckling under repeated blows, each impact vibrating up your arm and straight into your ribs. The sound of it started to blur together- metal-on-metal, dull cracks, the groan of forced failure- until the tunnel itself felt like it was made of breaking things.
Another crate, then another.
Each one a fight against metal, against pain, against the growing tremor in your legs that had nothing to do with fear anymore and everything to do with how long your body had been running on nothing but adrenaline and stubborn refusal.
The tunnel filled with sound in pieces: whispers, coughing, shaky breaths, the soft scrape of people trying to understand where they were without immediately understanding why they’d been there in the first place.
Your vision blurred.
You forced yourself toward the last crate you could see, dragging your feet through shallow water that suddenly felt like it was pulling you down instead of supporting you.
One more.
Just one more.
Your shoulder burned white-hot, then strangely distant, like it belonged to someone standing a few steps away instead of attached to you. Your fingers loosened slightly on the rod, then tightened again as if confused about their job.
You hit the lock anyway, it cracked open on the first swing.
Your knees gave out without warning. Just a sudden, total failure- like the signal between your brain and your body had been cut mid-sentence. Your weight dropped hard into the cold concrete, impact jolting up through your legs in a dull, distant shock that didn’t fully register as pain anymore.
The rod slipped from your fingers.
It hit the floor a beat later with a hollow metallic clang that echoed through the tunnel like it belonged to someone else entirely, someone standing farther away, in a different moment, in a body that still made sense. The sound rolled out into the chamber, bounced off wet walls, and faded too quickly to feel real.
You tried to inhale.
Your lungs didn’t cooperate.
Air caught halfway in, stuttering like it had to force its way through something thick and unresponsive inside your chest. The attempt left you suspended between breaths, stuck in the gap where breathing was supposed to be automatic and suddenly wasn’t.
The tunnel started to lose its shape.
Light smeared into long, trembling streaks. Maintenance bulbs flickered into broken halos. Concrete lost its edges, turning soft and uneven at the corners of your vision. Water on the floor stopped looking like water and became shifting reflections of everything and nothing at once.
Sound fractured next.
Footsteps, dripping pipes, distant movement, all of it collapsing inward and layering on top of itself until you couldn’t tell what was close and what was far anymore. Even your own heartbeat felt detached, like it was happening somewhere outside your body instead of inside it.
Somewhere distant, very distant, you thought you heard voices calling.
The ground met you fully a moment later, your body dropping the rest of the way down with a heavy, final weight that sent a faint ripple through the shallow water around you. Cold concrete pressed into your cheek. Dampness crept in from the floor, seeping through fabric, grounding you in a way that felt less like sensation and more like surrender.
The last thing you registered was the faint, scattered sound of children still inside the open crates- confused, alive, real- spilling into the tunnel air as everything else slowly went dark around you.
Summary: Being the youngest on the Z Team means sometimes you get overlooked, but how far would you go to prove yourself?
Pairing: Z Team x Teen!Reader
Warning(s): None
Words: 3,397
Note(s): There is definitely going to be a part two to this! Thank you for the request anon!
You sat near the far end of the long conference table, just outside the center of the room where everyone else seemed to naturally gravitate. The overhead lights reflected off the polished brown surface in pale streaks, sharp enough to sting your eyes if you looked too long. Beneath the table, your hands were locked together so tightly your knuckles ached, your thumb dragging restlessly over the same patch of skin again and again until it felt raw.
Your tablet sat untouched in front of you, the screen dimmed after minutes of inactivity. Fingerprints smeared the glass from where you’d been scrolling through satellite feeds, patrol logs, intercepted comm traffic- anything that might force this disaster of a meeting into something productive.
You had an idea.
Not just an idea, either.
A good one.
The kind that actually fits the evidence instead of the ego contest currently happening around the table.
You knew it was solid because you’d spent the last hour combing through timestamp discrepancies and overlaying patrol routes until your eyes burned. While everyone else argued over each other loud enough to shake the room, you’d been doing the actual work. Cross-referencing blind spots. Comparing heat signatures. Tracking vehicle movement patterns nobody else had even noticed.
The docks weren’t the target.
They were bait.
You knew that with near painful certainty.
But every single time you tried to speak, somebody louder crashed over your voice before it fully existed.
A fist slammed against the table somewhere to your left.
“The timing doesn’t line up-” Sonar argued.
“That’s because you’re assuming they came by water-” Prism interrupted.
“No, you’re missing the point entirely-” Flambae cut in.
The room folded over itself in overlapping voices.
You leaned forward just enough to gather your nerves.
“Actually, if-”
“Look, I’m just saying the docks are a distraction-” Robert insisted.
The words hit like a door slamming in your face.
Your jaw clicked shut hard enough to hurt.
Heat crawled up the back of your neck as your sentence collapsed unfinished in your throat for what felt like the fifth time tonight. You stared down at your tablet instead, pretending to reread information you already had memorized, while the argument kept raging around you without pause.
You were the youngest person in the room by almost a decade, and sometimes, it felt like everyone could tell. Not because anyone outright said it. But because every time you opened your mouth, the room somehow moved around you instead of toward you. Conversations redirected. Louder voices took priority. Decisions got made while you were still trying to find space to finish a sentence.
Your fingers tightened slightly around the edge of the tablet.
You hated that it still got to you.
Hated that some part of you kept shrinking every time it happened, no matter how many successful missions you’d gone on or how many times your intel turned out to be right. You worked twice as hard as everyone else just to avoid giving them a reason to look at you like a liability. Triple-checking reports. Memorizing patrol routes. Staying later than everyone else after briefings ended.
And still, moments like this made you feel like a baby again instead of a full-fledged Z Team member sitting at the same table as everyone else.
Across the table, you swore you could feel Invisigal notice.
She lounged sideways in her chair like meetings physically offended her existence. One combat boot rested against the table leg while the other tapped lazily against the floor. Her cropped pink jacket hung open over the black shirt beneath it, dark violet hair sticking out in uneven spikes like she’d cut it herself with a knife and boredom.
At first glance, she looked half-asleep, like she would rather literally be anywhere else. But her brown eyes moved constantly.
Invisigal acted detached from almost everything around her, throwing out dry remarks and cynical observations like armor plating, but somehow she still noticed things nobody else did. Who skipped lunch. Who was exhausted. Who was pretending not to shake after missions. Who kept trying to speak and kept getting ignored.
A pen suddenly flicked across the table from her direction. It skidded over scattered papers before striking a coffee mug with a loud, sharp clack that cracked through the room.
A few heads twitched slightly.
Nobody actually stopped talking.
