Chapter Text
With the robot flying at three hundred feet in the ice cold LA air, her bloodied hands roughly gripping on a ragged crack in the metal, and a ticking time bomb planted right below her feet—Courtney is stuck camping on Mecha Man’s back like the absolute slug she is.
Not that she is complaining or anything. No way in hell, she’s not. After all, getting a panoramic view of the city was a once in a lifetime experience with the way her bank account was bordering on the thin line in between debt and getting jailed for debt.
For fuck’s sake, just—she was supposed to climb on the suit, place the bomb on its back, activate it, then bounce off of it. That was it. That was all that she had had to do.
It should have been an easy job. No, it was an easy job. No, fuck her, it was the easiest fucking job Shroud had ever assigned her in this whole stupid ass villain’s bell girl career she had. But boo-fucking-hoo to her heart of fool’s gold, she had even fucked that up. One look at Mecha Fuck’s terrified shit face, and it was just enough to get her in a tizzy, fumble with the bomb like a rookie, then grow hesitant to jump off and act like she hadn’t just contributed to a superhero’s death.
And, look where that has brought her. Flying at God-knows-what speed, freezing to death and trying to defuse the bomb while actively bleeding altogether.
Talk about bleeding, ironically, it’s going to be the actual death of her. Her fingers are slowly losing their grips as more and more of her blood coats them slick. She can’t help it though. If she doesn’t dig her palms deeper into the metal, she’ll just float right off the suit like a dumb fucking plastic bag. Also, her sight is blurred out with tears, and they are jumbling everything from shapes to colors together.
Amazing. Completely, absolutely amazing.
Then, there’s the wind howling in her ears. It’s deafening her, completely drowning out the shrill beep-beep-beeping of the timer she can’t see jackshit of. (How much is left before she gets blown into pieces, anyway? Forty seconds? Thirty, maybe? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t fucking know.)
“Okay,” Courtney’s voice gets ripped away from her throat by the wind the moment she lets them out. She isn’t sure if she’s even spoke them out loud. “Okay! Okay, okay, okay—“
(Which one is it? The red wire? Or is it the blue one? God damn it, there are no wires, genius! It has a shitty pressure trigger!)
A sudden move of the suit, and the metal edges she’s been holding onto impales through her palms. Pain shoots up from her arms, and Courtney’s hands slip. She gasps. For one horrifying moment, she’s sliding right off—hands grabbing at air, at something to hold onto, at nothing but smooth metal.
However, as if God has somehow separated her screams from the wind’s deafening ones, her fingers manage to latch on another crack at the last moment, and she slams back against the metal hard enough to knock the air out of her lungs.
But, before she can even come close to stabilizing her position, the suit banks to the left. And, she nearly loses her grip all over again.
(Fuck this. Fuck all of this.)
She can’t defuse it. She has no time, isn’t in the right angle, doesn’t have the tools, doesn’t have the brains for this because she’s just Shroud’s stupid little errand girl who places bombs and doesn’t ask questions.
…So, she does the only thing she can think of.
She kicks it.
The bomb detaches with a metallic crack. Courtney swerves herself to the left, and watches as the bomb takes a huge chunk of Mecha Man’s suit on its way sailing off into the evening sky. As she hits back straight against the suit, she thinks she’s done it. She thinks that she’ll keep her fingers and legs intact for another day, and that she’s saved herself from blowing into smithereens. She just has to figure out how to keep her balance on the suit now, to not slip off and to—
…The explosion turns the night sky into day.
The shockwave hits like a freight train. The suit lurches, spinning wildly, and Courtney’s grip finally, terribly fails. And, she’s airborne. Falling. The city lights below are spinning like a carousel, then blending into one big dot, then—
Then, the suit explodes too.
Fire. Metal. Pain.
Then, nothing.
Courtney swings her legs off the bed at the exact moment the nightshift nurse pulls the door shut behind herself.
The movement makes something stab in her chest. It’s her ribs, most probably, or whatever the hell they’d reset back together after she’d decided to kick a literal bomb like it was a good life choice. Though, the lack of air that her lungs can hold points toward the possibility that it might be the stitches drilled into her skin to fill up the place of her missing Red Ring implants, as well.
…Whatever, whichever. She doesn’t find it in herself to care much about it.
She’s been awake for three days now. She’s been suffering through three long days of fluorescent lights burning into her retinas; of doctors poking at her like she’s an elementary school class animal; of nurses asking her questions in that slow, careful voice people use when they think you might be suffering from severe brain damage, or even better, that you’re hysterical enough to kill yourself without their constant supervision.
