#dispatch x you

[mewgalvania]

(Screenshots from "[NO HIT] Underswap – Sans Papyrus Salsa Lesson" by Metal Sonic Gaming)

Info about the game; "This game is made my Mehigh - the creator of Idutshane and its amazing, the plot revolves around Dustswap: Dusttrust, if you fail to no hit you get Dusttrust ending, but no hit leads you to the Dustswap ending."

These screenshots are from the dustswap/no hit ending

[stashmeaway]

HELLLOO ı dont really send requests but ı love your works so ı just had to send one

Can we get some flambea x male reader but the male reader is Roberts childhood best firend??

I think it would be funny ngl😼 (also ı hope ı gave enough info for the concept)

Flambae x Roberts Childhood Friend! Male! reader

A/n: this was pretty fun to do (maybe you can tell that because I wrote a LOT more than I usually to for the little blurbs I do!!) as usual thank you for the request!! Hope you enjoy!! Some of the headcanons are a little more Robert-ish I hope that's okay!! Thanks!! Also side thing im actually really happy that all the flambae requests specify they are for a male reader... No hate but there was a bit too much x fem reader for a canon gay character

You and Robert grew up pretty close together. You were frequently at each other's house, so much so that even Chase was expecting you to be there when he was babysitting Robert. You were there most of the time too. Even while the two of you got older, you were a dynamic duo. He'd always end up telling you about his missions and crime fighting as Mecha Man and you'd tell him your own. You kept yourself a bit more niche as a superhero compared to Robert or Mecha Man. That's why Flambae didn't recognize you as your hero persona. Not too known. But, he was interested.

Chase most likely asked you to join the team more as...damage control or a baby sitter. He didn't really know how these ex-villains would adapt and change to be heroes now. He desperately needed you to keep them in check on the field. You know, Robert can only do so much as a dispatcher... Like yell at them. But, you might have a chance to physically stop them.

Flambae would notice how you stuck next to Robert a lot, you and Robert had taken roles of authority.

Whenever he realized he did like you, he would try to get you away from Robert to be with him instead of Robert

Maybe sometimes he'd shamelessly flirt in front of him/the team low-key would depend on his mood and the vibe

Oh my gosh if he was flirting on the comms Robert would act like a substitute teacher talking about some "are you finished?"

Robert would probably tease you about this too I'm not gonna lie but not too much. Probably just quick jabs.

Whenever you and Flambae get together he would get so much more comfortable (he's always really comfortable with team z as we know but.. idk I feel like he'd start doing more...)

I can imagine him kinda teasing Robert about being a third wheel and calling him a cuck... This came to me in a vision...

[absolutelyparched]

Your relationship with Chase is...unorthodox. Definitely turns heads. But it's not your fault his body doesn't match his actual age. Not his fault either, despite what he says. He didn't know his powers were double-edged until it was too late.

He can't give you what he'd want to. God, back in his prime, he'd have had you melting. Putty in his hands. Drunk on him. But now, he's gotta be careful with his heart. Chase has hands, though. And a mouth. Most nights you are content to cozy up to him and drift off, but sometimes -- a lot of times, honestly, you are young after wll -- your libido isn't satisfied with just your morning shower routine.

And you're there in his arms while he presses your favorite toy against you, reverent in how you squirm for him. Wishing, wishing, no, yearning for a solution. A way to reclaim the life he sped away. Not just because he wants to fuck you senseless, but because he will miss you.

He doesn't know what's after death, but it's something, as far as Malevola says. For him, it's almost worse than a big nothing. For eternity. He'll miss you. This isn't how it was supposed to be. He wants to properly grow old with you. Be with you the way he should be able to.

So. Chase starts hunting around. He is far from the only unfortunate super with detrimental powers. The world's a big place. He searches, scours. No rock unturned. Doesn't even write off magic because, after all, Blazer's medallion saved him once before. It even stopped the damage. And that was where he chose to start.

You assured him you love him all the same, but supported him. Because it wasn't fair, what happened to him. He deserves this win.

One day, there's a breakthrough. One day, he finds the key. He can stop the damage. He can reclaim his lost years. He can age normally, live normally.

You jump when that young man answers the door. You look around, wondering if you somehow went to the wrong apartment. But those eyes. You know him too well to not be able to recognize your Chase.

He pulls you inside without a word, and he's eager to make up for lost time.

You have to call into work the next day, in fact.

[spicebombb]

Cross your fingers!

Dispatch x Lucky!Reader <3

Maybe your secretly a leprechaun? Masterlist!!

Lucky!Reader! You got pretty used to not having you superpower taken seriously. People thinking your joking, saying your power isn't real. What can you do with being lucky.

Turns out robbing a bank is pretty easy! Highly recommended!

Yep. You robbed a bank. Multiple actually. You gave up on trying to be a 'hero'. Had enough of people belittling you to your face about something you were honestly proud of. I mean, who can say they normally never carry money on them anymore. Always finding 20$ here, 10$ there. It got to the point you didn't even have to look for it. Plus, it always ended up being enough for lunch.

And that's not even the best part of your power. Late to a meeting? All of a sudden traffic is clear. Need a drink on a hot day? Free one from the vending machine. Not to mention the amount of people that buy you free snacks or drinks just cause they had a "good day today"

You were sick of everyone telling you your power didn't count. So you decided to test your free will. For awhile it was working pretty well. The plan was simple. Find bank. Walk to bank when its closed. Coincidentally the lock was open. The cameras where all off! And the safe might as well presented itself to you on a silver plate.

