Tracy fought against the creeping anxiety like vines spreading through her, every errant beep, or static-ridden call over the intercoms pairing with the ever-present scent of rubbing alcohol to send her into a mild panic. 

She quickened her pace, muttering distracted apologies as she made her way through the crowded maze-like halls of Kingsport General. She’d hated hospitals for as long as she could recall. Her earliest memories of her mother, wasting away from an aggressive cancer in a hospital bed before she’d been left orphaned and found and adopted by Anthony - had haunted her. Despite all her injuries over the years, she’d done her best to avoid those places.

Her heart pounded in her throat as she entered an elevator, clicking a button for the third floor as she made her way to the room Jenna was being kept in. Her stomach turned with greater unease than it had at the heights she’d scaled hardly an hour before. It made her consider the pieces of the puzzle before her, the mental framework of the mystery at hand serving as a much-needed distraction as she tried to determine her next move. She thought over what she knew, trying to make it fit in such a way as to reveal the next logical step.

The Dancer had attacked the city, fact. Police had had some sort of hint of the attack beforehand, but clearly not enough to prevent it entirely, fact. 

Darkstar, the city's greatest hero and a man she had more conflicting emotions about than she could fathom at the moment, was dead. She knew it was fact by all accounts, and yet in the assertion found something uneasy. Her mind returned to the cable from the old hero grappling blade, currently sat in the glove compartment of her car as she considered what it meant, and where its addition fit into the puzzle she was trying to solve.

Nothing in the videos she’d agonized over had shown the man using his grappling blade but to scale the bridge, and in doing so never once had it been deployed near the wire where she’d found it. It was a small detail, the sort so minuscule the average mind would overlook it, but Tracy could see the inconsistency and it gnawed at her. It was like watching a movie where she knew there was some crucial plot point she’d missed, the story hanging loose and unfitting around the pre-existing framework until she could find that meat, the flesh of the matter that seemed missing. 

She wanted answers to the questions that seemed desperate for them. Every step she’d taken through the hospital and the city at large seemed a reminder of the people who needed it just as much as she did. So many had been hurt, this time around. So many good and innocent people were caught in the ever-grinding gears of Kingsport’s underworld which seemed to slick themselves with the blood of those who sought better for themselves, and this time it had struck far too close to home. Tracy couldn’t accept it, the random, wanton violence, feeling a need to distill the chaos into sense. There was always a reason, always an answer to be found with sufficient digging and a capable mind. Darkstar, Anthony, had taught her that young and she’d never forgotten the lesson, on the contrary seeming to embody it, developing a mind that he had credited for its sharpness, and ability to solve a mystery. She had been the first to ever don the mantle of Kid Rocket, the first sidekick Darkstar had ever taken on and had gained so much from him, her almost detective-like problem-solving capability and unwillingness to let go of a grudge both chief among them.

It was an idea that made her feel strangely responsible for all that had happened. Tracy chewed her lip, wondering what if anything she might have been able to do to avoid this all had she still been in costume. With the thought, came a new set of conflicting emotions.

The chime of the elevator made her stomach flip once more as it opened onto the third floor, and she stepped out and made her way toward the room in which Jenna was being kept.

Jenna. Jenna who had made the last few years of her life make sense after years in which she’d felt herself floundering as she struggled to abandon her old habits and leave the costumed life behind in order to build the sort she’d never been allowed. When a father who had neglected her in her earliest years, a mother who’d died when she was hardly old enough to recollect, and a guardian who’d raised her for a life that was everything but normal and safe, it had been the preschool teacher she’d met through a colleague who’d offered her something genuine. 

As she arrived outside of the room, steeling herself before pushing the door open, Tracy could feel a gnawing guilt. It had been Jenna for whom she’d been able to finally leave the costumed addiction behind, and yet as she entered the room, she couldn’t help but wonder if this had been the cost.

It was a ridiculous thought, she knew. It was superstitious to think she was being punished or something for rejecting that which Darkstar, Anthony, had raised her for. And yet, entering the small room - made smaller by the large white sheet used to divide it between the two patients it contained, it lingered more than she cared for.

Jenna lay beneath a thin blanket, folded just below her chest arms stretched over it to allow for the series of tubes and errant wires that ran into them, pumping clear liquids in or taking blood out in a seemingly chaotic arrangement. 

The monitor that stood behind her bed chirped and beeped in a rhythmic pattern, tracking her heartbeat amongst other things, which seemed to have stabilized for the time being.

Tracy bit down hard on her lip, her eyes stinging as she blinked hard against the tears, placing a soft kiss on the woman’s forehead.

“Hey boo,” she cooed.

There was no response, which she’d expected but still sent barbs through her heart. 

Comatose. It was a concept she thought she’d understood in concept, and yet standing before the woman she loved, her mind almost struggled to accept it. It was as though she were taking one of her mid-day naps, and were it not for the scars, and the heavy swelling under her right eye which told of the very blast which had placed her here, she could almost look peaceful. The circumstances had been anything but. 

She’d pulled her from beneath the rubble herself, the very memory of which made her eyes shut hard as though the thought itself brought physical pain. Jenna - beneath a heavy pile of brick and twisted metal remains of store shelving, a pool or her own blood growing thick beneath her head.