It sounds kind of like, “Can you tell us your name, Miss?”
Or, “Do you remember what happened?”
Or even, “Is there anyone we can call?”
(The respective answers are no, yes, and hell no. Fuck you.)
Courtney lets her feet dangle off the bed for the moment being while she adjusts her position on the hospital bed. She inches her ass on the mattress, and moves forward until her toes graze, then soles land flat on the floor. Cold, it’s cold. The linoleum is fucking freezing beneath her bare feet.
With one hand braced against the bed for balance and the other pressed against her ribs as if it’ll be able to do something if she tears an organ, she manages to prop herself back up to her feet. Her legs shake, either from a month of rotting away on a bed or from the whole skydiving-from-a-fucking-robot thing, and it pisses her off way more than it actually should for a patient who’s woken up from a coma just three days ago.
She forces herself up straight on her feet, and the room begins to spin without a second’s delay. The walls follow it close behind on spinning, and her head joins them right after.
Bile rises up from her stomach to her throat. She stops it, then forces it back down with a gulp of spit.
She wheezes for air until the spinning eases down, and eventually stops.
She doesn’t even notice she’s sweat until the bandage on her face itches from the salty wetness. Despite her whole body screaming at her to scratch at it, she doesn’t touch it. Because if she touches it, she’ll feel the texture of what’s underneath.
(The puckered, melted skin that ran from her right cheek down to her jaw the explosion had kindly gifted her was under it. She hadn’t seen how it actually looked, because the nurses have been so fucking careful not to bring her a mirror to keep her sanity at bay.
Sanity? Please, color her stoked. What part of her sanity was even left after knowingly attempting murder and unknowingly attempting suicide at the same time?)
The room is on the third floor. She’s checked. The first thing she’d done was to check it when she woke up, actually, before she’d realized that she would have to pay the hospital bills. The third floor was doable. Probably.
The window is old. That’s the first thing Courtney notices when she finally makes it across the room—which takes approximately ten years off her life expectancy, by the way, because apparently walking five feet is an Olympic sport when your body’s held together with leftover spite, antibiotic IV and surgical thread.
Nevermind. The window is old, and it doesn’t have one of those fancy new locks that would require an actual key or some kind of security clearance. No, this is one of those classic shitty hospital windows with a simple latch that probably hasn’t been switched out since the building was constructed in, what, the fucking seventies?
Thank God for budget cuts.
She braces herself against the wall, and catches her breath. Her ribs are screaming. Her legs are jelly. The room is doing that fun spinny thing again where the walls decide they’d rather be a carousel than actual architecture.
She presses her forehead against the cool glass and closes her eyes.
(Don’t think about anything. Don’t think about the fall. Or Mecha man. Or how you’re three floors up and you can barely stand and fucking—)
The latch clicks open easier than she’s expected from the rusty thing.
The window slides up with a soft scrape of wood against wood, and cold night air slaps her square in her face, blows down her neck, and sticks the sweat-soaked hospital gown to her back. Los Angeles in winter—which can’t really be counted as winter against the snow-and-cookies-and-hot-chocolate winter of New York, to be honest—is cold enough at night to make her shiver.
Or maybe that’s the blood loss. Hard to say at the moment.
Courtney leans out, just enough so that she can assess the situation. Below her, there’s a maintenance ladder running down the side of the building, rusty and probably violating eleven different safety codes. Next to her, there’s a ledge, maybe eight inches wide, running along the building’s exterior.
She could try the ladder. Probably the smart choice. Climb down real nice and slow, and hope her grip holds and her ribs don’t decide to puncture a lung halfway down.
(Or.)
…Or, she could try the ledge, shimmy along to the corner where there’s a fire escape, and take the stairs down like a semi-normal person.
Both options suck ass. Both options involve a very real possibility of her becoming an awesome sidewalk art.
“Doable,” she mutters to herself, “Totally doable.”
She grips the window frame. It feels surprisingly sturdy for an old fart of a window. Then, by forcing her arms to cooperate with her, she pulls herself up, and manages to sit on the frame.
She swings her legs again. She’s so over this already.
“—just checking on the Jane Doe in 304—”
Courtney freezes.
Shit.
(Jane Doe. Right. Because she wouldn’t give them her name, since that would mean Shroud could find her, or worse, SDN could find her, or worse-worse, literally anyone could find her and then she’d have to explain why she’s covered in second degree burns and ugly scars and why she looks like she’s been made into a goddamn shish kebab.
