Roxy Geyer

The plaster cracks under his fist, spider webs rolling up the wall to the ceiling. The entire structure is liable to come down like this, under his aggression, on top of her fear, but it hasn’t so far.

A lot of things haven’t happened so far.

“You said you’d wait,” he says. His clothes cling to his skin under the bulletproof vest, defining the sharp cut of muscle and the soft curve of bandages. He’s injured underneath, probably nursing more than a few fractured ribs and assorted lacerations from his fight with The Whip. She’d watched the fight on the five o’clock news, nails digging into her own throat as if she were going to rip out veins and arteries if (when) he went down. He’s still wearing his mask, a tattered, black scrap of spandex that rolls up his cheekbones, around his eyes and towards his forehead where it meets black, unruly hair. “You said you understood.”

“I wanted to,” she says. The words whistle out between bloodless lips and she can feel the crescent moon indents on her own neck throbbing. God, she wanted to. “Aaron, I wanted to. But all those people—”

“I didn’t mean for that to happen,” he says. Inexplicably, the anger drops from his shoulders and he steps towards her, hand outstretched. “I tried to save them, sweetheart. I did, but Yellow Plague is relentless. He was off the rails.”

Her stomach rolls at the mention of the villain and she looks down at her feet before she’s sick. She’s been caught in his range before, forced to accept viruses into her lungs and breathe poison for weeks. She doesn’t know how Aaron works with him, with people like him, regardless of his own villainous disposition.

She no longer knows how she’s with someone who’s on their side when good people die.

“I swear to you,” he says, voice a low rumble in her chest, “I swear to you, that this is the last job. Then my debts will be paid and I can put Goliath away. I’ll get a normal job and it’ll just be us. Like I promised.”

“What debts?” She feels herself trembling as the question is forced out. She’s been too kind to ask, too considerate, maybe too understanding. She’s been asked to wait and she doesn’t even know for what. “Who do you owe these people’s pain to, Aaron?”

“You’re so innocent,” he says and there’s disbelief curling around each word. “Which people? The people today? That wasn’t pain, Roxy, not like I know it. Not like you know it. What happened today could have happened at any point in their lives. I wasn’t responsible for it.”

It’s a familiar argument. Villains, she knows, are always out there, out there to hurt and steal and kill. She knows that, if not him, then someone else, if not him, then another villain pulls the trigger.

She no longer knows if she hasn’t been the one pulling the trigger all along with her kindness.

“You didn’t answer my question,” she says. She lifts her chin, lets herself take up the space she takes up, lets herself stand up to Goliath her enemy and Aaron her lover. “Who do you owe, Aaron? Who tells you to go out and destroy the city you claim you love? Who holds your leash and makes you do these things?”

His jaw clenches and something she’s never seen before flashes through his eyes, too fast to track. “You promised you’d never ask.”

It takes the crack in his voice for her to realize that he’s afraid.

Good. So is she.

“I know,” she says. Gently. Quietly. She wants to lean against the back of their ugly, argyle couch. She wants to let her head fall into her hands so she can forget about the crescent moons on her neck. She wants him to take the step he’s on the precipice of and she wants to let herself be folded into his arms. She can’t let herself do any of these things. She says, “But who would I be if I didn’t?”

She wouldn’t be Roxy, she knows, not the woman she’s built herself up to be after the unkind years. She wouldn’t be the sort of woman she could be proud of and, in the end, being with Aaron falls just short of losing herself. 

By the look on his face, he knows it.

He doesn’t answer her at first. He reaches up with soot stained fingers and unties the knot at the back of his head. It’s almost comical, the negative of pale skin that’s left behind when the mask is removed, a crisp line of ash running over the bridge of his nose, but neither of them laugh. He wipes at his face with the inside part, succeeding in wiping off a fair portion of the dirt until it’s Aaron standing in front of her and not Goliath.

“Please, Roxy,” he says. “Don’t.”

Her heart clenches at the raw emotion in the word. She takes a deep, burning breath and asks, “What should I do? I can’t wait anymore, Aaron. After tonight, after what just happened, you can’t ask me to wait. So what do I do?”

She can hear their screams through the boom mike. She can see their blood through the shaking news camera. She can smell iron from her memory super imposed over the memory of the news program, over the vision of her boyfriend throwing a teenager into a crowd of fleeing civilians.

“What,” she asks again, “do I do?”

He stares at her, breathing hard enough that his kevlar vest moves with the motion. Swelling and contracting. In and out. He looks at her like a man being asked to walk to the gallows and says, “You don’t leave.”

She spreads her hands, a helpless gesture, but not one of surrender. She doesn’t surrender anymore, not even to the man she loves.

“Who,” she asks, “would I be if I didn’t?”

“My Roxy,” he says and it isn’t meant to be answer.

**************************************

She’s one of those unnamed children, the ones in fairytales who stare with hungry eyes and hunched shoulders. She’s one of those unnamed children who live in the hostage zone, the place that heroes don’t dare to go for fear of the dark shadows that lurk behind each broken down tenement.

