indulgent creativity

He laughs, but does as you say, attention returning to the mostly-empty highway. In this rural area, it’s only your one lane heading north, and the other heading south, single lanes with no division between them except a solid yellow line painted on the road.

“I am going to eat so many apples, I might actually die,” Adrian informs you as the song comes to a fading close, starting to transition into the next one. When you laugh, he smiles, insisting, “No, seriously! Did you know that if you eat, like, hundreds of apple seeds, you can technically die of cyanide poisoning?”

“Then don’t eat hundreds of apple seeds?” you suggest. “Seems simple enough to avoid.”

“No, no, that’s my point,” Adrian tells you. “You won’t be able to stop me! I will eat hundreds of apples and hundreds of apple seeds and—”

“Adrian!” you shout, hand shooting out to grab onto his forearm on instinct, your other hand flying upwards in an aborted motion towards the windshield—

—And towards the massive tractor trailer truck that has come barreling out of the southbound lane, crossing the yellow line to head straight for Adrian’s little four-door replacement for the Vigilantemobile.

“Shit, shit, shit—” Adrian curses, cutting the wheel so hard to one side that the car spins to the side. “Hold on—”

You grip his arm tighter, bracing yourself in your seat as the world outside blurs and Adrian fights to avoid getting crushed by the truck and—

There’s an impact at the front of the car that jars you, and then suddenly you have the stomach-dropping sensation of weightlessness. You tighten your hold on Adrian’s forearm in the last moments you have, the world flipping end over end outside the windows, before everything goes dark.

— — — — —

Something keeps hitting you in the face.

You frown, scrunching your face up a little bit. When you try to lift your hand to swat whatever it is away, you realize you can’t manage to move your arm.

As you’re waking up, coherence slinks in a little bit at a time. The pain comes in in waves as your body starts recognizing it, processing that there is a throb in your skull, a burning in your back and legs, and a piercing, radiating agony high on your chest.

Whatever is hitting you in the face strikes a little harder this time, and you groan, forcing your eyes open.

The entire world is upside-down. Adrian’s face fills your vision, and you blink again, disoriented, as his hands grasp your face and his forehead comes to rest against yours, just— in reverse, because he’s upside-down—

Or you are, you realize, because you’re still buckled into your passenger seat in the turned-over car, flipped on its roof. You shift, and the pain in your chest and back explode.

“Hey, hey, don’t move, stop moving,” Adrian insists. “It’s fine, you’re fine, you just— You gotta stop moving, okay? Or it’s just gonna hurt worse, but— I am going to get you out of here, okay?”

Your head spins, thoughts coming through foggily. His words are difficult to process, but your body responds to his intensity, to the panic he’s just barely keeping a lid on, to the terror that’s clear across every line of his face despite his attempts to keep you calm.

Looking more closely at his face, you realize one of the lenses of his glasses is gone, shattered out of the frame, and there’s blood on his face, splattered across his cheek on the right and dripping from a cut on his temple on the left.

“You’re hurt,” you mumble, your throat feeling sore and rasping. Had you been screaming? You don’t even remember; the last thing you remember is the truck coming at you, Adrian trying to avoid it, and then, just— nothing. “Are you okay?”

Adrian huffs a half-hysterical breath of a laugh, though you can’t help but feel that he’s not finding this particularly funny. “Am I okay? Am—” He takes a steadying breath, holds your upside-down face between his palms again. You’re starting to get even dizzier, looking at everything from your wrong angle while your head hurts and your body throbs with pain. “Yeah, I’m okay. Nothing we can’t stitch up, right?”

You try to move your arm again, wanting to wipe the blood off of his face, but the pain in your chest doubles, triples, and you cry out in a whine you bite back, hating how it sounds ripping out of you.

“Stop— Stop moving,” he repeats, firm, looking you right in the eye. “I’m—” He looks around, as if he’ll miraculously find something that will help him, before he lands on his cellphone, dangling from its mount precariously, just as upside-down as you are. “Okay, I’m calling for help, we’ll get you out, okay?”

