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Good Days Are Few And Far Inbetween

The days following finding Snow were nowhere near easy, especially not for any of the kids. Not only did they all have to deal with having their own jobs, but they also had to deal with the way Heroes and the police were being much more strict with their curfews and laws, the threat against the Hero Tower and the return of the Ram making things much harder than they truly needed to be.

Tommy and Alexa were getting the worst of it. Working at the Hero Tower at a time like this was hell, finding out your adoptive mother is not only alive, but the only villain in the whole city (maybe aside from Schlatt) whose wanted status is 'dead or alive' –the information so graciously coming from Phil about a day after they got Snow to the Underground– is somehow much worse than hell.

As if the kids' lives weren't hard enough, they had to go out nightly for vigilante work, not because they had to (unless it was their morales to do so), but because petty crime ramped up the moment the Heroes new patrol hours were figured out by thieves and muggers, the generally shitty people that the police handled more often. It was one of the rare few times the police were grateful for vigilante help and not actively trying to get them arrested. It was pleasant enough, but any vigilante knew to run off as soon as they finished helping, some Heroes that weren't chosen for day watch would show up at night to assist the cops as well.

Encounters with Schlatt aren't very frequent, considering he was a 'busy man' he'd said to Thesus and Stinger once, 'explosions don't just plan themselves' he added on before picking up Stinger and throwing him at Theseus, turning tail to run as the vigilantes struggled to get up. Theseus had at least one or two broken ribs, Stinger was insistent on saying he was fine with a broken wrist and sprained ankle.

Even with the constant distractions; day jobs or night shifts, vigilante work, having to deal with an array of injuries, helping take care of Snow whenever they had the time; even with all of that, it was still near impossible to get the image of the way they found Snow out of their minds.

The way she was laying there in that alley so lifelessly, the way blood was all over the walls and the ground, bloody feathers strewn about like confetti, the call for her family while she was struggling to even breathe; Gods, it was fucking awful. The nightmares and the difficulty with sleeping made all four of the villain's flockmates painfully aware that she very well could have died, that, with her condition slowly getting better, at any moment there could be a complication that could very well kill her for good.

Tommy, Tubbo, Mark and Alexa have never felt so grateful but so unlucky all at the same time, it was so terribly wonderful but terribly sickening as well.

The fact that they saw Snow again made their nightmares where the comforting blanket of white wings would protect them much worse. On one occasion Tommy woke up screaming again because as he was being saved by the comforting blanket, a terrible inky red stain ruined the pristine pure white that once brought him comfort. Alexa had a similar experience, as did Mark and Tubbo, but they all had different variations of it.

Tubbo's was watching Snow get stabbed, over and over and over, until the wounds she had made sense, until there was as much blood he saw in the alleyway, until chunks of her feathers were missing and she looked as if she was on Death's doorstep by an invisible force that didn't even allow her time to make it a fair fight.

Mark had to witness what he thought happened to her, strong figures of what he thought were the enemies that aimed to kill her, that aimed to add more red to their ledgers, to get rid of a problem, a thorn in their side that they knew would be their downfall, their Achilles heel. The Enderian was forced into a state of paralysis, and all he could do was watch as the only person he considered a mother get beat till she stopped moving.

Alexa, due to how much her anxiety spiked one night when she got a call from Bad. He told her about the further development in Snow's condition, and how her breathing had all but stopped for what felt like much too long before it evened out and became normal again, and Alexa's purgatory was watching hundreds of different ways Snow's condition could worsen and kill her, how many times she was forced to watch the life finally drain from her face and listen to the heart rate monitor flatline was excruciating.

Tommy's was just being unable to escape the grips of the monster that plagued him and his family, that stupid fucking laughter that haunted his dreams and made it feel as though his limbs were made of lead, like his body was suddenly an unmoving mountain that not even the Gods themselves could move; the mangled, disfigured body of the monster whose only goal was making sure he was tormented for the rest of his life now suddenly strong enough to take down and nearly kill the protection he lived through most of his life with.

It was hell for all of them, and it wasn't going to stop being hell for a long time.

A

: bit of a shorter chapter, but that won't last for very long :}