Chapter Text
In the weeks following Hax’s abduction from their shared apartment with nothing but a “pending” note from HBG, Infume had imagined their reunion over and over again.
That’s a half-truth. He’d spent a lot of his time writing emails, sending letters demanding reason after reason and getting half-baked confidentiality claims in reply–there had hardly been any time to think about hypotheticals. The first weeks turned into months were punctuated by denied emails and appointments. No matter how he pulled the corporal weight of a top hero, something would cut off his authority, and he’d be back, frustratingly, at square one.
As far as they knew, Infume—Incense—hadn’t known of Frostbite’s real identity, so he couldn’t demand that either. As far as Infume knew, they had simply arrested his housemate overnight, and were never going to see him again.
The simple matter was this: if HBG had Hax, then it was clear who they had Hax for: Frostbite. And through his countless exchanges with HQ, it was clear they weren’t going to tell him.
In the following months, Hax’s absence had felt like a black hole lying in wait on the edges of his peripheral. Grief was both at once a sharp blade and a pit of quicksand, frustratingly tempting to sit and let himself drown in.
HBG’s extensive prison system would never allow Hax to see the light of day, but it should’ve allowed Infume to see him, at least once. For god’s sake, it’s his fucking roommate and he’s fucking Incense.
But the email applications weren’t getting through.
That should’ve been the first sign, and later Infume will think back to these months and wonder how he missed the sinking dread building with each red warning. However, Infume then had believed that while HBG had their vices, their strictness had humanity, and their confidentiality had been reasonable.
So, for months, Infume came home to an empty apartment made for two.
.
They have the meeting at, oddly, one of the spare meeting rooms.
Infume gets there first, the doors sliding before his approach and into the stale air, glass paneling parting ways.
There’s a mostly round table in the middle of the room, six standard office chairs; it’s protocol stuff really. Infume picks a chair to the leftmost corner, back against the wall and track the glass walls with barely constrained intensity.
A year and two weeks.
What do you say to someone after a year and two weeks?
Scratch that—What do you say to your criminal boyfriend a year and two weeks after they’ve been to prison?
Infume accepts Hax for who he is—Frostbite, the villain that does not care for collateral damage in neither property nor civillian life—but there’s a secret part of him that hopes with parasitic guilt that Hax could come to see things his way.
He hopes that their time apart had changed him for the better.
Horrible, horrible Infume.
He knows he’s asking for too much but really he gets it, okay? he doesn’t even care anymore. In the days without Hax, Infume’s days had been near comparable to a timeloop.
Wake up, eat, work, sleep, repeat. Spin the merry-go-around again and again until the cogs break off and it goes all the way to hell.
Hax’s missing presence had been a cannibalising sinkhole. The hollow and dense remains of the northern star. Infume, the compass and Hax, the guiding light.
Infume is a broken compass, spinning around and around and around.
But it will be okay, because while Hax might be behind bars, there are loopholes for this kind of thing. If Hax has changed, then court is a matter of pure navigation. If Hax has changed for the better then Infume will get him out. Even if not, Infume is willing to lie for this, and his word matters more than others because–he’s Incense.
The echo of a pair of footsteps round the corner and head his way. Sweat collects in the divots of his palms, welling up in the ridges of his fingers and condensing rapidly.
Thump.
Thump.
Infume cannot get enough air in his useless lungs.
Hax rounds the corner with Nerdi by his side—one of the supervisors in the technology development wing, they hadn’t spoken much before—and Infume does not breathe.
Hax— Hax doesn’t look like Hax. But it is—Infume will know that until the day they die—but it’s an empty house.
This Hax is wearing layers and layers of sheer silk, hung over his frame—and had Hax been that gaunt before?—in iridescent, blue layers in what looks oddly traditional.
White hair— true, eyesearing white, not the result of layering over his roots and strands with pin-tip delicate frost—but something had dyed it differently. Infume’s vaguely polar bear genes had gifted sight, it was real and it was woven into a braided crown with long, purple flowered pins.
This Hax looks overwhelmingly soft; weathered. Frostbite had been the sharp yet tantalising edges of broken glass, the refractions cruel yet mesmerising and had drawn Infume like siren call. This Hax is a version after years in the waves, this is harmless seaglass. Beautiful still, yes, but.
But.
