prodigaljaybird | (no subject)

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Jason hasn't slept a night through since he was fourteen years old. It's nothing new, half his nightmares so familiar they happen almost by rote, though there's a few that still manage to terrify. He goes to bed in tired expectation, feels his body sleep and his brain light up. The fighter in him smiles and welcomes the chance to meet each falling crowbar with something better than child-sized fists, meet them with guns and blades and bombs, and in his dream Jason doesn't start screaming until the shadows grow long and bat-shaped.

He falls asleep in silence.

Jason wakes to his own gasping breaths in bed and the earth shifting beneath him.

"What the f - " he starts, but the world only shakes harder, something in the movement focused, personal. It's shaking his bed harder than anything, and Jason reaches out against the attack, seizes the gauntlet beneath his pillow and wishes it was a gun.

"You'll fucking wish - " he bellows, but as soon as the words leave him he feels himself forced violently back, propelled from his sheets and right into the air. His heart races - his bed's so close to the wall, he's gonna hit and there's no time to twist, nothing to grab, nothing to stop him and it's too fucking late to -

Jason's body flies through the bamboo with a mighty crack and is caught by the ground, coming to rest a dozen yards away with great rivets of earth in his wake.

There's a million things he should be doing. Lying there stunned feels like the best start.

[ooc: open to all in game, posted privately for preplay~ Jason just blew out the side of his hut, still in the boxers and tank top he went to bed in. His power is the sonic scream.]

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"Place doesn't care how things are supposed to be," Jason replies, "just what it wants us to do. Effy, focus." He waits for her to meet his eyes. "I think it's me, it's my voice, it's pushing me."

His fingers slide around her wrist. "This is you. You're stone, you're protecting yourself. Can you make it stop?"

Air shudders through her lungs and her shoulders hunch, still feeling a thrum of energy in the air. Is it him? Effy thinks that it'd make sense for all of that to him, her eyes darting to where the earth has practically opened up under their feet. Such power, commanding, the only surprise being that she's not sure if Jason has so much control over it after all. If he did, he wouldn't hurt himself. It laces her blue eyes with concern, clouded as she stares back at him, lips parting for too long without words, the back of her throat growing parched.

Legs still free, however fragile, Effy does her best to find her balance and stand on her feet. "You could do anything," the realization slips from her tongue, a spark of admiration in her eye. "I..."

Glancing down at her arms, they itch, crackling down the side along the sand of the stone, until blood rushes through again, warm and alive. "Do you think I could try?" she asks, quiet, raising her hand for both of them to see, same as it was before. "To be powerful."

Edited 2011-09-15 06:59 (UTC)

There's been an odd sort of tension to several of the people Lux has passed on the boardwalk this morning. Instead of the typical polite smiles, they've seemed uneasy, introspective and almost wary as she passed them by. Dread creeps easily into the pit of her stomach these days, and each solemn or uncertain face coils it tighter. Nothing else seems wrong, but she can feel it, now: An anticipation that won't be dislodged. This place is too cruel too often for her to shrug it off.

A sound hits her out of nowhere, drops her down to her knees on the bamboo planks with her hands instinctively over her ears. She can feel it in her fingertips and reverberating in her chest, the sensation so distinctly physical that she doesn't immediately register it as a sound at all. The crack of splintering wood follows from the direction of the hut Jason shares with James. It's a mere whisper of sound against the ringing of her ears, but she scrambles to her feet and runs, heart in her throat.

At the end of a long trench of dark earth sprawls her boyfriend, dazed and unmoving. When she shrieks his name, her voice sounds dim and distant, heard through cotton or a bad line.

"Jason," she says again as she skids to a stop and drops by his side, shouting like her hearing aid battery has stopped working without her knowing it. "Look at me, are you okay?"

Helena was out wandering like she was most nights, scouting or hunting or just enjoying the time under the moon. It wasn't the same as patrolling in Gotham – she wasn't in costume, for starters – but it wasn't bad. Maybe a little boring –

Until the scream. She froze for an instant, then moved, running hard in the direction of the familiar sound. The moonlight filtered through the trees, playing oddly on her skin, but she barely noticed. She was focused on her goal, which was – probably that trench dug into the ground.

She pulled up, falling into a defensive stance as she took in the situation. Which was so not what she expected to see. She stared at the guy laying on the ground, then cast a look back at the busted hut. Torn between amusement and confusion, she glanced back at Jason. “Damn. Are you getting your ass kicked by Black Canary?”