Invisigal let out a long, theatrical sigh like humanity had personally exhausted her. Then, without warning, she planted one boot onto the lower rung of her chair and stood halfway up on it, balanced carelessly like she was about to deliver either a speech or a threat.
“Hey,” she said flatly.
The room barely reacted.
Invisigal’s expression deadened, then her eyes narrowed into something dangerous.
“HEY!”
The second shout hit the room like a stun round, voices stumbling apart mid-sentence.
“You people ever get tired of hearing yourselves talk?” she asked. “Or is this like a competitive hobby?”
A couple annoyed looks got thrown her way, mainly from Robert and Sonar, but she ignored all of them. Then she jerked her chin toward you.
“The kid’s been trying to talk for like five minutes.”
The silence stretched long enough that Punch Up finally muttered, “Right. Sorry.”
Your pulse hammered stupidly hard, but this time nobody interrupted.
“The warehouse isn’t the actual meeting point,” you said, forcing your voice steady. “It’s a relay location.”
Sonar and Waterboy tilted their heads in unison.
You reached forward and tapped your tablet awake, bringing up the route map.
“The trucks only stay there an average of eight minutes. But every route loops through the old flood tunnels beneath the financial district.” You zoomed in. “If they were distributing weapons, the warehouse would make sense. But they’re moving people.”
Flambae nodded along as you were speaking, and Prism mimicked him. You kept going.
“The flood tunnels bypass most city surveillance because the sensors were damaged during the blackout two years ago. If we intercept there instead, we cut off every exit point simultaneously.”
“…That’s actually solid,” Malevola admitted.
“Damn.” Flambae murmured.
Across the room, Invisigal smirked like she’d expected this outcome from the beginning.
“Wow,” she deadpanned. “Crazy. It’s almost like listening to people improves meetings.”
A few groans answered her.
She sat back down.
The discussion shifted after that. Focused. Productive. The Z Team started building around your idea instead of shouting over each other, and you tried not to stare too hard at the screen in front of you while warmth settled strangely in your chest.
The meeting finally unraveled nearly forty minutes later. Voices slowly peeled apart into smaller conversations as the Z Team pushed themselves away from the table in waves. Invisigal and Robert argued over vehicle assignments near the far wall while Flambae tried unsuccessfully to fix the coffee machine by hitting it.
You stayed where you were.
Seated near the end of the table with your tablet still in front of you, fingers moving uselessly across the screen as you pretended to organize files that were already organized. Opening folders. Closing them again. Scrolling without reading.
Mostly just giving yourself a reason not to stand up yet.
Because your brain kept circling back to the same moment over and over again no matter how hard you tried to focus on anything else.
Invisigal was chronically unimpressed with humanity as a species, but she also kept showing up.
The first week you joined the Z Team, she’d silently appeared beside you in the hallway after a disastrous training session and dropped a candy bar onto your paperwork without explanation before vanishing around the corner.
The third week, you skipped dinner without realizing it. You were buried in mission reports at one of the long after most people had gone home, eyes burning from staring at surveillance footage for hours straight.
At some point, a plastic container slid silently into your peripheral vision.
You looked up, and Invisigal was already halfway down the hallway.
“There’s actual vegetables in that,” she called without turning around. “Try not to look so betrayed.”
During your first field mission with the team, Robert handed out comm assignments too quickly and forgot to pair you with anybody. You noticed immediately.
And somehow that made it worse when you realized nobody else seemed to notice at all.
Not intentionally, nobody was being cruel. They were just experienced enough to fall into old habits automatically, and you were still new enough to slip through the cracks between them.
Before you could awkwardly point it out, Invisigal’s voice crackled through your earpiece.
“Kid’s with me.”
You were still staring blankly at your tablet when movement stopped beside your chair.
Invisigal leaned against the table, one hand in her jacket pocket.
“You alive over there?” she asked.
Her voice was lighter now without the edge she’d used earlier to shut everyone up.
You looked up too quickly. “Yeah.”
“Hm.”
Her eyes narrowed just slightly, not suspicious exactly- more like she was trying to see through the walls you kept instinctively building around yourself.
“You do that thing where you disappear into your own skull when you’re overthinking.”
Your brow furrowed immediately.
“I do not.”
“You absolutely do.”
Heat crept faintly into your face before you looked back down at your tablet again, fingers hovering awkwardly over the screen without actually touching it. The corner of Invisigal’s mouth twitched upward slightly, not quite a smile but close enough to count.
A second passed, then she reached out and patted your shoulder twice.
“There you go again,” she said. “Relax, kid. You did good.”
You looked at her standing there with her tired eyes and sarcastic mouth and battered combat boots and realized, with startling clarity, that somewhere along the line your brain had started placing her in the shape of something dangerously close to family.
An older sister.
The kind who acted annoyed while helping you anyway. The kind who complained the entire time she was covering your back but never once considered not doing it. The kind who noticed when you went quiet.
You stared at her for half a second too long. And Invisigal noticed immediately.
Her eyes narrowed with instant suspicion while one eyebrow lifted sharply upward.
“…Why are you looking at me like that?”
“No reason.”
“That’s a lie.”
“It’s not.”
“It absolutely is.”
She squinted harder.
Then pointed at you accusingly.
“You’re about to say something emotionally devastating, aren’t you?”
Despite yourself, a laugh escaped your throat. Beside you, Invisigal stared another second longer before groaning quietly like she’d just developed a migraine.
“Oh no. That confirms it.”
“You’re impossible.”
“Correct. But deflecting isn’t gonna save you now.”
You shook your head, smiling despite yourself.
“Good,” she said quietly.
You frowned. “Good what?”
“You smiled.” She shrugged one shoulder. “You don’t do that enough.”
Then, before you could respond, Invisigal suddenly drew in a sharp breath. Her shoulders lifted slightly with the inhale, and she vanished.
Even after seeing her ability countless times during training exercises and missions, it still made something instinctive in your brain recoil every single time. Your eyes kept trying to find a shape that no longer existed. Your mind kept insisting a person couldn’t simply stop being visible that completely.
A second later, her voice drifted through the room from somewhere behind you.
“Don’t let the others bulldoze you next meeting either, by the way.”
Invisible fingers flicked the side of your head lightly. You jerked in surprise, one hand immediately flying toward the spot.
Behind you, Invisigal snorted.
“You’ve got good instincts, kid.”
Something in your chest tightened painfully at the praise. Not because she said it loudly, not because she made a big deal out of it. The opposite, actually. Invisigal said it like it was obvious.
Like your instincts being good was already an established fact in her head.
You wanted her to keep looking at you like that.
Invisigal looked at you like you were capable of handling yourself. Like your words had weight. Like you weren’t just some nervous extra standing at the edge of a team far bigger and louder than you. Like you belonged here.
