Post by angelofmusic1992 on Jul 16, 2017 3:29:09 GMT
Yang sighed. Usually, walking around the city helped when she was thinking about a problem. Just letting her feet carry her wherever they saw fit helped her relax a bit and focus on the problem at hand. But it looked like it wasn’t working today. She’d been walking around for at least an hour and still had no idea how she felt about her friends’ suggestion of becoming a cop.
On the one hand, she thought it was a super bad idea. She had all sorts of mental problems, she had broken the law plenty of times herself in the past, the list just went on. On the other hand though, she remembered how much she had wanted to be a cop when she was younger. It was all she had thought about. She could use her fighting skills for something productive. And she remembered how she’d been wanting to help with the sticky situations her friends had gotten into, but had had no idea how. Being a cop could certainly help with that. She just didn’t know what to do about the whole thing. Every time she looked at the prosthetic arm her friends had gotten her, she was reminded of the decision she had to make, and it made her anxious.
“Give me your money, kid! Now!”
The voice jolted Yang out of her thoughts. It was pretty much an automatic response, seeing as how she’d had nearly the exact same phrase yelled at her plenty of times over the years. She whipped her head around and saw a man pointing a knife at a little girl. Yang’s eyes widened as she recognized the girl as Rhona, who seemed to be frozen with fear. She couldn’t even respond, and that just made the thief angry.
“Come on kid, I know you’ve got something on ya. Now hand it over!”
All Rhona could do was shake her head. The thief didn’t seem to appreciate that answer, and he started to move forward, his knife getting closer with alarming speed.
“Okay, now you’re just pissing me off. You have five seconds to hand over everything in your pockets or I’m gonna-”
The thief never managed to finish his threat though, as something suddenly came out of no where and slammed into him with full force. He got knocked backwards a good several feet. Rhona was astonished to see that that something was Yang, who had practically slammed into the guy with everything she had. Yang, however, didn’t want Rhona to stick around. She could already feel her stomach twisting and her palm starting to sweat. If she lost this fight, she didn’t want Rhona to be around.
“Rhona, get out of here! Run and get help!”
That seemed to snap the little girl out of her state of frozen fear and she took off running. Yang let out a sigh of relief. At least she would be safe. She wasn’t sure if she could say the same for herself though. The sign above her head said this was a bus stop, and it looked like it was kind of a deserted one. There was nobody else in sight, save for the thief, who was getting to his feet.
“You have a lot of nerve girl, you know that?” he snarled. “You really think you can take me on? You must be crazy.”
“Says the guy who’s mugging little girls for money,” Yang snapped back, her hand curled into a fist to keep it from shaking. “You could have at least gone for an adult. At least they have credit cards and a good amount of cash. What were you hoping to get from her? Some Chuck E. Cheese’s tokens?”
The thief growled in anger, like a dog that was ready to tear apart a small animal with its jaws. “What do you think you can do? You’ve only got one arm!”
“Oh, I have so much more than that,” Yang replied. She savored the look of confusion on the thief’s face for a moment before she released a burst of fire. It was a pretty decent sized, considering she didn’t have two arms anymore. However, what she saw next made her eyes widen.
The thief had shielded himself from the fire blast with a shield of energy. She could it see it surrounding him, casting him in black. As the shield died down, he started laughing.
“So, you’ve got some powers huh? Well so do I. They don’t call me Telekinetic Tarrlok for nothing!”
Almost instantly, Tarrlok seized a mailbox nearby with his powers. Anything they touched instantly became coated in the black energy. He chucked it towards Yang.
The blonde managed to duck just in time, but barely had time to recover before Tarrlok hurled several slabs of concrete he had pulled from the ground. Yang barely had time to attack at all. Most of her time was spent dodging. If she wasn’t so scared, she could have come up with a plan, but she could barely think past the mind-numbing fear that coated her brain. She could feel the adrenaline making her heart race, and she wasn’t sure how much more she could handle.
Yang’s luck finally ran out as she dodged a bush Tarrlok threw at her. The next thing that hit her wasn’t an object, but rather a beam of energy. It struck her right in the chest and she got knocked backwards, landing on the ground hard enough to nearly knock the wind out of her. As she struggled to get back up, she gave a strangled gasp.