"Great," Cissie said as she crouched into a defense posture. "Because this day isn't already weird enough." She scanned the area but didn't see anything. Maybe whoever it was had already slipped away. Tracking them would have been a bit of a challenge before but now, she was thinking not so much.

"Stay here, I'll be right back. I'm going to take a look around and see if I can find anyone." In the best Impulse tradition, she didn't wait for Jason to respond but took off in a blur.

A few seconds later, she was back where she had been, looking anxious. "There's no one around," she started to say then jumped back as the ground shook. "Is... is that you doing that?"

The sound makes Billy wince and stumble back again, and he feels like he's never going to get the ground under his feet again. That he'll spend this entire weekend unsteady and unsure.

"You sound--" he can barely hear himself over the ringing in his ears, and raises his voice. "You sound like Banshee."

Eden's just out for a walk, trying to figure out what to do with herself, when someone bursts through a wall and rolls to a halt not far from her. Even before she registers it's Jason, she's racing toward him, kneeling down to touch his arm. "Oh, my god, Jason, are you okay?"

For a moment, her gaze flickers to the mess he's made of the ground. She could probably fix that in a moment now with a bit of concentration — now that she's realized what's going on, it's a matter of harnessing that same feeling under her skin persuasion gave her — but first she has to see to Jason.

There's someone shouting at him from underwater, and it sounds like Lux. Jason's eyes blink open. His vision swims, but her presence is instantly recognizable, her long hair tickling at his shoulder and smelling of coconut.

"Something's here," he says, or he thinks so, it's hard to tell through the ringing, but even as he says it he's rolling to his feet. Something's here, and Lux is, too, and there's no time to lament that he's once again put her in harm's way. His back aches, twinges protesting the movement. Jason groans and the earth trembles beneath their feet. "I can't see it," Jason says, more urgently now, "I can't protect you, run."

"Maybe," Jason posits from the ground. It takes him three tries to sit up, but he manages it, figuring if she's standing there talking to him there must not be anything to fight.

His ears hurt, his back, too, but not his chest, which seems strange when he'd been forced backwards. God, through the wall of his hut and fuck his life, Bucky is going to murder him. "Is she invisible? Is that a thing she does now?"

Jason meets her searching gaze with a miserable one of his own. Maybe it's stupid - she's already seen him lower than most, delivered him from the ground with her own two hands, but there's something extra humiliating about being found on his back, flung there by an unseen enemy.

"I'm okay," he replies, assessing the damage even as he says it, his fingers spread wide across his chest. "Should have a bruise the size of a cannon ball. Eden." He wraps his fingers around her tiny wrist, remembering at the last to be gentle. "Something's here, you gotta get out of here."

It had been a fucking weird morning already, waking up to find the door of her hut made of stone, dealing with the revelation that apparently it was happening to whatever Mathias touched. After nearly four years, Lucy liked to think she had gotten good at handling whatever the island threw at her — prided herself on it, even — but this had thrown her for something of a loop, different from its usual tricks. More alert now than she'd been when she had first discovered it, at least, and intent on finding out how widespread this particular phenomenon was, she was only walking by the hut when she saw the wall fucking blow out, and Jason land on his back.

"Oh my God," she blurted out, hurrying to his side without thinking and dropping to a crouch, her hand at his shoulder. "Holy shit, are you okay?"

"Breathe."

It's an order, not a suggestion; Bucky's gaze locks onto Jason's, concern plain behind his eyes, but there's not time for reassurances. The pieces of the puzzle are quickly falling together, the lack of a visible attacker potentially explained by the way Jason himself is vibrating, the strange quality of his voice--

"I need you to breathe."

"No," Eden says, shaking her head quickly, "Jason, no, I'm not going." Her free hand settles over his. If he's being attacked, there's no way in hell she's just going to cut and run, even on a normal day when she doesn't seem to have a new power to grapple with. She's a fighter, even if she doesn't look like one, and he's her friend. She doesn't run. Besides, he's hurt, no matter what he says. "Two heads are better than one. What is it? Who is it?"

"Jason! Are you okay?" The words come tumbling out of her mouth before she remembers. Because at the exact same time she speaks the world around her explodes; the tree leaves inexplicably pop off, the pebbles shatter into pieces and the lollypop she's holding explodes. Coraline covered her mouth, eyes wide as she stares at Jason.

Coraline mouthed I'm sorry silently. She didn't dare speak again.

Invisible? “Not last time I checked.” Helena held her defensive stance, eyes moving, watching for any sign of an attacker. Attention focused outward, she didn't notice that her own legs and feet were starting to blend in with the ground under them. “You were attacked by someone invisible who could produce a sonic scream? What the hell? I thought everyone lost their powers when they came here, anyway!”

