Running From Himself 3-24 (Patreon)

“These motherfuck-”Nubia bit down a curse as she cut a path through the air, leaving behind the fifth waste of her time in the last three hours. Somehow, it had been the most annoying of them all.Stormfront ‘sighting’ after Stormfront ‘sighting’, each one of them another nothingburger occupying her whole morning and bleeding into her afternoon.The first and second had both been social media-related, number two just some dumb little bitch in Yonkers with a cheap wig and a Party City cape filming a TikTok. ‘pov: ur fave problematic supe.’ As edgy as she was on social media, the college girl had cried actual tears when Nubia landed in her backyard.The third sighting had been even worse, a mannequin on a rooftop in Bay Ridge — the thing fully dressed up like the woman she was on the hunt. Nubia had left it charred and smoking by the time she took off.Sighting number four had at least been an actual supe, some E-Lister twink with taser hands and a bob. Doing her best to keep the scowl off her face, the new member of the Seven had taken a moment to give the guy the selfie he’d asked for.Hartford — number five — was a drone; an actual drone with a cape someone had glued on and sent flying over the city with a live feed to Facebook.

Nubia had the pleasure of being the one to put an end to a million-view livestream — Fly like a Supe — and probably a meeting with PR by tomorrow.All in all, it was bullshit after bullshit on top of more bullshit; Nubia in no mood for anything else that didn’t at least come with something she could fry or punch.

So when the call came through her earpiece for Queens and the comms team started talking over each other about the usual bullshit — something about ‘verifying the credibility’ or whatever they did — Nubia already figured that this was just going to be another idiot in a cheap cosplay making her day so much more annoying.She hadn’t even bothered to pretend like she was taking it seriously, ignoring every additional call on her earpiece as she drifted her way to Queens with her arms crossed. Taking her time wasn’t against the rules after all and Nubia had used all that travel to do some thinking, some real important thinking.Like… “What am I gonna make for dinner?”Or even if she wanted to cook for Maya tonight, considering she wasn’t even sure if there was still chicken in the freezer.

Then she cleared one last set of rooftops and found the streets on fire.

What… One chunk of an intersection was more a crater than a street, the block torn to pieces all around it — a whole car was even sticking out of a building. Hell, that same building had a fence in it, and it didn’t stop there; not with a chunk of Corona crawling with people tearing at each other in a way that had nothing to do with views or virality. …The hell? Nubia stopped short several hundred feet up, wind tearing at her hair as gray eyes narrowed down at everything. Bodies on top of bodies everywhere, some of them still running and plenty more completely still on the ground and there…You.Stormfront stood there, dead center in the street and drifting through a cloud of concrete; purple plasma dragged off her hand as she raised it up.Nubia’s head snapped down to who the woman was targeting; some random man in a flannel and a baseball cap tearing down the street fast enough he had to be some kind of supe. Nubia had no idea who the hell he was; her eyes unable to pick him out from any promo, supe roster, or all the endless Vought+ garbage showcasing the ‘current talent landscape’. 

It didn’t help that he wasn’t in costume either, if he even had one.Granted, Nubia didn’t have much of a shit to give in the first place, because Stormfront was down there. "Oh, absolutely not."

Her hands were already up — Nubia not even bothering with a thought — as the air spiked with ozone sharp around her knuckles. "BITCH!"

The bolt she threw was as long as she was tall, yellow power tearing loose and crossed the whole block in almost an instant. It caught Stormfront square in the side, the woman put through the front of a bodega — everything down to the bulletproof partition coming down on top of her head until she was buried.

…bitch? Not the most professional callout in the history of the Seven and Nubia knew that, bursting forward with lightning charged up in her fists. Worth it.

Ashley could choke on her notes.

It was still worth it even as Stormfront came out of all the wreckage, the Nazi brushing plaster off one shoulder as she tilted her head up to the sky.

"Ach." The smile on the Nazi bitch’s face sent another surge of something bitter through Nubia’s chest, fists clenching tighter as gold crawled up and down her forearms. "Of course.”Stormfront shook her head again. “Of course it had to be you."

“What?” Nubia let herself drop — nearly a hundred feet lower all at once — as she gave her ‘teammate’ a smile with absolutely nothing behind it. "Surprised?"

"Not really." Stormfront rolled her neck, a scoff leaving the woman’s black lips. "I could smell the baby mama on you from a mile out."

A single gray eye twitched. "...I'm sorry, the what?"

“It’s a very particular stench. I can imagine you’d be used to it, though.” Two eyebrows went high as the Nazi’s lips twitched. “Nose blindness is a blessing.”

"I…” Gloved hands clenched tighter against the sparks crackling in the almost-nonexistent gaps between her fingertips. “I was married!" The words left her before her brain could veto those three stupid syllables, a problem she’d been struggling with since she spoke her first. Worst of all, she could hear exactly how it sounded, and just how much ground she’d given up.And yet- “Ten years!”She just couldn’t stop. “There was a whole ceremony. Hell, half of Vought showed up!”

