Swords and Shield

Chapter 4: Mercy

Eversince that night, Celia didn't dare to mention about Marvel in front of DC. Or anyone, in fact, but he could still notice her piercing gaze everytime he stared at the name of Protector for too long. It's like she was afraid he would break into pieces whenever he thought about the hero. He didn't. He was confused and lost, but he wasn't weeping over Marvel. Everything happening between them was still completely fine, eventhough sometimes it was hard for him to pretend not to know the blond's lies. His reaction to Marvel was still a little rigid, which earned him some concerned looks from the man, but he quickly covered it up with a smile and a small kiss on his cheek. Everything around him changed the moment he found out Marvel was his enemy all along. He was not himself when he was with his boyfriend, his personal love life was affected, and he seemed to stuck on his destroying superhero path.

That was what made Celia most worried about him. She was a straight forward person. She directedly voiced her worries after a few days of seeing him wandering around without any purposes or schemes. She was just like him, having a life taken away by corrupted heroes and wanted nothing but to knock them to the ground, but seemed like she was a lot more stable than DC right now. It was almost like his motives were cut off abruptly like a broken string of a violin. One moment ago he was still boiling with the desire to pull the heroes off root and stem, and now he was an aimless, lost man who didn't know what to do. Well, it wasn't that pathetic, but he always knew Celia never goes lightly on him. Everything he had done: trying everyday to survive in a slum, stealing and fighting to fill his belly and had such a strong will to live he managed to go to university and graduated with enough knowledge to make weapons on his own, taking down the superheroes in New Castle one by one, all of them was to revenge for his family's death. He never gave up in front of a tough supe, every single one of them is completely mysterious and he had to find a different way to destroy each one, but he still stayed up at night and worked harder than anyone she had ever seen to find a weakness and plunge his sword into it. He had the thugs and mafia bosses providing him money to carry out his hero-hunting projects, since he could eliminate their greatest obstacles and pave the way for them to make profit in this city. He had Celia working with him, controlling the cameras and hacking the systems into aiding his missions. He had done everything, and he had a rather long list of dead targets. But not until this one.

Protector. The most powerful of them all, the purest, toughest, and almost impossible to penetrate. So hard they had to play dirty and target his secret identity, and suddenly everything was turned up side down. She could see that DC didn't have the heart to murder his boyfriend. The man was more sentimental than he admitted, and he considered Marvel his new family, the only one who can get past his internal walls of defense to step into his life and stay there for longer than she expected. She had heard how DC talked about this man before. With all of the love and affection in the world. If someone told him to blow up the White house in order to protect Marvel, DC would definitely do that without hesitation. He had made the man soft.

She didn't like the way it turned out, but DC never neglected his desire to destroy superheroes, so she let it slide. Until that man, that Marvel, suddenly revealed to be their next mission, Protector, and blocked DC completely. He stopped trying to kill Protector altogether, and became lost. He tried to take Marvel's life at first, but found himself unable to hurt even a hair on his head. Without the want to eliminate the man, they wouldn't have purposes. Without any plans and action, the hero would stay there, while the supervillain stopped showing up. And their work came to a dead end. Everything they had been working so hard on will be pointless if they stopped now.

"Oh, stop being a drama queen, Miller." Celia could practically hear his eyeroll over the communication line. "It's not like he's the only hero in this city. And, I'm not a fraid of him or anything. I just need to avoid him for a while to figure how to do this."