Like, somehow, she’d already decided there was a place for you beside her.
The realization hit hard enough to make you stare blankly at the table for a second. You wanted to impress her.
The same way younger siblings wanted older siblings to think they were cool. Competent. Worth bragging about when talking to other people. You wanted to walk into meetings and have Invisigal lean back in her chair with that smug little told you so smirk curling at the corner of her mouth because of something you figured out before everyone else did. The kind of expression that said she’d been right about you from the beginning. You could practically picture it- her boots kicked up against the table leg, arms crossed loosely over her chest, eyes sliding toward the rest of the team like she was waiting for them to finally catch up.
You wanted her to glance around the room with poorly-hidden satisfaction, like she’d known all along you were smarter than people gave you credit for. Like every dismissive comment, every interruption, every moment someone overlooked you only made her more stubbornly certain that they were wrong.
And God, you wanted to survive missions cleanly enough that she stopped drifting subtly toward your side during firefights.
Stopped unconsciously placing herself between you and open doorways.
Stopped lingering half a step behind whenever the hallway ahead looked too dark or too quiet.
You’d noticed it weeks ago. The way she always seemed to appear at your flank the second things got dangerous, moving with casual precision like she wasn’t doing anything unusual at all. Like she wasn’t quietly preparing herself to intercept whatever came at you first.
You just wanted her to feel like she didn’t have to anymore.
You wanted her to watch you hold your own against collapsing buildings, screaming civilians, ricocheting gunfire, and whatever impossible horror the city decided to unleash that week- and look relieved instead of worried afterward.
You wanted to see the tension leave her shoulders.
Wanted her to stop checking whether you were hurt before checking herself.
And somehow, worst of all, you wanted her sarcastic approval like it was a measurable resource your body had decided it needed to survive.
Every offhand “nice work, kid.”
Every quick grin she tried to hide behind sarcasm.
Every casual shove against your shoulder after a mission.
Every absentminded moment where she chose the seat beside you without thinking about it.
That was the problem.
Because Invisigal wasn’t easy to impress.
She treated almost everything with the same detached amusement or bone-deep sarcasm, like the world had simply run out of new ways to surprise her years ago. Explosions. Supervillains. Building collapses. Near death experiences. Team arguments loud enough to shake the briefing room walls.
None of it ever seemed to rattle her for long.
She’d brush ash off her jacket after a firefight with the same energy someone else might use to complain about bad traffic. You’d seen her walk out of a collapsing parking structure with blood running down one arm and still crack a joke before medical even reached her.
How were you supposed to impress someone like that?
Someone who could literally vanish whenever she wanted?
She felt larger than life in a way you weren’t sure you ever would.
Because your power- your power wasn’t flashy. No invisibility, no super strength, no crackling energy blasts ripping through concrete walls. You couldn’t fly above the skyline with your cape snapping dramatically behind you. Couldn’t punch through armored vehicles or dodge sniper fire like your nervous system existed several seconds ahead of reality.
Nobody looked at you and immediately thought superhero.
Your ability worked quietly.
You saw patterns, literally.
The moment your focus locked onto something, the world stopped feeling random. Your brain began processing movement, behavior, architecture, timing, probability, and spatial relationships at speeds that bordered on inhuman. Fast enough that ordinary people sometimes stared at you afterward like you’d cheated somehow.
You could watch pedestrians moving through an intersection and instinctively know who was about to collide, who was armed, who was nervous, who was lying, who was watching exits instead of storefronts. You’d look at a room and somehow know which object someone would reach for in a panic. You could memorize building layouts after one glance. You noticed weaknesses in security routes, blind spots in surveillance systems, inconsistencies in witness testimony, structural stress fractures in walls, escape patterns, timing windows.
Conversations unfolded like branching diagrams in your head. Tiny facial twitches. Delayed responses. Eye movement. Breathing patterns. Weight shifts.
Once, during a bank robbery, you identified the exact support column a panicking gunman was most likely to shoot through based purely on his angle, stance, and tunnel vision under stress. You warned the Z Team before it happened, which was enough to save a civilian who would’ve died otherwise.
.
Another time, you tracked a serial arsonist across six city blocks because you noticed the burn patterns subtly favored buildings with older copper piping and east-facing maintenance access.
When your power fully engaged, connections stopped feeling abstract. They became instinctive. Immediate. Like invisible threads suddenly stretched between objects, people, movements, and decisions.
The Z Team joked that you had “conspiracy board vision.”
Invisigal once upgraded that description to “creepy little Rain Man Batman” after you correctly predicted where a getaway driver would reroute during a hostage situation. You’d laughed way harder at Invisigal’s nickname than you probably should have.
Mostly because she’d sounded so annoyingly impressed when she said it.
Your gaze drifted slowly back toward the tactical map still glowing across your tablet screen, pale blue lines cutting through the darkness of the display like exposed veins beneath skin.
The flood tunnels.
The relay routes.
The maintenance corridors threading beneath the financial district, the smugglers moving people.
Your eyes traced the highlighted warehouse from tonight’s raid, then followed the surrounding tunnel branches outward. Instantly, your mind started building movement paths faster than you could consciously articulate them.
If the warehouse was compromised, the nearest routes became liabilities. Too obvious, too exposed: meaning they’d relocate deeper first before resurfacing elsewhere. Except the deeper eastbound tunnel access bottlenecked near the river overflow junction-
Your eyes flicked sharply to another route.
There.
Three separate street exits, heavy nighttime foot traffic above ground, enough ambient noise to hide transport movement.
Your pulse kicked slightly harder. The realization settled into your chest with the sharp, dangerous clarity of a puzzle piece finally snapping into place.
The others would probably wait until tomorrow morning to move, the kind of plan people were supposed to make. But if your read on the routes was correct, the smugglers were likely already relocating after the warehouse got exposed tonight. Criminal groups adapted fast when operations got compromised.
You stood before your common sense could fully catch up and stop you, the legs of your chair scraping harshly against the floor in the otherwise quiet briefing room. Your tablet was already in your hands before the decision fully felt real.
You slid it beneath your arm and started toward the exit with quick, controlled steps, forcing yourself not to move fast enough to attract attention.
Your mind was racing far ahead of your body now.
The east maintenance sector entrance sat three blocks from the financial district perimeter. Locked officially, but the municipal access panel had outdated security hardware you already knew how to bypass. From there, the lower drainage corridor connected directly to the secondary junction network beneath Blackwater Avenue.
Close quarters amplified your power in ways people didn’t fully understand. Most teammates thought you were just “good at noticing stuff,” but underground environments turned your ability into something almost surgical.
