Running From Himself 3-25

queens

corona

hrry

No capitals. No punctuation. And a misspelled word.

Starlight had almost dropped her phone when she got those three texts from Hughie because the man punctuated everything. He texted like an old man that way, periods and all on single-word texts as if he was forty and grew up back when they still called computers ‘word processors’ or something.

A misspelled word meant his hands had been shaking too, which could only mean the absolute worst. Even without detail, Annie January didn’t waste a second in dropping everything and running.

Twenty-or-so blocks at a full sprint had been… hard.

She had feelings about her new costume, feelings that would require words and none of them her mother would approve of. It wasn’t even the costume itself at this point, really; a year of the same look had gotten her used to more of herself being out in the open.

No, it was the boots.

If she’d ever needed more reason to believe Vought didn’t actually care about them stopping crime or being heroes, these stupid heeled boots they put her in made that perfectly clear.

Even still, she kept going as fast as she could, hair trailing behind her like a comet tail. Not fast like Reggie fast or anything — a car doing forty would probably leave her struggling even if she pushed and all that pushing meant her lungs burned before mile four anyway.

Four blocks out, the smell of burning rubber and worse grabbed Starlight by the back of her throat and had her pushing even harder in a dead sprint, something under all that faint but unmistakable — burned meat.

The street was gone.

Whatever it had looked like before Annie had made her way down here no longer existed, a crater in the middle of everything as something like thirty different supes tore across a three block stretch.

This was a war.

Starlight froze at the corner, mouth open and palm gripping the blue metal of a mailbox as she tried to take it all in.

Annie January was never new to a fight and hadn’t been since she was all of twelve years old. Even still — oh my god — this wasn’t something she had a category for. Disasters were one thing, building collapses too, and even chemical fires weren’t past what she experienced but this—

Purple streaked past overhead, Annie snapping her head up wide-eyed as the top corner of a building shattered apart. Something gold-yellow smeared across with a — “BITCH!” — loud as she’d ever heard it, the familiar voice of Nubia sounding out as she crashed into something purple-white.

Both bursts of electricity tangled together and broke apart above Starlight’s head, streetlights popping apart in their wake and something on the ground vanishing as a blast of power struck too low.

A whole storefront went, a fire escape roaring down onto the roof of a parked van.

“BITCH!”

Nubia.

And—

“Do you have nothing else to say?”

Stormfront!

Annie’s chest went tight and cold at the sight of her twisting in the wind, cape fluttering behind her like she hadn’t just been outed as a straight-up Nazi in front of the American public and probably the whole world by now.

Blue eyes squinted against glare as another rooftop blew out, a whole row of windows shattered under a clash of yellow and purple. 

And the yellow…

Oh… oh no. The yellow was being pushed back, Nubia losing even as she kept swinging against the other supe. The gold streaked higher, climbing as best as she could but even through the smoke, Annie didn’t have to squint too hard to make out how she kept getting pulled back down every time she tried.

What’s she even trying to… Annie’s narrowed eyes went wide as she looked higher, gaze rising past the smoke to a sky that had gone a flat coal color that didn’t match the rest of it; a wind picking up that hadn’t been there when she started making her way down here.

“Haha!” 

Annie’s feet shuddered as a sound like thunder boomed out, her attention pulled back to the ground as a body tore through the air like a missile right past her. Before she could even blink, a storefront crumbled to nothing just a few feet away.

“Another one!”

She knew that voice.

Hell, she knew that beard. Vikor stood there swinging his hammer, the supe in this fight for some reason. Starlight didn’t find that too odd, all the Rojos swarming around — their numbers in the double digits and the signs of knockoff V unmistakable. Cars melted to puddles and acid sprayed from orifices as each of the red-veined street supes did their best to take down the viking and the other supes with him. 

But she still found it a little odd.

The supe’s career had stalled out less than a decade ago with the failed revival of Payback and he never even touched street crime. Norska was up over the crossing not too far from her husband, throwing out giant cannonball-sized blasts of gold. 

Who… Annie’s hands were up and open, streetlights all around flickering as she pulled from them. Who do I… Instinct was pushing her to jump in against the Rojos but the sight of Stormfront made it hard to be sure about anything.

Especially as a man she remembered from a Vought Christmas party — Thrymr — roared across the street, the blond charging through overturned cars like a football player. Are they after Stormfront? Did they come for the Rojos? A second later, a girl at least a few years younger than Annie soared over his head, shaking her pale-gold head as she threw matching spears of glowing light through cars and kept going. Are they — are they just here?