Thrax was walking towards her, eyes gleaming and his teeth bared in an evil grin. Yang shook her head, cowering backwards in fear.
“No, no, no. You’re not here. You’re not here.”
“Getting a little scared now, aren’t we girly?” It was Tarrlok that spoke, but all Yang could see and hear was Thrax. “What’s the matter? Lost your spark?” He started to walk forward.
“Stay back!” Yang let out whatever fire she could conjure, throwing the flames desperately in front of her to shield herself. But Tarrlok, or Thrax as she saw him, just kept advancing. He let out blast after blast of energy, wearing Yang down with every hit she took. In her eyes, Thrax was shooting out flames with every stroke of his hand, and black tentacles leered around him like hungry snakes.
“Look at you. You’re pathetic,” she heard him say. “Did you really think you could beat me? Face it, you’re nothing.”
Thrax started laughing, the sound making Yang whimper in fear. She put her hands over her ears, shutting her eyes as if she could just make everything go away by not looking at it. All she wanted was to just curl into a ball and disappear. What Yang didn’t know though, was that somebody else was witness to the scene.
While Pitch only had so many Nightmares that patrolled the city, it still offered him a fairly wide glimpse of any activity that was going on. And when one reported that Yang had stepped in to fight off a robber that had been attacking a little girl, Pitch knew he had to move fast. Yang was in no shape to fight, and who knew how long she would last. Getting to where the fight was happening was almost no trouble at all, and he was soon a rooftop no more than five feet away.
The first thing he saw was Tarrlok, advancing towards Yang, while the young woman cowered on the ground. The fear radiating off of her was massive, almost overwhelming. Pitch pushed it aside as he got ready to attack. But, just before he was about to, something happened.
Amidst all the fear Yang was feeling, something Thrax said struck her. “You’re nothing.” That one statement was one she had thought of many times to herself over the last few months. With her arm gone and her mind shattered, she felt like there was nothing inside her. She was just empty. But, her friends never failed to tell her otherwise. She was important, she was loved, she could do anything she set her mind to. And they would never leave her, never give up on her. Their words circled together in her mind, forming an energy that seemed to replace the fear inside her, growing bigger and bigger until it finally exploded.
“No!”
The word burst out of her, and in that same instant, the fire inside her seemed to do the same. Tarrlok watched in shock as Yang rose to her feet, flames flowing around her body, shining brighter than he would have thought possible. They even seemed to be dancing in her eyes. There was no fear left in them anymore. Thrax was gone from Yang’s vision. All she could see was Tarrlok, who was looking more and more like he had made a big mistake.
“I am not nothing. Never have, never will be. Pieces of my body may be taken away, but this…” Her hand rested on her chest, above her heart. “This is never going away. And I am never letting anyone dictate what I’m worth ever again!”
Tarrlok only had time to gasp before Yang shot forward like a fiery bullet. After that, everything was a mess of punches and kicks and flames as Yang let loose everything she had. Even though she had one arm, she moved with the same fire and energy she had in the fighting ring. Her fist lashed out in quick jabs, her legs swung with powerful kicks. And just when it looked like Tarrlok was going to try and retaliate, Yang let loose an uppercut, her fist smashing into his jaw. The move sent him falling to the ground, out cold.
For a moment, all Yang could do was breathe heavily, her chest heaving in and out. Then, the reality of what had just happened hit her full force. She had been in a fight. She had been in a fight and won. She’d seen Thrax, but had managed to push him away. The shock of it all, not to mention her adrenaline dying down, made the flame around her fade away as she sank to her knees. Hardly a moment after, she heard the sound of sirens and saw several police cars coming up the street. It looked like Rhona had found help. High up above on a rooftop, Pitch left the scene. It looked like he wasn’t needed to intervene right now.
About an hour later, Yang was sitting in the back of an ambulance, hanging up her cell phone and trying to put it back into her pocket without catching it on the shock blanket that was wrapped around her shoulders. The police had asked her tons of questions, while the ambulance had checked her to make sure she didn’t have any major injuries. She was more or less fine. Tarrlok hadn’t done much physical damage. Her mind was what had taken a real beating, hence the shock blanket. The only way the paramedics would let go would be if she spent at least one night at a friend’s house, just to make sure she didn’t have another episode, so Yang had explained the whole situation to Jane over the phone. Jane had been a little frantic the first minute or two, but then again, who wouldn’t be? But after calming down, she agreed to pick up Yang and spend the night at her place. Yang hoped there was something good on T.V. Otherwise, she wasn’t going to have much to do, entertainment-wise. She was brought out of her thoughts by a voice though, a very young-sounding one.