Tunnels restricted movement.
Restricted options.
Which meant patterns emerged faster.
And if you brought back hard proof tonight…
Not theories.
Not projections.
Not another carefully explained possibility everyone politely nodded at before talking over you anyway.
Evidence.
Photos.
Routes.
Hostages.
Confirmed movement.
Maybe the team would finally stop treating your conclusions like educated guesses.
Maybe they’d stop speaking over you during briefings like your input was optional background noise.
Maybe Invisigal would look at you with that sharp, impressed little smile again.
robert “shut up dad!” robertson didn’t even know why the SDN had a child, or well, a teenager in the program. he didn’t like your attitude, how you treated the team or how you’d play the victim if you’re in the wrong. “but i’m just a kid! i don’t know any better!” bullshit.
robert “shut up dad!” robertson who was getting quickly sick of how you never ever listened when he gave directions. it pissed him off even more when you’d look directly into the cameras and stare at him while you went in the opposite direction. he can’t snap at a kid, but he was going to be at his limit soon. even other members of the Z-team were on their best behavior to avoid his wrath.
robert “shut up dad!” robertson who watched you eat alone during your lunch break. serves you right, you were constantly rude to everyone. that was his thought process before he saw you watching a kids show. he had to do a few turn backs before realizing you were watching shows meant for 3-7 year olds. he noticed the blue dog with her orange sister, running around together. he saw how you touched your phone screen, your fingers lingering on the screen.
robert “shut up dad!” robertson who remembered; you’re still a kid. there was a reason to why you were here, and he didn’t want to push you for an answer. it was obvious you didn’t trust anyone, hence why you had built this barrier to keep the others away.
robert “shut up dad!” robertson who would only private dispatch you, keep your line separate from the others. you noticed how much more quiet it was, and it made you feel less alone and anxious. he noticed how you’d listen more compared to being yelled at when he would call you along with the others.
robert “shut up dad!” robertson who had his break switched in order to sit by, or around you so you wouldn’t be completely alone. he saw how you’d stop watching your show around him, or play it from under the table with headphones. he thought it was progress one day when you had your phone out on the table, with the brightness on the lowest is could be.
robert “shut up dad!” robertson who was on the hunt for a lost beef before he spotted you by the janitors closet, holding beef in your lap. he tried to stay quiet as he watch the scene, you gently rubbed beef’s head as you showed him bluey. apparently you learned your show lets dog see colors, so you and beef were watching bluey together away from others.
robert “shut up dad!” robertson who nearly had a heart attack after he saw you come back from a mission with bruises and bandages all over your legs and arms. you tried to hide them from the rest of the team, you were successful at first until robert had came looking for you. he began scolding you instead of yelling, but that was enough for you to snap. you raised your voice before yelling “shut up dad!” robert was taken aback, some part of him wanted to continue arguing, but another part had his heart squeezing.
robert “shut up dad!” robertson from that day forward became a workdad. it wasn’t expected, but he can’t complain too much.
Righty o'tie it's that time again for me to write why Cassandra is the only correct answer to become the next Batman.
Dick- he became nightwing to escape the Batman name, and never wanted to feel tied to that cowl. He won't take it.
Jason- has so many moral convictions with batman's actions, but knows that batman should exist in Gotham. It won't be him. He won't take it.
Tim- would make a better Oracle over a Batman, honestly. He is far more a coordinator, like Oracle, than a lone being that has a team occasionally.
Damien- obviously, shouldn't get it but now he doesn't want it due to him leaving the vigilante life to become a doctor.
Babs, Steph, and Duke- one, none are Bruce's children so they wouldn't be a first thought, and secondly they have shaped identities outside of Batman so would rather have their own prodigies
Cass has the drive, the morals, the skill and the stamina. She was raised to become almost an antithesis to batman, but took it upon herself to reject that life and follow the morals and values of Batman. She also has a taimed hubris that no other batfam character has, bar Bruce.
And no, she wouldn't be Batwoman instead of Batman. Batwoman is Kate's moniker to hand over.
In Which: you’re still groggy from anesthesia when you arrive home after getting your wisdom teeth out
“Alright, watch your-” your dad barely catches you as you sway, dangerously close to faceplanting on the floor. “Jesus, don’t do that.”
“Sorry,” you mumble, eyes squinting as you try to get the room to stop spinning. “Floor’s wavy. ‘S like the beach.”
You gasp, turning quickly and nearly hitting your arm off the wall. You look at Hal, pulling out your puppy eyes—though in your current state it looks more like you’re holding back tears. “Can we go to the beach?”
“You can’t even walk a straight line yet, kiddo. It’s not like the beach is gonna go anywhere.”
You sniffle, your face conveying all the despair of a little girl being told she can’t have a horse. “You hate me,” you accuse, pointing your finger at him—though you could just be pointing at the wall, you’ve been seeing two of everything since you woke from the anesthesia.
Your father pinches the bridge of his nose, one hand on your shoulder to keep you steady. “Bug. I spent all day yesterday turning food into mush for you. I am not taking you to the beach for you to get a face full of sand ten seconds after we get there.”
“…did you make mashed potatoes?” You ask, reaching out to him.
Hal sighs, scooping you up and carrying you over to the couch. “Yes, I made mashed potatoes.”
“I like mashed potatoes,” you murmur, leaning your forehead against his cheek.
“I know.” He sets you down gently, rearranging the pillows to better support you and grabs the throw blanket from the end of the couch, covering you so you're nice and cozy.
“I’ll go get you some,” he says, smoothing a hand over your hair. “You just stay here.” He plants a kiss to the top of your head, making sure you're settled before disappearing into the kitchen.
Teen Villain Reader who is 17 and was a bomb expert who worked for Shroud since childhood because their parents also worked for the man.
Teen Villain Reader who was infamous for how WELL their bombs could work.
Teen Villain Reader who ends up in the Z-Team after the events of episode 8 bc Blonde Blazer thinks they can be set straight before committing to the life of crime in adulthood.
Teen Villian Reader inspired by Jinx’s off-putting demeaner. They wear a coat that's far too big with more pockets than necessary. Why do they have so many pockets?
Teen Villain Reader who kind of looks up to the different members of the Z-Team because THEY were once villains too. (Especially Sonar/Coupe, since they may have known about them while they worked with Shroud.)
Alternatively, the Z-Team with a little-not-so-little younger sibling in the workforce that's a little bit messed up.
Summary: As a teen living on the streets, your life is turned upside down when the Z-Team literally stumbles into you
Words: 2,425
Pairing: Z-Team x Teen!reader
Notes: Holy cannoli, a request! I hope that I wrote to your expectations Anon!!!! My master list is here, Part Two here
You didn’t mean to become a fugitive, you just needed money.