Infume stands from the chair as the door opens, uncaring of the way the chair clatters against the floor, rushing the three, four steps that it takes to cross the room.
“Hax!” Infume holds his hands out and for a moment does not know what to do with them.
He had been expecting movement, action from Hax that he could have used to map out his next move. A hug, maybe, at best and a punch against the jaw at worst–he’d definitely be expecting some retaliation even while under surveillance.
Hax—does not move. Infume watches with horrid fascination as a slow smile crawls up on his bare face, slunk on like a slug. Awful in the quality of its smile lines falling unnaturally into place, casted on unsmoothly.
“Hi Infume,” Hax says, lacking the distinct singsong quality he always speaks with like on the edge of laughter. “Long time no see.”
Infume’s hands finally come to rest on Hax’s shoulders, falling flatter than he expected when the fabric hides the outlines of his body. He’s thinner, a little like birdbones; hollow on the inside.
Something falls and cracks. It could have been a glass vase or it could have been that delicate balance of his joy against thorned ivy dread.
The question falls out of his lips unbiddenly, “Are you okay?”
Nerdi’s relaxed posture takes on a rehearsed confidence. He knocks his shoulder against Hax’s as if good friends and closes his hand against the handle of the door they’d just entered. “I’ll leave you to it, Crocus.”
Infume’s left hanging, tilting his head. “Hey, what’s up?”
Nerdi leaves through the door and Hax continues smiling off-centre.
“I’m glad you asked,” Hax says half a beat too late. “I’m Crocus, a hero-in-training, I’m on my probationary training period.”
“What?”
“I’ll be on-field support for Icarus, so we won’t meet much, but I look forward to working with you.”
Infume’s hands leave Hax’s shoulders and come to grasp at his hands, only to flinch away at the sheer cold they emitted. Glancing down quickly reveals the tips of each finger emitting a sickly, bruising blue that only happened when Hax overused his ability. Even through his ursine skin, the part of Infume’s hands that touched Hax felt like nearing the edge of frostbite.
Infume takes a hold of Hax’s hands anyway, holding on tight. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“We’ll be working the same job, isn’t it good?” Hax says. “You won’t have to hide being Incense anymore.”
Infume’s never had to hide jackshit and Hax knows this. “Are you serious?”
Maybe it’s the way it came out, but Hax takes it at surface value. “Very serious.”
There’s much more urgency projected into his voice when he asks again: “Are you okay?”
“Super!” Hax says. Infume’s hands are cold enough to start shaking— something inside him, too, starts wobbling dangerously.
And for a long while, Infume doesn’t know what to say next. The person in front of him feels like a terrible mimicry of everything Hax stood for. A unique sculpture shattered and then pieced together with hot glue and duct tape. One of those sci-fi clones that lack all the soul at only go surface deep.
Formulaic responses, strange vocabulary, Infume had the feeling if he were to cut open this Hax’s hand there wouldn’t be red blood, but the chipped remains of marble.
Infume’s mouth moves before his thoughts catch up. “What happened to you?”
This answer took slightly longer to answer, and that should’ve warranted a more awkward response, but.
“HBG took notice of my ability and decided I was a good fit for the hero program.” Hax replies, same sick smile. “I never thought my weak cryokinesis could be useful, but I’ve been learning to make use of it well.”
Weak cryokinesis? Frostbite was a calamity, given enough time and preparation, entire neighbourhoods were put out of commission in his footsteps— so the fuck was he saying?
“Weak cryokinesis?” Infume asks incredulously.
“Sorry for keeping it from you,” Hax still does not move. “And sorry for disappearing suddenly last year, I was just too excited.”
Frostbite was dragged from the streets. Infume had watched the TV with barely contained helplessness. Everything he owned was too distinctly either Infume or Incense, and so he had been rendered completely stagnant to the broadcast arrest.
Hax is saying another story, and it would’ve only worked if Infume didn’t know Hax was Frostbite.
This time, the question is asked with intention, barely concealed urgency. “What happened to you?”
This time, at the repeated question, Hax flinches, and removes his hands out of Infume’s hold. Something inside his voice cracked briefly, but slammed back right. “I don’t—”
A steady chill begins to permeate the room, spreading from his body, alarmingly quick so that Infume’s breath begins to be visible in faint puffs pf white.
Nerdi takes this as the time to reenter the room, strolling in with a brief click of the door.