You then take your goods. And leave. Simple! Your powers pretty great. Granted, it has it's limits. You only have so much reserves everyday. Like a cup that eventually gets refilled after some time. For small stuff like catching the bus. Doesn't take up your reserves. Robbing a bank? Welllll, your normally had enough to take you to your nice warm bed.

Normally you can go about your usual commute without breaking the bank. Hehe. Get it? Bank- ok nevermind. Moving on. Normally you simply don't overuse you power like normal.

But it seems luck ran out today. You reallyyyyy didn't wanna wait in line for your coffee. And you realllyyyy cant afford to be late for work. So you may have used your power a teensy bit more than you should have. When your about to walk out of the bank, pink duffel bag flung over your shoulder filled with money. You can't really be surprised when you see a blond blazer standing outside with a pretty pair of silver cuffs a slight grin of amusement at how casuallyyou were about to walk out.

"Come round here often?"

"..."

"..."

"If i said i just found this-"

Annnnnnnnnnnd

Thats how you ended up in a jail cell at 2:36AM on a Thursday. You would try use your powers to escape. But with how closely blond blazer has been standing near your cell. You dont think You'd get very far.

Honestly you didn't think you'd become a big enough deal that they sent a high ranked hero like her. You dont really know if you feels proud? Since you technically the villan of the story right now? But it feels kinda good to get acknowledged. Then again. You'd been slyly keeping up with this rouse for years. Surprised it took them so long.

You kinda wanna brag, but between a superhuman who seems to sigh everytime she glances towards your cell, muttering something about paperwork and overtime and a chief of police who grinds his teeth everytime you so much as breath to loud. Your not sure whose patience to test.

After spending a few weeks in jail, atoning for your crimes. You discover jails not for you. The communal showers. The shitty food. The horrible smelling toilets. Yeah this life ain't for you.

So you escape. Blonde Blazer caught you. You escape again! She finds you again...Turns out third time wasn't the charm. And so on and so on.

Weirdly enough you two grew kinda close over the weeks. Having the occasional chit chat before she once again catches you before you flee the country.

"How is it you always get caught right at the airport?"

"Takes a bit of luck to escape the prison. Then i get hungry. I realise i need some money, and by the time i get there, they realised my id was fake.

"..."

"..."

"Wanna join this new project im working on?"

And thats how you end up on the z-team. Their loud, crazy bunch. You've got an assassin. Bat boner. Mr Strongman. A midget. A living flashlight. A crazy chickwho turns invisible and probably laughs when kids cry. A stone! And a LITERAL DEMON.

Bet hey, this is 2025. Who are you to judge if some folks are...weird.

That was a week ago. And you were wrong. These people are batshit crazy. And your pretty sure your gonna die anytime now.

"Hey team, this is your new member. Y/n. Be nice, it will go in your reports."

You can't help but atare at blonde blazer as if it feels like she just threw you into a den of sharks. Honestly, when she first pitched the idea to you, you wanted to laugh in her face and call her mad but jail sucks, like really sucks. So here you are.

A certain hothead speaks up before any of the new information gets processed. "Bitchhhh, are you that kid that robbed all those banks. Thats fucking cool." You want to reply but your jaw practically hangs open at his outfit.

"Does your HR have any semblance of rules or -" Before you finish a blast of fire gets sent you way, a loud beeping sound emerging before the sprinklers come on. Dousing the flames in water before it even gets a chance to hit you, the walking fireball gets drenched as he stands below the sprinkler that just turned on. His long ponytail lying flat on his back as his eye twitches.

A whistle lets out as the hot, demon? Lady speaks up, chuckling with a guy who seems to be half bat. "Dude. That was fucking cool"

"Now this is a business opportunity. Is it transferable? Hi, im sonar. Harvard graduate."

"Literally, no one asked you, bat boy. Hey girl. You obviously know who I am—Prism, the main event. Im like the best hero here."

Many voices speak to you at once. Before you can reply, a woman slightly taller than you appears right next to you, making you jump.

"Aack!"

"Great. Another recruit for the hallway monitor squad. Look, Y.N., let's skip the PR-friendly introductory speech. Names invisigal. Keep your habds to yourself and we'll do fine."

"Another little human to join or team! Joyus. My name is phenome-"

"Hi there, Lace! Names punch-up. " You look down to see a small muscular man, no taller than your waist. Maybe jail was a safer choice-

"Coupé"

...Were those knives?

"Golem. Welcome to the team." Okay so. That is a rock. Are you going ceazy? Or? You know what. At this point, you doubt much can surprise you.

At this point you look towards blonde blazer with a pleading eye, surely this isn't yourrr team. Right? Right!? "Whelp. Uhh y/n this is z team. Welcome aboard. Don't die"

Wait. what was that last part-

"Hi im Robert Robertson. I'll be your new dispatcher. Welcome to the team." He offers you his hand, in which you reluctantly take. Atleast someone here is. Relatively normal.

That was until a loud voice speaks up from the background. "Ya, no one cares Bobby! My hair is wet thanks to this fucker!" Flambe shouts, a light flame in his hand as he tries to dry his hair.