“Da, Da, there she is!”
Yang looked up. She was surprised to see it was Rhona, along with her dad. Yang hadn’t seen her since the police and paramedics arrived. They’d been too busy peppering her with questions and examining her injures for her to ask about her. It looked like she was doing okay, although Yang noticed the way Craig made sure to always keep her hand in his, as if she could be snatched away at any moment.
“Ugh, finally,” he said. “They wouldn’t let us see you for a while. Wanted to make sure you were okay before you had anyone else talking to you.”
Yang shrugged. “Paramedics are always like that. They like to err on the side of caution.”
Craig just nodded in agreement. It looked like he was thinking for a moment before speaking again. Rhona gave a tug on his arm and that seemed to give him enough of a push to speak again. “Listen, I…I don’t think I could ever express the…gratitude I feel, for saving Rhona. She’s my only child. If anything happened to her, I don’t know…”
Yang could see what Craig was thinking well enough. Imagining the “what ifs” in bad situations was something she used to do for a long time. It had been hard, stopping herself from imagining what might have happened if things had gotten worse. Craig spoke again, emotion laced with every word.
“‘Thank you’ doesn’t seem enough, for what you did, but it’s all I can say. So…thank you.”
Rhona nodded solemnly in agreement. Yang knew she felt the same, and she smiled. “Hey, those words mean more than most people give them credit for these days.”
That got Craig to smile in return. “If you ever need anything, whatever it is, just feel free to ask.”
Yang nodded. “I’ll remember that. You two take care, okay?”
Craig nodded. “You too. We’ll see you around.”
“Bye,” Rhona said, giving a little wave.
Yang waved back as she and her father walked off, their hands still linked together. It looked like Rhona was going to be okay. She’d get over this. Craig might be a little more paranoid about letting her out on her own, but at least he could take comfort in knowing that his daughter didn’t get hurt.
“Looks like you’ve done some good here.”
Yang jumped at the sound of the voice and spun around. “Pitch?” she asked in astonishment. “When did you get here?”
“Near the end of your fight, actually,” he replied nonchalantly, as if Yang had asked him about the weather. “I had my own statement to give to the rest of the cops here. They like having multiple points of view.”
Yang blinked. “Wait, so…you saw some of…that?”
Pitch nodded. “Tarrlok’s used to have a pretty good reputation as a master thief. But he’s been caught one too many times at the scene of the crime. Nobody could catch him, but he couldn’t steal anything either. I reckon that’s why he was so desperate to rob that girl, and beat you. He just wanted to win at something.”
“Why didn’t you intervene?” Yang asked, her eyes narrowing. “In case you didn’t notice, I kind of got my butt kicked for a while.”
“I was about to,” Pitch replied, giving her a look. “But I saw you pull yourself back together. After that, you seemed to handle things pretty well on your own.”
That got the accusatory look in Yang’s eyes to vanish. What had happened back there…she wasn’t even sure how to explain it. She hadn’t felt that way in, well, forever. She had felt so confident. Every move she had made had been with precision, no hesitation at all. It was like back in the day, when fighting had been nearly second-nature to her. She’d never had to think too much while fighting. The moves just sort of came to her. She went with the flow.
Pitch seemed to notice that Yang had a lot to think about. “I should head back to the station, make a full report of this. Is someone picking you up?”
Yang nodded. “Yeah. Jane. She said she’d be here soon.”
That was good enough for Pitch. He gave a nod, and started to walk away. But, he stopped and said “Yang?”
“Hm?” Yang looked up.
Pitch turned back to her. “Just so you know, your fire doesn’t seem very gone to me.”
Yang blinked, the words bringing back her lost conversation with Pitch. She’d expressed fear that the fire inside her was gone. Heck, she’d even said something similar to Shadow, Sunshine, and Adrien the other day. Had this whole thing proved that her fire wasn’t as lost as she had thought it was? She was still pondering the question as Pitch left, his footsteps silent against the pavement.
