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Thud. The sound of a dulled impact pounded out again in response to his fist slamming into the heavy weight again. The bag hanging from the ceiling swung back a few inches and then returned, just as it did after every time he hit it and just as it would every time after as long as it was still strung up to the ceiling supports. The thick chain suspending it creaked as it swung and the weight inside the bag shifted slightly, the otherwise silent room filled only by the sounds of heavy breathing and a faint squeak that sounded like a whining dog as the bag swayed back and forth.

Thud thud thud thud. THUD. The blows against the side of the bag continued steadily, no breaks longer than a few seconds between strikes and with each punch thrown the man throwing them was focused on the grim purpose he had for this sort of thing. Not in the moment, but not out of it, his thoughts wandered away from what his hands were doing even as sweat rolled down his neck and his feet shifted him to the side yet again to strike a blow from another angle. He had been at this almost an hour now, unceasingly and only really focusing on the task for the first ten minutes or so. The bag was marred with dark stains across it where blood had seeped in, and his hands were streaked with both bright and dark red that oozed between his fingers or cracked with each movement of his hand dependent upon whether or not it had dried yet or freshly flowed out.

Still, his mind was not there. His body was on fire but inside he was focused on something else; the work still left ahead and the things that would need to be done in order to make sure that things went smoothly. It was the same work as always, but the same work as always was never the same twice. That was the nature of the business he was in, the business of solving problems.

Today's problem had been unexpected even by his standards. The Noah Foundation had ordered a large quantity of new machinery to replace some of the failing and wearing facets of the Ark; apparently the s**t that had hit the fan in 2011 had caused some serious structural damage to the steel island and Noah, being such a good old chum to his tournament sponsors had decided to drop a hefty amount of cash into Creation Industries' Latent bureau account. That wasn't the unexpected part.

The problem arose when the goods were being prepared for pickup at a warehouse on the Latent docks and a few rather specialized machines turned up missing... after an investigation only turned up one lead, the next step was fairly obvious but it almost felt too obvious. James let his mind wander, considering possibilities too outlandish to ever really happen in a sane and ordered world. Fortunately, Latent was on the verge of the beginning of another HoH which meant that 'sane and ordered' were not the words that best fit this town at the moment.



Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. A sharp stinging snapped his mind back to reality for a moment, feeling another split open up in his knuckles. His hands stopped, the bag swayed slowly to a stop, and the only sound left in that large, empty room was James' own heavy breathing as he waited... waited what seemed like several minutes.

A faint chirp broke the silence, coming from a table by the window.

For the first time since he started he let his hands drop, and in that instant they felt like cinderblocks attached to his wrists. His breathing was coming in heavy, desperate gasps and now that his mind was back he finally realized that his vision was blurred from the sweat dripping off of his brow and running down his face like a river. He took one step toward the window and stumbled, the knee not holding up under his weight and he had to catch himself before trying it again with a bit less confidence than before.

By the time he made it to the table his breathing was more controlled, still heavy but not quite so much like he had just tried to run across Scotland. The backlight of his phone was still on when he leaned over, prominently displaying one message across the screen:



"...well, fu- HNNK!" His casual profanity was interrupted by a sharp cough and he decided to drop the statement from there. The taste of blood in his mouth wasn't unfamiliar in the slightest, nor was it all that infrequent these days; this was not the first time that he had pushed himself this hard in the past few months and it was not the first time he'd found himself coughing up spatters of blood at the end. He wrote it off as something to be expected of a man whose insides were a jigsaw puzzle of scar tissue... but that wasn't the only reason. He ignored it because he just couldn't bring himself to feel like it mattered.

For the past few months, James Black had felt invincible.

He'd pushed himself to the point of collapse in his workouts several times in the past few weeks but it never seemed to quite get there and no matter how completely exhausted he was it seemed as if it had never happened only a few hours later. He'd been shot, stabbed, and lit on fire and it just hadn't felt the same as it had before... before Sey died. Before the connection she had made between them had forced him to relive her memories and to house the divinity of her soul within his own. He knew nothing about what had happened there other than what the apparition had told him but ever since then something was different.

He'd tried to fight it, instinctively. Sey had explained to him before what their connection meant and what it could do for them but it had never felt real. Just another part of this mystical bullshit he could hardly understand. It was different now though, he could feel her even without thinking about it. He knew where she was right now, he knew her feelings and knew her pain, he knew that she'd been drinking. He didn't want to accept that type of responsibility.

Seyumi had always been a prize in his eyes. Their relationship, whatever it was, was a cause of constant arguments between them for one reason or another and it had always been James who broke down the walls she put up, invaded her privacy with clear and obvious intent to use it against her in some twisted game they both couldn't seem to say no to. This was not a game. The level of connection between them now was frightening, having all of the secrets she could have tried to keep from him without even trying - no, even more than that it was something that he couldn't tune out when he tried to - the playful song and dance they had performed so many times wasn't there. He knew her secrets, and he had no idea if it was the same for her.

He didn't want this responsibility, and this wasn't the first of her phone calls that he had missed lately.

James reached out for the phone but stopped himself, remembering the blood on his hands. His body was heavy and his chest burned something fierce but his breathing was almost back to normal now. Ever since that night he'd felt like his body was recovering unusually quickly. Things that should have taken weeks to heal took days, things that should take days took hours. In response his workouts had become increasingly severe, testing the limits of this... absurd development.

Sey truly was a treasure. Everything she touched turned to gold, including James. A nobody like himself shouldn't feel like this, a kid from the streets had no reason to feel like he was special; but something about that girl had a way of changing up everything that he knew about the world.

"...alright, take over. I have some business to attend to."

