Chapter Text
“It’s dark.”
Wow, what an observation. Get a load of this guy, everyone.
It’s dark, huh?
Yeah, no fucking shit.
Give a round of applause to the genius who decided to say ‘it’s dark’ in the lightless fucking room. Of course it's dark, you fuckers didn’t install any lights. She would’ve thought she was blind had he not said anything!
Screw the fact that light followed him into her humble (and very temporary) abode when he entered. Screw the fact that she could see the outlines of her hands in front of her, because, believe it or not, dogs can see in the dark.
Somewhat.
Some is better than none, though.
Bitch.
Smarty Pants fumbled with something from the other side of the iron bars. The ones that keep her in this part of the room instead of the other part of the room. Maybe the other side of the room had bad vibes or something. Some evil tool, like, oh, she didn’t know, a door that would lead outside. Into the big bad world with big bad criminals and people smart enough not to lead a hero straight to them.
Because those people definitely weren’t here.
Another thing. Adding iron bars was kind of stupid when there’s no light anyway. Sure, she wasn’t chained down or anything, but the prison cell aesthetics were not doing anything for anyone when they aren’t put on display. Just… add a food hole in the wall and call it a day. Don’t waste your budget on useless iron bars.
Or at least grow some balls and give her something to see with.
She had been there for at least a day, and somehow, despite being in the shittiest prison cell ever, she hated the people who put her in there even more.
They’re all pussies who didn’t give her a fucking meal on a regular basis. It pissed her off.
She hoped with every fibre of her being that they knew that the moment they got too close, she was gonna yell their ears off about starving their hostage. She hoped it hurt too! She hoped they went deaf or, fuck it, she hoped their ears hurt so much that they went blind.
Ah yes, let's kidnap a hero for ransom and then not give them basic fucking treatment. We don’t want them to live long enough to get our money, after all.
How about you go suck dick. Choke and die.
Absolute bitches, the lot of them.
Cypress just wanted to have a grand old time fighting these crappy villains after they literally doxxed themselves. But noooooo, one of them just happened to have some fucking sleeping power and decided to nuke the hallway she was in.
It was all going swimmingly at first. She got super far without getting caught, even after the alarms started blaring. She found all their cliché cartoon villainous plans. She beat up, like, ten dudes in less than a minute in the most objectively badass way possible. She was about to leave too! She got up to go, but then she couldn’t keep her eyes open. Next thing she knew, her eyes were opening, but it was wrong cause everything looked the same open as it did closed.
Turns out it’s dark.
And cold!
Cypress had seen enough movies to know she was in some type of prison cell. It stunk like moldy cheese and there were more damp bricks than reasons why Jene is a bitch. (And there were a lot of reasons)
The whole being captured thing wasn’t even the biggest deal. She was more mad about how basic it all was. Damp brick walls with iron bars on one side? It’s the starter kit for evil prison cells, except these idiots obviously bought it on Wish.
Nobody's thought of a stone brick prison cell with iron bars on one side before! Never. In the history of time. Not at all.
God! She just wanted to punch someone so fucking badly!
“Woah. Who would’ve fucking thought?” Cypress croaked very angrily from her place on the floor. “Maybe you should’ve installed lights in this damn place.”
If passive-aggressive comments made by Heroes-turned-prisoners could kill, the asshole in front of her would already be rotting.
They chuckled, but in a way that felt more like a grimace than a chuckle. “We were going to,” they probably paused for dramatic effect. It didn’t land. “Before you came along, Emperor.”
She snapped at him, “I wouldn't have had to come if you sent your cargo of illegal shit to a warehouse instead of your main fucking hideout! Do you know how pathetic you are?
“Your order got flagged because ‘being a collector’ is not a good excuse when you buy 15 crates of bombs!”
Cypress was full-on seething. She was spending her time in a prison cell yelling at one of her captors. She was literally yelling at her captors because that’s how pathetic they were. She needed a fucking raise. A huge fucking raise.
“Not to mention you didn’t even try to be sneaky about your location! Or your identities! Or anything, literally fucking anything! How stupid are you? I wanted to spend my time doing something useful—” Bothering Duke. “—but instead I got called out to punch some morons!
“You’re the morons, by the way. I thought I might need to spell that out. In case you couldn’t fucking tell.”
Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to tell these people how they got caught, but—actually no. They were probably too stupid to use the information anyway. She could do whatever she wanted and face no repercussions. Not with these fools.