If Adrian’s calling for help, that means whatever it is that he’s panicking about isn’t something he can handle, isn’t a problem he can solve.

He’s fumbling with his phone, blood-slick fingers sliding on the screen as he taps into an emergency call, and he’s distracted enough to give you time to look down— or, rather, up at yourself.

You realize immediately why you can’t move, why the pain is there. A massive fragment of glass— maybe from your windshield, maybe from the truck, you can’t tell— has shattered off and broken its way into you, right through the space above your collarbone and through, pinning you to the seat. You twitch your fingers, and all the muscles burn; one arm is trapped by the glass, unable to move while it’s stuck in you, and the other is pinned by the twisted-up seatbelt, keeping it caught at a hard angle against your chest.

Your legs are caught above you, the blood flow coming down. You see more blood on yourself than you think you ever have before, and your spinning vision starts tunneling into blackness.

“Adrian,” you mumble, a wave of dizziness washing through your body. You can feel unconsciousness coming this time, and you see his wide, terrified eyes land on you just as you manage to tell him, “I don’t feel good.”

“Hey, you have to stay awake, though,” Adrian insists. “Gotta stay with me, can’t go anywhere else, right?”

“Mm,” you agree, letting your eyes drift closed. It’s easier than watching the world spin and tunnel and splotch out the way it is.

“Hey, hey, look at me— Look at me,” he begs you, but you can’t. It kills you that you can’t do what he wants, especially when he’s asking so desperately, and when you know it’s what you need to do, but you just can’t manage it. You’re not even sure where your eyes are anymore; everything becomes nothing again with a sigh.

— — — — —

This time, when you wake up, everything feels soft.

It’s like you’re inside of a cloud. You have a weightless feeling that’s much nicer than the one you’d felt in the car— and even thinking of the accident, horrifying and traumatic as it is— was?— doesn’t bring you any panic. You’re just floaty, foggy, all the pain and panic and fear held further than arm’s length away.

Shifting, you realize everything really is soft. You’re laying someplace soft; your head is on something soft; something soft has been placed over you.

The only thing that isn’t soft is whatever’s held tight in your hand.

You squeeze your fingers around the shape and feel it squeeze back. A smile comes onto your face automatically, and you hum, drifting off again.

— — — — —

This time, you’re a little more coherent as you start coming into consciousness.

You manage to open your eyes this time, blinking sleepily upwards towards a grey-and-green speckled ceiling. It reminds you of a cardinal’s egg. It’s also definitely unfamiliar, and you turn your head just enough to feel the crinkling of a pillowcase beneath your cheek.

The hand in yours tightens, and you blink down to find Adrian’s fingers woven into yours, sitting in a chair scooted up to your bedside, slumped over the edge of your mattress. His head is pillowed on your thigh as he sleeps bent over. The position looks incredibly uncomfortable.

You reach down, your fingertips just barely grazing a pad of gauze that’s been taped over his temple where you remember he’d been bleeding from. He’s wearing a hospital gown, and a thin white hospital robe thrown over it. A tan blanket is draped over his shoulders; you wonder who else has been here, how long it’s been.

Glancing down at yourself, you see that you’ve been positioned sitting halfway-up, and that your torso is heavily bandaged. One of your arms has been immobilized against your chest, but the other is free to move; reaching up, you find a bandage on your head, too— though probing around it makes your skull throb, so you stop searching out the wound after a second.

Instead, you reach down towards Adrian again. He’s got his backup glasses on, though they’re smushed at a sideways angle with how his face is pressed into your thigh over your blankets; when you let your hand rest on his head, lightly running through his dark curls, he stirs only a little bit, humming contentedly, a smile slipping onto his face even in sleep.

Soft, you whisper, “Adrian,” and he just shifts again, cracking a yawn against your thigh. “Adrian? You shouldn’t lay like that if you’re hurt.”

“Whuh?” he mumbles, confused, blinking his eyes open. He seems lost for a moment— and then you see the instant he remembers everything that happens.