She’s one of those unnamed children with black eyes and a hungry belly and no fear of death. Because what is death but this? What is hell but this? What is anything but this?

The villains that frequent Songbird as it comes to be known, are not kind even among their own kind. They’re hungry in a different way than the orphans are, blood dripping from their teeth and hands, eyes dark with it all. She’s watched more than one unnamed child crunch under heavy, metal boots and she’s seen more than a few huddled around broken bones and open wounds before succumbing to a slumber they never wake from.

She knows better than to follow the smell of food from the tenement furthest north by the time she’s seven. So do most of them. She’s just one of the few with the wits to resist when the nights grow longer and the garbage leaner.

Still, sometimes, she’s caught.

“There’s a world outside of here,” a sorcerer tells her. He has long, black hair and a wide face, eyes like glittering tears in the fabric of the universe. He smiles and the scent of his mouth rolls across the short distance between them, bringing her the scent of cloves. “It’s the same. Prettier, maybe, but the same.”

She snarls at him, chains dragging at her neck and her wrists and her legs. All around her are the broken bodies of children like her, arms and legs jumbled around horror-stricken faces. He killed them all for a spell he claims will save them. He’d whispered breaking truths into their ears to do it and waited until each cried one, crystalline drop before breaking their necks.

She’s the only one who hasn’t cried yet. It’s the only reason she’s still alive.

The sorcerer sits back on his heels, arms splattered with blood up to his elbows. “Huh. I really thought that one would work.”

In her memories, she’ll dream of what she should have said but now she’s more animal than human as a child, wordless and thoughtless. Unable to speak but able to understand just enough. She knows this man is dangerous. She’s seen this man is a killer. 

She knows that he’ll kill her, useful or not, because he’s there and he can.

“Hmm,” the man says, tapping the strange, white knife he carries against his chin. “How about this; You’ll never be as real as I am now. Nothing more than a forgotten, broken infant at the mercy of the world. Unremarkable and unloved.”

She’d heard him whisper that to the dead boy behind her. His eyes had gotten really big as he tried not to let a single tear fall, but it had been futile. He’d died with waterfalls cascading down his cheeks and the last words in his world belonging to a villain.

She bares her teeth and screams into his face, a horrible wail of noise that contains neither shame nor fear. Only a nameless, wordless rage that makes him rock back on his heels, white knife dropping for just as long as his surprise lasts.

“Ah,” he says when he’s recovered. He looks disappointed as he wipes spittle from his cheek. “The last one and you’re a dud. Too stupid to even know the skin you’re wearing.” He sighs. “It’ll take time to catch another one. Time wasted.”

She watches his face carefully and sees the moment he decides to kill her anyway. She drinks the look in like she’s dying of thirst, promising herself that she’ll remember this. Promising herself that she’ll find a way to make that look the last he’ll ever see.

The knife whines through the air just as a man in a cape appears on the wall behind the sorcerer. She doesn’t close her eyes as both the knife and the hero race toward her.

*********************************************

The home they place her in is for victims of superpowered trauma. There are other empty-eyed children there, but they cry now and again. She’s silent, the last sound on her lips the scream that had done nothing to waylay her death.

“…traumatized…”

“…Lavender says she doesn’t sleep…doesn’t dream…”

“One of the kids is an empath and he’s…”

“…afraid, everyone is afraid but she…”

This is another way she’ll die, she realizes. Under the suspicious eyes of her saviors, next to children who’ve lost and lost and lost but at least they had something to lose. She’ll be sent somewhere else where they won’t watch her quite as closely and they’ll never let her go then.

She has to give them something.

They encourage her to draw and she never does. She doesn’t like how the crayons feel in her hands, too smooth and waxy and unlike anything she’s ever touched. 

But on the day she decides to live, she draws a house. It’s not for any special reason. She saw the little girl who sleeps next door to her draw one two weeks ago. So she draws the house the sorcerer was going to kill her in front of and adds red flowers to hide the holes in the brick walls.

“Oh,” they say, relief singing in their eyes, “was that your house?”

She wordlessly shrugs, something they seem to take as agreement, and adds a stick figure lying down next to the red, red flowers.

“Are they sleeping?” they ask.

She doesn’t answer and draws herself smiling on the other side of the picture holding a flower.

“That looks nice,” they say, smiling just as wide as she’s drawn herself. “Would you like to go back?”

She finds it in herself to whisper, “Very, very much.”

They don’t think about locking her up after that and it occurs to her it’s as simple as deciding.

She’s got years before they release her back into the world, years to watch and learn, years to decide.

She decides to make good use of that time.

******************************************************

Now, years later in a little apartment in Brooklyn, it’s like walking out of that first home. She feels scraped raw and empty, wondering who she’s going to have to be to survive, who she’ll have be to keep getting up every morning, who she’ll have to be to keep herself from screaming her rage.