“And your time is up!” He announces. “So sorry, Incense, but Crocus’ got some orientation to do, you know how it is.”
“Wait, no but—”
“Don’t you?” Nerdi smiles at Hax, and pats a hand over his shoulder. “Let’s get going.”
Hax’s face, twitching at the ends of his lips and nearing what Infume could have recognised as misery, right itself into a carefully blank slate, and he nods small and quiet.
And Nerdi guides him out of the meeting room, the cold along with, and Infume’s left behind in the silence, one hand stretched out to empty space.
Infume, working on autopilot, resets the chairs and smooths the tables. He has one handle on the door and about to exit before his eyesight narrows into the previously unremarkable wall.
The red, beating light of a camera recording.
.
It’s like— it’s a factory reset for a human being.
It’s wrong. It’s the face that belongs on movie posters, on tv screens. Flawless and primped up for the show the way Infume sees himself in the mirror as Incense.
But not Hax. Hax who’s in it only to feel something. Whose heart beats and blood burns despite his freezing hands and icy bones. Hax who can’t keep it together in stillness and needs to be moving with bright and triumphant grin and stunningly vicious eyes.
Whoever Crocus is, it’s not him.
Infume hears the distant call of a wailing siren in the back of his head, but by then it had been too late to react.
.
That night, Infume thumbs over a long buried contact he hadn’t bothered to call since a few weeks since Hax’s disappearance.
Infume waits past the first ring, the second, the fourth, and as the fifth ring runs its finally casting call, waits for him to be sent to voicemail.
Click.
The call connects, and Rowl’s voice is at once harsh and flat when he says: “What do you want.”
He and the Mores had a major fallout, back when they were still trying to find Hax together–and Infume had resolutely believed it was for the best; when he hadn’t yet realised they were planning to keep the two of them separate–that even brief meetings behind the bars wasn’t possible.
Infume holds his breath. “I fucked up.”
“So?” Rowl’s sneer, despite being through the phone, is audible in its viscerality.
“Hax’s in the HBG.”
“No shit,” Infume expected this, they had known, Infume had just thought it could have been good. “We know that.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t— I don’t,” His words come out on the side of awkwardness like slipping off a gradually tilting seesaw, tumbling ungracefully downwards. “He wasn’t in prison, they didn’t put him into prison.”
Over the phone there’s a sound distinctly like glass shattering. Rowl’s voice emits from Infume’s burner phone somewhat even less tolerant than before. “We fucking know,” Rowl states. “We scanned the prison database, Hax isn’t in there.”
Infume blinks and a part of him feel offended they hadn’t told him—but then again, it had been a mutually hateful cut off. They hadn’t spoken in a while.
He’s never been the best at putting things into words when the situation rested delicately, and even more so now, most words leave his mouth as if a mind of their own; they splatter unwillingly onto the ground between their silences. “Hax’s… changed, something happened to him I don’t know.”
There’s a sudden crackle through the phone of something knocking on the small microphone. This time, when the voice comes through it’s distinctly not Rowl anymore. “You met him?!”
Rowl adds onto it in just about the same time, scrambling onto the tail end of Mongey’s question. “How is he? What do you mean he’s changed? What did they do?”
“I don’t know!” Infume says, louder than before, incited justification of audio as the memories of the push against each other, maelstrom of emotions. “He’s quieter and he didn’t move, and I don’t know how it even happened but he’s in the hero program— they put him in there somehow— and he didn’t look alright,” and for a moment Infume is stumped for what word to describe it, because there was no word for it. “He wasn’t alright.”
“Sorry, the hero program?”
“Yes!” Infume stresses. “He’s going to be a support for Icarus.”
“What the fuck, man.” Mongey says through the tinny speakers, and Infume’s still standing in his bedroom.
Stress had clung its cold hands like limpets on his back, stuck on from the meeting room and followed him all the way back home. Along the way it had solidified into stones, churning endlessly in the pits of his stomach.
“What more do you know?” Rowl’s steadily worn voice demands. “Describe it, how was he.”
“His hair was white.” Infume tells him. “White without frost, and he was thinner. Kind of like what people look like after malnourishment— or like, eating disorder—”
“Fuck.” Mongey says.
