Fighting Chance Vol 2 #6

Hitting up the same grimy diner at the ass-end of Queens was a habit all three of the boys had gotten used to before and after late-night jobs. Carb-loading and protein-filling. It wasn’t because nowhere else stayed open past midnight because come the fuck on, this was New York City.

No, not that.

However, it was the only place they knew where everyone didn’t bother to ask questions when three kids walked in all busted up, covered in dirt and blood.

Which… honestly, gave Zain some questions of his own, but he also didn’t feel like finding anything out. You could call it laziness, (and yeah, you’d be right), but he also didn’t care about that either.

Two AM, and Zain still felt the buzz from the adrenaline inside him, that electric feeling he always got after a good scrap that wasn’t just Sensei Collie barking while she beat his ass up and down the dojo. Vince was slouched against the cracked vinyl booth, picking at his fries like they'd personally offended him, while Elvin had his phone out, pretending he had better places to be.

Of course they had to start up with their bullshit.

"How’s the little kitty cat?" Elvin's grin was all teeth, the muscular boy showing off his brand new pair of gold grills, Rage enjoying his split from their hauls in the most obvious way. "You been checking your phone every five minutes like she your whole world."

"She's not my girlfriend," Zain shot back as he glanced up from his brand-new iPhone 4S, but his voice came out too quick, too defensive, and he knew they'd caught it. Damn.

“You bet, Chowder.”

Zain’s mouth dropped open, one eye twitching in irritation. You motherf- 

Rather than say anything, he wisely grabbed a handful of fries and shoved them in his mouth to buy time, because sometimes the best defense was making it impossible to say something stupid. CHOWDER?

Impulse took over intellect and Zain flipped Elvin off anyway.

"Yeah, yeah, big dawg, we see you." Elvin wasn't letting it go, because of course he wasn't. His friend had the attention span of a goldfish except when it came to fucking with people, then suddenly he had the memory of an elephant.

…which he could respect, honestly.

Vince looked up from his food, that slow grin spreading across his face like molasses. "Woof woof."

"Stoooooop." The word came out like a whine along with a few fry crumbs, and Zain immediately wished he said nothing at all. Just gave them more ammo, damn. He could feel heat creeping up his neck, the real-deal annoying kind of heat that meant he was actually embarrassed.

Which was stupid.

It wasn't like that with Cat.

It wasn't like anything, really, except maybe his stomach had done something just a little weird when she slipped her number into his hoodie last week. Hell, he didn’t even know her real name. Well, she hadn’t told him her real name, but the Black Cat has only ever had one name anyway.

Either way, she called him her “fighter boy” and he called her “kitty cat”, which sounded bad but he was just throwing an annoying nickname back her way. It wasn’t… like…

That.

His left eye twitched as Vince slapped the table, laughing again as Elvin did his best Chowder impression with a “I’m not your boyfriend!”

Whatever. They could think what they wanted. Didn't make it true.

Laughter eased off and went quiet as the waitress walked over, something in her step and the look on her face making all three of them straighten up without thinking about it.

Maria was a nice older lady, Zain could tell that much. She always made sure their food was cooked just right, even when she brought it over to their booth with tired eyes and hands that shook just a little when she wasn't paying attention. Maria had been watching them come in for weeks now, always giving them the same booth in the back corner, never asking why three kids were out so late or why they usually had blood on their clothes.

And it was because he always made sure to leave her a real big tip, usually with fresh cash from one of their hauls.

She stopped at their table, wringing her hands like she was trying to squeeze courage out of her knuckles. "You boys... I hear you might be Wonders?"

The question came out of nowhere, and the three of them couldn’t have been more shocked if the woman had slapped a gun on the table. Zain felt his whole body go tense, a sudden question like that after a month of polite pretending not to notice usually wasn’t a good sign, not at all.

"Why you wanna know?" Elvin went defensive first, because that's what he did when he felt cornered. 

But Maria wasn't backing down, the woman still twisting her hands together as she looked all the boys in the eyes. "My neighbor's daughter. Sophia. She's been missing two weeks."

The words hung in the air like smoke, and suddenly the diner felt too small, too hot, too quiet. Vince sat up straighter, all that lazy Arkansas drawl gone sharp and focused. "Missing how?"

"She was walking home from school. Some men in a van..." Maria's voice cracked, and Zain found himself leaning forward without meaning to, because there was something about the way she said it that made his hands want to curl into fists.

"You call the cops?" The question came out before he could stop it, even though he already knew what she was gonna say. He'd seen that look before, on his own mom's face when the police showed up after neighbors complained about noise and treated them like they were the problem instead of the people getting help.

Maria let out a bitter laugh that didn't have any humor in it. "Cops don't care about missing Puerto Rican girls."

There it was. 