Tracy had arrived at the corner store hardly four minutes after the first bomb in their neighborhood had gone off at the start of The Dancer’s latest attack, and all the while her heart had seemed to sink into her gut with a sensation of dreadful expectation that made her wish she could teleport. 

The scene had been one of chaos, the likes of which she hadn’t seen in years. The corner store they’d frequented sat below a local art house, a location that had been a direct target by the Troupe, and she’d arrived in time to find the facade crumbling and smoking, as a few bystanders attempted to pull victims from the rubble while other lingered observing the structure nervously, and still more fled in fear of repeat attacks.

She’d scanned the faces of those pulled from the remains, unable to find Jenna before darting headfirst into the crumbling face of their corner store, lifting the collar of her shirt over her nose against the plumes of smoke that billowed forth in black columns. The saliva in her mouth mixed with soot and ash creating a bitter taste as she stood amongst the collapsed shelves and fallen brick. 

She ducked through low hanging remnants of ceiling and towards the aisle they’d browsed for snacks so often, finding the shelf overturned, Jenna lying below, blood pooling beneath her head and eyes shut.

It had been all she could do to get Jenna a bed as the place grew flooded with wailing injured, and she had been able to stay only long enough to see to it that her girlfriend was in semi-stable condition before she was forced to go. They’d settled her into a medically induced coma after assessing the damage. It was bad, besides the lesser broken bones and things of that nature, her head had taken a blow, likely from falling debris or one of the shelves, and there were signs of internal bleeding that had been described as worrying. 

Worrying, she’d thought. 

The center of her galaxy lay in bed, her brain bleeding, and it was simply worrying. She’d bit her tongue to prevent saying something rude to the exhausted nurse who’d said it to her, knowing the woman was just as near wit's end as Tracy with the endless stream of seriously wounded flooding the hospital, and likely with her own worries for loved ones in the city while she juggled her responsibilities. 

Responsibilities. The thought filled her mouth with a bitter taste.

There suddenly felt no escaping it anymore, as she’d made her way back to their apartment and the box she’d kept buried beneath a pile of clothes and old memories for years like the moment in which she would return to the mask had been a foregone conclusion.

And she hated it. She wanted to hate him for it but…couldn’t. He’d been the closest thing toa father she’d had for so long, and he was gone now and with his death, her anger at him felt smothered. That made her angry in a directionless sort of way that called for action.

She had always wondered over the years, why she’d kept all of the old gear - her costume, grappling blades, and the various tools of the trade - all things she hadn’t touched in over a decade. Tracy had been the first to fight alongside Darkstar, one of the “World’s Finest Heroes”, as the titular Kid Rocket. She’d lived a life unimaginable to most, her childhood better cataloged in newspaper clippings and old TV reels recounting her and Darkstars battles against the various evils of Kingsport City than in years books or family pictures. 

While other girls had argued over Barbies or been allowed to choreograph dance routines to trendy pop songs, Tracy was learning the best way to disarm a man with the toss of a blunt-tipped throwing knife, or how best to collect a fingerprint with minimal smudging. 

He’d made her into one of the most promising young heroes in the world, and part of Tracy would always despise him for it. Her life before meeting Anthony had been miserable, both parents lost in a car accident when she was seven, and at the time his presence and the wonders he offered had seemed impossible to deny. 

But as time had gone on she found herself growing bitter at her adoptive father, the man who was raising her to fight monsters when he’d had every option of just letting her be a kid. Instead, he’d infected her with that thing, that urge that had seemed to hang over her for all of those years, making her heart lurch at the sound of police sirens, and which now found ample excuse. As much as she’d come to hate the costumed life, Tracy Chance knew it was an addiction. The sort that always hurt you, and yet brought you back somehow. 

And yet, watching as Jenna breathed - a slow and labored effort - lung rattling every so often from the smoke she’d inhaled, Tracy felt unwilling or able to fight the familiar urge. She curled her finger within Jenna’s gently avoiding the IV as she laid her hand on her stomach, and sat there for quite some time letting her worldview shift into the old ways of thinking.

Her phone buzzed, and she pulled it from her jacket pocket to find a text she’d been expecting, from the Mike 'the Tailor'. He’d been an old friend of Anthony’s for years, a wizard when it came to designing tools and uniforms for their unique line of work, and a number Tracy had kept despite herself.

‘It’s ready, whenever you’re ready to pick everything up.’ the first read.

‘Glad to see you’re back.’

She placed a kiss on the back of Jenna’s hand, the skin feeling dry and uncharacteristically cold, and she felt an iron resolve settle in.

She would find out how this had been allowed to happen, no matter what it took. She would find answers, and she would make the man responsible pay.

The Dancer. She bit hard on her bottom lip, stifling the chill she felt crawling up and through her as she recalled some of her earliest meetings with the maniac, alongside Darkstar.

She’d known evil all her life, fought it for most, but that man…there had always been something so unsettling about him, something lifeless beneath the eyes of that steel, horned mask, as though the truly inhuman parts lie beneath the demonic visage.

It was no matter. He had hurt Jenna, at least by his actions, and for that - Tracy was going to find out why and hurt him for it.

But first, she knew, I have a funeral to attend, and family to visit. Somehow, it was almost a more frightening thought.