T.I.P. - Pt.4 (End Chap 1)
CW list
A number of buildings, buildings of all kinds, started being blown sky high. The one commonality was Phantom. The DEO was pressuring the League to intervene. By their account he was involved in Meta trafficking and incredibly dangerous. (Too dangerous for them to deal with.) By all on scene accounts he was definitely doing something, but the damage was surprisingly minimal. Many of the buildings were reportedly abandoned. Some had even been marked to be condemned. It was suspicious but it maybe wasn’t as malicious as the DEO made it out to be. The League was starting to have reason to doubt their versions of the story after Amanda Waller took charge.
The League ramped up efforts to gather intel. Trying to speak to the elusive Phantom and the young lady working behind him. Hopefully get ahead of whatever they were doing before another building was forcibly converted into a crater. The girl had been a case that the Young Justice team was following. A Meta, and reportedly named Suzie, though Phantom called her Secrets. They had little else.
Somehow they only really arrived to the commotion in time for cleaning up and too short notice to gather a proper team. The couple of times they got there before Phantom was done clearing out he had managed to keep everyone too occupied to intervene. They were always in the wrong spot to see anything and he was good at managing their movement. He had the opportunity to do more than knock out some of them more than once. It looked like he might have been able to go toe-to-toe with Superman in strength, but kryptonite did nothing. He never said much but he looked tired.
He looked tired when asked if he was being coerced. He said no. When asked if he was working alone, his answer was yes, though they knew that wasn’t true. J'onn also wasn’t able to read his thoughts, though he did sense him to be not only tired, but also sad, frustrated, and maybe a bit afraid.
The DEO was unwilling to share any information they had, even on Secrets who’d been a resident of one of their orphanages. The DEO was also getting impatient with the caution of the League. They, and by extension the GIW, started carefully fortifying locations that might become targets, trying to balance maintaining the League’s naivety to their activity and stopping the destruction from continuing. If more important locations were found it could lead to their systems getting compromised. Danny was used to all the old tricks, but the GIW were planning a trap.
AN: I've decided this would probably be a good spot to have as the first chapter. I've already gone back and changed a couple small things for AO3 and I've written some more for upload here. I don't think my writing will be outpacing these uploads without some serious inspiration, but I am having fun doing it this way. Thoughts welcome!