Zain felt a trickle of something in his chest, thoughts of home popping up before he pushed it back down and focused on the here and now. Ignoring everything else, he’d heard variations of that same sentence his whole life when his parents told him to be careful outside. Cops don't care about missing poor kids. Cop’s don’t care about missing Black kids. Cops don't care about anything that doesn't make them look good on the evening news.

Maria slid a napkin across the table, and her handwriting was shaky but readable. 

"There's a building. Other side of Astoria. Girls go in, they don't come out." Her voice dropped to a whisper, like saying it too loud might make it more real. "I seen men over there… they been in here before, come round late." Her mouth trembled a little. “Not late as you boys. They not Black, but they not exactly White either. Kinda…”

She shook her head. “Look, I don’t know what they are, but I know they got accents. Like they talk with their teeth closed.”

Zain sucked his teeth and Elvin's eyes snapped to his, wide and knowing, because they both recognized that description. Albanians. They’d kicked in the teeth of one or two in the last month.

"How old is Sophia?" Zain could hear the tension in Vince’s voice, the thirteen-year old suddenly more serious than he’d heard him in a while.

"Fourteen. Around the same age as you boys."

The boys shared a look and, without saying a single word, the three of them knew what they were going to do before they headed back home.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

The trip over to the warehouses was quiet in a way that made Zain's skin crawl. Even in the city that never slept, Three AM meant pretty much empty streets, and by the time they reached the building, it was damn near empty.

The three-story brick building squatted in the darkness, most of its windows boarded up with plywood. Two guards stood outside, both armed from the way something bulged under their jackets, both looking bored out of their minds. 

Which was good for them, because bored meant sloppy, and sloppy meant opportunities.

"This ain't like the other spots," Zain muttered, because it needed to be said even though they all felt it.

"You right, this feels different." Elvin's voice was quiet, thoughtful in a way that meant he was probably thinking of doing something more permanent than broken jaws and wrists.

Vince was studying the building like he was trying to memorize every brick on it and count them too. "I seen places like this before. Back home."

"What you mean by that?" But even as Zain asked the question, part of him didn't want to know the answer.

"Girls used to disappear from my school. Nobody talked about it, but... everybody knew." Vince's accent got thicker when he was stressed, vowels stretching out like taffy. "Teachers would tell us to be careful, walk in groups, don't talk to strangers. But they never said why."

Elvin shifted beside them, and Zain could practically hear him thinking. "Same as always? I go big, you chain the guards, Redneck burns shit?"

"Nah." The word came out harder than Zain intended, but he didn't take it back. Something about this whole situation was setting off alarm bells in his head, making him want to be careful in a way that went against every instinct he had. "This time we go quiet first. See what we're dealing with."

"What if there's actually kids in there?" Vince's question was a loaded gun pointed at the both of them, the youngest of them always asking the questions that hit the hardest somehow. “What we doin’ then?

"Then we get them out." Zain's voice came out flat, certain, and sure, answering back without a blink like he said the sky was blue. "Whatever it takes."

Getting to the third-floor window was easy enough. Zain's chain wrapped around a fire escape bracket, and the rope retracted slow but steady, the entire process as quiet as he could make it go. He helped the others follow, muscles working smooth and quiet, because stealth was just another kind of fighting and he'd always been good at adapting his style to whatever the situation called for.

As soon as they got in, they moved through the building like ghosts, and Zain found himself grateful for all those hours of training with Colleen because knowing how to move your body went a long way in knowing how to move it quietly.

Voices drifted up from below, men laughing and speaking in Albanian. The language was unfamiliar but the tone wasn't. Zain had heard that same casual cruelty in English plenty of times, usually right before someone got hurt.

Then the smell hit them. 

"Aw hell. I know that smell." Vince's voice came out like a hiss, the blond boy suddenly a snake with a Southern accent

"What smell?" Elvin sounded confused, and Zain was glad that he didn’t have to ask.

"My ol’ man was on the force and he told me ‘bout this. People who ain’t wash up in a while, a bunch of them, all stacked up tight. That mean one thing…” Vince’s hands tightened into fists. “Traffickers."

Yeah… He already didn’t like it but having a name for the smell forcing its way up his nose made it real in a way that hit him like a punch to the gut.

They found the hidden door behind a false wall, metal stairs leading down into darkness that seemed to swallow their flashlight beams and as they got downstairs, they froze.

Fuck.

Twelve kids, boys and girls.

Some were too young and a bunch of them were his age or close enough to it, all of them chained to pipes along the wall like animals. Some were barely conscious, clearly drugged with something that made their eyes roll back and their breathing shallow. No bathroom, no beds, little food, and the stench of unwashed bodies made the sight of it all a lot harder to deal with.

"J-Jesus Christ." Vince's voice was strangled, like the words were being forced out through a too-small opening.