"Uhh you attacked me? This power mostly moves on instinct-"

"-How about you learn to stop picking fights flambe, no one cares about you hair." OK, so maybe Robert isn't as tame as you thought.

"You wanna go bob bob!?"

"Why, you wanna lose more teeth?"

You here the rest of them chanting in the background, FIGHT. FIGHT. FIGHT. The woman whose name you believe is prism, already holding her phone to record. With the bat guy hosting a betting station in the corner.

.

.

.

This is a superhero team?

The next day.

Soooo, you take that back. Everyone here is insane. Crazy. Weirdos. Blonde Blazer must have put you on the wrong team. You just need to go to her calmly-

"Yeah...no."

"WHAT! ...Ahem. Sorry but uh. WHAT!?"

"I did tell you this project is about reforming ex-criminals. Which you technically are. We still haven't managed to give back all the money you took."

"It's not my fault i spent it." You see her shoot you a stern look as you say those words. Maybe you take a tiny bit of the blame. Money really does buy happiness.

She sighs before continuing. "Besides, im certain we only managed to recover 40% of all your crimes. So i suggest you use this time to reform and pay your debt."

It's closer to 25. But whose really counting? The point is, your lucky they only caught you that one time and the rest of your charges are from escaping jail.

So now your walking in for your first day of work with a big smile on your face like your happy to be there.

"Okay everyone, team meeting. We're doing an ice breaker." Robert announces at the head of the table. Staring right at you. "Blazer introduced you but now its time for you to say some words. Besides dousing flambe."

For fucks sake.

You hear a few chuckles across the room as he says those words. Flambe sitting in the corner with a grimace.

"Hi. My name is y/n. Uhh. Im here because they caught me during a bank robbery. Uhh. My powers luck."

There's a moment of silence after you introduce yourself.

Malevola is the first person to speak up. "Thats a pretty cool power dude. You turn that shit on and off or?"

"How you gonna let them catch you robbing a bank? They sent you here for that?" Prisim speaks to next. Tapping on her phone as she glances at you.

Coupe stands quietly in the background. "Just one? How juvenile."

That one you can't even disagree with. They did technically only catch you stealing from ONE bank.

"How'd they even let you on the team. Do you even count as a criminal?" Sonar and malevola walk in from a portal together.

Honestly, their reaction kinda surprises you. You sorta expected to get laughed at a bit. Having good luck as a power? Doesn't really garner a warm reception. Even flambe seems indifferent to what happened yesterday, giving you small glances in between filling his nails.

Weirdly enough you feel, respected.

Malevola chimes in. "I mean having luck is pretty cool but-"

Invisigal appears right next to you unannounced. "-Snagged this ones file from blazers office. They suspect her for like 87 robbery cases. Cleaned out like 30% of banks in the area. And she escaped from jail like 16 times."

"AACK!" You jolt as she appears before you. "You need to stop doing that. And technically, i was only charged for one robbery so-"

Flambe whistles from another corner of the room. "Damn bitch, 30%. No wonder they sent you here."

Punch up quickly pipes up from the news. "Aye, i think i saw this ones work on TV. Thats some luck."

Coupe sends you a nod of approval. "Impressive. Do you take requests?"

"Ye-"

"Okay! Lets stop that. Everyone. Shut the fuck up. This is a team meeting and-"

Sonar interrupts. "No one cares bobby! About those requests."

All of a sudden. Multiple voices are crowding you at once. Their all pretty crazy. But, maybe being a hero won't be so bad. Plus, those many, many debts you owe to different banks. Your gonna be here for awhile...

© All works made by @spicebombb. Do not reproduce or translate to any platform, or feed to any AI platform/create them into bots without my permission. Warning. You will get hexed.

Thank you to those who were patient with me! This was honestly a pretty long fic surprisingly. Im definitely considering a part 2, so let me know! Sorry for those who voted for frat jjk. Still working on it.

Divider by @anitalenia

[nyraeafterdark]

The Princess Protection Squad

Sypnosis: You and Robert come home from a sweet date night only to find your children turned the house into a glitter-covered war zone and Waterboy into their unwilling princess babysitter.

Pairing(s): Robert Robertson III (Mecha Man) x Reader, ft. Herman (Waterboy)

Warnings: domestic fluff, babysitting gone catastrophically wrong, exhausted babysitter syndrome, weaponized five-year-old affection, gremlin behavior at maximum capacity

A/N: this was too cute, i kept giggling every few minutes

Requested by: @cookieshakr

Masterlist

Your intertwined hands swung back and forth as you both walked home from your sweet little date night.

The city lights reflected softly against Robert’s face, easing the harsher lines of his features while his massive hand practically swallowed yours whole every time your fingers tightened around his.

It had been nice.

Normal, even.

A small picnic dinner, just the two of you on a nearby hilltop. Peanut butter jelly sandwiches, chips and coke serving as witnesses to your romantic night wrapped in jokes, laughter and quiet affection.

Sure, most people probably wanted something fancier. Something more extravagant than a couple of poorly assembled sandwiches and convenience store snacks.

But you?

This was more than enough.

“Babe,” you snickered, nudging him lightly. “C’mere.”

“Hm?” he glanced down at you curiously before bending slightly toward you.