Haha. Yeah.)
The door handle starts to turn.
Courtney makes a decision.
She throws herself out the window.
Her feet hit the ledge and immediately slip.
For a second there, she’s tipping backward into open air with her arms windmilling, and her brain helpfully supplies the image of her body bouncing off the pavement three floors down like a meat piñata.
But, her fingers manage to catch the window frame. Somehow. Her knuckles go white with the desperation of her grip, and she slams forward against the building’s exterior, cheek pressing against rough brick.
(Her broken ribs feel like they’re trying to break through her chest. Her impaled palms are screaming where the brick digs into them. The stitches in her chest pull tight enough that she’s pretty sure at least one of them has just popped.)
She doesn’t dare move. She just stays there against the wall, plastered on it like a fucking cockroach, breathing in short gasps because that’s all her lungs can do anymore.
“What the—where did she go?”
She hears footsteps inside the room. They approach the window. The nurse is leaning out now, looking down, and then up, and then—
Courtney holds her breath. She goes invisible.
“Fuck. Call security! Jane Doe’s gone—she must’ve—how did she even—”
The nurse pulls back inside. More footsteps follow it. Then, shouting does.
Courtney gasps for air. She doesn’t wait to hear the rest.
She inches along the ledge, scooting sideways, with her back pressed against the brick.
(Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Don’t—)
She looks down.
The ground is very far away. The ground is, in fact, so far away that it might as well be in a different time zone. The streetlights below look like pinpricks. The cars look like toys.
Oh. She’s actually going to puke this time.
The fire escape is maybe fifteen feet away. Might as well be fifteen miles. But she moves anyway, because what else is she going to do? Go back inside and let them call the cops? Let them run her prints and figure out who she really is? Let them contact SDN and arrest her?
No. The hell she’s not.
She moves.
Inch by inch, hand over hand—her fingers find the spaces between bricks, grip on them, and shuffle sideways on the narrow concrete lip like her life depends on it.
Because, it fucking does.
Halfway there, her hand slips.
She gasps, lurches, catches herself on—something, she doesn’t even know what, some piece of architectural detail that definitely wasn’t designed to hold a person’s weight. It holds anyway.
Two minutes of pure agony, straight hell. Her foot finally finds the fire escape, then her hand follows suit.
And then, she’s on it, collapsed on the metal grating, her whole body trembling.
She allows herself exactly ten seconds to lie there like a dying fish.
Then, she gets up.
The fire escape shrieks with every step she takes. So much for stealth.
Courtney half-climbs, half-falls down the metal stairs, her grip slipping on the railing more than once. By the time she hits the second-floor landing, her hands are leaving bloody trails on the metal.
Great. Evidence. Not like she’s trying to fucking disappear or anything.
The alley below is dark and smells like cat piss and rotting garbage. Perfect. She’s already intimately familiar with both, and it’s no fucking thanks to either of her crackheads of parents.
She takes the last flight of stairs too fast and nearly eats shit at the bottom. Her legs give out and she goes down hard on her knees, palms smacking against concrete.
She nearly collapses altogether. But, she manages. She bites down on her tongue, and gets back up to her feet like the absolute champ she is.
And, that’s when she spots it: a maintenance door, propped wide open with a chipped off brick. Light is spilling out from inside. There’s gray smoke in the air.
Looks like someone’s on a smoke break.
Courtney’s hospital gown is paper-thin, blood-stained, and is currently the only thing between her and public indecency charges. She needs clothes. Real clothes.
She needs that leather jacket she can see hanging on a hook just inside the door.
She inches closer as quietly as she can manage. (Which, it isn’t very much, considering the wheezing and the coughing and the general shittiness of her current situation.)
The maintenance worker—or doctor, or nurse, or whoever the hell it is, she could have cared less—is facing away from the door. He’s leaning against the wall, with his phone pressed to his ear, “—yeah, I know, I’ll be home soon—”
Courtney reaches through the doorway.
Her fingers graze on the sleeve of the jacket, then close around it.
She pulls it.
The hanger makes a faint creak as it comes free.
The guy on the phone doesn’t even bat an eye.
Her feet are bare and bloody by the time she makes it to the street. The sidewalks are cold, dirty as shit, and littered with so many of God-knows-what.
She doesn’t stop.
She just pulls the jacket tighter into her chest, and keeps on walking.
(Time to find somewhere to spend the night.)