Jolting upright, his hands are on you in an instant, slipping from your hold so he can frame your face between his palms, then skate down over your chest. You can only assume he’s already done this countless times, but you still allow him to do it again, to take inventory of you, just like you have with each other every time you’ve been hurt in a fight or an accident or just doing something goofy.

“I’m okay,” you tell him, when he’s straightening your blankets, fidgeting with them over your legs.

He scoffs, turning to look at you over the top edge of his glasses. “You are not okay, I— I will be the judge of when you are okay, and when you’re— you’re in the hospital after I saw— I watched them—” His words come to a stammering stop, and he frowns down at his hands before fiddling with the blankets again. “I’m just saying, you were not okay, you are not okay—”

“I will be okay?” you interrupt.

With how stressed and on-edge he clearly is, it’s a risky move, but you earn the small huff and the smile that you’re angling for.

“Yeah,” he tells you, the wind leaving his sails, sitting heavily on the edge of your bed. “They all kept saying you’ll be just fine. I just—” He waves one hand vaguely through the air. “Seeing that—” His voice breaks, and he curses, “Shit—”

“It’s okay,” you promise him. He shakes his head, so you reach out with your good hand, catching his in yours. “Hey, it is. I swear. We’re both here, aren’t we?”

His eyes are bloodshot, his face flushing. You can see the shine of tears welling up before he swallows thickly and looks down at your joined hands, taking a shaking breath, in and out in tremors.

“You nearly weren’t,” Adrian mumbles. “It should’ve been—”

“Stop,” you interrupt him. “Stop right there. It’s bad enough you’re hurt—”

“I’m not hurt—”

You used your joined hands to point right at his temple. “Then what’s this? And I’m sure that’s not everything, Adrian. You have to tell me when you’re hurt. That’s the deal, remember? We’re honest with each other.”

“This is different,” Adrian insists.

“How?”

“I don’t— I don’t know, it just is,” Adrian says. “I was the one driving—”

“It’s not your fault,” you tell him. He’s about to protest, but you cut him off with, “No, it’s not your fault. The truck came at us. You tried to get us out of the way— we’d probably be dead if you didn’t.”

It seems like he’s still going to argue, for a moment, but your last words draw him up short. Instead, he shivers a little, then tilts towards you.

“Come here,” you tell him, releasing his hand so you can wrap your arm around him instead. He’s ginger, gentle, trying not to hurt you as he curls up into your side. You rub his back, kissing the top of his head; he winds his arm around you, slow and easy, waiting for a wince from you that never comes.

“I should be comforting you,” he mumbles into your throat.

“You are comforting me.” You kiss the top of his head again, letting your lips linger there as you murmur, “Thanks for saving my life.”

He sniffles. You feel his chest hitch.

“Thanks for saving mine,” he says, muffled by your skin, growing humid and slick with his tears.

You press your cheek to the top of his head, just holding him for a while. When he’s able to calm down, he lifts his head a little, shuffles you around a bit, slow and steady with you as he guides you to rest against his chest instead. His fingertips trace nonsense patterns into your uninjured shoulder, and you yawn, letting yourself relax.

After a moment, you realize, “Wait— Where’s your bed?”

“Down the hall,” Adrian tells you in a sleepy murmur.

“Wh— Adrian.” You shift a little, but Adrian doesn’t let you sit up. “You should be in your own bed, you’re going to hurt yourself—”

His grip tightens on you. “Do you want me to leave?”

You think about it for a moment, and he did promise to be honest, and he doesn’t seem to be in pain, so—

“No,” you confess.

“Good.” He snuggles back in. “Just relax, okay? Everything’s going to be fine.”

It turns out that the superhumans value life enough to let you hang onto yours, but not so much that they’re not willing to play with it as a form of punishment for you. They have a variety of weapons— and a variety of powers— and you get to witness so many of them in action, in ways you wish you never had, in ways you wish you could forget, in ways that will scar you for the rest of your life— which might not be that long, depending.