“You’re so messy,” you chided, brushing crumbs from the corner of his mouth. “Christ, did Chase not teach you manners when he babysat you?”

He rolled his eyes with a soft chuckle as he straightened again. “I just know how to appreciate fine dining, that’s all.”

“Fine dining? Please,” you snorted.

He let out a fake wounded gasp, face twisting into exaggerated offense.

“That hurt my feelings, y’know? And my wallet.”

“Oh, woe is you,” you teased. “You gonna cry?”

“I open my heart to you and this is the cruelty I receive,” he lamented dramatically, though the grin tugging at his lips ruined the act. “My heart will never recover.”

You laughed, sticking your tongue out at him as you climbed the few steps toward your shared home.

Nothing could have prepared either of you for the sight waiting on the other side of the door.

“ON GUARD!” your daughter roared before launching herself across the room, crashing straight into her brother and tangling both of them into a chaotic pile of limbs.

Your son responded with a near inhuman screech before immediately biting her while making feral little gremlin noises.

Both you and Robert froze.

Crayons littered the floor.

Blankets and couch cushions were scattered everywhere.

Glitter somehow coated half the living room.

And slime…

There was slime stuck to the wall that was absolutely going to leave a stain once you peeled it off.

“What the…” you muttered.

“I WON’T ALLOW YOU TO HARM THE PRINCESS!” your daughter yelled again while wrestling her giggling sibling.

“…Princess?” Robert mumbled before movement caught the corner of his eye.

In the corner of the room sat Waterboy, fidgeting awkwardly with a face red enough to rival a stop sign.

“O-oh! H-hi, uh… sorry about the m-mess…” he greeted nervously.

Yet again, both of you blinked, trying to process what exactly you were looking at.

Waterboy was covered head to toe in random accessories.

A green feather boa hung around his shoulders. Several plastic necklaces clattered against his chest. Your daughter’s fake press-on nails decorated his fingers, and a sparkly pink tiara rested proudly on his head.

Judging by the makeup smeared across his face, he’d also been forced through an entire makeover session.

Blue glittery eyeshadow.

Patchy hot pink blush.

Bright red lipstick messily smeared across his lips.

“Herman…” you gawked. “Are you… what the hell happened?”

Poor man looked like he lost custody of his dignity three hours ago and never recovered. Babysitting really is just psychological warfare with Goldfish crackers and glitter.

“I-I can explain,” he blurted immediately.

“You better,” Robert said slowly, staring at the glitter somehow embedded into his eyebrows. “Because right now it looks like you lost a war.”

“I did lose a war,” Waterboy muttered weakly.

“HE’S THE PRINCESS!” your daughter corrected loudly from the floor.

Waterboy squeaked at that.

Your son immediately lunged at him from behind the couch with the energy of a caffeinated raccoon.

“HOLD HIM DOWN!”

Robert physically recoiled. “Jesus Christ.”

Water erupted from the air instantly on instinct, catching your son mid-flight before he could tackle him directly into the coffee table.

The child dangled there laughing maniacally while Waterboy looked one stress-induced heart attack away from death.

“T-they figured out I can make…rides,” he admitted miserably.

As if summoned by those exact words, your daughter gasped dramatically.

“SHOW THEM THE WATERSLIDE!”

“Hm?” you blinked.

“N-no,” Waterboy answered immediately.

“SHOW THEM!”

“Uh… that’s n-not a good id—.”

“SHOW THEM!”

He looked at Robert like a hostage begging for rescue.

Robert folded his arms. “Well then. Go on.”

“You’re e-enjoying this.”

“A little.”

Before Waterboy could continue defending himself, your son escaped the floating water bubble and sprinted toward Robert at full speed.

“DAD! DAD! UNCLE ERMIE MADE A DEATH TUBE!”

Robert paused.

“…A what?”

Your daughter grabbed your hand excitedly and began dragging you further into the house.

“It goes WHOOOOSH and then BAM and then he catches us before we hit the wall!”

You turned slowly toward Waterboy.

“Herman.”

“W-well… it sounds… it sounds worse than it is.”

“It sounds exactly like what CPS writes reports about.”

“I didn’t mean to-to make it that fast!”

Robert finally cracked, laughing under his breath as he walked deeper into the disaster zone. He crouched slightly, picking up one of the couch cushions covered in glitter.

“…Why is there slime on the ceiling?”

Your daughter proudly raised her hand.

“That was me!”

“…How?”

She stood there in silence before shrugging and skipping away.

“Honestly,” Waterboy sighed, “I stopped asking after the pirate incident.”

“The WHAT incident?”

Your son pointed dramatically toward the kitchen.

“Captain Uncle Ermie fought the evil sea monster!”

Robert peeked around the corner.

The “sea monster” was apparently just your mop wearing googly eyes and wrapped in tape.

“Huh….creative,” Robert admitted.

“You are being suspiciously supportive right now,” you accused.

“I wasn’t the one left unsupervised with tiny supervillains.”

“You abandoned him.”

Waterboy raised his hand shyly, “I-I really wasn’t….”

Your daughter suddenly climbed onto the couch beside him, carefully grabbing his face with both tiny hands.

“Unckie Ermie,” she whispered seriously, somehow smearing more lipstick onto his cheek, “you’re the prettiest princess.”

He froze.