Talking over his shoulder, James called back to the open door of the large empty room as a pair of men in suits emerged from the hallway, one with a pair of bolt cutters in hand and the other holding a white plastic bucket filled with soapy water.

"Related business?" The one carrying the bucket pulled a wet rag from inside of it and slapped it soggily into James' hand.

"Unrelated." The towel turned red in patches and streaks as he wiped his hands off, leaving the seething red patches of torn skin on his knuckles in stark contrast to the surrounding flesh. Folding the towel over he wiped his face and neck as well, then swiped back his hair and threw it back into the bucket.

"Make sure to get a proper confession. I want more than names this time." James leaned into the window as he swiped his phone off of the table, placing one hand against the window frame as he peered out at the street two stories below and the crowd beginning to gather around the vans outside. Latent certainly was busy this time of year, even more so in the part of town near the Hawk. Prime location for keeping an eye on things was a reason James kept a few pieces of prime real estate in his expense accounts.

"Aye." The larger of the two suited men wrapped the bolt cutters around the chain holding the bag up and, with a sharp tug, split the chain and caused the bag to fall with a heavy thump to the floor.

"Okie doke, homeboy. Time to rise and shine." With a swift kick the man smacked the side of the long bag to roll it over, exposing the zipper that ran down the entire side of it before kneeling down and pulling the zipper back.

"Hope you had fun. Now it's time to talk about your little friends..."



In the hallway, James thumbed the touch-screen of his phone. He hovered over the green call-back button for a few seconds as he stood outside of the stairwell door, staring intently at the device as if it were a living thing... and then touched the text message button instead. Tapping letters as he disappeared into the stairwell, James sent back a reply a few minutes late.

What had she just been doing? There was something that she had just been doing or thinking about but at the moment it eluded her. A slap on the shoulder brought her back to her senses, her head turning sleepily to the side in the direction the slap had come from only to catch the tail end of a set of a half dozen children filing off out of the room behind where she sat cross-legged on the floor.

"C'mon dummy or you ain't gettin' none." The last kid out of the room shouted back in at Sey, who was the only one left sitting on the bare floorboards of the large but almost empty room. Rather than hurrying to her feet though, Sey turned back the other way and went right back to watching the small, fuzzy-pictured television sitting in the corner. Of course there was no way that she would be able to walk away from the legendary acting of Adam West as he fought crime in Gotham City. Unfortunately, it only lasted a minute more before the episode cut out to the ending credits. Finally budging from her spot, Sey rocked forward onto her hands and knees and crawled the rest of the distance to the television before cranking the enormous silver dial on the right to the 'off' position and standing up.

The would-have-been silence in the empty room was still filled with the boisterous shouting of children from the other room, calling each other stink-face or demanding that another one give up what they had because of who was older.

"Dummy isn't coming again. I get his dinner!" The voice belonged to the same young boy that had shouted earlier, and was followed by five or six other equally demanding shouts about portions of portions and who was more entitled to the absentee's dinner.

Sey stood and dusted her knees off with her hands before slowly following the path the others had taken out of the room, a path that lead down a side hallway lined with slightly warped furniture and broken chairs propped against the walls. A broken mirror was leaned between two upturned chairs with missing legs and Sey glanced at it as she passed, her eyes meeting the reflection of a thin boy, probably no more than six years old and covered with countless scrapes and bruises across his face and arms. Sey looked at her own hands while she walked on, flicking fingers across a few rough scabs on her knuckles and elbows and squeezing down on the piece of cloth tied around one finger with the other hand that she somehow knew was covering a rather large cut on the side of her finger. She turned right at the end of the hallway into another hallway with boarded up windows on the left side, before finally coming around through a swinging door into a brightly lit room in which a dozen children varying in ages from very young to almost pre-teens sat around a long, rectangular table. Against the back wall the cloud of steam hanging in the air faintly obscured the form of a rather rotund woman in the midst of straining the water out of a large pot into a sink basin.

SMACK! A sharp stinging pain was felt on the back of her neck and Sey immediately brought her hands back to the place where the pain had been, groaning and almost doubling over in an over-exaggerated response to a light smack.

"Don't keep the rest of the children waiting, John. Now hurry up and take your seat."

Sey didn't answer, she simply nodded at the gaunt woman standing beside her in the penguin suit and picked up her pace as she ran around the table to the only open seat left which was immediately beside the older boy from earlier who had apparently called dibs on her dinner. The boy flashed a grin missing his two front teeth, then smacked her on the back again with an open palm.

" -'took you so long, dummy? I'm fukkin starved already- OW!"

He was cut off by a sharp smack as five fingers slapped him across the top of his buzz-cut head and the tall woman walked up behind, leaning over the boy with a stern expression. "Mind your language, Francis. You'll not use those kinds of words in this house."

"Aaah," Francis whined, "yes Sister Margaret. I'm sorry Sister Margaret."

She answered with a curt huff before walking off to loom over each of the other children's shoulders in turn, her expression never changing from that same stern glare she had used on both Sey and Francis. While she made the rounds the heavier woman circled the table in the same way, placing a plate in front of each of the children with a bread roll and a small amount of spaghetti on the plate. It was spaghetti in name only though, because other than noodles there was only a small amount of thin sauce dabbled atop it.

The first thing that Francis did once the woman passed by was to grab the bread roll off of Sey's plate and bite it in half, chewing greedily and dropping the other half of it onto his own plate. Sey did nothing.

"-'s what I like about you, dummy." Francis laughed a little while he chewed, "you'll never tattle since you don't talk!"

Sey didn't answer, she just pulled the spaghetti noodles into different corners of her plate with the prongs of her fork so that they were spread out, making it look like there was more than there actually was.