Aaron is sitting still as a statue at the kitchen table, hands wrapped around a cup of coffee that’s no longer steaming. Neither of them has words anymore, the night having stolen the last of them. She carries her bags to her car and comes back. Carries some more. Comes back.

Stops in their half empty bedroom and reminds herself that being Roxy is a series of choices, none of them easy. If she stops making them, she goes back to being unnamed and she can’t—she can’t—

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Aaron says from behind her. “It’s almost over. Then I won’t—they won’t—” He breaks off, frustrated with the words he can’t say clicking against the back of his teeth. “Roxy.”

She turns and weights what she could say as she stares at him. He’s a big man, thick ropes of muscle making him look fluffy even when he’s not. He hasn’t shaved and his stubble is thick and dark. The hand resting on the doorframe is trembling. The other is pressed flat to the small table they keep for their keys. He’s not in the doorway, really, just next to it, taking care not to trap her in the room even when he clearly wants to.

She feels her heart ache with love and it’s a bittersweet pain.

“I spent,” she says, not sure of each word until it’s already tumbling from her mouth, “years thinking that there was never a choice. I know sometimes we have to do things, Aaron, even when we don’t want to like making the bed or paying taxes or being some supervillain’s lacky. But some things are choices, in the end, and we’re just human, Aaron. We have to make them. You made your choice for a reason you can’t tell me and I can’t make my choice any differently without that information.” She breathes out hard enough her thin hair is blown away from her face. “I’m not making any sense.”

“I’m asking you to wait a little more,” Aaron says, but he’s not really asking. He’s begging. “I’ll be better, I won’t let them hurt people so much. You know that’s not what I want.”

I don’t want to go, she wants to scream. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.

She decides that Roxy would never tell him something so painful when her mind is already made up.

“I have to go,” she says and she lets her eyes be as sad as her heart can make them. “You have to stay. There’s nothing else here, Aaron, except goodbye.”

The table his right hand is pressed against snaps under his fingers, solid wood reduced to ashes under his strength. The door dents with a series of pops and crunches as his left fist crushes it.

When she walks past him, he doesn’t move to stop her, doesn’t attempt to hold her with his superhuman strength. He bows his head in defeat and doesn’t move as she walks out of their home.

***********************************************************

Roxy is four-years-old (her body is closer to 20) when she reads in the paper that Ortaz, a dark-haired sorcerer with an affinity for necromancy and ritual, has died. She reads that he was considered one of the League’s most dangerous targets, one of the superheroes’ most sought after villains, one of the most evil men in the world. She reads that he went down burning into a sea of sewage and oil.

She lets herself read the word “died” seventeen times before she decides to let it be true.

It tears something loose in her, a cornerstone of who she decided to be years ago. She’d looked into that man’s face and promised that he’d die with her decision to kill him written across her face.

And yet, he’s dead.

She realizes that you have to act to decide, that the moment of deciding isn’t enough, that it means nothing without results. If she’d gone after him, she could have given her decision the action, the consequences, it deserved as one of her first.

She snaps the paper closed and lifts her chin.

She decides to move past this, to keep building herself, decision by decision, choice by choice. She decides to stop waiting, to make it happen.

She does.

And then Aaron asks her to wait.

********************************************

She drives for what feels like hours, her bags and boxes settling in the backseat and trunk. She feels raw, gutted, and heartbroken, but underneath it all she’s strong. She’s molten, all the way through, alive and burning and her.

She didn’t fail against this test. She walked away before she gave in and she can’t help but be proud of herself for that even as her heart rots in her chest. She’s still Roxy.

The motel she booked is a state over and the rental car she booked is already waiting for her. She doesn’t think Aaron will follow her (not yet), but Goliath runs with a dangerous crowd. She knows what type of poison men like Yellow Plague deal in and it’s in her best interest to clear the blast zone before the explosion.

She just hopes that Aaron does decide to follow her before it all goes to hell.

She parks next to the front entrance, rifling through her purse for her ID and credit card before getting out. She walks to the revolving door, nudging it along with her hand, and slips inside.

The receptionist looks up, a pleasant smile on his face. It drops almost as quickly as it forms, his mouth dropping open in surprise. “Ma’am? Are you alright?” He half stands, brow furrowing. “Do you need help?”

She blinks at him in confusion. He’s staring at her like there’s something wrong, but there’s not, she’s got a reservation and she—

Something hot scorches her cheek and she reaches up instinctively to catch it on the pad of her finger. The tear glitters back at her, cooling rapidly until she rubs it away to nothing.

“I—” she clears her throat, fighting through the ache in it. “I’m fine, just a bit of a rough day.” She decides to smile but can’t quite manage it. She decides to forgive herself just this once. “I’d like to check in.”

The receptionist seems uneasy, but he cautiously sits down and pulls his keyboard towards him. “Of course. Name?”

“Geyer,” she says. “Roxy Geyer.”

She is.