cracked mirror - "Birds of Prey" ficlet - PG
Title: cracked mirror
Fandom: “Birds of Prey”
Disclaimer: Claude Morton, Jesse Reese, and Helena Kyle aren’t mine.
Warnings: spoilers for episode three, “Prey for the Hunter”
Pairings: none stated; if you infer what I imply, there’s a smidge of slash
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 660
Point of view: third
At first, as a kid, Claude didn’t understand. He got headaches every couple of months, until a new boy showed up in his class and the pain never went away, except when he went home for the day.
Claude begged his mother to let him stay home. He wasn’t sure what Michael Deltin had to do with the migraines, but it didn’t hurt until he got on the bus. His grades suffered and he was always exhausted from the pain.
And then Michael quit coming to school and the headaches stopped. It wasn’t till long after that Claude realized his newfound painting skills stopped, too.
In senior year, the headaches came back, but only at lunch. Claude looked around the cafeteria when it happened the third day in a row and the pain centered on a little freshman girl. Claude studied her, searching for why being close to her hurt so much. She seemed pretty normal.
He started taking lunch in the courtyard and when he graduated, he forgot about her.
All throughout college, the migraines came and went with no reason or warning. He noticed that his gaze sharpened on certain people, so he followed a guy one day, exhausted and angry, and demanded to know why his head hurt so damned much.
The guy looked at him, bewildered, and then brightened. “You’re like me!” he said. “Man, I thought I was alone.”
Claude blinked and rubbed his temples. “Like you?” he asked.
The guy gestured to the beige classroom wall. As Claude watched, it darkened to a medium green. Claude’s mouth dropped open and he stepped forward, trailing his fingers on the wall. He glanced back at the guy. “Can you do that again?”
The headache never went away whenever he was around David. But David was funny and smart and he could change the color of anything, which was endlessly fascinating. Together they investigated the migraines and found half a dozen others, each with their own unique abilities.
The last one, Maggie, didn’t appreciate being found and disintegrated David as Claude watched in shock.
She turned to him and the shock became rage. As she raised her hand to kill him like David, the pain vanished and he didn’t even think about it, just lifted his own hand and smiled when she scattered into a million pieces.
Claude took a semester off and went home. He followed every headache to someone else and watched them. As long as they were in sight, he could do whatever they could, and those who confronted him he had no problem killing. They weren’t like David. They were like Maggie and needed to be put down before hurting innocents.
Dad had been a policeman and Claude never questioned following his footsteps. It led him to more and more criminals with abilities-they were bad people, nothing like David, and the law couldn’t handle them, and they attacked him with their freakishness so he defended himself and they died. After a while, he quit hiding the remains, if anything was left, and laughed while the other police tried to explain it.
They hurt him just by existing, and they were a threat to anyone ungifted. They killed David, who had never hurt anyone.
So Claude kept up his crusade. He’d stop only when his head never ached anymore and he knew David had been avenged.
In New Gotham, where he’d heard metahumans gathered by the dozens, Claude met Detective Reese, who reminded him so much of David. Claude warned him about the metahuman he seemed to hero-worship, but Reese didn’t listen.
If Claude could get rid of her, he considered staying in New Gotham. Staying partnered with Reese. Maybe finally rest.
He thought back to the first time he met David, watched him change a plain beige wall to bright green. The wonder.
Reese was in danger from his metahuman girl, just like David had been from Maggie. So Claude went hunting.