Issue #13: True Fear

There had been only one instance in my long years that I had felt the second type of fear. It was when I was strapped on that metal platform, waiting for the hammer to drop and the Owls to kill me. Even when they were pouring metahuman blood into my body, I was waiting for the imminent death that was about to occur.

My blood, believe it or not, was freezing cold by then. If my heart was not beating like a drum, then it would have dropped to the furthest reach of Hell. Yet, for all that agony and anticipatory dread, there was a bastion of hope within my very essence. It was as if none of that really mattered. Even if I had died, no one would miss me nor would I miss anyone.

At least at that moment, I had thought so.

You see, true fear only works when you have something to lose; just like many extreme philosophical quandaries, works only on the assumption that the base set of arguments are set in stone. If nothing else matters, then this works.

But, you see, now I had something to work for. I had something to lose.

I should have thought of that when I entered the building.

•••

"It's alright, ma'am! Just come in. Our friend is inside." Dick keeps placating the clearly terrified Samantha Farris.

I, on the other hand, am dragging the unconscious bodies of the remaining five bikers inside to not gain the attention of any roaming police cars. Sure, some backup would have been nice, but we all know how corrupt and incompetent GCPD is.

"I told you boys not to move." Olgar admonishes with an exasperated sigh as he sits on the rotting wooden receptionist counter alongside the traumatized prostitute.

"Yeah, you dingbats! Olgar told you to stay put!" Yells the prostitute, arms crossed as she hides behind Olgar.

Olgar looks at her as he rolls his eyes. "Tone it down a little. They're still my employer."

"Oh, sorry." I sure am surprised at how accommodating she was. "Sorry, kids!"

"N-no prob-lem, Miss prostitute!" I huff in pain, dropping the leg of the last biker.

As I wipe away the dust and blood that lingers on my clothing, my eyes cannot help but linger on the fragile state of Miss Farris. Her reddened eyes zig and zags from one corner to the next, arms clenched tightly between her chest. It appears that her mentality had been somewhat broken by the kidnapping and hiding she had to undertake beforehand. Not that I can fault her; it's not everyday you get sexually molested by a bunch of bikers then get saved by two kids in a ninja costume.

I walk up to her. My height is a couple of inches taller than her squatting position, so I can talk down her eyeline and give myself a sense of solemnity.

"Miss, would you like some water?" I ask her, handing her a small metal flask. It's always handy to tuck a small bottle of liquid inside of my utility belt, though this time it's just plain water.

Samantha's gaze quickly turns towards me, startling me for a moment as I see the crazed eyes. "T-thank y-you."

One big gulp is all it takes to finish the flask before she gives it back to me and I put it back on my handy-dandy utility belt. I put on my calmest tone and say, "Listen, Miss. It's all going to be alright. We just want to ask you some questions. For instance, what do you do for a living?"

"I, uh, I'm just a biochemist–" She begins to lie, but Olgar's exasperated sigh interrupts her.

"Listen, Samantha Farris," Olgar enunciates her name, her eyes widening some more. "We know you experiment on humans. What we want to know is why and the specifics of it all."

Samantha stares at us for a good few seconds before her eyes waters and tears come out. "I-I'm researching ways to incorporate live bacteria into sub-zero dead cells. Trying t-to see if, like a neuron, we could re-activate the vitality of the dead cells by artificially re–"

"Stop. Layman term." Olgar instructs.

"O-of course. We're trying to see if we can revive people." Her words shocked those who have not seen her video of the experiments–the prostitute, mostly.

"What the fuck?" The prostitute exclaims, quite loudly.

"Keep your voice down, Miss prostitute!" Dick admonishes, quickly scanning the building for any signs of disturbance.

The prostitute purses her lips. "You can't just call me Miss prostitute, not after what you did to me. My name's Valentine! "

"That's not your real name, is it?" Dick is now intrigued by the hooker's real name. Marvelous.

"It's Jillian, actually." The prostitute answers.

