Kate Bishop is practically an Avenger. (hawkeyetoo) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2017-06-06 12:09:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !complete, joe hardy, kate bishop (hawkeye) |
Who: Hawkeye and Joe Hardy
When: May the fourth (or fifth or sixth?)
Where: Out and about
What: Battle
Rating/Warnings: Low/None
Status: Complete when posted
Kate was so tired of this shit. As if the Dreams weren’t enough… they had to deal with all this crap falling all over Orange County every couple of months. Ugh. At least this was similar to last year. Kate remembered the Storm Trooper invasion from the previous May, and she remembered how to find the chinks in the armor, so to speak. She wanted to keep her distance, though she figured she could probably avoid getting hit by the red, glowing blasts from those blasters. (The Storm Troopers were terrible aims.)
So she was on a fire escape, keeping an eye out. There weren’t too many of the bad guys around here, but it was a good idea to protect the civilians, right?
Joe had sort of been expecting something to happen today. It had happened last year and, seriously, with a “holiday” as geeky as May the Fourth, how could there not be? And compared to some of the other shit the forum’s reach had pulled, he’d take shooting a make-believe army over throwing up blood any day of the week.
But it wasn’t really make believe. The Separatist Army was real. The soldiers that invaded the county were real. The firefights were very real. The blaster in Joe’s hands? Also very real. At least he’d gotten his hands on one this year. He had ever intention on keeping it if possible, unlike the X-Wing he and Frank had ended up having to surrender to the mysterious Agency once the Empire was defeated.
It was fairly quiet in this section of town. Some time during the morning Joe and Frank had gotten separated and Joe was making his way towards the location the two had agreed upon as a rendezvous point if such an event should happen. He’d helped evacuate some poor people who had no idea what was going on along the way, and now he just wanted to reach Frank before anything else distracted him.
It was just about time to move. Kate was nearing the end of her self-imposed shift of superhero-ness, and the last hour or so had been kinda lame. Either she should throw in the towel or change locations. She was thinking change locations was the thing to do, actually. Kate climbed to the bottom of the fire escape and swooped down to the ground. She found herself face to face with a blonde dude carrying a blaster. In a flash her bow was up and taught and an arrow was pointed right into the guy’s eye. Gut instinct, knee-jerk reaction. She couldn’t help it.
The sudden appearance of someone (or thing) literally hitting the ground in front of him and Joe reacted in kind. He didn’t even get a look at who -- or what -- it was before the muzzle of the blaster was jerked up and pointed right in it’s face. The next thing Joe was aware of was that the business end of a sharp weapon was inches from his left eyeball. An arrow, Joe realized now that he was frozen into position. A flick of a finger and that arrowhead would go straight through his skull. Joe was no Star Wars buff, but he didn’t remember any Storm Troopers carrying bows and arrows in any of the movies. She may have not been alley, but she was no foe.
“Hey, whoa!” Joe jerked his hands up, and the blaster out of the woman’s face. “We’re on the same side here. Don’t turn my head into shishkabab, please.”
There was one tense moment, and then Kate slowly lowered the bow and arrow. She exhaled deeply and shook her head a little. “I'd say aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper? but I don't think I'd do the line justice.” A quick roll of the shoulders and the tension had lifted. “where'd you get that thing, anyway?” she asked, motioning to the blaster in his hands.
Short? Joe wasn’t a giant by any means, but he was pushing 6 feet (one inch shorter than his brother - an inch that had driven him crazy as a teenager), but he knew the line and it made him grin a little bit. “Hey, I’ll give it to you since you didn’t literally just shoot my eye out.” The more the woman relaxed, the more Joe did as well. He lowered his hands again and glanced at the blaster. “Technically, I found it,” he admitted. Then he looked up a little sheepish. “Of course it was still in the hands of a stormtrooper when I found it but…” he shrugged. “I always wanted one of these.”
“Yeah?” Kate pulled the arrow from her bow and slipped it into the quiver she had strapped to her back. One good thing about being Kate was that she had an excellent sense of people. A couple of good, solid looks at this guy told her two things; one, she could trust he wasn’t going to use that blaster to take her head off, and two, she could probably take him, anyway. His reflexes weren’t as quick as hers were. Not that she wanted it to come to that, it was just something that came up in her thoughts.
“You know how to use it?” She added, turning to walk with him down the street. She had places to go, man. And he should come along. Strength in numbers, all that.
Joe was supposed to be meeting up with Frank, however, it seemed as though he and the pretty lady with the bow were headed in the same direction. What luck! So Joe fell into stride easily next to her. “Sure I know how to use it,” Joe answered with a shrug. “It’s not that much different than a gun you’d find here. The ammo is different, of course, but with everything that’s going on, it’s been pretty easy to find.”
Joe eyed the woman’s bow and quiver a moment. That was definitely not something you saw everyday. The woman had to be a Dreamer. Why else would she be out here pulling arrows at random people. “Name’s Joe,” he introduced himself. He gestured at the weapon she was carrying. “Where’d you get that?”
“Not everyone here knows how to use a gun,” Kate argued gently. It was true. In her self-defense classes she often taught her students not to use one--or attempt to use one--unless absolutely necessary. Most people couldn’t or wouldn’t pull the trigger if it all boiled down to it. And it was almost more dangerous that way. “You a good shot?” She asked as they turned a corner.