“—and his fingers,” and Infume has to pause to really think about what it meant. “His fingers were doing the near frostbite thing that happens when he overuses his ability, but I don't think he had been using his ability when we started speaking—and his hands were already blue and cold then.”
“Did he use his ability after speaking to you?”
Infume swallows, playing back the memory. “I asked him what happened to him, and then the room nearly froze over, but there was no ice. It just got really cold without any ice.”
“Fuck,” Rowl echoes. “That’s not good for him.”
“What?” Infume quickly asks. “Why?”
Rowl sounds surprised when he replies. “He needs to spend his excess energy physically or else it makes him internalise all the frost, how do you not know this?”
“He’s never told me?”
“He’s never told you why he’s a villain?”
“I never asked!” Infume stresses. “Isn’t one’s reason for villainy kind of a private matter? And why is this relevant?”
This time it’s Mongey who answers. “Frostbite only exists because he needed to use up his ice, but without control he would cause a lot of collateral damage—and Hax just never cared enough. No matter what he says, all the thrill seeking and fighting only came later when you got on the playing board.”
“Oh.” Infume feels sick.
“If he can’t expel that energy, it builds up inside him and he gets sick. We don’t know what happens if it goes on for too long, but it can’t be anything good.”
“Oh.” Infume repeats. “Okay, okay.” And the quiet stretches.
“So?” Rowl prompts when he falls silent. “Are you going to help us get him out or not?”
Infume blows out a long stream of air between his teeth before replying, and with it, the last of his loyalty in the HBG hero society.
“I called hoping you’d say that,” Infume tells them. “I need your help to get him out.”
.
Around two weeks after they take Hax, Infume finds Hax’s phone in the midst of a deep clean, half thrown in between a wall and the cabinet. The blue metal shell encased in its clear acrylic casing and a snowman drawn soddily on the back on a piece of paper, it had clearly survived the absence of its owner.
Infume had trouble keeping himself away from it. Hax’s absence hadn’t yet settled in—his room still smelt like him, the entire space left untouched and too painful to clean in any manner—but Infume missed him like a moth doomed to a dark room. His day-job was increasingly mundane, his spare time nonexistent.
Infume cracks at the month mark, fresh from cutting off the remaining Mores, and opens it to the detriment of himself.
Hax’s screensaver was a selfie of the two of them late at night, barely clocking off their respective other identities and taking the long, scenic route back to their apartment. They’d taken a detour to the local fast food joint and were both holding their paper soda cups idly, the other hand striking a peace sign.
Hax had his hair—civilian black and faintly damp from his Frostbite persona covering his hair in frost—down and over his eyes as always. Tongue stuck out and holding a half-finished cup of cola fo the camera as if in cheers. Infume had been watching fondly in the back, taking a sip from his own steadily sodden cup.
It had just been everyday. It had been commonplace. A blur smears over the divot of pixilated Hax’s cheek and Infume cannot control the next drop that falls down either.
He hadn’t cried over Hax yet because it felt like giving up. That something was wrong—and he’d just told the Mores that Hax would be fine—so it must be fine.
Infume cries holding onto the evidence of his love, alone in the apartment that had been well-lived and well-loved by two bodies and now embracing only one.
He doesn’t dare unlock the phone.
.
The next morning, when Infume enters the HBG headquarters, it’s with the knowledge he no longer intends to keep his loyalty wholly to the city.
They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but it’s never stated that fondness is the tempered remains of longing. Stretched out on the wrong side of too thin, it may just as easily crack under the strain; the jagged edges of human desire.
Infume, long since known the fact he’s undoubtedly not the most morally clean person in the world—you have to be, when you’re dating a villain who walks like a natural disaster and kills routinely on weekdays and sporadically weekends—learns the hard way that grief looks a lot like a hunger for destruction.
HBG uses Infume’s ability often in the form of routine nullification gas collections. It's plenty handy for handling weaker villains without using the expensive power suppression metals, and has the added advantage of being capable of diluting its concentration for various purposes. He knows with fact his refuels alone keep half their high-priority prisons running steadily.
It’s from one of these routines Infume’s walking out of, having finished the day and passing the nightshift to Silver when he sees Crocus again.
Same snow white hair, purple flower pins. This time equipping a mechanised mask, that fits oddly into the traditional, silken flow of what Infume now understands must be his hero outfit. The mask fits cleanly over the lower half of Crocus’ face, purple-stained steampunk in origin but bastardised gas mask on the surface, as all hero support gear end up looking one way or another.