The poor man looked emotionally unprepared for affection delivered by a five-year-old wearing a yellow blanket cape and one frilly sock.

“…I…I-I….” he stammered quietly.

Only, your son immediately ruined the moment by screaming.

“PRINCESS ATTACK!!”

He launched himself directly at Waterboy.

Water, once more, exploded upward in panic.

Your children shrieked as he accidentally created a massive swirling water tunnel across the living room, lifting both kids safely into the air while they spun around laughing.

Robert stared upward as one child flew past the ceiling fan.

“…Okay,” he said slowly. “That’s actually kind of cool.”

“HERMAN!”

“I P-PANICKED!”

You buried your face in your hands laughing hopelessly while Robert finally lost the battle against his own amusement.

And honestly?

Watching him sit there covered in dollar-store glam makeup while your children treated him like a magical disney attraction was maybe the happiest your house had looked in weeks.

[homeybadger]

Proving Yourself (Part Two)

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. 

[homeybadger]

The Note

Pairing: Blonde Blazer x gn!Reader (romantic)

Words: 3,198

Warning(s): None!

Notes: This is the story connected to the headcanons Blonde Blazer x Shy!Shadow Power Reader Headcanons! I am so sorry in advance about the love note contents being cringe, I tried my best to be romantic

The note had already been rewritten fourteen times.

Some of the failed versions lay scattered beside your bed in little ruined heaps, paper crushed so tightly the edges had split. Thin ribbons of living shadow still coiled lazily around them, reluctant to let go even now, as though your embarrassment had seeped into the darkness itself. 

Others had been spared destruction entirely.

Those ones were folded with almost painful care and hidden away inside drawers, tucked beneath books or beneath stacks of old receipts where no one would accidentally find them. You told yourself you kept them only because throwing them out felt wasteful, but the truth sat heavier than that. Even the worst versions still contained pieces of things you had almost been brave enough to say.

This newest draft rested in your hands now.

The paper had grown soft at the edges from constant handling, corners bent slightly inward beneath the repetitive sweep of your thumbs. You had read the same lines so many times the words practically lived behind your eyes now, memorized against your will. Every pause, every sentence, every scratch of ink had become something dissected and doubted a hundred separate times.

Dim amber light spilled from the lone lamp in your apartment, catching across the dark ink in uneven glints. The handwriting shimmered faintly against the page where the pen had pressed harder during moments of hesitation, the fresh black strokes reflecting like wet oil.

If I were braver, I think I would say these words aloud instead of hiding them inside paper and ink. But courage has always rested more naturally in your hands than it ever has in mine. You step into the world so easily, like you were born already knowing it would welcome you. I have only ever known how to linger at the edges of things.

Still, there are truths too large to remain silent forever.

You are the sun to me.

Not merely because you are bright, though there are moments I could swear heaven itself shaped you from warm gold and gentle light. It is more than beauty. More than the way your smile softens rooms without effort, or how your laughter seems capable of pulling people out of the darkest corners of themselves.

It is the way you endure.

The way you remain warm even after difficult days. The way people turn toward you instinctively, like flowers bending toward dawn, without fully realizing they are doing it. You make this city feel less cruel simply by existing within it. People do not love the sunrise because it demands worship. They love it because, after surviving the long and lonely hours of night, its arrival feels like mercy.

That is what you are to me.

Mercy.

And I think perhaps that is why loving you frightens me so deeply.

Because I am not a thing of sunlight.

I have always belonged to quieter hours. To dim hallways and sleepless apartments where shadows gather thick beneath doorframes. I know how to vanish far more easily than I know how to be seen. Where you blaze bright enough to warm the world around you, I drift farther away- distant and pale, like a lonely moon wandering blackened skies with borrowed light upon its face.

Yet still the moon yearns for the sun, though it knows such longing foolish.

So I want to ask you one selfish question: if you’re the sun, and I’m the moon- could we make an eclipse together?

Your entire body locked up with mortification so sudden and intense it felt almost violent. Heat flooded straight to your face. Your shoulders hunched instinctively inward like you could physically curl yourself away from the words sitting on the page in front of you.

“Nope,” you muttered under your breath immediately, voice strained with horror. “Absolutely not. Horrifying.”

The shadows beneath your desk reacted before you could even finish the sentence.

Blackness spilled outward in thin, nervous tendrils, slithering across the hardwood floor in quick uncertain movements. A few curled around the legs of your chair, climbing upward in twitchy little spirals like anxious cats trying to comfort a distressed owner. Another crept toward the edge of the desk before recoiling dramatically the second your gaze snapped toward it, as though even your powers were embarrassed on your behalf.

You let out a long, suffering groan and dropped forward until your forehead thunked softly against the desk.

“That’s too much,” you mumbled into the wood. “That is way too much.”

The shadows quivered sympathetically around you.

One patted weakly against your sleeve.

Outside your apartment window, evening rain washed the city in smeared gold and electric blue. Neon signs reflected across wet pavement below in distorted ribbons of color, trembling every time passing cars cut through puddles. High above the streets, illuminated billboards flickered against low storm clouds while distant skyscraper windows glowed like scattered constellations.

Somewhere far off, sirens wailed through the rain- softened by distance until they became part of the city’s heartbeat instead of a disruption to it. Traffic hissed against soaked roads. Thunder rolled faintly overhead.

