Greg Vs Raid 9-10

Their new little hideaway from the world; it smelled of rust.

Rust with a lack of remembrance to it.

Perfect.

Dust, thick and heavy, coated every single surface of this once-busy factory floor; rusted carcasses of machining and labor little more than soft grey sculptures. It was a place that sang of this city’s slow crumble, a neat little representation of what Brockton Bay was.

Sad, sullen, and in need of some desperate shaking up.

Late afternoon sun beamed in through grime-caked skylights, slices of luminescence showcasing swirling galaxies of disturbed particles. A cathedral of decay, and Jack Slash found himself once again at home in the midst of it all. One hand trailed itself along a railing, half-rusted metal both cool and gritty beneath his fingers, leaving a clean dark line in the dust.

A canvas, wiped clean.

Beautiful.

The leader of the most wanted found family in the world stood atop a corroded catwalk, observing his troupe below. Troupe was the term, not team. 

No, no, no. Never team.

Teams implied equality, cooperation, all those tedious democratic principles that diluted art. No, what they were could much more accurately be described as a collection. 

His collection. 

Each one a unique instrument of slaughter, a different color in a palette of pain and combined their symphony of sadism made the most beautiful music a man could ask for.

Below, the most adorable little girl in the world was humming a tune just as sweet as she was; damn near diabetes-inducing the little tyke was. 

A cheerful, off-key little tune horribly at odds with the task at hand, but oh-so-delightful it made him want to join in. Bonesaw’s head bounced from side to side as she sat cross-legged on concrete floor, surrounded by a halo of gleaming medical instruments, meticulously re-attaching the severed arm of a vagrant they'd found near the train tracks.

The re-attaching part was curious, but he was never one to disparage his surrogate daughter’s experiments, no matter what they were.

Of course, the vagrant was conscious throughout the entire ordeal. He knew his little Tinker would accept nothing less. The man’s eyes remained wide and pleading, frantic as they went from side to side, but there was no screaming to be heard.

No, she had made quite sure of that before anything else.

Never far from his sweet little surgeon sat her zebra-skinned minder on a stack of rotting pallets, the silent silhouette in contrasting chiaroscuro just polishing one of her nails. Amasterpiece of negation she was, a walking void that made everything else feel more real by comparison. 

It only made it worse 

The shifting mountain of black chitin and twitching flesh in the far corner the world called Crawler, scraped his bulk against the factory floor; concrete sounding off against carapace with a noise that would grate against lesser ears. Masochist he was, dear old Ned was perpetually bored and yet perpetually evolving. 

Never a static piece, yet entirely a blunt and obvious one.

But then, he played his part well, no matter how simple it was.

The others were scattered about, each a part of the quaint little composition he served as conductor to. The silent, porcelain statue of self-contained suffering, the instrument of sound just waiting for her cue to play the city's overture, the violent little splash of bright red and vibrant orange sitting distantly by the window. And in the shadows, the two remaining members of the percussive section; dull, predictable, but necessary to keep the beat. 

Jack smiled, the expression a pleasant easy thing, the kind one might give when appreciating a fine work of art.

And this... this was his finest collection yet.

He strolled to the edge of the catwalk, long coat whispering against rusted metal. Looked out through a gaping hole in the corrugated wall, a framed view of his new canvas: Brockton Bay.

Oh.

Oh, yes.

It was perfect. More perfect than he could have hoped for, and Jack had hoped for quite a lot over the years. It wasn't just the physical damage, the scars left by Leviathan. Any city could be broken. Any fool with powers could knock over buildings, but this…

This required a different touch.

He could feel it in the air, strange frantic energy that made his fingers itch for his knife.

There.

Right there, where you wouldn’t expect it in a city so battered and brutalized and down on it’s luck as this one.

It was hope.

Hope in its most pure form; raw, desperate and absolutely dying to be dashed away. Certainly can't paint shadows without light. Can't break what isn't trying to mend itself.

The city was trying. 

That was the key. That was always the key. 

They were building it back up, brick by brick, nail by nail, believing that this time would be different. This time they'd survive. This time they'd be safe.

Adorable.

"It's so… loud," a voice chirped from behind him. Bonesaw had abandoned her project (the vagrant was either dead or passed out, didn't matter which) and skipped over to the railing, pigtails bouncing. She peered out at the city, head tilted in that way she had. "They're fixing it all up. Are we going to break it again, Jack?"

Sweet child. Still thinking in such simple terms.

"Much, much, much more than that, my dear," A smooth, playful purr left his lips as he tapped his sweet little girl on the nose without even looking at her. His gaze was still fixed on the city below, enraptured by all that desperate, foolish hope. "Breaking things is for amateurs. It's… crude. Any brute can knock over a sandcastle. The real art is in the reshaping." 

Jack Slash gave a little flick of his wrist, sending some illusory paint flying off into the ether. "All we’re here to do is show these dull little denizens a far more interesting way to play."

He'd read the reports, of course. Watched the news feeds, the shaky phone footage, the hero shots from PRT drones. The 'Brockton Bay Miracle.' The boy who piloted a golem of scrap and rage and had actually wounded an Endbringer.

White Knight.

How utterly… droll.

Yet this city was different now because of his presence, wasn't it? Pushed to the brink and rebirthed itself with a new creation myth; all of it revolving around that unstable element.

This White Knight.

A raw, unformed thing of immense power and, from what Jack could gather from the interviews and the leaked PRT assessments, a spectacular level of emotional immaturity. The best kind of clay.

It was all there, laid out in his mind’s eye.

The whole production, in all pieces and a greater combined glory to be witnessed only when fully complete. A production worth the name. 

The overture, of course, would be Shatterbird's. A city of glass, silenced and made beautiful in its fragility. Always start with something visceral, something that makes them understand the rules have changed. Then, the first act: a series of small, intimate performances.

But the main event, the star of the show, would be the boy.

He wouldn't just kill him. God, no.

That was a waste of a perfectly good protagonist. Boring. 

Downright pedestrian. Any idiot with a gun could kill someone.

No, he would test him, push him, introduce new, exciting colors to his palette; despair, fear, and something to extinguish all that pride and rage into something that would take the defiant shining hope the city had invested in him and curdle it into something far more exquisite. 

Could he be broken? Of course. 

Everything could be broken. But how would he break? Would he shatter into a million pieces of righteous fury, become another rampaging brute? Or could he, perhaps, be bent? Could that raw, untamed power be sculpted into a new shape? Could a knight be made to see the beauty in the slaughter, the artistry in the cut?

Now that was an interesting question.

That was art.

"Most people think the goal is to create order from chaos," he murmured, more to himself than to Bonesaw, though she was nodding along like she understood. Sweet child. "They're wrong. The true art is in creating a more beautiful, more interesting kind of chaos from their tedious, boring order."

Looked out at the distant, defiant lights of the city, a canvas just begging for a new master. They thought they had survived the storm. They had no idea the artist had just arrived.

"Let us play, Brockton Bay."