"Man... man, this is..." Elvin couldn't finish the sentence, and Zain understood because what words existed for something like this?

Zain opened his mouth to say something, anything, but no sound came out. 

Most of the kids were too drugged to really react to their presence, but one girl who looked around thirteen or fourteen managed to whisper, "Are you here to hurt us too?"

Somehow, he managed to find his voice as he answered back, "N-no. We're here to get you out."

They moved deeper into the room, and that's when they found the table, the table with a menu on top of it, the whole thing laminated and neat. Photos of the kids with prices next to them like they were items in a catalog, and Zain's vision started going red around the edges because his brain was finally catching up to what his eyes were seeing.

Sophia's photo stared up at them from the laminated page. $1,500 - Virgin, Hispanic, 14.

Vince's hands started smoking before any of them noticed, heat distortion rising from his fingertips like summer asphalt. "I’mma kill ‘em.”

The words came out choked, sputtering and flickering like his flames, the same flames already crawling up his arms, bright and angry and hot enough that Zain could feel the temperature in the room spike. Vince started moving toward the stairs, and Zain could see the way his shoulders were clinched up tight, violence clear in his face and body. "Cook ‘em alive!"

The flames were getting brighter, hotter, and the kids in chains started crying because fire meant pain and they'd already had enough pain for several lifetimes. Sophia pressed herself against the wall, eyes wide with terror. "Please don't hurt us!"

Elvin tackled Vince before anyone else could react, because sometimes being the biggest meant being the one who had to stop the others from doing something stupid. "Bro, you gon' hurt the people we here to help."

They went down hard, wrestling on the concrete floor while flames licked at the ceiling and the smell of burning air filled the room. Vince was stronger than he looked, sure, all that Arkansas farm boy muscle corded tight with rage, but Elvin could probably match Captain America in an arm-wrestling competition before transforming.

"G’off me, they gotta burn!"

"Not with the kids here, dumbass!"

"I… they… I…"

Elvin pulled him back, lifting the smaller, scrawnier kid off the floor, arms wrapped around his midsection. "I see it, lil’ man! But we save them first!"

The flames started to die as Vince began crying, tears cutting tracks through the grime on his face. "This... this." He wiped his face with the back of his hand as Elvin let him up, movements shaky and uncoordinated. "This happened to kids back home. Nobody did nothing."

His voice broke on the last word, and Zain felt something twist in his chest because Vince never talked about home, never mentioned the things that made him flinch when certain subjects came up. "Nobody ever does nothing."

While Vince kicked weakly for freedom and kept his teeth gritted as his tears refused to evaporate even against his heat, Zain found himself with almost nothing to do but look straight up at the ceiling. I can hear them. 

He could hear them, his senses twice as good as the average person’s from what he had figured out over the last few months. With that, he tended to pick up on things pretty quickly, even when he didn’t really want to.

Now was one of those times.

But want was different from need.

The men upstairs, the ones who'd built this nightmare of a “business”, were laughing about something, while the children they were selling off were down here suffering.

The thought process started simple and got complicated fast, the way his mind always worked when emotions got too loud and he needed logic to make sense of things. These weren't just bad guys. Bad guys sold drugs, started fights, maybe robbed a convenience store if they were feeling ambitious. These were monsters. They bought and sold kids like trading cards, reduced human beings to price tags and catalog descriptions.

Something cold settled in his chest, spreading outward like ice water in his veins. Not anger, because anger was hot and messy and made you do stupid things. Not rage like Vince, because rage burned itself out and left you empty. This was something else. Something calm and certain and completely terrifying in its clarity.

They don’t deserve to live. He knew the world would be better off without them. It was a simple equation, basic math that his brain could solve without breaking a sweat.

His hand went to his chain, fingers closing around the familiar weight of metal links. For a moment, just a moment, he let himself imagine going upstairs, wrapping it around their throats one by one, watching the light go out of their eyes.

His fingers twitched even when the rest of him remained unmoving. It would be so simple. Three on however many, but they had powers and surprise and the kind of righteous fury that made people do impossible things.

Elvin broke the locks and cuffs holding the kids down while Zain did his best not to pull a Vince and commit murder when they had more important things to deal with. The three of them carried the ones too weak to walk, and the weight of barely-conscious children in his arms should have grounded him, should have reminded him what this was really about.

Instead, it just made the cold certainty spread deeper, because every kid they lifted was just another reason to compromise these guys to the most permanent of ends. How many more would there be if these monsters were allowed to continue operating?

Vince had calmed down enough to help guide them to safety, but his hands were still shaking, even with a kid on his back, and his eyes kept darting toward the stairs like he was fighting the same urges that were eating at Zain's self-control. Some of the kids were catatonic, moving like sleepwalkers through a nightmare they couldn't escape even when awake. Others kept asking if they were in trouble, voices small and scared and so fucking young that it made Zain's chest hurt.