That was all. A warm bed, something that didn’t come out of a vending machine, maybe a place to sleep where shoes weren’t used as pillows because you couldn’t afford an actual one. Your parents told you to get out the day your shadow stretched by itself, slithering like wet paint off the ground.
“Demon child,” your mother spat, venom curling at the edges of her words.
Your father didn’t say a thing. Silence, you learned, was its own sentence.
That was around three months ago. And now? You’re running through alleys, your chest burning, shadows clawing up your arms like they’ve grown teeth.
The men after you don’t yell anymore- there’s no need. They know they’ll catch you; they always do. You can still hear the whir of their containment gear, smell the antiseptic on their gloves from the lab, the one that promised money for powers, then started saying things like weaponization, risk factor, extraction.
Extraction. Like you’re a resource to be mined.
Your breathing stutters.
You’ve learned to hide in true darkness. Not just “nighttime” dark. Not “close the blinds and bury your head under a blanket” dark. You hide in the kind of dark that swallows streetlights whole, where nobody can see you unless you want them to. Where the shadows listen to you like loyal pets, curling around you for warmth, shaping themselves into a mattress so your back doesn’t touch the cold pavement.
That’s where they find you.
Well… crash into you.
A foot slams down right next to your head, kicking through the shadowy cushion you made.
You jolt upright, shadows tightening around you like a spooked cat’s fur, and the first thing you see is a pair of glowing, pupil-less yellow eyes and a panicked voice.
“Sorry I didn’t see them!”
Another voice- gravelly, low- shouts back.
“You didn’t see a human person on the ground?!”
Your pulse rockets. Every instinct screams: run, hide, fight, survive.
The shadows fight for you, faster than reflex, faster than breath. They drag at their feet, bind their wrists, try to pull them into the asphalt. You don’t know who they are and they didn’t announce themselves, and you are not going back to the labs.
You’d rather die here.
Then the red woman slams her blade through space itself and reality splits open under your feet. And then, the air shatters.
It feels like falling into a hole made of static and ash.
You drop hard, shadows collapsing with you. Your hands tremble so badly you can’t summon anything again. All you can do is try to crawl backward, away from them, cold sweat mixing with dirt.
The shadows twitch in your trembling fingers, ready to flare again the moment someone moves wrong. You can’t breathe right. The air feels stuck in your chest.
You’re not sure if you’re talking when you rasp, “Don’t touch me- don’t- I’m not- I’m not going back there-”
The presence towering over you steps back.
Red skin. Horns curling from either side of her head like twisted crowns. Pupil-less yellow eyes. A long, flexible demon tail flicking behind her. She wears a white leotard, denim shorts, and black heels that somehow make her look taller than a skyscraper. She lowers her sword to the ground, letting the tip rest against the pavement.
Back.
A demon-looking gladiator is giving you distance.
Her voice coils low through the air. “Don’t fight. We aren’t here to hurt you.”
Your heart doesn’t believe her. Your arms shake, shadows trying to form weapons. The man immediately raises both hands, palms out, huge and open like stop signs.
Then the man speaks. Short, dense with muscle, knuckles thick and scarred, cauliflower ears standing out from his skull like trophies. Short black hair, a meticulously groomed mustache, green eyes that study you without judgment. A rose curls across his forearm in ink.
“I’m Punch Up,” he says. “This is Malevola. No one’s taking you anywhere.”
His voice is soft. Gravelly, but soft.
Soft. But that softness makes your chest tighten. Lies are always soft. Always promises before pain.
You’re swallowing broken breaths, but they don’t know you can’t stop shaking. They don’t know breathing feels like drowning in cold air.
They don’t-
Gunfire rips through the alley, a sudden, sharp intrusion.
Bullets hiss past your ears.
You flinch so violently the shadows surge again, but this time they don’t stab forward. They shield, forming a jagged wall around you without direction, like instinct instead of intent.
Malevola whips around.
One sweep of her sword- clean, silent- slices open the air itself. A portal yawns wide like a monstrous mouth.
The bullets disappear into it and clatter uselessly onto some rooftop across the city, metal screaming on pavement. Punch Up storms forward, knuckles cracking.
“You wanna shoot at a scared kid?” he roars. “Alright, I’ll break EVERY part of you that reloads!”
Bodies slam. Bones meet brick. Punch Up fights like an earthquake, loud and unstoppable. Malevola fights like a guillotine- precise, efficient, every strike sending someone falling into portals and reappearing far, far away. Every strike, every portal, every throw, every punch ensures you remain untouched.
They never once aim you toward danger. They don’t use you as bait.
They move in front of you, shielding you.
The last attacker tries to drag you away, reaching with gloved fingers to grab your jacket. A reflex makes your shadows spike up, but before you can react-
Malevola’s blade touches the attacker’s throat.
Her voice is a death sentence made of velvet.
“Let. Them. Go.”
He drops you. Fast.
She doesn’t slice him. She opens another portal and kicks him into it like throwing trash into a bin.
Then there’s silence, except Punch Up dusting off his knuckles and yelling, “AND STAY LOST!”
Malevola turns toward you, weapon lowered, but voice still dangerous.
“You are not property.”
A statement. No room for argument.
“You are not a weapon.”
A vow.
“You are a child in danger.”
Punch Up nods, breathless but sure. “And you’re with us now, got it?”
No contracts. No cage. No lab.
Just two strangers who fought for you.
You try to speak, to force words out, but your voice fails you. Your throat feels raw, scraped clean on the inside, your breath trembling like a broken instrument. You just nod. Small. Slow. Scared.
Punch Up grins like he won something. Malevola just lets out a quiet exhale- almost relief.
Your shadows continue shaking around you, nervous animals, crawling up your arms and ribs. You can’t help it. You don’t know how to calm them, you never learned how. You never had time.
Malevola lowers herself just enough to look less like a looming executioner. Her voice is steady, low, like a warm fire held at a distance.
“We need to get you somewhere safe.”
Safe.
The word scrapes through you. It doesn’t feel real.
Punch Up gestures with one thick, scarred hand.
“C’mon. Our HQ isn’t far. Trust me, okay? We got food, beds, thick walls, and nobody with needles.” His tone tries to be joking, but the word needles ruins your breathing again, sharp and jagged.
You swallow, but your mouth is dry. Shoes scraping asphalt, chest stinging, your voice comes out small, almost painful.
“Don’t…don’t touch me.”
They don’t.
Punch Up nods once, hands still up. “Alright. No touching. You walk on your own. Just stay close so we don’t lose you.”
Malevola adds, “And stay within my shadow if you can.”
