Certified Superhero (Misfits #2)

4: chicken nuggets and interventions

A/N: Like the last chapter, this one is a repost because the original draft was very boring. This is the most I could do to spice things up. 

It was past seven in the morning when I swiped my key card at my suite's door. As it turns out, paperwork is the worst, and Officer Donovan, the woman who interviewed me in the early hours of the morning, was very thorough in her paperwork.

As I was getting out of the tracksuit that hid my supersuit, Diana stepped out of her room in perfectly planned business casual with her thick black hair thrown in a sleek ponytail. Like usual, she was put together and ready to log a few hours at the Conspiracy's labs in exchange for her scholarship to U of NC.

"You look like crap." She wasn't lying.

We couldn't look less alike. I could only imagine what I looked like: short hair pulled into an unintentionally messy ponytail, covered in street grime, prominent dark circles.

"When did you get back last night?" she asked. "And why are you still in your suit?"

I knew if I told her the truth she would blame herself. She would think if she hadn't gone to sleep she could have saved me from the fight and a mountain of paperwork. That was probably true. Diana's quick thinking and technology had gotten me out of plenty of scraps in the past four months.

But it wasn't her fault. I was the one who sent her to bed. She wouldn't understand that.

So I lied and said, "Oh yeah, I was just so tired last night that I crashed in my supersuit. It's a good thing no hotel maids accidentally stumbled in to clean this morning or my secret identity would have been toast." My laugh at the end did little to cover my terrible lie.

Diana's eyes narrowed, clearly not convinced. "Why are you up before me then? You don't have work for two hours."

She knew me too well. I never woke up more than forty minutes before work. Once upon a time I may have been a morning person, but superhero night shifts were really putting a damper on that.

"Slept like a rock. My body is all recovered." Trying to prove my point, I pulled out a quick left hook, dodge, kick combo that I was working on with my personal trainer at the Conspiracy. Every muscle screamed. My fight with Mr. Relentless had really taken it out of me.

It was an impressive enough demonstration to assuage Diana's doubt.

She grabbed a granola bar and some of our leftovers from last night, shouldered her backpack, and made her way past me to the door. When she passed me, she playfully shoved me with her shoulder in place of a goodbye.

The gasp of pain left my lips before I could stop myself. Whatever damage Mr. Relentless had done was causing me some serious discomfort and a serious lack of mobility in my right arm. After that, there was no escaping Diana.

"I knew I shouldn't have left you out on your own," she said as she forced me to sit on the couch and searched through the freezer for an ice pack. "And you weren't going to tell me about it either and don't try to argue with me. You were going to let me waltz off to work and pretend like you were seriously injured."

"I wouldn't call it serious," I countered.

"I would if a little shove sent you doubling over in pain like that." She held up our emergency carton of ice cream and a bag of frozen chicken nuggets. "This is the best we have."

"Nuggets please." She tossed the bag at me, which I instinctively tried to catch with my dominant right hand. That set off a whole new layer of pain. "What are you thinking, throwing food at a seriously injured girl like me?"