Super Jaded (5/23)

Chapter 5: Outrage

“Oh. My. God,” Nina murmured the next morning, her voice low and quavering as she looked at her phone, coming to a complete stop on her morning stumble toward the coffee maker.

“What is it, Neens?” asked a groggy Fern from the bed, a single long leg fully revealed by the crumpled covers.

Nina’s stomach was in freefall as her eyes scanned the comments on the viral twitter post.

“So Nina Etana is a lesbitch? Figures.”

“Can’t believe the world’s only superhero is a sexual deviant!”

“Degeneracy. Proof that the west is heading down a dangerous path.”

“Today’s a sad day. To think I actually used to respect that POS.”

“Wonder who that other bitch is?! She’s just as hot as Nina!”

Nina swallowed hard, turned, and walked back to the bed to show Fern the image on her phone that started it all. Clearly taken from the building across the street, window blinds partially obscuring the view, two naked female bodies were unmistakable. As was what they were doing.

Nina’s face was also quite recognizable, though thankfully Fern’s was completely blocked by the blinds.

Fern’s eyes widened, then she cast a sidelong glance to the window. She rolled across the bed and closed the blinds fully before turning back to Nina, a reassuring smile masking her worried eyes.

But seeing Fern shaken—no matter how hard she tried to hide it—ignited the powder keg that was Nina’s swirling ball of negative emotion.

“Those fucking assholes!” cried Nina. She launched herself through the window, completely shredding the blinds as she sent a spray of glass tumbling over the people on the sidewalk below, a few dismayed and startled cries wafting upward.

But Nina didn’t care. Floating in the sky, she saw nothing but red as she used her x-ray eyes to scan the building across the street for cameras. Finding none, however, her anger simply continued to simmer as she committed the very crime she had arrested a group of burglars for merely two days ago.

Her building anger and tearful eyes caused her flight path to be altered slightly, the trajectory clipping a portion of the brick wall near the window across the street as she burst through it at top speed. Even though her x-ray vision had confirmed that no one was present within this particular apartment.

Only once the pounding in her ears ceased did Nina hear the screaming from the street level. Her collision with the wall must have led to debris falling onto the civilians below, but she found that she didn’t really care at the moment.

She methodically gazed around the abandoned apartment. This camera guy was annoyingly thorough, she realized. They didn’t seem to leave any trace of their existence… at least to the average eye.

Switching from X-ray vision to infrared in the literal blink of an eye, she scanned the apartment once more. There was an isolated fingerprint on the doorknob and some mud that was a lower temperature than the floor beneath it revealed a footprint on the floor.

With her selective photographic memory, she locked the images of the prints within her subconscious. She would have to run tests on them later, she decided.

“Niiiiina!!! Come back, please! I-I promise this isn’t the end of the world!”

Fern’s voice of desperation shouted from their bedroom window, breaking Nina from her hyper-focused anger. She simply couldn’t leave the love of her life waiting in uncertainty.

Once again ignoring the potential collateral damage caused by her reckless actions, she floated back across the street into the warm embrace of her lover. Fern seemed equally—if not more—shaken about the ordeal, but she knew that acting frantic would only make the situation worse for wear.

Looking outside, Fern noticed that an elderly man was being helped by paramedics. She instantly deduced the cause in her head, visualized by a nervous lip bite. This situation was quickly spiraling into chaos. It was time for Fern to work her magic: a deescalation approach.

Fern helped guide the two of them over to the couch and away from view of the street-level problem. As soon as the two of them sat down, Nina immediately sprawled out, laying her head on Fern's lap, in between her pillowy thighs.

Nina looked upward, but not specifically at her lover. She seemed to just be gazing emptily into space, coming to terms with the gravity of the situation. Fern put her hand on her girlfriend’s cheek like a loving mother would.

“Nina, it’s going to be okay. If we just stay calm, we’ll get through this.”

“I don’t think I believe that.”  The superheroine responded, taking a deep sigh after doing so. “My career as a superhero is over. The world isn’t ready for a lesbian superhero.”

“Maybe not, maybe not,” Fern said wistfully, adopting a tone often found when she was about to say something wise. “But they’ll have to live with one. After all, they’re beholden to you, not the other way around.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Think about it, you could stop fighting crime tomorrow and no one would be able to do anything about it. You’re endlessly powerful, and unlike those comic book superheroes, you’ve got no weakness on record!”

“I wouldn’t say that, Fern.”

“Hmm?” Her lover responded in confusion, a raised eyebrow sliding up her effortlessly beautiful face.

“My weakness… Well, don’t take this the wrong way, but… My weakness is you.”

Now Fern was even more confused than before. Nina reached up lazily and reciprocated Fern’s gesture, cupping her cheeks.

“If something bad happened to you… I-I don’t know what I’d do. And that scares me, Fern. It’s getting to the point where I keep going just because I know it means you’ll be there the next day to make it enjoyable. Now that those photos are out… Well, it’s not me who’s at risk, it’s you.”

A moment of silence permeated the living room. Then, now that the two of them were already in position, they both leaned forward to meet halfway for a passionate kiss between them. An unspoken mutual gesture of true love.