Normally, you loved nights like this. Darkness made sense to you.

Rain muffled the world into something smaller, quieter, easier to breathe inside. Shadows stretched longer after sunset, gathering comfortably beneath furniture and in corners like familiar companions. Night never demanded too much from you. It never asked you to stand in the center of attention or bare your heart open where someone could hurt it.

Darkness was easy. Darkness did not require confessing romantic feelings to one of the most beloved heroes in the entire goddamned city.

Your mind conjured her instantly without permission, every detail vivid enough to ache.

The bright blonde hair that somehow always survived battles looking windswept and cinematic instead of sweat-soaked or singed like everyone else’s. The rich blue mask around her eyes somehow only making her expressions more earnest instead of less readable. The little cape she wore with complete sincerity despite the fact half the younger heroes teased her for it relentlessly.

God, and the dorkiness.

The painfully corporate-approved thumbs-ups after successful missions. The finger guns. The motivational speeches that should have sounded cheesy but somehow never did because she meant every single word with embarrassing, wholehearted sincerity. The way she checked on civilians twice.

The way she remembered your name.

Not your codename, your actual name. Your chest tightened dangerously at the memory of her saying it so casually, so warmly, like it mattered.

The shadows beneath your desk stirred again.

Thin wisps of darkness crept across the surface of the desk toward the folded note sitting near your elbow, nudging at the edge of the paper with hesitant encouragement while you stared at it like it might personally ruin your life.

Your phone rang. Not the familiar, idle chime you were used to hearing in the quiet hours between everything important and everything forgettable.

This was different.

Sharp. Immediate. Unforgiving.

Robert.

The sound seemed to cut through the apartment itself, as if the signal didn’t just travel through air but through the very stillness clinging to the room. Even the rain outside, still tracing slow golden-blue rivers down the window, felt suddenly distant- muted, like the world had been pushed behind glass. The phone’s vibration hammered against the desk in tight, insistent bursts, each one vibrating up through your bones like a warning you already understood before your mind could fully catch up to it.

Your body snapped upright so fast it almost felt detached from thought entirely- muscle memory forged in moments you’d rather not remember asserting itself before embarrassment, hesitation, or doubt could even begin to form.

The rain-lit calm that had been draped over your apartment shattered in an instant.

“Good evening,” Robert said, like this was a perfectly normal time for anything good or evening to exist together. “I need the paperwork you have.”

You blinked once.

“…The emergency line just lit up like a war zone,” you said slowly, still half-standing, shadows coiled tight around your feet like restless smoke. “And you called me for paperwork.”

“Yes,” Robert replied without hesitation.

A distant shuffling sounded through the line, like he was flipping through files or, more likely, reorganizing chaos into labeled folders out of sheer spite. Paperwork rustled- too calm, too mundane for the tension still ringing in your veins.

“It’s the incident report from last week’s containment,” he continued. “The original draft. Not the redacted one. The actual one.”

“I wrote that at three in the morning after getting stabbed in the shoulder,” you muttered.

“Yes,” Robert said. “It was still technically accurate. That is part of the problem.”

Your shadows, still half-alert from the emergency line, slowly loosened their tight coils around the room. The tension didn’t vanish so much as it deflated, like something important had been misfired and everyone involved was pretending that was normal.

You exhaled through your nose.

“…There is no emergency emergency, right” you asked.

“I did consider emailing you, but my job is on the line.”

The call ended before you could decide whether to hang up or simply dissolve into the floor out of spite. You stood there for a moment anyway, phone still warm in your hand, listening to the lingering silence where Robert Robertson’s voice had been far too calm for a man requesting paperwork during what had absolutely felt like the beginning of a city-ending catastrophe.

“Fine,” you said under your breath. “Fine. You win.”

Your hands swept across the desk in one practiced motion, gathering the stack before it could become a moral dilemma. Pages slid together with soft, papery friction- incident reports, annotations, redlines, the dreaded original draft Robert had specifically requested like it was a sacred relic instead of a confession of administrative sins.

A few sheets threatened to escape.

They did not get the chance.

The shadows moved first.

They slid up from beneath the desk in smooth, obedient waves, catching loose pages mid-drift and folding them back into alignment with unsettling precision. One tendril wrapped around the stack like a strap, securing it in place. Another curled into a makeshift handle, as if offering you a better way to carry your own bureaucratic burden.

SDN rose ahead of you like it always did- an unassuming building from the outside, too clean to look dangerous, too ordinary to advertise what actually happened inside. The signage was minimal. The security even more so, which was its own kind of statement: if you were supposed to be here, you’d already know how to get in.

Robert looked up from his desk immediately, as if he had been waiting for the exact second you’d arrive and resented the universe for making him wait even that long.

“Ah, thank you.” he said.

“Here,” you said flatly. “Your sacred artifact. Try not to lose sleep over it.”

Robert ignored the comment entirely, which was also his version of humor. He flipped the top page open with care, eyes scanning with practiced speed. 

“I’ll give this to Blazer, she needs to see it too.”

Something in your body went abruptly, catastrophically still.

It wasn’t dramatic at first. Just a small internal hitch, like your thoughts had tripped over something invisible and hadn’t quite decided whether to recover.

“…Blazer,” you repeated carefully.

Robert hummed in acknowledgment, already flipping to the next page.