It takes you a heartbeat to understand she means her literal shadow- long and dark beneath her heels. Your own shadows twitch at the invitation, crawling toward hers without waiting for you. They feel strangely calm near her darkness, like her presence is a stable anchor they can cling to.
You’re not sure how you feel about that.
They walk slow, matching your trembling pace. Punch Up keeps to your left, cracking his knuckles occasionally but not talking much. Even his silence feels protective. Malevola walks on your right, sword hilt glinting at her shoulder, tail swishing like a cat’s, irritated but careful not to hit you.
A few people stare as the three of you leave the alley. Not because of you, because of them: Malevola looks like she was sculpted out of blood and myth, Punch Up is shorter but carries himself like gravity bends around him.
No one approaches.
No one even thinks about it.
You keep expecting sirens. Footsteps. Needles. Containment gear.
Your heart won’t slow down.
You try to hold onto that word the whole walk to HQ, but it keeps slipping away like water through a cracked cup. Your shadows trail behind you, jittery and uneven, clinging to Malevola’s shape without permission.
When you arrive, Sonar gives you a once-over. It’s not harsh. It’s observant. Like he’s scanning for injuries, not weaknesses.
“You okay, kid? Blink twice if Punch Up made you listen to him complain the whole walk.”
You don’t blink. You just stare. Sonar sips his coffee again.
“Yeah. That’s the face of someone who met Punch Up.”
Malevola steps forward, all quiet wrath. “They need rest. They were being hunted.”
Something ugly flashes across Sonar’s eyes- not pity. Anger. Directed somewhere else.
He nods, voice softening. “Alright. Let’s get them out of public view before someone starts filming.”
He pivots inside. Punch Up motions you forward.
You take exactly one step into the building before almost walking directly into a human refrigerator.
No.
Not a fridge.
A man. A thing?
Earbuds hang from his ears, and he turns down his music.
He sees you, then Malevola, then Punch Up, then the shadows shaking around your ankles like rabid ink.
His eyelids droop. Voice rumbling like rolling stones:
“Is this the kid?”
Punch Up: “Yes, and don’t call them the kid, we don’t know their name yet-”
Golem leans down. You don’t move. You’re too stiff, too tired, too close to panic to flinch. He studies your face, your shaking hands, the way your feet keep inching toward the nearest shadow.
Then he steps back. Slowly. Carefully.
Like someone backing away from a wounded animal.
His voice is low, respectful. “You’re safe here.”
You want to scream at him for assuming that. For believing safety exists. For saying it like it’s real.
Your throat hurts instead.
Then someone gasps.
Loudly. Dramatically. Like she just walked in on a murder or a discount sale.
She’s tiny, fierce, decked out in neon and gold, and strikes a pose like someone should be taking pictures. You don’t know who she is, but she looks like she knows exactly how fabulous she is.
“Oh, COME ON,” she groans, tossing her half-pink, half-teal bob with theatrical exasperation. “Did someone kidnap a medium and not invite me?”
Malevola responds, voice like gravel wrapped in velvet. “Prism. Not now.”
Prism immediately softens. She sees you, really sees you, eyes widening behind her visor.
“Oh. Baby. Did someone try to kill you?” she asks, not mocking.
Furious on your behalf.
You can’t answer. You don’t know how.
Before you can react, a dry voice cuts in from the side. Slouching in the hallway, sleeves rolled up, shirt half-untucked, freckles scattered across a tired face that looks like it hasn’t slept properly since the Cold War.
“We don’t kidnap people,” he mutters without looking up from a clipboard. “Paperwork’s a nightmare. Also, illegal. Allegedly.”
“Robert,” Punch Up sighs. “Please don’t scare them.”
“I’m not scary,” Robert replies, deadpan. “Life is scary. I’m just honest about it.”
He finally glances at you. One eyebrow raises slightly. Something in his gaze sharpens, less judgment, more… calculation? Assessment? He takes in the bruises, the way your shadows curl tightly around your arms, like bandages.
He checks something off on the clipboard. “They’re terrified.”
You freeze. Shadows stiffen around you like spikes. You don’t want him reading you that easily.
Robert notices that too. He lifts his free hand, slow, palms out. Not approaching. Not forcing anything.
“Hey. You don’t have to prove anything. We believe you.”
You don’t remember anyone ever saying that to you before.
Then a blur of ratty wetsuit and nervous energy skids into view. A lanky ginger guy nearly trips over his own flippers. He salutes awkwardly.
“H-h-h-hi! Waterboy, uh, janitor and, um, part-time hero and-” he panics mid-sentence, voice cracking. “Do you- want water? Or a towel? Or a sandwich? Do you need- something??”
He’s shaking more than you are.
Your shadows twitch. Confused.
A woman with mechanical wings and a voice like a razor blade drops down from the upper hallway railing without warning, landing in a crouch, silent as a guillotine.
Coupé. You recognize her from news feeds.
She could kill entire governments and treat it like a grocery list.
She eyes you. You tense.
Then she straightens, offering a precise, military nod.
“No assassins will harm you here. Unless you request it. In writing. Through HR.”
Waterboy whispers, horrified, “You can’t say that.”
“It is protocol,” she replies, deadly serious.
Before you can recover, someone suddenly appears beside Coupé with a snort of laughter- short spiky hair, jacket half-zipped, septum piercing glinting. Invisigal. You didn’t even hear her arrive.
Of course you didn’t.
“Oh my god, can we please not threaten the refugee?” Invisigal snickers. “They look like they’ll pass out if someone blinks too loud.”
She grins at you. Not mean. Mischievous.
“Don’t worry. None of us bite. Anymore.”
Then someone clears their throat. Loud. Judging.
A tall, dramatic man with a ponytail and a suit cut so low it’s practically a crime walks in like an opera villain. Fire patterns lick across his costume. Flambae.
“You are safe here,” he says calmly, “And we have empanadas.”
Prism gasps. “OH, we ARE keeping them! They’re adorable and tragic. That’s my brand!”
Malevola steps in front of you, raising a hand like she’s fending off paparazzi. “We are not keeping them.”
Punch Up nods, earnest. “Right. They’re not a pet.”
Prism winks at you.
“Not yet.”
You don’t know whether to run, cry, or laugh.
You settle for breathing. Very slowly.
Your shadows ease. Just a little.
Malevola notices. Her voice softens, iron cooling into something protective.
"You can stay here. As long as you need. No tests. No cages. Just food. Rest. Safety.”
Then she adds, like a contract: “And if anyone comes after you…”
Coupé finishes the sentence with a smile sharp enough to cut diamonds.