It’s clear what marketing trend the HBG is trying to make with Hax as Crocus—flowy and soft—it’s Frostbite’s antithesis. Having ice-related powers have been steadily becoming more and more of a villainising trait as Frostbite’s notoriety had spread, so if the HBG wanted to put Hax on-field with cryokinesis—nevermind he’s actually Frostbite—they would have to pivot from Frostbite’s character in every conceivable trait.
Swallowing the sick and longing that had risen from his throat, Infume approaches Crocus in what he hopes was a casual manner.
Infume makes a friendly wave. “Hax, how are you?”
Staring outside into the bustling streets through the third floor window of HBG’s hero tower, Hax does not reply.
Infume goes to put a hand on his shoulder in a gentle nudge, only for him to violently flinch away. Finally turning around to meet Infume, Hax’s eyes are wide and panicked—and it makes Infume panic in the same breath.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
“He’s not good with touch,” Icarus cuts in from where he comes out of the meeting door they had been standing by, his face reflected in the marble tiles and visible from where Infume had ducked down his head reflexively. “And mute, if what management had said was right. I haven’t heard him speak either.”
“What?” Infume flicks his body to face Couriway, who gives a shrug in reply.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to have him on-field either,” He turns to Hax slightly to say. “No offence to your technical skills, but communication’s going to be rough if you don’t speak.”
“No I didn’t mean it like— Hax, you spoke just yesterday?” Infume asks again, can’t help but to feel useless at repeating the same question he’d said yesterday. Of course not, but— “Are you alright?”
And Hax just keeps standing silently. Whatever small moment of shock and aching terror Infume had triggered by a tap to the shoulder smothered under a thick, opaque mask of nothing. When he looked into Crocus’ familiar blue eyes, only the stare of a faraway star looked back.
“Hey,” Infume goes to come and hold one of his hands again—still blue at the tips, but Couriway intercepts it.
“Bro, I just said he doesn’t want to be touched.”
“He’s my roommate!" Infume snaps. He doesn’t say partner; lover. “I know him!”
Couriway freezes at his exclaimation, and turns to look at Infume quickly. “You don’t. No one knows Crocus or where he came from.”
“What are you even saying?”
“Management recruited him from external channels.”
From being about to fire another exclaimative, Infume is shocked into pausing. “Huh? What?”
“I’m not sure on the specifics, maybe you can ask in detail later if you’re so concerned.” Couriways has the audacity to look pitying, following. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about your roommate, but it’s been a year since he’s gone missing, right?”
Right. If that’s the game HBG wants to play; fine.
Gnawing on the inside of his cheeks hard enough to draw blood, Infume replies through gritted teeth and resolutely keeping his gaze away from Hax’s immobile, stationary body. “Yes, right.” He says. “I’m just not feeling well today.”
Couriway gives him an apologetic smile and after a few more pleasantries turn to walk away. As if snapping out of a reverie, Crocus turns to follow mechanically.
As Crocus passes by until Infume is left gazing at the long shadow of his back, he notices the canisters equipped to the sides of his neck, attached to the cyberpunk gasmask.
Small—almost the size of his palm and all too familiar in the HBG building—were the same gas canisters Infume had been filling with his nullification vapor just moments before.
Infume feels sick to the stomach.
.
The line connects.
“You hurt him.”
“Well good evening to you too— what was I supposed to do!”
“Avoid him! Run away!”
“It was a heist we’ve been planning for two months, Rowl barely scratched him!”
“How could you not care?”
Mongey audibly holds himself back from growling through the phone. “Hax would understand.”
“Did Crocus look like he’s in any mindset capable of that right now?”
“Don’t call him that.”
“Yeah— sorry.” Infume buries his face into his left hand. “I got worried.”
Mongey sighs through the tinny speakers.
“I had a signal come through the jammer I commissioned from Fulham that linked to his mask, do you know anything about that?”
“It could be HBG’s tracker,” Infume replies. “No, it definitely is, every hero has one.”
“Good to know, anything else?”
He pauses. “I think Hax’s frostbite is being kept contained through sanctioned doses of my nullification ability.”
“Oh what the fuck?”
“Did you see the gas containers he had equipped with the mask?”