Another trail of purple smeared across the sky, a woman in all-black wrapped inside a comet of plasma. A split-second later, the ground shook in a way that had nothing to do with Vikor’s hammer and a new crater formed.

The girl with the platinum hair dropped out of the air, a word on her lips. “Uroma!”

Wha- Annie January didn’t speak a lick of German but she didn’t need to, not as she heard the voice that left the girl’s lips. Skandia?! 

She knew that voice more than she knew the face; the other girl a blaster in gold-and-white that some fans online had been comparing her to, mostly for the fact she could sing too. For a year now, Annie had seen all the posts and plenty of comments on Instagram and TikTok, people outright begging for a team-up or even a collab. Some had even taken to calling them the ‘Starlight Sisters’, Annie glad that one hadn’t caught on.

But all that didn’t matter as everything Annie had been trying to work out the last few seconds suddenly settled in her head with a simple ‘oh’.

Skandia was already moving, her flight path right between Stormfront and the street. Pushing aside everything else, Annie took a page from Nubia’s book as her hands went out.

Three streetlights and whatever was still live in the wiring of the dry cleaner behind her wound a tight charge into her palms, Starlight grunting as she let it all fly. A column of gold lit the whole block up as bright as any lightning, the other girl knocked out of the air with a scream.

Uroma… Annie grit her teeth, still breathing a bit heavy from the run. "God, I hope I’m right about that one."

“Me too!”

Something hit her from the left, faster than a car and far faster than her.

A half-second of a shape was all she caught before Annie went off her feet and across the sidewalk, bare shoulder scraping the ground as a muscled forearm dug itself hard into her collarbone.

Nggh. Blue eyes blinked open, Starlight almost recoiling as a man’s face was barely six inches from her own; his breath hot against her skin as he grinned wide.

“Ohhhh, look at the star-girl.” No shirt, and tattooed all over — plenty of them layered atop ropes of scar tissue — with nearly as much ink as he had skin, the supe held her tight as a laugh left him loud. “Think you can go around hittin’ my lil sissy-in-law, huh?”

A hand on his chest answered everything, neon sign above her head flickering as she took all it had to give and compressed it hard, tight, and point-blank into whoever this was.

The light went off with all the force of a grenade and at least ten different flashbangs in one.

The supe on top of her screamed, the air smelling like more of that burned meat as he skipped across the sidewalk and through the driver’s side of a parked Camry, the entire door folded in around him.

Okay… Annie got to her feet, hands still up and legs surprisingly steady. Okay, I’m fine. That’s fine. It’s all f-

Something came down at her from above, determined to prove her wrong.

Both hands came up this time, Starlight fast enough to block and aware enough to regret it as three white-gold spear points punched down out of the sky. Grunts punched their way past grit teeth as they struck her like punches; forearms, shoulder and one hitting her hard enough across the ribs to force breath.

Each one hurt.

Like getting hit by someone almost as strong as she was but— That it? Annie’s eyes slid to her own arm, a long red scrape with about one small bead of blood to show for it. That can’t be…

Well, she had taken a fifty-cal to the chest a year back in Central Park. Sure, she’d cried afterward but that was more because of Hughie than Butcher’s shot. Tears or no tears, she’d taken the shot.

Compared to that, this was… “Really?”

Skandia stopped short in mid-air, a look on her face that told Annie all she needed to know. She’d clearly expected that to do a lot more and, to be fair, so did Starlight. “...how?”

“You don’t know?” Shooting back an Ashley-approved grin, Annie’s hands went up again as she let blast after blast free. “You’ve gotta be tough to make it to the Seven!”

The platinum blond girl twisted and turned, banking hard to dodge all of Starlight’s shots. “You talk tough!” A swipe of her hand caused pinpoints of pale gold to flare over her shoulder, a dozen of them shooting forward with a growl from Skandia. “For a corn-fed mongrel!”

“Mongr-!” Annie didn’t even get a chance to be surprised at the insult, her boots sliding back across pavement as the impact nearly took her off her feet. Each one stung like hell, sharp edges scraping angry red lines across Annie’s arms and shoulders with the skimpy suit doing nothing to shield her. “Mongrel?!”

Her hands shot back the second she got a moment to breathe, lights flickering and fluttering with each pump of her arms. “Who are you calling a mongrel?”

