Who. Jennifer Hill, Alyssa Kenworthy & the Maximoffs What. Patrolling turns violent w/ an unwanted dosage of Brotherhood Where. M-Town, NY When. Forward dated to Wednesday night, May 9th 2012 Warnings. Violence, strong language? Not so much adult content
Jen was used to nights like this. Nights spent on roof tops and skulking down dark, empty streets late at night when other girls her age should be safely in doors and not out purposefully looking for trouble. But for her? Out purposefully looking for trouble had sort of become her forte over the last few years. Sometimes it was still hard to believe that this was her life, or that she shared a conscious with Clark Kent, the man of steel. That when she wasn't cramming for tests and tinkering with science equipment in the Agency's R&D basement, she was fighting crime with other people her age and they were slowly but surely dropping like flies.
Natalie Rakov had only been the most recent in a long string of team mate losses for Jen, but that didn't make this one any less hard to swallow. She hadn't been as close to the Widow as Alyssa and some of the others had, but that didn't matter. Avengers, JL, they were all a team, and it never got easier. Jen still remembered the day Sarah and James's bodies were found like it was yesterday, Brad and Barbara's sad end and Seth's more gruesome one. She took every loss personally, carrying it with her in a way Clark disapproved of. He told her she couldn't take the weight of the world on her shoulders like that, there had to be some separation between what she was trying to save and what she couldn't. It was easier said than done.
Usually M-Town was more Avenger and X-Men territory than the JL's, but whether it had actually been unspoken or not, Jen and Alyssa had both been pointedly avoiding Gotham for the most part since the night of the New Jersey riots. They had more than enough people to cover Gotham without them anyway, so Jen had been glad to spend more time in Metropolis and M-Town for awhile and avoid the fresh, bad memories. Besides, the Avengers had been down two people, what with the disappearance of Fox soon after Natalie's death and all. The appearance of a completely new Captain America in the shape of Alyssa's older brother had been more than a little confusing, but she was determined not to drive herself too crazy with any of this. If anything she welcomed the foreign territory, it kept her mind firmly locked on the task at hand and not off wandering somewhere else.
"And that's for trying to cop a feel!" Jen snarled, punching the mutant convenience store robber square in the face, the force of her blow sending him sailing into the opposite outside wall of the building. "Ass." The guy didn't even try to get up, he just groaned from where he now sat half-hunched over on the ground and Jen turned back to Alyssa with a raised eyebrow. Of all the things they had to deal with tonight, of course it had to be criminals with actual powers. Jen found herself almost missing Lex Luthor. Key word being almost. "Wanna do one more sweep of the next block? I've got a test tomorrow but if I study anymore I'll probably go cross-eyed." Even the woman of steel wasn't immune to senioritis.