It was a beat before Einstein’s Pathetic Copycat did anything. A long beat of silence in a gross prison cell surrounded by gross bricks and cold iron bars and stupid villains who thought they could do whatever they wanted because they had a rich sponsor and…
Hold up.
Fuck. She completely forgot about that part.
Money didn’t just appear out of nowhere. She overlooked it before because of their sheer stupidity, but now that she was thinking about it, it didn’t make sense for them to have the funds for 15 bomb crates. And their base (or would calling it a bunker be better? It was all underground) was expansive. Cypress didn’t have the best internal clock, but she was probably running down random hallways for over an hour before she got forcefully konked.
The building itself was just some fairly small office building in lower. It barely clung to life, and for all intents and purposes, it was abandoned. Except it had a basement. With running power. And keycard-accessed elevators and an on-duty security team and loud alarms that blared the moment someone saw Emperor.
They (Cypress and Jene, but mostly Cypress) looked into everything about the place and criminals before actually doing anything, and they were pretty sure they had everything. Cypress may hate the behind-the-scenes stuff, but she still takes it pretty damn seriously if it's important. Everything was normal. Everything about everything was completely clean!
Too clean, now that she was looking back on it.
There were no overt ties to any group or person, nothing that would explain how they even got to where they were. But there had to be something. There were too many holes in the story.
Beyond the bombs, the heroes had no record of these guys doing anything big. All the members she could track down were just low-level thugs who used the money they scrounged up to compensate for a lack of skill, buying high-tech support weapons and power boosters. It didn’t seem like they had any major plans anyone had to be worried about, but Cypress still spent ages looking into their records and transactions.
She could only find that the building they occupied was recently sold by the previous owner, some guy who owned a pharmaceutical company. She couldn’t find anything on him, though. Plus, he donated to the Commission.
Negative Intelligence (was that even the right thing to call him anymore?) broke her train of thought. Iron screeching across concrete echoed across the room, a shrill creak breaking through the silence and shadow for just a moment. Enough to bring her back to the dull silhouette of the man in front of her.
Guess she knows what he was fumbling with before. The keys.
“On the topic of being fucking idiots,” she started, “you should probably feed your prisoners. And give them water. Getting ransom with a captive is great and all, but nobody's gonna pay for a starved hero’s rotting corpse.” She spat that last bit out, like it was a slur. Cypress would not die. Not here and not ever. She fucking swears by it.
Footsteps approached her as she spoke. She and her captor were probably the only substantially-sized things in the room. The echo each step took proved as much.
The footsteps stopped a little ways away from her. Anticipation hung in the air. The kind right before someone speaks. She wasn’t going to say anything. So it’d probably be the criminal crying about how right Cypress was, how foolish they were for borderline starving someone that was still valuable to them.
He said nothing.
She could hear him breathing in front of her. The silence was dragging on in a way that made her sink, just a bit. The air was stagnant and she couldn’t hear anything outside of—
“We do not want ransom money, Emperor.”
The room, if it could, got darker. It must’ve.
Cypress could feel eyes on her. She knew, logically, that they were from the man in front of her, but she couldn’t see anything. She couldn’t see before either, but this felt more real. This felt more permanent.
She swallowed. Dry and thick in a way that really made her wish she were at the cafe getting an employee discount on hot chocolate. Or water. She’d even settle for water at this rate. She hates water.
“Then what the fuck are you doing here? Get me some water or get lost. My eyes were finally starting to make me hallucinate, and I would like to get back to that, thank you very fucking much.” There was another moment of silence before the man in front of her spoke again. The coarse concrete below her was cold. If she could see her hands, Cypress was confident they’d be white, like a ghost’s. She’s confident her voice was just as cold, if not colder.
She may be playing along for now, but make no mistake, she is not a damn captive. Not here.
Clothing rustled in front of her, and the next words spoken were directly across from her rather than above. Her cheek was warm with that man’s breath.
“You had no right meddling with our affairs. Consider this your retribution.”
The room was dark. She hoped that blinking would somehow make it lighter. Like seeing complete darkness would make this darkness less dark. It didn’t.
Movement in front of her, someone walking away, a shrill creek that echoed, a click, before finally:
“Your mask hid your face well, Emperor.”
Instinctively, Cypress moved her hand to her face. Skin met skin. Her fingertips burned her face as the blood drained from it. She couldn’t discern it from the concrete below her.
Cypress realized, with pooling dread, that the room was not always dark.