All the Other Ghosts (Boyxboy Superhero AU Fanfic (Klaine))

Chapter 2

The first time Blaine goes out, shades on under his hoodie and a ski mask in his back pocket, knee and elbow pads on under his baggier-than-usual black outfit, he doesn't come across any trouble at all. He wanders the city until nearly midnight and doesn't see so much as someone flipping someone else off. When the hell did New Yorkers get so nice?

Cooper's just back from a performance, and Blaine shrugs and says he was getting a drink with people, then trawls the internet for Ghost-sightings for a while. Someone's put a photograph up of the corner of what could be a cloak slipping out of sight around a wall but Blaine's inclined to agree with the commenters, it's more likely a plastic bag.

The next day he walks around with his iPhone out, trying to work out the Ghost's geography of the city. He seems to turn up all over the island, though, Tribeca to Harlem, there's no centre to the sightings. Maybe he's wise enough not to stick to a single neighbourhood. The police still have an arrest warrant out for him - it occurs to Blaine that what he's trying to get into is illegal, which actually makes it seem even more thrilling - and Blaine knows that while he's got fairly strong support on the ground from New Yorkers themselves, he probably still doesn't want to stay too long in any one place.

He's walking the edge of Central Park squinting at the map on his phone when it's snatched right out of his hands by a guy careening past on a bike. Blaine's too shocked at first to do anything but give a sort of startled yelp, knocked to the side to bang into a parked car, and the guy's speeding off quick, standing up on the pedals -

He doesn't think. It's the worst thing about himself, he knows, he just doesn't think. He snaps a shield up in front of the handlebars and the bike flips right over, the guy yells out, Blaine's phone goes sailing and bounces off the sidewalk. Blaine's breath stops before he gasps it out and runs over, oh hell he didn't mean to break the guy's neck -

He's making a long groaned noise on the ground, and a jogger's pulling her headphones out, picking up Blaine's cell. She holds it out to him, just a little scratched in the corner but miraculously unhurt. "You want me to call the cops?"

"Did you see what happened?" a man in a suit says, staring at the guy dragging himself up on his arms, cursing and touching his face. "What did he hit?"

"I - don't know." Blaine says, and his face feels scarlet, oh god he hopes they can't guess - "Just - lost control, I guess."

"Or our friendly neighbourhood Ghost stuck his foot out," the jogger says, and grins at him. And Blaine, after a startled pause, grins back.

*

So, the shields.

They're hexagonal, he doesn't know why, translucent but tinted green. He seems to be able to throw them up pretty much anywhere, to a really wide radius - he can surround himself, boxed safely into a blocky green-tinted globe, but he can also make them pop into existence at a distance, or he can fling them like discuses. He's practised with them, out in the middle of nowhere back in Ohio; they're incredibly smooth, he can skid along them like a path of ice, can even make himself a staircase to get off the ground. It's not exactly flying, but it's - it can be a pretty amazing view, even if that sometimes is distracting enough that he drops a shield and goes down with a yelp.

The thing is, to a kid from Ohio, becoming a superhero just belongs to another planet. Maybe kids who grew up in New York discover they've got some crazy power and they just know what they have to do with it, Blaine mostly wanted to just get by, he really didn't need the extra sense of isolation this gave him. Or at least until his first year of college, when reports of a new superhero in New York first appeared.

They didn't even know if he was a super, at first. For a while people genuinely believed he could be a ghost. Blaine got online, kept an eye on the sightings, became more than a little obsessed. Four years ago there was that firebombed building and that one photograph, iconic now like it had to be that way, like the world was waiting for that photograph to be taken, Blaine has it taped to the side of his computer monitor: the building still pouring flames in the background, a soot-smudged firefighter holding the oxygen cylinder and the Ghost, his body a little bowed, clasping the mask to his face. With the hood over the top half and the oxygen mask over the bottom half there's little of his face to be seen, it's just possible to make out that his eyes are closed, his mouth is open; that pale grey costume is blotched with smoke-stains, and there's still a small wisp of smoke coiling from a corner of his hanging cloak, where the material smouldered and crisped.