#canariesqueen

@canariesqueen

Natasha had a longstanding soft spot for younger heroes. Or aspiring heroes. (It was hard to tell where they stood — hard to tell what they considered themselves. Hero was a big word, created shadows bigger than most could imagine.) But Olivia was a funny one. Determined enough that Natasha could see her going far, and yet funny enough that Natasha wasn’t sure if she’d make it around the corner, let alone far enough into a fight to make a difference. That had been her issue with Scott Lang as well. He talked too much. Instead of shooting back another joke in Olivia’s direction, Natasha grabbed a length of rope and tossed it towards Olivia. “For your legs. You only need one leg, right? Let’s put it to the test.”

Anger and grief wend hand-in-hand. Scott knew that, had felt it more times than he could hope to count. When his parents died, when he lost Jean, when he lost himself... After a while, that anger started to build up. It became overwhelming, became hard to control. It burned you from the inside out.

Scott, for his part, tended to react to it by doing exactly what Olivia was describing now. He ignored it, let it fester. Warren once called him the king of emotional repression, and that was certainly a fair accusation to make. Scott couldn’t begin to pretend otherwise. 

That didn’t mean he wouldn’t encourage other people to be better. As Logan was so fond of pointing out, Scott Summers was a damn hypocrite.

“That anger always spills over eventually,” he pointed out with a shrug. “You can either get ahead of it and be in control... or you can be a ticking time bomb and just hope there’s no one nearby when you explode.”

@canariesqueen​

Her first reaction was to drop what she was doing and remind Olivia that was exactly how people lost things. She said the very definition of the thing and then claimed that was not what she was doing... Colleen opened her mouth, almost arguing her point, before she shook her head and thought better of it. “You know... that sounds suspiciously familiar. I hope you didn’t set anything down at the center, pretty sure Rosie is firmly set on her finder’s keeper’s policy.” 

@canariesqueen

There was a long pause that followed the comment. Daisy tapped her fingers on her leg and looked at Olivia... still silent. "Well," she started, not selling any sort of confidence at all. "Do... do you want me to lie to you?" May would have had a plan. Coulson would have been talking through a really long and boring one - but Daisy's plan was always one thing. Run in and get in the action. She did her best 'planning' when she was in the middle of a problem, not on the outside looking. "Do you have a plan? We could do a plan - or we could just... you know... go in?"

“If you’re waiting for me to tell you not to...” Robbie trailed off with a shrug, shifting his weight. He didn’t know her, and he figured that meant she didn’t know him, either. They were a pair of strangers who’d happened upon a warehouse that seemed to be the base for some kind of gang operations, but it was empty at the moment. Everybody packed it in and went home at a certain point in the day, even gangsters. 

He glanced over to her, eyeing her carefully. She was the vigilante type, he was sure. He’d gotten good at picking them out, recognizing the signs. Most of them were a pain in his ass, but if she was willing to tear down a building in the middle of the city, chances were she wasn’t so bad. “See, me? I figured I’d wait for them to come back. We tear the warehouse down, they find another one. They build this shit back up. Nothing changes. Or...” He trailed off again, clicking his tongue. “We take them down, and we change shit ourselves.” 

“You don’t know me very well,” Scott said with a wry smile, entirely too at ease for the situation. From the outside, it looked bad. Anti-mutant groups were really only anti-mutant in name --- they rarely limited themselves to mutantkind alone. If he thought they would (and if he thought she’d listen), he would have sent Olivia on her way without concern. But... Men like this only ever wanted to wipe out anything different. Metahumans were included in that description.

They were outnumbered. Anyone else might have been concerned about that, but Scott? Scott had been a trained tactician since childhood, had faced odds far worse than this long before he was out of high school. To Scott, this was child’s play. “I always have a plan,” he assured Olivia with a nod. “Actually, I always have several. We’re going to flank them. You go right, use your ultrasonic vibration. I go left, use my concussive blast. We drive the ones who don’t lose consciousness immediately into a retreat.”

@canariesqueen

Zatanna sucked in a breath, caught between wanting to help Olivia because she was her friend's kid (even if it was another version of Dinah) and wanting walk away because at the end of the day? Zatanna didn't owe Olivia a damn thing. And she was less inclined to go the extra mile for her after she had seen the way Olivia had treated Dinah. There was a story there, she figured, but Zatanna didn't know it and Olivia had made it clear that Zatanna was unwelcome company. "Fine," Zatanna said, keeping her distance. "But you should get that looked at, even if it's not by me."

Hell was a place the Rider had a complex relationship with. It was home, but only in the way a crumbling house was home. It was the place in which he had complete control, the place that was his domain, but staying there indefinitely... There was a reason why he found hosts on Earth, a reason why he kept coming back to this realm instead of staying within his own. It was a trade-off, of course. Less control in exchange for whatever peace passed for in a mind so wrought with war and chaos. 

The way the world was right now... It was a nice medium between the two. There was the control he’d earned in Hell, but with the relative ease of Earth. It wouldn’t last, he knew. Either this world’s heroes would end it or the world itself would end. Either result would be a shame. Either result was a way’s off.

The Rider stared at a glowing green mass, a thing that was not dissimilar to something he’d seen before, though he couldn’t put a finger on it directly. (So many lifetimes ago, when he had a face, a body which belonged to him and him alone. These were not memories he experienced when locked inside someone else’s head, nor were they ones he knew in Hell. He wasn’t sure where they came from. He wasn’t sure what to do with them.) It was large, towering. The shape of a man, but made of fire. It was looking directly at him. He shifted. 

“It means to kill me,” he said, glancing over towards the only person who had yet to run. She was young. A little too brave to be intelligent enough to leave, he supposed. Heroes usually were. Robbie, though he would argue he didn’t fit the term, was the same. “I know it from somewhere. I don’t know how. Why.” He rolled his shoulders back, squaring his feet. “But I think I remember how to kill it.”