((Yeah, this is a little bit rushed, but I wanted to get this out there. And yeah, the only reason I chose Tarrlok was because his name starts with the same letter as Telekinetic. I had to find something to make it sound catchy. XD))
On the one hand, she thought it was a super bad idea. She had all sorts of mental problems, she had broken the law plenty of times herself in the past, the list just went on. On the other hand though, she remembered how much she had wanted to be a cop when she was younger. It was all she had thought about. She could use her fighting skills for something productive. And she remembered how she’d been wanting to help with the sticky situations her friends had gotten into, but had had no idea how. Being a cop could certainly help with that. She just didn’t know what to do about the whole thing. Every time she looked at the prosthetic arm her friends had gotten her, she was reminded of the decision she had to make, and it made her anxious.
“Give me your money, kid! Now!”
The voice jolted Yang out of her thoughts. It was pretty much an automatic response, seeing as how she’d had nearly the exact same phrase yelled at her plenty of times over the years. She whipped her head around and saw a man pointing a knife at a little girl. Yang’s eyes widened as she recognized the girl as Rhona, who seemed to be frozen with fear. She couldn’t even respond, and that just made the thief angry.
“Come on kid, I know you’ve got something on ya. Now hand it over!”
All Rhona could do was shake her head. The thief didn’t seem to appreciate that answer, and he started to move forward, his knife getting closer with alarming speed.
“Okay, now you’re just pissing me off. You have five seconds to hand over everything in your pockets or I’m gonna-”
The thief never managed to finish his threat though, as something suddenly came out of no where and slammed into him with full force. He got knocked backwards a good several feet. Rhona was astonished to see that that something was Yang, who had practically slammed into the guy with everything she had. Yang, however, didn’t want Rhona to stick around. She could already feel her stomach twisting and her palm starting to sweat. If she lost this fight, she didn’t want Rhona to be around.
“Rhona, get out of here! Run and get help!”
That seemed to snap the little girl out of her state of frozen fear and she took off running. Yang let out a sigh of relief. At least she would be safe. She wasn’t sure if she could say the same for herself though. The sign above her head said this was a bus stop, and it looked like it was kind of a deserted one. There was nobody else in sight, save for the thief, who was getting to his feet.
“You have a lot of nerve girl, you know that?” he snarled. “You really think you can take me on? You must be crazy.”
“Says the guy who’s mugging little girls for money,” Yang snapped back, her hand curled into a fist to keep it from shaking. “You could have at least gone for an adult. At least they have credit cards and a good amount of cash. What were you hoping to get from her? Some Chuck E. Cheese’s tokens?”
The thief growled in anger, like a dog that was ready to tear apart a small animal with its jaws. “What do you think you can do? You’ve only got one arm!”
“Oh, I have so much more than that,” Yang replied. She savored the look of confusion on the thief’s face for a moment before she released a burst of fire. It was a pretty decent sized, considering she didn’t have two arms anymore. However, what she saw next made her eyes widen.
The thief had shielded himself from the fire blast with a shield of energy. She could it see it surrounding him, casting him in black. As the shield died down, he started laughing.
“So, you’ve got some powers huh? Well so do I. They don’t call me Telekinetic Tarrlok for nothing!”
Almost instantly, Tarrlok seized a mailbox nearby with his powers. Anything they touched instantly became coated in the black energy. He chucked it towards Yang.
The blonde managed to duck just in time, but barely had time to recover before Tarrlok hurled several slabs of concrete he had pulled from the ground. Yang barely had time to attack at all. Most of her time was spent dodging. If she wasn’t so scared, she could have come up with a plan, but she could barely think past the mind-numbing fear that coated her brain. She could feel the adrenaline making her heart race, and she wasn’t sure how much more she could handle.
Yang’s luck finally ran out as she dodged a bush Tarrlok threw at her. The next thing that hit her wasn’t an object, but rather a beam of energy. It struck her right in the chest and she got knocked backwards, landing on the ground hard enough to nearly knock the wind out of her. As she struggled to get back up, she gave a strangled gasp.
Thrax was walking towards her, eyes gleaming and his teeth bared in an evil grin. Yang shook her head, cowering backwards in fear.
“No, no, no. You’re not here. You’re not here.”