You forced your voice to stay level. “She… she’s reading it?”

You pictured her without meaning to, and the thought arrived so cleanly it felt less like memory and more like intrusion. The blue mask framing her face in that unmistakable, almost painfully sincere way, then her eyes, steady and sincere.

Then her posture- always just a fraction too upright, shoulders squared as if she were consciously negotiating her place in every room she entered. Not stiff, not unnatural… just careful. Like she was constantly aware that she took up space, and was determined to make sure she deserved it.

And then the image shifted, you saw her holding your work.

Eyes scanning your handwriting, your phrasing, the small tells you never intended anyone to notice: the way you hesitated mid-sentence, the way you overcorrected when you felt uncertain, the places where professionalism gave way, however briefly, to something more human than you’d meant to expose.

The version of you that existed in ink instead of silence.

Your stomach tightened sharply, like something inside had been pulled too fast in the wrong direction. Heat rose at the back of your neck before you could stop it. Your fingers flexed once at your side, as if you could physically dislodge the thought by force.

She stepped in like she always did- without hesitation, without noise that felt unnecessary. The kind of entrance that didn’t demand attention but somehow received it anyway.

Blue mask. Bright blonde hair still faintly damp at the edges from the rain outside. The faint gold trim of her suit catching the office light in soft, warm reflections that made everything else in the room feel slightly dull by comparison.

Robert looked up the moment she entered, as though the timing had been quietly prewritten somewhere in his mind and the world had simply arrived to fulfill it on cue.

There was no surprise in his expression. No shift, no adjustment, only the calm, practiced recognition of someone who had already accounted for this variable in his internal schedule.

“Blazer,” he said evenly, as if greeting the arrival of a scheduled document rather than a person. “You’re on time.”

“Trying to be,” she replied.

Her voice carried easily through the room: light in tone, but anchored by focus, like it never fully lost sight of why it had entered the space in the first place. She stepped closer without hesitation, boots quiet against the floor, movement controlled in that effortless way that suggested she was always aware of where she was in relation to everything else.

And then she was closer to you.

You became intensely, almost absurdly aware of yourself in a way that felt unfair- like someone had turned up the volume on every minor detail you usually managed to ignore. The angle of your shoulders. The fact that your hands were hanging there, doing nothing useful. The unmistakable reality that you were, in fact, standing in the middle of a room pretending to be a functional human being while she moved through it with composed purpose.

She passed within your field of view like gravity had briefly decided to take a different shape.

Her eyes flicked toward you, and a faint smile formed on her face.

“I’ve seen your work before,” she said, tone easy but sincere as she adjusted the file in her hands. “You’re… really good at noticing things other people miss.”

Your mind stalled so hard it nearly became audible. Your throat tried to produce words and failed on principle.

“Seriously,” Blonde Blazer added, like she was confirming something she already considered obvious. “It makes a difference.”

And just like that, she moved again- back into motion, back into purpose- carrying the file as if the moment had been completely natural and not something that had just rearranged your internal organs.

Blonde Blazer disappeared down the corridor with the file tucked under her arm, footsteps fading into the soft, bureaucratic hum of SDN’s interior life. Only then did Robert look up again.

“You’re red.”

“…I’m not,” you said automatically.

You made a noise that was meant to be a protest and accidentally came out as a strained exhale instead.

“I’m going home,” you said quickly.

“You are still on duty until-”

“I’m going home,” you repeated, more firmly this time, already backing toward the door.

Then, almost absentmindedly, Robert added, “Try not to combust on the way out. It would be inefficient.”

Behind you, SDN receded into the night- quiet, indifferent, and entirely unconcerned with the fact that you were currently fleeing emotional consequences faster than any actual threat you’d faced all evening. The apartment had settled into something almost gentle by the time you got home.

Rain still traced faint lines down the window, but it had lost its urgency. The city outside was reduced to a softened glow- neon bleeding into wet pavement, headlights stretching into slow-moving ribbons of light. Everything felt distant enough to pretend it hadn’t happened.

The microwave hummed as you leaned against the counter, arms folded, watching the little paper bag of popcorn slowly inflate like it was becoming something more important than it had any right to be.

Your phone lit up. You froze so completely the popcorn nearly became secondary to your survival instincts.

Unknown number.

For a brief, irrational second, your brain supplied every possible worst-case scenario it could think of, most of them involving Robert Robertson and paperwork-related vengeance.

Then it rang again.

You answered.

“…Hello?”

A pause.

Then her voice.

Not on speaker. Not broadcast. Just direct, close, unmistakably real.

“Hi,” Blonde Blazer said.

Your grip tightened on the phone immediately.

“…Hi,” you managed.

There was a small pause on the line, not awkward, just careful.

“I wanted to ask you something,” she said.

Your stomach did something profoundly unhelpful.

You glanced toward your shadows. They were, traitorously, very still.

“Okay,” you said, voice slightly too cautious. “Sure.”

Another pause.

Then her tone shifted- just a fraction softer, like she was stepping closer without actually moving.

“That letter,” she said.

Everything in your apartment went quiet in a way that felt impossible for a space that still had a running microwave. Your brain attempted to evacuate the situation.

“I read it,” she continued gently. “Or… I started reading it. Robert handed it to me earlier, it was in the file.”