“You, of course!” Another formation tore down at full speed, Annie jumping back as the younger girl cackled like a witch. “An Iowa farmboy fucked an Iowa farmgirl and birthed you!” Skandia laughed again, dancing past each return blast and making Starlight remember something she’d always wanted. “A mewling milkmaid mutt whining on national TV for the sympathy of the masses! You’re livestock in lipstick!”

The girl could fly.

God. Annie punched apart a spear, teeth grit as it shattered into light on her fist, and stared back up at the fairy-like girl sky-dancing on platforms the same color as her spears. Flying would be so unbelievably convenient right now.

It wasn’t a new thought.

Annie’d been sitting on that same idea on and off for about a decade and everytime she saw Homelander on screen, that same feeling poked its head up harder. Right now, that same envy came back with some real force as Starlight was forced into a dead run on heeled boots over broken glass just to keep an angle on someone who had the benefit of three dimensions.

Two blocks turned to three as Starlight kept firing and hit nothing, Skandia moving faster than she could aim. The air filled with lances of light, Annie taking them on her skin because dodging meant giving up more ground she couldn’t afford.

Then Norska tore past overhead, hard and fast with gold bleeding off her shoulders, as she blased three Rojos apart in one shot.

Before Annie could shift her aim, someone else did it for her — a car engine screaming through the air like a cannonshot right into Norska’s stomach.

The woman went down, Annie’s eyes snapping to the source a-Kenji?!

Kimiko’s brother stood there in the fight, his arms out as she watched him work; powers aimed at the supes on Stormfront’s side while he packed whole vehicles into a rolling wall around a bunch of people crouched behind a delivery truck.

Six people and—Hughie!

Her boyfriend was crouched behind a truck’s rear axle, a bit of blood trailing down the side of his head as he held a shotgun in both hands. He was upright and in one piece, which was as much as she could ask for, the sight of him looking back at her with a smile enough to put one on her face too.

“Don’t look away from me, heifer!” Unfortunately, she was forced to duck almost immediately as another hail of piercing gold came down on her head.

Annie spun past one last lance, the edge of it tearing at one of her extensions. Without wasting a breath to care, her hand flicked back out in the same motion she’d seen from Skandia almost a dozen times now. 

Her blast split apart before it even left her palm, a single shot suddenly following the path of her fingers in four smaller rays.

“Wh-” Skandia took two of them in the ribs sixty feet in the air — an attempt at a dodge taking the other girl right into the path of second.

It didn’t hurt her… much.

She could tell that by the way she just staggered a few feet in the air, the gold platforms beneath her fading for just a breath. Even still, the girl grunted and held her stomach, a scream on her lips. “Uncle!”

Uncle?

Annie whipped around, wide-eyed as a roar came from the left; the blond man built like a quarterback breaking off from the Rojos and aiming gray eyes her way. “You little-!”

Thrymr was one of those supes that never did much.

Starlight didn’t pay too much attention to most supes, past what she saw on socials and what was required for just basic interactions at Vought, but Thrymr was almot a closed book for a supe as impressive as he was. The man was loud and in-your-face as you’d expect but, other than a bunch of shows and being a fixture in the Vikor trilogy, he mostly just did whatever he felt like.

And, right now, that included charging her way with yellow light wrapped tight around his fists.

Both of Starlight’s hands went up, the street dimming just a little bit as she pulled a charge. The dim only lasted an instant, the sun getting a little competition as a blast flared bright.

The hit took him in the chest, Thrymr rocked back half a step but it barely even forced a flinch from him as he kept forward.

Come on… c’mon! Her hands stayed high, Starlight drawing on even more. Light punched out from her palms—

—and didn’t stop.

Annie’s eyes widened — What! — as the blast stretched wide and long, a continuous stream of white-gold barelling into Thrymr’s chest instead of breaking apart. She pushed further, pouring more and more as the big man’s boots scraped against pavement.

The light held for as long as she could force it, four seconds longer than she had ever thought possible and that — that was enough for a slab of concrete to come tearing across the street and slammed firmly into Thrymr’s open chest.

What… Annie’s hands fell empty to her sides, breath coming heavy as wide eyes watched the lights flicker back on. What did I just…

Starlight didn’t even have the time to dwell on it as something dropped like a meteor down the street, the air changing as thunder clapped loud and hard. Pavement cracked in a ring thirty feed wide, dust flying high as Annie’s arms came up on instinct.

By the time they came down, she already knew who it was.

She knew from the sound.

She knew from the landing.

She knew from the way she straightened up from the crater.

More than anything, Annabelle Grace January would have known that red hair anywhere.

Maeve.