Could you maybe do a Joel x teen!fem reader (STRICTLY PLATONIC)? Like, reader lives with Joel and Ellie (because bro would totally just take in orphans let’s be so fr) and reader has an anxiety attack after a patrol and maybe comes too close to a clicker…? Then Joel tries to help them but reader just keeps pushing away so he just sits with her and is there as a silent anchor. I swear I’m not mentally unstable, I just think it would be a really really nice hurt/comfort, especially in your style
No Alarms And No Surprises (Get Me Out Of Here) (Platonic!Joel Miller & teen!reader)
Warnings: canon-compliant gore and violence, clickers (a warning in and of themselves tbh), anxiety/panic attacks and Joel being very much a father (Words: 1k)
(author’s note: okay first off— love this prompt so much, and I don’t think you’re mentally unstable for requesting this at all!! Thanks for sending this in, it was a pleasure to write :> as always, please do not repurpose, steal, or otherwise misuse my work in any way, including anything involving Al.)
MY MASTERLIST
You should have known that there would be a clicker behind that door.
It wasn’t your first patrol, and you had hoped it wouldn’t be your last, either. You knew the sound they made, their behaviours, their looks— all like the back of your hand,
For someone your age, you were an expert.
And yet, you stumbled backwards when the sudden flash of rotted, fungus-ravaged flesh lurched towards you, pushing the door open with a shaky claw, the once-silent grunts that came from its crooked jaw growing into dragged-out moans and shrieks.
You felt yourself hit the ground, your tailbone colliding with the old wood, sending a jolt of pain up your spine as you scrambled to get some distance between the two of you.
You cursed under your breath as you shot to your feet, dragging yourself backwards and as far away as you could from the beast lumbering towards you with shaky legs.
Your heart slammed against your ribs as your shoulders bumped a wall, and the creature approaching you jolted, letting out a raspy screech that let you know it knew exactly where you were.
You turned away, jaw clenched and eyes squeezed shut as the gaping maw of the clicker stretched wider, the strands of flesh connecting it morphing with the movement. You let out as deep a breath as you could, if you were going to die today, you’d do it with some dignity.
As you braced yourself, fists clenched and chest tight, waiting for the final blow that would be decayed teeth sinking into the flesh of your throat, you felt a split second of stillness, which led to you peeling one eye open, just in time to be met with a deafening bang.
You flinched, arms shooting up to cover your ears and head as your knees tucked into your chest, ducking, as if it would do anything.
It wasn’t until the sensation of a warm palm pressing against the top of your head reached you that you looked up at the scene before you.
Joel’s timing was always immaculate, but you felt no relief. Blood covered the floor in front of you, and bits of the now ex-clicker’s head still lingered, stuck to the side of your boots.
You tilted your head up, meeting Joel’s eyes, as he crouched down to check you over, his gaze raking over any common spots that someone could get bit.
He had taught you where to look a while back, and you could almost follow along with his thought process. Neck and throat, shoulder, bicep, forearm and wrist, hand, and down to the calf, before he looked back up at your face.
“Y’okay, kid?”
You hesitated to speak, not because you didn’t know, but because the words didn’t form on your lips. Your eyes, wide and horrified, felt like they were watering, and your fingers trembled as you took them down from your ears.
“You hurt?” Joel nudged you, just a gentle push against your shoulder. It wasn’t painful, or that effective, but the way you felt yourself shrink away from him left a bad taste in your mouth.
He sighed, eyes narrowing slightly as he took one of your arms, lifting you off of the ground.
“C’mon.” He sighed.
You stood, somewhat frozen. Something held you there, staring at the bloodied body at your feet. Your heart was, thankfully, still beating, but it kept racing within your ribs. You felt yourself pale, feeling as if you’d stepped outside in the middle of winter. Your stomach churned, and you felt like bile would rise up into your throat with one wrong move.
It kept you still as a statue, like you were brittle and made of stone, yet your mind swam with the thoughts of what could have happened. Could the corpse on the floor have been you? Joel could have missed the sounds of struggling from the other room, and where would you be then?
Joel muttered your name, gripping your shoulders and saying something, although you found that you couldn’t quite focus on the words escaping his lips.
Your lungs seemed to spasm, almost, as they managed to knock the air out of you, unwilling to refill themselves as your arms snaked around yourself. Your fingertips dug into your upper arms as you clung to them, your vision still tunneled, the only thing you could see in full clarity being the pieces of clicker on the ancient hardwood, blood seeping into the cracks.
Joel’s grip broke through the haze, as he held onto your shoulders, trying to get your attention.
“Kid, talk to me.” He said, brow furrowed in concern, “Breathe.”
A surge of panic bloomed from within you, and you tore away from him, backing into the corner of the room. You saw him hold out a hand for a moment, before dropping it to his side.
You slid down against the wall, sitting with your arms wrapped around your legs, gathering yourself together, even for a moment. You shut your eyes, avoiding the red stains all over, and the thoughts that sprouted form the sight of them. The ones that questioned whether or not you should have survived, the gruesome ways that the day could have gone, if Joel had been a minute later.
And a few feet away, you heard a shift. Most likely Joel. And as the floorboards creaked beneath him, you could tell he was sitting down.
And you heard him, as he breathed slowly, exaggerating it loud enough to be clear. And despite everything, you tried to match it.
Somehow, amidst everything, your breaths began to untangle, the knot in your throat loosening slightly, bit by bit, breath by breath.
As you let go of your biceps, you realized your grip on your arms had most likely left dents, if not bruises.
And, albeit a bit too cautiously, you lifted your head from where it sat against your knees.
You met Joel’s eyes once again, and blinked slowly. It was like you’d been balled up and tossed against a wall, the way your limbs felt like noodles.
Heyo! Can you please do platonic dispatch headcanons of z team with a kid reader,their taken in by the sdn as their superpower could be dangerous? What would their reaction to the reader calling them mom and dad
Thank you for reading my request! Have a lovely day/night!
absolutely i can! this is such a wholesome idea i love ittttt
reader's power is essentially blood bending from atla
characters: robert robertson iii, flambae, invisigal, punch up, prism, malevola
Z TEAM X PLATONIC!GN!TEEN READER
ROBERT ROBERTSON III/MECHA MAN
He's probably the only one who thinks its concerning there's someone so young around SDN
"Doesn't this count as illegal child labour or some shit?"
But honestly, he's got no fucks left to give
So he tries to ignore you most of the time
But he's not an ass
He'll sigh and begrudgingly hand you some change when you don't have enough for whatever you're trying to get from the vending machine
Lectures you on your eating habits (hypocrite)
Sees you drinking a coffee one day and decides that's enough
"You're too young for that shit"
He steals it and immediately starts drinking it
"Whatever, dad"
Freezes immediately
He doesn't know whether to be offended, or touched
Ultimately decides to let it go, pretending he didn't hear it
FLAMBAE/CHAD
Meets you while heading to the gym between shifts one day
"Aren't you supposed to be in school or something, dipshit?"