Thankfully, the street was quiet. She offered him a hand as they walked. “Kate Bishop,” she said, and then glanced at her bow. “Ah. Yes. Well, I’ve been into archery since high school, but this one’s special. Came to me in a dream.”
Joe was not one of those people. Make no mistake, he was all for using a firearm responsibly, but there had been times during his career as a detective that he’d had to draw his gun. Those days had seemed far behind him, he’d even sold the weapon itself before moving to California. That seemed like a monumental mistake now.
“I’m no sniper,” Joe admitted with a slight shrug, “but I’m a pretty good shot.”
He took the offered hand. “Nice to meet you, Kate.” He raised a brow when she said the bow had come to her in a dream. “Yeah?” He asked. “I got a motorcycle from mine.”
“Damn!” Kate said, kicking a stone off the sidewalk. “A motorcycle? Shit, man. I want a motorcycle. Or my bug. I miss my car from my Dreams, you know? Well, you don’t know, because you’ve got yours. Dick. I’m so jealous.” She was mostly kidding, breaking into a grin as she looked over at him. Maybe it was a good thing to run into some random dude on the street as she was out hunting folk. Freakin’ Star Wars folk. Same old same old.
“It’s pretty sweet,” Joe said with a little bit of pride. “It’s from 1927 and in mint condition. Here lemme show you.” He produced his phone from his pocket in order to show Kate a picture of his pride and joy. Joe rode the thing everywhere, as often as he could.
“It’s really the only thing I’ve gotten,” he went on as he put the phone away and readjusted his grip on the blaster in his hands. He didn’t count the burnt shell of the sedan the Dreams had given him last year. He didn’t want to think about it at all. “The only good thing, anyway. Last year my brother and I woke up and found a bomb in our kitchen.”
Kate leaned over so she could take a look at the phone. She gave an impressed, low whistle. “It’s really pretty,” she nodded, as if to emphasize her agreement. Damn. Now she really, really wanted to have the Dreams give her that damn car. She was super jealous. Super happy for Joe, too, but also super jealous.
“Wait, a bomb? Like, a cut the blue wire, no cut the red wire! kind of bomb?” She asked, surprised and impressed.
“Yeah,” Joe snorted. “Exactly like that. In the Dream we both had that night my brother and I were chasing down this terrorist organization that liked to bomb shit. At the end of the dream we were literally finding a bomb in the local mall and having to defuse it. Well, technically Frank diffused it, I tried not to kill the lead terrorist in charge.”
Joe’s grip on the blaster tightened slightly. “When we woke up that morning the same bomb was sitting on our kitchen table ticking away. I evacuated the apartment building and Frank tried diffusing it. Only, instead he wasn’t as successful and ended up using our fridge as a blast shield.”
Kate took a moment to process all that. It must have been absolutely terrifying. Not to mention incredibly stressful. “Shit, man. I’m sorry to hear it.” She said, shaking her head. “Quick thinking on his part, though. I mean, a fridge is a lot easier to replace than a whole apartment. Or a human life.”
“Yeah,” Joe agreed. He had come far too close to losing his brother that morning. For days afterwards, he had been sure to be up before Frank in case anything else happened. Fortunately, no more bombs had appeared. Joe wondered why he hadn’t made Frank move that same week. He also wondered why the hell they kept coming back.
“We had to pay to replace the fridge,” he went on after a shrug of his shoulder, as if trying to shrug off the memory. “And we were lucky the complex’s manager didn’t evict us on the spot. I had to come up with some ridiculous story about the fridge catching on fire or something.” Joe sighed. “We live in a farmhouse now. At least if anything happens we don’t have to convince a land lord that nothing weird is going on.”
“Yeeeeah, trying to convince non-Dreaming people about the crazy shit that Orange County throws at us is hard enough as it is. When fridges explode? It’s hard to talk off.” She got sidetracked thinking about the weird shit that came out of her dreams--injuries, that sort of thing. The kind of stuff nobody else really noticed, save for Clint and her. She was often sporting a black eye or a split lip that she couldn’t explain. Thankfully, a lot of it was easy to cover with makeup. And the only job she had where she’d have to cover that sort of thing was working at Victrola. Emma--her boss--was a Dreamer, too. So she didn’t have to make up weird stories.
“Okay, I’m headed this way,” she said, pointing down the next street with her bow. “You’re all right to go on your own?”
“I’m just happy she bought it,” Joe sighed. He and Frank had mostly avoided any Dream injuries carrying over, and for that at least, Joe was thankful. He could have gone without the bomb not to mention the hallucinogenic gas in the apartment last Christmas...among other things.
“Hm?” Joe glanced down the street Kate was indicating, which really was the opposite direction he needed to go in to meet Frank. “Oh, yeah. I’ll be alright. You?” Though he had a feeling Kate would be just fine with that bow of hers.
Thankfully Joe got out of a sticky situation. Kate was a little surprised and a little impressed… though not nearly that much. The Dreamers of Orange County went through a ton of shit, and somehow managed to survive it. Joe seemed like a good guy with a good head on his shoulders. She thought he could do whatever he wanted to, really.
She nodded. “Yeah. I’ll be fine. Stay safe, Joe. Maybe I’ll catch you on Valarnet sometime.”