The position was not uncomfortable either, as Fern wasn’t actually holding Nina up with any particular force. Instead, Nina was floating in midair, something she found herself doing unconsciously on occasion whenever Fern made her feel loved. Such a kiss certainly helped take the edge off the moment.

“I wouldn’t be worried about me, seriously,” Fern finally spoke. “Don’t forget, none of the photos actually show my face!”

“I suppose I can’t argue with logic as sound as that.” Nina giggled in response, her anxieties quelled for the moment as she closed her eyes calmly, properly basking in the comfort that was her girlfriend’s athletic thighs.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but all this worrying has given me quite the appetite and I really don’t feel like preparing a meal. What say you?”

“I concur wholeheartedly!” Nina responded goofily in a terrible British accent. “You wanna order takeout?”

“I was actually thinking of something a little different…” Fern responded mysteriously, putting a finger to her cheek deviously. “Remember our first date?”

That immediately got a chuckle out of Nina. “That crappy Waffle House in the middle of nowhere? You really wanna go there?”

“Yep.” Fern responded, without a pause.

“Y’know what? That honestly sounds like a plan. Even though the place looked a bit run-down, I remember the food was pretty good. Although maybe that memory was exaggerated a bit. After all, I only remember staring at your beautiful face the entire time.”

That got a cute blush out of Fern, but it also awakened a rather intrusive thought within Nina mindset.

“Ugh, no, wait! We can’t go there!” Nina added suddenly, slapping her hands over her eyes and rubbing them in tired defeat. “We’re trying to lay low from the inevitable paparazzi crowds, remember?”

Nina took her hands off her face, yet Fern’s expression hadn’t changed in the slightest.

“You said it yourself: that place is in the middle of nowhere. It’ll be a perfect place for us to get some fresh air while we lay low for a little.” Fern’s mouth proudly displayed a devious smile. She knew how sneaky yet silly her plan sounded out loud.

With no further objections from Nina, the two of them got dressed and ready for the day. Sneakily flying out from her skylight, Nina and Fern were at the nostalgic restaurant in just thirty minutes. Nina definitely could have gotten there faster, but she understood what Fern’s limits were.

“Hmm… I think I’m going to get some waffles.” Nina said, looking intently at the menu.

“How original.” Fern responded, with loving snark in her tone. Nina playfully stuck her tongue out at her lover from across the booth.

But then, the superheroine’s train of thought was interrupted when her super-hearing picked up an unusual amount of car activity on the horizon. This Waffle House was in the middle of nowhere on an underutilized road, where was all this traffic coming from?

Just as the two of them got their food, both Nina and Fern realized what was happening. “Oh… that’s a… fuckton of cars. Wow.” Fern spoke, trying her best to hide the anxiety that was building up alongside the growing number of vehicles in the parking lot right outside their window.

Nina just looked down at her food with a blank stare, dreading what was inevitably to come. “Oh fuck… They put two and two together… they know…”

Sure enough, the doors opened and a flood of camera crews and independent photographers spilled out. They rushed over to the window and began unleashing a barrage of camera flashes.

“Just… try to ignore them, Neens.” Fern said with a defeated expression, trying her best to hide her face with her hand, which was basically useless at this point.

Nina tried to follow her girlfriend’s advice, but something rather interesting caught her eye.

One of the paparazzi in front was a portly man clearly in his late forties. At first, Nina paid him no mind. But upon catching a glimpse of his muddy shoes, she started to focus her attention evermore, at the behest of Fern.

And then, he lifted his hand to shoot a thumbs up to someone else, exposing the palm-side of his thumb.

The fingerprint matched.

“Gotcha.” Nina muttered under her breath, anger and resentment boiling up through her gritted teeth.

At almost unnoticeable speeds she exited her booth, made a U-turn out the door and stopped right in front of the lead photographer. The small sonic boom that erupted from her speeds knocked everyone off of their feet. But that wasn’t good enough for the superheroine. There was someone important among the crowd that she felt deserved special attention.

Casually walking forward, she grabbed yesterday’s peeping tom by the neck and effortlessly hoisted him into the air; floating a few feet above the ground due to him having roughly a foot of height over her. He began to squirm like a cockroach, but her grip remained firm and unbreaking.

“So, you think it’s funny to take pictures of me in my private house, doing private things to my private girlfriend, huh?” All of those questions might as well have been rhetorical, as the man rapidly losing oxygen before her was in no position to answer them. But Nina didn’t care. She now had someone to definitively blame her problems on, and she wasn’t exactly wrong about her assertion.

His face began to turn purple, yet her hold remained. To further the fear factor, she began to rise higher off the ground. Several of the confused paparazzi were unsure how to help, and just continued taking pictures.

A situation from bad to worse.

“No! Don’t kill him!” An actual voice of resistance spoke up. It was Fern’s.

The lovely sound of her lover’s voice drowned out all other sound as it filled Nina’s ears. In shock at just how angry she had gotten, she instinctively did the first thing that came to her mind to remedy the situation.

She released the reporter from her grasp.

She was twenty feet in the air.

He hit the ground with a loud “CRACK!”

He didn’t move afterwards.

Not waiting around to find out if the man was okay, she swooped back down to the ground and made a B-line for Fern. She then scooped her lover up with a Fireman’s carry and flew off into the cloud layer.

It wasn’t always this way. God, why couldn’t things be just like they were back then!?