You endure sonic shrieks that make your ears ring and your head throb and your nose bleed. You’re tied to a chair, and have been this entire time, unable to move; your body aches horribly, and you wonder if you’ll ever be able to get out of this position. You know both kneecaps are broken; one swing from a superhuman with super-strength had shattered them both. Even if you could break the silver, impenetrable ropes keeping you bound to the uncomfortable wooden chair, you wouldn’t be able to walk anywhere. You probably wouldn’t even be able to crawl by this point.

Burns from a super with pyrokinesis; lightning-bolt marks electrocuted through you by a super with electrokinesis; constantly soaked-through and shivering in this tiny shed they keep you in, because a weather-manipulating super has it storming constantly in here, no reprieve from the cold rain that pelts you at all times.

Occasionally, you manage to slip into sleep and get a break from it all— but it always comes roaring back when they wake you up again. They seem to enjoy having someone to test their superpowered weapons on; you don’t know how many knife blades they’ve brought to you by this point, testing on every inch of available skin. There’s a bullet festering in your shoulder made of alien material; that’s all you’d been able to find out before they’d experimented with it by firing it on you. You’d barely been able to feel the ball-ended whips they’d tested on you afterwards, you’d been so focused on not throwing up and passing out.

Now, after a week of this, you’d love nothing more than to just pass out and stay that way. You’re exhausted, you’re in so much pain you feel like you’ve moved onto another level of existence just to handle it, and you’re starting to wonder if the team’s coming for you— if they even can.

You feel a sense of panic at the thought of them being captured, too— of John, and Leota, and Emilia, and Chris, and— and Adrian—

You especially can’t think of Adrian in another tiny shed like this, being subjected to the same treatment you’ve been subjected to for the last seven days. At least, you think it’s been seven days; it’s getting harder and harder to keep track, and you think you’re losing time.

Blinking, you know you’ve just lost it again. It’s the strange feeling of slipping sideways, and you just know you’re coming in and out.

You just wish you could feel any relief in the moments you’re out. You barely remember them or notice them anymore.

In the distance— you don’t know when, or where, or why, but you feel a rumble.

Your brain foggily tries to tell you that this is something different, but your body is reacting instinctively. Every time there’s been a noise in the last week, the door has opened into your shed, and you’ve been hurt. Your body is still trying to protect itself, even after everything, and you cry out at the pain that jolts through you as a result.

Outside there’s the sound of gunfire, then shouting.

And you think you recognize a couple of the voices.

Not as belonging to people here, but as belonging to your people. You think you can hear the Kids— Emilia shouting instructions, Chris calling back to her— it’s them—

But—

This could be another trap. Another method of torture. You’d been wondering when they’d move on from physical torment to mental; it was only a matter of time before some superhuman with illusion magic, or manipulation abilities, or— or any number of horrors you could easily come up with, after the week you’ve had— before they decided to break your brain as well as your body.

Despite this fear, your heart still lurches into your throat when you hear Adrian in a shout of, “Not here!”

If he isn’t real, you’ve got nothing to lose. You’ll be hurt anyways; you’ll probably die here.

If he is real—

“Here,” you whisper, licking at your dry lips, cracked beneath your tongue. You can’t manage to get your voice very loud at first, your throat aching as you try again, “Here, I’m— I’m here—” You cough, then shout, crackling but louder, “I’m here!”

There’s more gunfire outside, then Leota shouting, “I hear something!”

Your eyes fill up with tears. You don’t stop, making yourself keep shouting, “Here, I’m here, please, I’m right here, please, I’m here,” on an endless, begging loop, louder and more frantic with each pass, until the door is crashing in. You flinch; every time that door has banged in, it’s been followed by pain.

This time, though, Leota and Chris are rushing through the doorway into the rain, and you sob with relief. In better circumstances, you might be embarrassed, but you have been hurt and drained and broken; you can’t hold back your relief at seeing them, hallucinations or not.

“You guys came,” you gasp out.

“Of course we did,” Leota says, coming to crouch beside you. She can’t stop looking you over with this horrified expression on her face; she looks back at Chris, asks, “What do we do?”

“Well, we can’t just— pick up the whole chair, we have to get (Y/N) out of it first,” Chris points out.