I roll my eyes before glaring at them. "Focus, guys. Real-world problems!"

I turn towards Samantha and began asking the real questions because there's something in her words that made me uncomfortable

"How far have you progressed in your research?"

I can tell that she was hesitating on whether to tell us company secrets, but the imminent threat of a Gotham criminal and the fact that we just saved her from a bunch of bikers won over her allegiance to the corporation.

She sighs. "Not so far. At least, we can recover a tenth of the cells that cryogenics have destroyed. That's only for a corpse who had been frozen alive. So, revivification is off the table in the next… I don't know, fifty-sixty years."

"That's also if your research speed does not decrease or stumble on a wall." I surmise to which she agrees with a nod. "There's something in your research that makes me feel iffy."

"Maybe it's that you're trying to take away the gift of death from God?" The prostitute admonishes our presumed blasphemy.

I did not take her for a religious nut, given her profession.

Anyway, Samantha's work, albeit inhumane and unethical, could revolutionize biology and science in general. In fact, if her research works, we could restore extinct animals or revitalize downtrodden ecosystems. Hell, being extinct might be just a myth or a human choice if she could finish her work. Yet, an inkling within my heart told me that I'm missing something.

I asked her once again. "Tell me… what have you done lately that got you targeted by a villain?" 

"I, uh, I don't know." She keeps saying those words, even when I try to push her. "Look, all I know is some dumb executive kept saying there was some german lord who wanted to meet with me and when I researched him, he wasn't real."

The mechanism within my brain operated at full throttle as the answer came into my mind, so much so that I barely heard the dull DING! that came out of the still-operating elevator.

"Sparrow, someone came out of–"

"Run." I mutter reflexively as the temperature in the room drops to a biting coldness.

Olgar's eyes widens, taking out his handguns and wielding it with both hands. "What the fuck?"

My hands, trembling from sheer distraught, grab those of Samantha. "RUN!"

But I'm too late as an extremely concentrated gust of icy wind blasts the entire room with its icy grips and flash freezes nearly every surface with opaque thin rime. Before we can take stock of ourselves, another blast makes us lose our footing and creates a cage of ice around the cracked glass doors, entrapping us within the condemned building.

We could hear the ominous chuckles from further within the dark halls, fear turning our blood cold.

"Olgar, shoot everything you've got!" I quickly order. There is still hope.

"D-Robin, take out your prods and break that goddamn ice. Valentine, help him." I gaze towards them and see that the energy scared them stiff. But we have no time to lose, so I let out the anger swelling inside of me and roar, "NOW!"

They quickly got to work, focusing on a singular patch of the thick ice. So I do too.

I take out the butterfly knife I received as a gift from the biker and begin taking out the loose tiles on the floor to make a makeshift shield. "Samantha, follow Robin and Valentine. As soon as you see an opening, get the fuck out of here. Understood."

Although I doubt she can hear me as the intermittent bangs and clicks of Olgar's guns resound painfully across the room, it's enough that she stands from her weak sniveling seat and crawls towards the other two.

"How long?" Asks Olgar as he throws away the last of his clip, ice creeping upon its metal casing. 

"Cover me!" I roar as I finally dislodged the tile, just in time for another cold blast of wind to hit the reception desk where Olgar and I stand.

My legs quivered under the stress in which I put through as I evaded the beam of blue energy, hitting only the sides of my tile shield and encapsulating in frigid ice.

"Cover me!" I yell yet again to Olgar, who puts one bullet after another at the not-so-empty dark hall.

I can only see the vague outline of a tall figure in front of me, but that's enough of a target. As I pass through the broken signage of the former owner of the building, the temperature drops so much that it hitches my pumped-up blood. It nearly makes me falter, helped only by the ingrained muscle memory within my ankles.

Unfortunately, the villain uses that moment to fire a concentrated blast of wind that nearly coat me with frigid blue ice. Nearly, being the operative word as I throw the tile in front of me and use it to cover my escape. The tile forms as a basis of the extremely dirty glacier, bogged by spiderwebs, rat droppings, and blood.