Your stomach dropped so fast it felt like it left the room ahead of you. Your mind, meanwhile, did what it always did when confronted with emotional danger: it attempted to reconstruct the entire last twenty-four hours in excruciating detail until it found the exact moment everything had gone wrong.

“…in the file,” you repeated, carefully, like repeating it might change the meaning.

“Yeah,” she said. “The top pages were the incident report, but there was another sheet tucked in behind it. I think it fell in accidentally when everything was stapled together.”

No.

No, no, no.

That was a separate document. That was not supposed to be anywhere near official SDN circulation. That was supposed to be hidden. Destroyed. Possibly exiled to another dimension if you had your way. 

“And I just… needed to know,” Blonde Blazer added, voice still calm, but now threaded with something more careful than before, “did you mean what you wrote?”

“Oh my god,” you whispered.

“I’m sorry,” she said immediately, and you could hear the smile now- small, genuine, trying not to make it worse. “I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it like that.”

“No,” you said quickly, too quickly. “No, it’s- no, it’s fine. It’s not- I just-”

You stared at the microwave light reflecting off the counter. At the rain on the window. At your shadows, which were very deliberately pretending not to exist.

Then you exhaled.

“...Yeah,” you told her, “I did.”

[homeybadger]

Blonde Blazer x Shy!Shadow Power Reader Headcanons

Note(s): Thank you for your request anon! I decided to make both a story and some headcanons, I hope that's ok! There's a section for platonic and romantic, so you can imagine any kind of pairing you want!

Platonic

Your relationship with Blonde Blazer would immediately stand out to other people because visually and emotionally, the two of you look like complete opposites standing next to each other- her bright colors, confident posture, easy smile, and open charisma contrasted against your quieter demeanor, darker aesthetic, and tendency to physically shrink into yourself whenever attention lands on you

Where Blonde Blazer naturally fills a room without trying, you instinctively try to avoid being perceived at all; conversations with strangers drain you, crowds overwhelm you, and when uncomfortable, your shadow powers unconsciously deepen around you- lights dimming slightly, corners darkening, your silhouette almost blending into the environment

She notices this immediately, but instead of trying to “fix” it, she adjusts around it

When she introduces you to people, she naturally keeps herself slightly closer to your side, subtly redirecting attention away from you when she notices you getting overwhelmed

She’d become very good at noticing the small signs of your discomfort- your shadows thickening unconsciously, your avoidance of eye contact, the way you linger near exits or darker corners- and she’d quietly intervene before things get overwhelming

If someone talks over you or ignores you because you’re quiet, Blonde Blazer immediately redirects the conversation back toward you with calm confidence: “Hold on, they were talking,” not aggressive, just firm enough that people listen

She’d openly defend you against other people and their assumptions, especially from corporate hero types or civilians who see your abilities as “villain-coded”

Her response would always be calm but unwavering: “Their powers don’t determine who they are.”

Because you’re a bit shy and observant, you’d notice things other people miss: when her smile becomes strained, when she’s mentally exhausted, when she’s slipping into “professional mode” instead of being herself, when she needs support but doesn’t know how to ask for it

Your quieter nature would make her feel less pressured to constantly be “on”; with you, she wouldn’t have to fill every silence or maintain the perfect heroic image all the time, because you naturally create calmer spaces around her

Meanwhile, she’d become one of the few people capable of pulling you out of your isolation gently instead of forcefully; not dragging you into crowds, but reminding you that you don’t always have to disappear to feel safe

Romantic

Dates between you and Blonde Blazer would start with her realizing very quickly that traditional romantic gestures overwhelm you if there are too many people involved, like loud restaurants, crowded events, or places where everyone recognizes her

They make you visibly tense, shadows curling tighter around your body while you try not to draw attention to yourself

Instead of getting frustrated by that, she quietly adapts; your dates become softer, more private, more intentional- late-night diners with barely anyone inside, rooftops overlooking the city, quiet walks after patrol when the streets are mostly empty and the lights reflect off puddles around your feet

You’d probably apologize a lot early in the relationship for being “bad” at dates- worried you’re too quiet, too awkward, too uncomfortable around people- and Blonde Blazer would immediately shut that down with gentle sincerity: “You know dates aren’t performances, right?” because she already spends enough of her own life performing for others

She’d actually prefer the quietness of your dates because with you, she doesn’t have to maintain the polished celebrity-hero version of herself all the time; she can just exist in comfortable silence without feeling like she needs to entertain anyone

One of the most romantic things about your relationship would be how safe it feels emotionally despite your differences; neither of you actually wants perfection: she’s tired of always being “on”, you’re tired of feeling like you should disappear

Together, you create a space where neither of those things are required

Eventually, your shadows would become something she actively seeks comfort in; after exhausting missions or stressful public events, she’d intentionally step closer into the cool darkness surrounding you with this quiet little sigh of relief like she can finally breathe again. Likewise, her light would become one of the few things that doesn’t make you want to hide; instead of feeling exposed beneath it, you feel warm- seen in a way that doesn’t hurt

Dates at home would become especially meaningful because they remove the pressure both of you deal with publicly: sitting together on the couch while your shadows dim the room naturally, her lying against you while watching movies, quiet conversations at ridiculous hours of the night, her tracing shapes absentmindedly through the shadows curling around your hands