“Getting a little scared now, aren’t we girly?” It was Tarrlok that spoke, but all Yang could see and hear was Thrax. “What’s the matter? Lost your spark?” He started to walk forward.
“Stay back!” Yang let out whatever fire she could conjure, throwing the flames desperately in front of her to shield herself. But Tarrlok, or Thrax as she saw him, just kept advancing. He let out blast after blast of energy, wearing Yang down with every hit she took. In her eyes, Thrax was shooting out flames with every stroke of his hand, and black tentacles leered around him like hungry snakes.
“Look at you. You’re pathetic,” she heard him say. “Did you really think you could beat me? Face it, you’re nothing.”
Thrax started laughing, the sound making Yang whimper in fear. She put her hands over her ears, shutting her eyes as if she could just make everything go away by not looking at it. All she wanted was to just curl into a ball and disappear. What Yang didn’t know though, was that somebody else was witness to the scene.
While Pitch only had so many Nightmares that patrolled the city, it still offered him a fairly wide glimpse of any activity that was going on. And when one reported that Yang had stepped in to fight off a robber that had been attacking a little girl, Pitch knew he had to move fast. Yang was in no shape to fight, and who knew how long she would last. Getting to where the fight was happening was almost no trouble at all, and he was soon a rooftop no more than five feet away.
The first thing he saw was Tarrlok, advancing towards Yang, while the young woman cowered on the ground. The fear radiating off of her was massive, almost overwhelming. Pitch pushed it aside as he got ready to attack. But, just before he was about to, something happened.
Amidst all the fear Yang was feeling, something Thrax said struck her. “You’re nothing.” That one statement was one she had thought of many times to herself over the last few months. With her arm gone and her mind shattered, she felt like there was nothing inside her. She was just empty. But, her friends never failed to tell her otherwise. She was important, she was loved, she could do anything she set her mind to. And they would never leave her, never give up on her. Their words circled together in her mind, forming an energy that seemed to replace the fear inside her, growing bigger and bigger until it finally exploded.
“No!”
The word burst out of her, and in that same instant, the fire inside her seemed to do the same. Tarrlok watched in shock as Yang rose to her feet, flames flowing around her body, shining brighter than he would have thought possible. They even seemed to be dancing in her eyes. There was no fear left in them anymore. Thrax was gone from Yang’s vision. All she could see was Tarrlok, who was looking more and more like he had made a big mistake.
“I am not nothing. Never have, never will be. Pieces of my body may be taken away, but this…” Her hand rested on her chest, above her heart. “This is never going away. And I am never letting anyone dictate what I’m worth ever again!”
Tarrlok only had time to gasp before Yang shot forward like a fiery bullet. After that, everything was a mess of punches and kicks and flames as Yang let loose everything she had. Even though she had one arm, she moved with the same fire and energy she had in the fighting ring. Her fist lashed out in quick jabs, her legs swung with powerful kicks. And just when it looked like Tarrlok was going to try and retaliate, Yang let loose an uppercut, her fist smashing into his jaw. The move sent him falling to the ground, out cold.
For a moment, all Yang could do was breathe heavily, her chest heaving in and out. Then, the reality of what had just happened hit her full force. She had been in a fight. She had been in a fight and won. She’d seen Thrax, but had managed to push him away. The shock of it all, not to mention her adrenaline dying down, made the flame around her fade away as she sank to her knees. Hardly a moment after, she heard the sound of sirens and saw several police cars coming up the street. It looked like Rhona had found help. High up above on a rooftop, Pitch left the scene. It looked like he wasn’t needed to intervene right now.
About an hour later, Yang was sitting in the back of an ambulance, hanging up her cell phone and trying to put it back into her pocket without catching it on the shock blanket that was wrapped around her shoulders. The police had asked her tons of questions, while the ambulance had checked her to make sure she didn’t have any major injuries. She was more or less fine. Tarrlok hadn’t done much physical damage. Her mind was what had taken a real beating, hence the shock blanket. The only way the paramedics would let go would be if she spent at least one night at a friend’s house, just to make sure she didn’t have another episode, so Yang had explained the whole situation to Jane over the phone. Jane had been a little frantic the first minute or two, but then again, who wouldn’t be? But after calming down, she agreed to pick up Yang and spend the night at her place. Yang hoped there was something good on T.V. Otherwise, she wasn’t going to have much to do, entertainment-wise. She was brought out of her thoughts by a voice though, a very young-sounding one.