My legs work in tandem with my hands as I go on all-fours for the further I run, the colder and more ice there is. It was as if at a certain point; I had entered the man's domain in which freezing to death was but the natural course of life.

I didn't want to really look because my fear is that once I look, then it all becomes true. So I didn't, merely taking out my butterfly knife and sliding past another gust of icy wind that built a wall of rime and frost behind me.

"Argh! E-Sparrow, we got loose!" Dick's voice, although weaker as the thick white ice wall prevents much noise from spreading through, reaches my ears.

A brief moment of delight passes through my stomach before it's replaced by the feeling of my blood coagulating the inside of my veins. My hair standing at attention for any moment now, the world will crumble under your feet.

It's as if I had become nothing but a speck in the rearview as my gaze lands upon the piercing blue eyes of my enemy. In that moment, death is but one possible outcome, but certainly not the worst.

"My, my, my, child. Is it not past your curfew?"

The voice of Mr. Freeze embroils my senses into a feast of danger.

Although I had trained for months to maintain a specter of vigilance and sense in a battlefield, I did not, however, train for when I came face to face with an entity far beyond my meager means of resistance. The knife in my hand falls down the thick ice that creeps up on my shoes, replacing the cloth and leader with rime and frost.

As Mr. Freeze's unnaturally blue physique is laid bare before me, my eyes tremble and dilate to the tune of my heartbeat.

"I…I…" My mouth can not speak neither pleads of mercy nor snarky remarks, merely repeating the words that would be my last.

I watch as he turns a switch on his Freeze Gun that turns the illumination from light blue to dark blue. The world seems to slow to a crawl; Shouts from my allies as they retreat from battle turns into a cacophony of deep reverberations of fear and frustration.

Olgar's roars as he tries to overcome the thick wall between us becomes a tableau of a man failing to overcome the wrath of nature. A single tear falls down my cheeks and soars through the air, gradually turning into an ice sculpture that breaks once it hits the floor.

Mr. Freeze's gun slowly turns towards me as his finger pulls on the trigger. Unable to do anything–to say anything–all of my two lives flashes through my eyes.

Is this how I die? At the hands of a hopeless romantic simp?

Surely my fate is to be a hero that saves this universe and not just to be stuffed into a fridge like some superhero's girlfriend?

My desperation hastened the beats of my heart, my blood churning under the thick rime that had formed overtime.

I will not die here.

Not to some punk-ass bitch.

My roars came out an echo of a cry as Mr. Freeze's gun releases a beam of icy blue energy, concentrated enough to turn me into an ice sculpture.

"Nhoo!"

But before it can, a black line appears in front of me that stretches into what appears to be an eye without a pupil–pure dark void–a tear in the fabric of the universe. It's small, no more than a few centimeters, but the height and width of this tear is enough to swallow the ice beam whole.

The moment it passes through the tears, a feeling or memory tugs at my very essence. As if telling me to do something–to focus on a place within my sight–and to do it fast. I can feel the world climbing up to its normal speed, so my reddened eyes move towards the only non-ice thing that I can see.

The doors of the elevator.

The tear in the universe appears once more, although, this time, the whole inside had the view of the other tear and out of it comes the icy beam, hitting Mr. Freeze with his own attack. A cocoon of pure ice forms around the villain, turning him and the surrounding few inches into a glacial orb.

"O-oh my fucking–"

"Let's go!" Olgar grabs my hand as I stare in awe of what I have done.

My eyes are still watering from the threat of death, so much so that I didn't even react when Olgar throws me on his back and jumps through the small hole created by the others. His force widens the crack, but not enough that he still retains some damage as blood pours through his scraped skin.

"Start the car!" His yell jolts me awake from the midnight dream as I take stock of my surroundings.

"What?"

Even from his back, I can still feel the grin on the Russian spy's mouth. "Don't worry. We're leaving. By the way, good job on the portal! I knew you were destined to be a superhero!"