"Was." Stormfront actually laughed as one syllable left those lips. "Was married, true. Single mother, then. A mild step up from ‘baby mama’, but you people do hop between the stereotypes and never really leave the same place, do you?"

"You racist bitch."

"I mean — yes." She spread her hands out in front of her, purple sparking to life between each set of five gloved fingers. "Obviously. That’s why you’re here, aren’t you? You suspected, of course, and now everyone knows it.” Stormfront just shrugged again, the woman seemingly as unbothered as ever. "So what has changed here, between the two of us, Storm Sister? Come on, be specific."

"What's changed?” Nubia drifted a few feet closer, skin itching at the duo nickname she’d had to bear for six weeks. “What’s changed is I’ve got the green light to put my fist through your Nazi skull in broad daylight, bitch. That’s what’s changed.”

"Ah." Stormfront's chin came up, a smile bright and wide stretching on that pale face. "So your masters gave you new orders?"

Nubia's eye twitched. “Y-you…”Her mouth opened, nothing in it but the same bitterness building up; all that surging anger she never got the chance to let out. “You…”“Come on.” Stormfront’s hands spread out, the woman almost inviting her in as she tilted her head to the side. “Tell me I’m wrong. Strong independent woman you are, tell me one thing in your life you have ever decided. You speak of freedom and you spout empowerment yet you serve freely. Tell me, sister.”

There was an answer.Somewhere, somehow, there had to be.

A whole speech’s worth of an answer to shut this bitch up, but nothing but that same bitterness found its way up her throat — nothing she could throw back that would work anywhere else but her head. All she could think back to was the fact that Vought had her spend six weeks smiling next to this thing, a fact she was going to be up at three in the morning dwelling over for the rest of her natural life.

Tell me.

Nubia opened her mouth again, wind picking up around her. “You…”.

And something came off a fire escape screaming.

A kid — a girl, maybe three years older than Maya, no more than fourteen — dropped onto Stormfront’s back. She had on a Spongebob t-shirt a few sizes too big, but it did nothing to hide those red veins running up and down her jaw, both hands smoking as she slapped something onto the Nazi’s face.It hissed.Whatever it was came up off the little girl’s palms as she met Stormfront’s jaw, a scream leaving the woman’s mouth as her head snapped back and she staggered back a half-step. Not a big scream, but enough.

It definitely hurt, though.

Then Stormfront reached back, her hands finding the kid’s shoulder before they blurred.

“N-!” Nubia stumbled in the air, eyes wide as the girl’s mouth opened in a silent scream; both her arms coming off in a spray of red and white.Not with a blast or lightning or anything like that.

No, Stormfront had just grabbed hold of her and pulled with all the effort of taking apart a wet paper bag, the little girl falling off and slumping to the ruined ground.

…no.Nubia’s mouth was still open, the scream dead on her lips as she stared down at the kid’s sneakers; light-up soles still blinking. 

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re mad about that.” Stormfront smiled back up, wiping a bloody cheek with the back of one gloved wrist. “What? It was self-defense.” A hand went to her face, a pink little patch of skin already fading on her cheek as Nubia blinked. “She attacked me. You saw.”

Nubia knew she had issues.Reggie went as far to say that she had entire subscriptions.Impulse, ego, mommy; you name them, she had them. Anger, though… Anger was the worst of them all and nobody understood exactly how that worked. Everybody always asked her to tone it down, like there was a fucking switch.

Even Gerald — ten fucking years and he would still tell her to just calm down.

Like she didn’t want to.

Like she had a dial in her chest and just cranked it to ten just for fun. As if it was somehow possible that Nubia Reina King liked sitting in an office listening to a court-appointed ‘wellness consultant’ named fucking Brayden go on and on about ‘emotional hygiene.’

No, Nubia had spent twenty fucking years learning exactly how much emotion she could feel before streetlights down the block started popping and how pissed she could get before thing started getting biblical.

This… this was past that.“BIIIIITCH!!!”

The clouds over Queens roiled dark and heavy, a crack that had nothing to do with lightning or thunder sounding off as Nubia dove down. Every bit of charge in her body went off with a bomb, volume matching the impact of skin on skin as they went through the front of a laundromat and then right out the back and into a stockroom.“You-!” A fistful of Stormfront’s collar held the woman close as she bashed the other woman’s face into a metal drum. “Ripped-!”Another swing shook the walls, Stormfront’s face splintering a whole shelf.“The arms-!”Nubia threw punch after punch, again and again, yellow sparking bright off her fists with each full-weight thunderclap. One more cracked the tile under both their feet, something beneath even that going with it. "—off a CHILD!"The one after that — “So what?” — barely even moved her.Oh. Seventy tons. Right.Nubia topped out at maybe half that on a good day and the hand that suddenly closed itself around her own fist made the difference clear real fucking quick. Fine.