“But—” Leota starts, then stops. You can hear the unspoken words; you look like you’re about to fall apart, a beaten, wet mess held up by the ties keeping you attached to the chair.

Together, with knives Leota pulls from her belt, they work at sawing through the ropes binding you. You let your head drop; relief is flooding your system as you start to believe they’re real, their touch on you actually having weight and feeling, and exhaustion is seizing you.

“Hey, stay up,” Chris warns you. Into his communicator, he tells the rest of the time, “We’ve got (Y/N). Location is—”

“I’m on my way,” Adrian’s voice crackles through.

Your chest tightens hearing him. You’ve missed him so much; thoughts of him were one of the only things that got you through this. You’ve only officially been together exclusively for a couple of months, and you’ve still been keeping it a secret from the rest of the team.

You wonder how Adrian has been handling your absence. If the roles were reversed, you’re sure you’d be a wreck, determined to get him back, wouldn’t rest until you had.

When Adrian spills through the doorway, you know he’s felt the exact same as you would have.

Even with his entire body covered— face included, the prescription Vigilante visor shining red and getting speckled with rainwater— you can tell how destroyed he is about this from the tense lines of his body, the way he freezes when he first comes in, and then—

And then, him sprinting to you, sliding to his knees in front of you, grasping your face between his gloved hands. You flinch at the pain, and his hands leave; you beg him, “No, come back,” and he’s cradling you again, shifting upwards as the ropes are finally cut and you can sag into him.

“I’m so sorry,” Adrian babbles in your ear, desperate, words rushing together. He rips his helmet off in an uncharacteristic move, but it’s exactly what you need: to see his face, to meet his eyes, to see his red-flushed skin and his terror and him, to know he’s real. “Baby, I’m so sorry, I should’ve gotten here sooner, oh— Oh, shit, you look so bad, I’m so sorry, I’m— I’m gonna fix it, okay?”

You nod blearily against his shoulder. He lifts you up again, nudging you back so he can evaluate your face between his cupped hands again. The gloves are rough on your bruised skin, but you’re so happy he’s here, you just smile dazedly up at him.

“Thank you for coming,” you mumble upwards. “Love you.”

Adrian’s eyes widen, eyebrows lifting. “What? You— Wait— Sorry, wh—”

“I told myself I’d say it if I saw you again,” you tell him. Your blinks are getting longer, slower; you wish you weren’t in this rain anymore. “So, I am. I love you.”

It only takes a second for this to process through Adrian before he’s grinning. It’s a strange expression on his face, the simultaneous horror and elation, but you can see both there in spades.

“I love you, too,” he replies in a rush. “I love you so much, I’ve loved you since I met you, it’s been torture not telling you— Oh, shit, I shouldn’t be saying that, that’s insensitive as fuck—”

You huff a laugh that has him stopping, looking down to your mouth then back up to your eyes before he ducks in, pressing a gentle kiss there, careful with you.

It’s real. He’s real. This is real.

“What the fuck?” Chris demands from beside them.

“Is this really happening?” Leota asks. “Should I be stopping him? Is he taking advantage of—”

“I kinda think they’re into it,” Chris comments.

Your kiss breaks, and you loll against Adrian again, barely able to keep yourself upright. Everything is pain; you look up to Adrian, tell him, “Sorry.”

“Sorry?” he demands. “What sorry? What the fuck could you possibly be sorry for?”

“The secret,” you remind him. “Now they’ll know.”

His face is flushing from pink right into red when he tells  you, “I want them to know. Just— Not the bad guys.”

You smile, letting your head fall against his shoulder. “Love you.”

He kisses the top of your head, then moves to scoop you up. You hiss at the pain in your knees, your ribs, your head, your everything, and he kisses your cheek again, telling you, “I got you. I know it hurts, we’re gonna fix it all up, don’t you worry.”

“We are talking about this later,” Chris informs you and Adrian firmly. “Once you’re, you know— in one piece again.”

“Mmkay,” you agree, eyes closing. “Wake me up then.”