When you explain that you were in SDN's care for 'preventative measures' he just scoffs
"What are you even going to do? You're like - twelve,"
Your response?
Forcing his body to stop mid-squat, straining to hold himself up
"You little shit"
He doesn't let you get off easy, but he's not harsh either
Tries to get you to work out with him
"Gotta be strong if you wanna be a hero, even with your freaky shit"
He pushes you so hard
Be stronger, be faster, be better
But, he's trying to help. To support you.
One day, you decide you're done with his pushing - you want to do something big, something impressive
You put double the amount of your usual weights on the bench press
It plummets to your chest instantly (shocker) - painfully winding you
You scream for your dad. Funny, considering you hadn't seen him in years.
But Flambae is there in seconds
"What the fuck were you thinking, you stupid little shit-"
Despite his cussing, he frees you - fussing over you instantly
If you question why he responded to your yell - he'll never answer, probably telling you to stop being a nosy shit
But you both know he cares
INVISIGAL/COURTNEY
She hears about you before she meets you
Whispers around the office of some kid being brought in as a 'preventative measure'
It stirs something in her that she doesn't like to think about
About her as a kid, questioning her worth - wondering if she could ever be anything other than a villain
She hates that they put you in the same boat
And for the first time ever, she decides she needs to look out for someone alongside herself
Maybe its selfish, trying to fix her past in someone else
But the way you stick to her side makes her think that maybe it isn't
She doesn't give advice, or really look after you
It's quieter. Subtler.
Being invisible was always her specialty
So there's always your favourite snacks hidden away in the breakroom - on a shelf so low that no one else thinks to look there
Any medication you need will miraculously appear in your tiny SDN dorm
And those two things never seem to run out
Its on one of these drops she finds you crying in your cot - ashamed of how you'd manipulated someone's blood when you'd gotten into an arguement with one of the heroes earlier that day
"Shit kid, don't make me do the whole 'feelings' thing"
But she still sits on the edge of your bed
She doesn't speak. Just waits. Stays.
Like she wanted someone to stay with her
Once all your tears are dried up, and the post-cry exhaustion hits - you mumble something
"thanks... mum."
And maybe, Courtney thinks she can be good.
PUNCH UP/COLM
He's so keen to hear there's a kid wandering about SDN
He may have been a villain, but that doesn't mean he was a complete dick
Kids are cool, up to all kinds of dumb shit he can have fun with
He's probably the only one that approaches you first
"'EY KID! Been lookin' e'rywhere for ya, whatcha up to?"
Wants you to get involved in the team as soon as possible
He thinks it'd be good for you, having an outlet to work your powers - work through any problems you might be dealing with...
He spends months arguing with Blazer, vouching for you until he can secure a short, part-time trial period for you
On the condition that you never take a call on your own - no matter how small or meaningless
But he's more than happy to shadow you
He watches you work, clapping your back proudly every time you succeed - assuring you that you did your best whenever you fail
But like any teenager - you get cocky after a while
While you and Colm are resting, you sneak away to handle a call on your own
A bank robbery
It goes terribly
The perp gets away, you get injured, and Colm is PISSED
It's mid argument that you slip up
"Who do you think you are, my dad or something?"
"I fuckin' may as well be!"
His glare is hard as steel, completely unforgiving.
And you both know he means it.
You end up apologising after few more heated words
PRISM/ALICE
She meets you in the employee lounge, scrolling through your socials - not caring about how the audio of your fyp echoes through the room
"Can't you use some fuckin' airpods or some shit?"
Her annoyance fades a little when you respond with a snarky comment about SDN not caring enough to spend valuable customer income on stuff for you
But she scoffs all the same, sauntering out of the room
After some call delays, she returns to the lounge a few hours later - throwing a cheap pair of earphones your way
"Being a superhero means doing charity shit, so be greatful,"
Alice sits nearby whenever you hang out in the employee room now
She critiques your music choice, vowing to show you 'real' music at the club as soon as you're old enough
If you're femme presenting, or just enjoy makeup - she also reprimands your makeup, coming in on her day off to teach you how to properly accentuate your features
It's actually her that refers to you with any sort of familiarity first
You're sitting in the employee lounge like usual - legs over Alice's lap as she livestreams during her break
One of her comments must ask about the person just out of frame, because she speaks up not long after
"Oh them? That's just my baby, don't worry,"
Completely casual, like it was a fact of life
It's enough to make SDN feel more like home
MALEVOLA
Like Colm, Malevola's always had a soft spot for kids
They were usually less judgemental than adults - more facsinated by her demonic appearance than disgusted
And if they were, they were so much easier to scare
But it's when the team starts talking about your power that her interest really sparks
She runs into you in the break room when you first meet
"You're the kid, right? With the blood powers? So you got demonic blood or what?"
Straight to the point, you admit that you haven't got a clue
She shrugs, seemingly unbothered
But unbenownst to you, Malevola's decided to take you under her wing
She did like collecting strays (*ahem ahem SONAR ahem ahem*)
She always checks in when she sees you, asking how your day's been - if you need any help dealing with your powers
She's good at listening on the days that your powers make you feel inhumane
"Being human's fuckin' boring anyways,"
One day, when she's staying after work to use the gym - you follow her, continuing your usual chat
Eventually, it takes a turn when she asks about your family and you reveal that you've been out of contact with them since SDN got legal guardianship.
Malevola doesn't press, just letting you talk freely about your situation.
The words slip out before you can really think about it
"I wish my mum was more like you,"
The silence in the gym is deafening - leaving you to wonder just how badly you'd fucked up
I adore fanfics where a group of dysfunctional (young) adults gain custody of a small child and have to grapple with the fact that they are the best choice of guardians this kid has.
Had a culture shock that I have to verbalise somewhere but,
when engaging in superhero media (dc, marvel, etc), alot of it is grounded in some form of reality with fiction throughout, right?
And when it's put in a US setting, the fantastical elements are meta-humans and aliens and magic and stuff like that. But when I engage with the media the fictional lens also covers the guns.
Like, I don't live around guns, guns are banned in my country without a proper licence and reason to have one, and even then you can't carry it around it has to be locked up.
So when I read about Deadpool or Red Hood, the gun violence has that same suspension of belief I have for the Hulk or Superman.
Obviously I'm alert to global gun issues but it's not something I think about in my day to day, but it has to be so much in the forefront of the minds of US people, hasn't it?