If Bucky were anyone else, Jason would tell him that breathing is a fucking stupid command when he is already, and that there's some asshole villain on the loose while they sit here staring at each other, but Bucky's Bucky, and Jason listens, still shaking so hard he can feel his teeth knock together.

He grits them and sucks a rattling breath, and then another, mystified but relieved when the shaking begins to lesson. "What the fuck," he says when he can speak again, "is even going on? How'd you know that would work?"

"They fucking do!" Jason returns, mouth open to say more when he catches sight of the fucked up things her legs are doing. "What the fuck!"

The word rips out of him like a bomb, and in the instant it takes the sound of it to reach her, Jason could swear he sees it, even if the wave is closer to something he can feel. He watches, wide eyed, as it takes her feet right out from under her.

"I don't know," Jason gets out of a throat gone tight with panic. Christ, why is he such a mess, he's faced more dangers than half the island with all their lifetimes stacked together, and it feels like he's going to pieces. He feels off, wrong, like something's coming and he can't see what it is, and if he doesn't figure it out soon it's going to hurt Eden.

"Please," he says again, pulling his protesting body onto its feet. He twists his aching back to scan the treeline - there's nothing there but he can feel it. "Eden, something's happening, run."

The center of the tree nearest them blows out as if punched by a giant fist, the boom of the wood splintering lost to the massive concussive force that struck it in the first place. As the woodchips rain down on them, Jason's too stunned to do more than stare. He'd felt that, he...he thinks he did that.

Jason groans, wanting nothing more than to lie there and possibly lose consciousness for a while, but whatever hit him is still out there, and now Lucy's as much in its path as he is.

"M'not hurt," he says, though what he means is not seriously. He's not broken, and he's had worse bruises, but he still feels off, and not because he just dug a trench with his back. Jason sits up, his focus so wholly on finding a safe path for both of them out of the clearing that he moves too fast, and the rush of pain forces a groan from the bottom of his lungs.

It feels good at first, an outlet for the agonized mess of his shoulders, but then something pinches tight and Jason yelps, and then he's not thinking of anything other than the fact that the tree across from them just exploded, and he's pretty sure the blast came right out of his own mouth.

Jason closes it with a click.

"Fuck." Jason would really rather lie there, perhaps indefinitely, but Coraline's here and they're still under attack. He bolts upright, aiming the only weapon he has, his gauntlet, at the treeline, but there's nothing there.

"Do you see them?" he whispers to her, twisting his head to look around. "Hey! Show yourself!" The words leave him so hard it seems like they should hurt, but mostly they just feel powerful, and in the split second Jason has to witness it he could swear he sees the column of his voice fly towards the nearest tree.

And blast it into matchsticks.

Eden pulls her arms up over her head to cover her face from the falling wood, staggering back a step, and the minute she doesn't feel it anymore, she looks up. If she has an ability, it makes every sense others do, and there's a possibility that Jason's unseen enemy is actually invisible, but she has no idea who would attack him.

"You have to come with me," she insists, shaking her head. "Jason, please, you can't just stay here and — do you have any enemies here? Anyone who would — there's something going around, I think, people getting, getting powers, so if there's anyone here who has it out for you, that might be what this is." If they can figure out an identity, they might be able to fight more effectively.

Coraline stared wide eyed at where the tree had been. She certainly hadn't done that but had Jason. Waving her hand excitedly at him Coraline pointed at Jason, at his mouth before pointing at the tree. Coraline realised she probably just looked like a flailing monkey right now but it was better than opening her mouth. That's when trouble happened and trouble meant grounding.

"Jesus fucking Christ," Lucy breathed, barely audible in stark contrast to the yell he'd let out, eyes almost comically wide, though there was nothing funny about the situation at all. This was actually pretty fucked up, though she would never have phrased it as such aloud, certain that it had to be even more disarming to do than to witness. Careful, trying her best to stay as steady as she could, she drew in a deep breath, then held both hands up in front of her. "Here, take it easy, okay? I don't want you to hurt yourself."

"Observation," says Bucky, clapping a hand to Jason's shoulder once it looks like the worst of it is over. "Which is fancy code for a damn lucky guess."

The hit took her completely by surprise. Only reflex kept her from face-planting – the fall became a roll and she sprang away, landing in a crouch. “What the fuck?” she echoed, staring wide-eyed and angry at Jason. “Did you do that?”

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