“Da, Da, there she is!”
Yang looked up. She was surprised to see it was Rhona, along with her dad. Yang hadn’t seen her since the police and paramedics arrived. They’d been too busy peppering her with questions and examining her injures for her to ask about her. It looked like she was doing okay, although Yang noticed the way Craig made sure to always keep her hand in his, as if she could be snatched away at any moment.
“Ugh, finally,” he said. “They wouldn’t let us see you for a while. Wanted to make sure you were okay before you had anyone else talking to you.”
Yang shrugged. “Paramedics are always like that. They like to err on the side of caution.”
Craig just nodded in agreement. It looked like he was thinking for a moment before speaking again. Rhona gave a tug on his arm and that seemed to give him enough of a push to speak again. “Listen, I…I don’t think I could ever express the…gratitude I feel, for saving Rhona. She’s my only child. If anything happened to her, I don’t know…”
Yang could see what Craig was thinking well enough. Imagining the “what ifs” in bad situations was something she used to do for a long time. It had been hard, stopping herself from imagining what might have happened if things had gotten worse. Craig spoke again, emotion laced with every word.
“‘Thank you’ doesn’t seem enough, for what you did, but it’s all I can say. So…thank you.”
Rhona nodded solemnly in agreement. Yang knew she felt the same, and she smiled. “Hey, those words mean more than most people give them credit for these days.”
That got Craig to smile in return. “If you ever need anything, whatever it is, just feel free to ask.”
Yang nodded. “I’ll remember that. You two take care, okay?”
Craig nodded. “You too. We’ll see you around.”
“Bye,” Rhona said, giving a little wave.
Yang waved back as she and her father walked off, their hands still linked together. It looked like Rhona was going to be okay. She’d get over this. Craig might be a little more paranoid about letting her out on her own, but at least he could take comfort in knowing that his daughter didn’t get hurt.
“Looks like you’ve done some good here.”
Yang jumped at the sound of the voice and spun around. “Pitch?” she asked in astonishment. “When did you get here?”
“Near the end of your fight, actually,” he replied nonchalantly, as if Yang had asked him about the weather. “I had my own statement to give to the rest of the cops here. They like having multiple points of view.”
Yang blinked. “Wait, so…you saw some of…that?”
Pitch nodded. “Tarrlok’s used to have a pretty good reputation as a master thief. But he’s been caught one too many times at the scene of the crime. Nobody could catch him, but he couldn’t steal anything either. I reckon that’s why he was so desperate to rob that girl, and beat you. He just wanted to win at something.”
“Why didn’t you intervene?” Yang asked, her eyes narrowing. “In case you didn’t notice, I kind of got my butt kicked for a while.”
“I was about to,” Pitch replied, giving her a look. “But I saw you pull yourself back together. After that, you seemed to handle things pretty well on your own.”
That got the accusatory look in Yang’s eyes to vanish. What had happened back there…she wasn’t even sure how to explain it. She hadn’t felt that way in, well, forever. She had felt so confident. Every move she had made had been with precision, no hesitation at all. It was like back in the day, when fighting had been nearly second-nature to her. She’d never had to think too much while fighting. The moves just sort of came to her. She went with the flow.
Pitch seemed to notice that Yang had a lot to think about. “I should head back to the station, make a full report of this. Is someone picking you up?”
Yang nodded. “Yeah. Jane. She said she’d be here soon.”
That was good enough for Pitch. He gave a nod, and started to walk away. But, he stopped and said “Yang?”
“Hm?” Yang looked up.
Pitch turned back to her. “Just so you know, your fire doesn’t seem very gone to me.”
Yang blinked, the words bringing back her lost conversation with Pitch. She’d expressed fear that the fire inside her was gone. Heck, she’d even said something similar to Shadow, Sunshine, and Adrien the other day. Had this whole thing proved that her fire wasn’t as lost as she had thought it was? She was still pondering the question as Pitch left, his footsteps silent against the pavement.
((Yeah, this is a little bit rushed, but I wanted to get this out there. And yeah, the only reason I chose Tarrlok was because his name starts with the same letter as Telekinetic. I had to find something to make it sound catchy. XD))
