Luke Submitted Characters: Luke Cage Setting: Harlem, NY, in the street, late night. Content: Some Language. Summary: Luke Cage has a less than friendly chat with some local kids.
Not being shot is the strangest feeling, Luke Cage thought to himself as round after useless round bounced off his nigh-impregnable skin. Hearing the guns go off, feeling the bullets make contact. Yet there was no pain, no blood, no rending of flesh and bone, not the way he remembers it before he changed. There was just his cheap thrift shop t-shirt being torn up and three armed men with dread fixed on their faces. No, not men, these were boys. Teenagers with pistols that made them think they could get away with anything. Not here though, not in his neighborhood.
“That’s f-ing enough!” Luke cried out as he grabbed the nearest assailant and squeezed the boy’s arm hard enough to bruise bone, but hopefully do only that. The boy dropped his weapon, followed by his whole body, to the ground and cried out for help. One of the injured youth’s “friends” ran off into the night as the other stood there frozen in terror. Cage didn’t bother giving chase to the one trying to escape, he had what he needed. He strutted up to the teen quaking before him. Luke leaned in close enough for the boy to feel Luke’s breath on his face. Luke Cage grabbed a handful of the tattered yellow material that was his t-shirt.
“Look at this. I said look at this!” The boy had his gaze fixed on the ground; his firearm fixed on the ground; his entire body seeming to scream that he wanted to be anywhere but where he was. “This is my favorite shirt!” Cage shouted. “You sonuva…you f-ed up my favorite shirt!”
By his last count Luke had at least seven more shirts just like it.
The frightened teen mumbled something under his breath.
“What was that!?!?” Luke could be heard up two blocks in any direction.
“I’m sorry! I’m SORRY!” the youth blurted out, tears starting to appear in his eyes.
“Sweet Christmas! You better be sorry!” Luke knew a guy that let him get up to ten shirts at a time for dirt cheap. “First, boy, I want know where little pieces a' shit like you are getting these fucking guns.” Luke hated cursing, but knew sometimes to get people to listen he had to ask the right way. “Next, I want know where that damn friend of yours thinks it safe to run to.” Luke Cage looked the quivering boy over. “And I want your shirt too! I got errands to run and I don’t feel like looking uncivilized.”