Gold detonated off her hand, lightning exploding into Stormfront’s face. The room vanished yellow all around them, sending both women off the floor. “So what?” Nubia shouted the words right back as she drove a knee into the bitch’s ribs, the instant before the blast finished throwing them apart.A split second later, they tore out of the back room; each a comet tearing out into Corona. “F-!” Nubia skipped off the pavement, her back tearing up a good forty feet of blacktop before she got her hands back up under her. It only took a second to right herself in the air, Nubia flying again before her own vision even cleared. “-uck!”Where is that bitch?

The block was thicker now, and not just with smoke; more of the street supes flooding out of everywhere. Nubia had worked the Rojo problem for almost two whole months and had never seen numbers like this, so many red-veins out in force — dozens strong and ready for a fight like they always were.Stormfront burst her way out of a crumpled gray minivan, the woman snarling her anger. A split-second later, a Rojo took her from behind — some woman with arms like industrial cable looping herself tight around her shoulders and throat — as another big shirtless bastard with veins so red they looked black slammed an entire chunk of asphalt into the side of the Nazi’s head.They lived a whole two seconds, their screams dying as fast as they did.

But it was two seconds more that Nubia had.She took them up.

Straight up, hard and fast as the air screamed around her. Need height. 

That was the whole game here, before she had lost it and charged Stormfront straight on. Need time.The dark clouds above were just waiting for her, a sky full of roiling charge she could use; all of it just waiting to get pulled down and turn this fistfight into an event.

The clouds started stacking tighter and darker before she'd even cleared two hundred feet—"Awright, awright, awright!”

— and that was when something rushed her from the side.Pure reflex had Nubia’s hand snap out, something caught by the throat as she scowled immediately. 

Shirtless, scarred, and in suspenders of all things, some wiry bald man grinned in her face, red leaking heavy from both nostrils as he flapped his gums. “Look at the tits on you! You an’ me, we could have a pretty little mullat-”Nubia swung again.

The sick bastard went down like a missile, body folding around a mailbox and one leg pointed sky-high in a way legs just shouldn’t. “...ooooh.”Gray eyes blinked. "...you’re fucking joking"

A few seconds later, Suspenders was already giggling on the ground, voice coming out a wheeze as his leg twitched and then moved. "Ooooh, that's more like it.”“For our grandmother, Children!” 

Grandmother? Nubia’s head snapped down the block, past the crater, where the dumb fuck with the hammer she’d seen in a few shit movies was wading into a crowd of a dozen more Rojos, a blonde woman in white-and-gold over his shoulder calling something out as a twinky-looking shit in a leather jacket was throwing around ball bearings like bullets. For a few seconds longer, Nubia hung in the air and took in the ugliness of this whole picture, a few of those faces looking more and more familiar with every second. “...so, you put together this…”Her scowl deepened as she watched Stormfront twist a head clean off, tossing it overhand down the street. “What is this? Some kinda Fourth Reich Family Reunion?” Lightning flashed above her as a girl in a leotard and miniskirt — also in Nubia’s colors — tore through the street, a blond man tackling cars apart right beneath her. “Your own little Nazi Brady Bunch?”

"My Children." Stormfront surged up into the air as rain began to fall, gold lightning and violet plasma lighting up the whole wrecked intersection beneath them. "Perfect. Powerful. A hundred years of careful work in the making, of selection, o—"Nubia met her halfway, a bolt of yellow catching Stormfront in the chest before a crackling backswing sent the woman rocketing away.

It only took a half-second for Stormfront to catch herself, the Nazi darting around another hit and countering with a body blow of her own that forced Nubia’s ribs to make an ugly sound. “As a Negro, you would not understand. Your kind does not think that far ahead. Your planning abilities leave much to be desired."

"My kind. My kind?” Nubia spat blood into the rain as she came back faster. Two hands grabbed hair and pulled hard, forcing a scream. "Don’t get cute. Your kind lost twice. A whole fucking century ago!”

The air lit up gold as they came down together through the roof of a five-story walkup, Nubia dumping charge right into Stormfront. She didn’t stop, even when they crashed through somebody’s living room — a couch splitting apart in their wake and a TV going out the window like a cannonball.Nubia choked as something hit her in the throat but it didn’t stop the knee she kept throwing into Stormfront’s open stomach over and over until the wall gave out and they joined the TV in open air one more time.

The rain fell harder, fat droplets hissing off Nubia’s skin as she took to the sky again. “Nein!”She got maybe a hundred feet up before Stormfront caught her ankle and swung, Nubia suddenly face-first through a Rite-Aid.

Then the street.

Stormfront came up through the rain after her as Nubia found air one more time, eyes on the dark clouds as they suddenly narrowed. "Nein. We are not doing that."

"Oh." Nubia grinned back, blood in her teeth as the cloud lit up gold again. “We’re doing that."