"Are you taking us somewhere else?" Sophia's question was barely a whisper, and it took Zain a moment to realize she was talking to him.

"No." His voice came out rougher than he intended, but steady. "We're getting you home."

The plan forming in his head was simple, logical, the kind of step-by-step approach that made sense when emotions threatened to overwhelm everything else. Get the kids to street level. Call 911 from the payphone down the block. Wait for ambulances and cops before leaving, because abandoning them now would make everything they'd just done pointless.

The traffickers upstairs were still oblivious, still laughing about whatever sick joke they thought was funny while their basement full of victims escaped through a third-floor window. Part of Zain hoped they'd figure it out, hoped they'd come looking for trouble so he'd have an excuse to finish what he already wanted.

They made it through the backdoor without a problem, and that was somehow worse than if there'd been a fight. Fighting he could handle. Fighting made sense. This careful, quiet extraction felt wrong, incomplete, like walking away from a test before answering the last question.

"We just gonna let them walk?" Vince's voice was quiet, but Zain could hear the violence underneath it, barely leashed and looking for an excuse to break free.

"Cops gonna arrest them, fam." Elvin sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as them.

"For how long?" Vince's accent was thick with frustration, words clipping short like he was biting them off before they could turn into something worse.

"So what you saying?" But Zain already knew what he was saying, because he was thinking the same thing, had been thinking it since he saw that menu with children's faces and price tags.

"I'm saying some people don't deserve trials."

Zain felt that ice-cold certainty spread a little deeper as he felt more and more sure Vince was right. "No. We call it in. Let the system handle it." The words came out automatically, the response he was supposed to give, the answer that didn't make him a killer.

He didn’t like them.

Not one bit.

He wanted to do the opposite of what he was saying, but he wasn’t Frank Castle.

"The system don't work, Z!" Vince's voice cracked with frustration, and Zain could see tears starting to form in his eyes again.

"Just… not… not like this." Even as he said it, the words felt hollow, meaningless, empty. “Not now, we got more important things to do.”

Even as the doubts clawed at his certainty, he forced himself to stick to the plan. 

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

They watched the arrest from a water tower several buildings away, close enough to see the flashing lights but far enough to avoid questions they weren't ready to answer. Police cars, ambulances, news vans, the whole circus of official response that always showed up after the real work was done.

The traffickers were led away in handcuffs, and Zain found himself studying their faces, memorizing features in case he ever saw them again. Because deep down, in the part of his brain that calculated odds and planned contingencies, he didn't believe this was over. People like that didn't just disappear into the system and stay gone.

"My cousin Jenny. They took her back when she was twelve." Vince's voice was quiet, conversational, like he was talking about the weather instead of ripping his heart out and showing it to them.

Zain felt his stomach drop, because he could hear where this was going and he didn't want to hear it.

"Some men in a truck. We heard from her friend that they were lookin’ for models and said she had the face for it." Vince was staring at the police cars below, but Zain could tell he wasn't really seeing them. He was seeing something else, something from before, something that explained why his hands had started smoking the moment he saw that menu.

"Found her body three months later in a ditch."

Oh. Suddenly everything about Vince's reaction made terrible sense. The rage, the flames, the need to burn everything down. It wasn't just righteous anger at injustice. It was personal. It was grief and guilt and the kind of pain that ate you alive from the inside out.

"Yo... man, I'm sorry." Elvin's voice was soft, careful, like he was afraid of saying the wrong thing and making it worse.

"Cops said it was a runaway situation. Case closed." Vince's accent was getting thicker with each word, pain bleeding through in the way his vowels stretched and his consonants got swallowed. "I always wondered what I'd do if I found the men who did it."

He finally looked at them, and his eyes were bright with unshed tears and something else, something harder and more dangerous. "Now I know."

Zain opened his mouth to say something, anything, but no words came. What could he say? That he was sorry? That it wasn't Vince's fault? That the system would work better this time? All of it felt inadequate, meaningless in the face of that kind of loss.

But he wished he didn't understand what Vince meant. He wished the cold certainty in his chest would go away, wished he could still believe that justice was something that happened in courtrooms instead of dark alleys. He wished he was still the kind of person who thought there was always a better way, always a solution that didn't involve becoming the thing you were fighting against.

He wished he didn't understand what Vince meant.

But he did.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

5K Words (100 DP)


ROLL: Ruthlessness (200 CP) [Reincarnator] {Refinement}: "If there’s a lesson this place has to offer, it’s this one: weak-minded people don’t last long. Luckily, you have learned that lesson early on, being able to rationalize and deal with any situation, no matter how costly it may be, with no emotional baggage. Because sometimes, all that matters is pushing forward, no matter the cost."

Dojo Points: 200