#ofdemonsandmagic

Robbie grit his teeth as he looked at his car, the faint scratch in the paint likely invisible to everyone but him. It would heal the moment he got into the driver’s seat, just as it always did, but it was the principle of the thing that bothered him. It was the audacity of the stranger who’d rammed a shopping cart into it that got his blood boiling.

He turned to the stranger with an angry glint in his eye, clenching his jaw tightly. Something strange about this one, the Rider told him. Don’t give a shit, Robbie responded. “Yeah,” he said aloud, “that was your fault. You ever watch where you’re going?”

Scott shifted, glancing over at the scene with a sigh. It was a little funny, the disaster the latest villain had left in their wake. It wasn’t every day a man with slime powers terrorized a city block... but it was hard to feel entertained when there was a good chance the damage would be, like everything else, blamed on mutants. “Well,” he said, glancing back to the woman at his side, “I’ve been reliably informed I ruin most jokes anyways, so that may be for the best.”

In the Air Force, sleeping in was never much of an option. You woke up with the sun, you worked up a sweat before most people got their asses out of bed, and you kept going. It had been years since Sam retired from that life, but he’d never managed to shake the internal clock. Even if old nightmares didn’t wake him up, he was up before dawn, feet on the pavement, running laps around whatever he could find. This morning, it was the park. A generic setting, but quiet enough and not yet crowded in the early morning hours.

Sam was nearly finished with his run before he saw anyone, already slowing in preparation to stop. He stopped next to the bench where the stranger sat, propping a foot up on it to stretch his tired legs. “Getting an early start,” he observed. “You here to feed the birds?” The joke would have been funnier with someone who knew who he was, but Sam never cared much if the only person he made laugh was himself.