“That’s filled with your ability?”
“I’m pretty sure. When I met him, he said he had only ‘weak cryokinesis’ as an ability, but it’s probably because his power is constantly being suppressed."
“It’s definitely not healthy,” Mongey says. “do you know the long term effects of power nullification with your ability?”
Infume goes to shake his head before remembering that Mongey cannot see. “No, I don’t know what HBG uses my ability for after I’ve given it to them.”
“But there definitely is some aftereffect.”
“Yes.”
Mongey blows a huff of air through the speakers. Infume ideates.
“When can we meet up? I’ve got an idea.”
.
In the span of only two weeks, Crocus is eaten up by the media and made into a darling in a way Infume’s certain had HBG’s meddling stamped all over. He sees it in the morning as he’s eating breakfast.
Ice Prince Crocus sweeps the streets!
Is HBG’s newest hero sidekick mute—or just too cool?
Everything you need to know about Crocus, HBG’s prodigy newbie.
It’s clever marketing. Hax becomes more and more like Crocus every time they meet in the HBG tower, it’s hard to see someone he loves in the shell that Crocus is.
It became very disgusting to keep chewing at his cereal. The tube leading from his useless mouth to his oesophagus to the lining of his washing machine stomach.
Hax is—losing himself. And Infume is—running out of time.
.
Infume calls in sick for the day, and the day after, and the day after that. His entire lifetime’s worth of saved up holidays which he hadn't touched since the day of him starting patrols as an official hero rather than just a trainee finally coming in handy. The HBG covered his patrol lines neatly, deployed only a few lower ranked heroes and it was enough.
Incense’s routes were designed to perfectly overlap with Frostbite’s typical haunts, but since the day he was arrested, it had almost transformed into a peaceful town—you could call it even the safer part of Ranked City if you dared. There had been a few villainous upstarts in the district, all wishing to fill up the sudden power vacuum Hax’s absence had created—but down a member, both Rowl and Mongey had guarded their claim with alarming viciousness.
Before Infume had dared to indulge the more morally grey parts of his dwindling conscience, he would have called it just, but now almost everyone knows that all Hax’s absence had caused was to awaken a sleeping bear.
Frostbite’s danger was in the sheer amount of collateral damage—rampages for seemingly no reason able to be deduced. In the eyes of the public, the More trio exist not for their teamwork or branding, but simply because Hemlock and Mongey were able to capitalise on Frostbite’s trail of destruction.
Frostbite was the main threat, ignore the other two.
That too, was planned.
Like a true snake hidden behind the petals of eden, in the police crackdown of the district incited by the disappearance of the main terror, Hemlock kills the entire police staff of the district in three days and Mongey eliminates the structures themselves.
HBG had scrambled for almost half a year afterwards to reestablish order, but by then it was simply because the pair had concentrated their efforts to scour the underground, as far as Infume was aware.
He spent much of his own time then too caught up in keeping distance from his own emotions to be aware of much else.
Regardless, in Infume’s approved short holiday—which application was apparently backed by Couriway for mental health reasons—he spends majority of the time planning with the remaining Mores, but somehow more importantly turning his apartment into somewhere habitable for two again.
There were safer places to hide a ‘kidnapped’ ‘hero’—they could go out of town, move out to the rural countryside until it all quietens down.
But Hax was coming home.
He contacts Fulham—they’d fallen out of contact along with the rest of his less-than-moral friends after Hax—through Mongey and Rowl for jammers to be installed all around the apartment and sweeps his own record clean. Makes sure that he’s set to return to work just two days after the rescue to smooth out any alibis.
He cleans the kitchen and wipes the counters and mops the floors. He buys a new candle of the same old scent they’d always burned before together, but alone, Infume had fallen out of the habit. He vaccums the sofa and dusts the lamps.
Most importantly, Infume opens the door to Hax’s room for the first time in half a year.
It’s a simple, constricted room ordinary for the cheap apartment they’d rented since both were students. A bed in disarray, a soft blue duvet pushed to the side and the indents of where a body would have been left on the sheets. Infume had been tempted countless times to crawl into its embrace, if only to cling onto the last dredges of Hax’s lively existence. It would have still smelt like him—some strange combination of eiderdown and sugar resin.
Hax’s phone is left charging on its station since the last time he dared to crack it open. The desk with a dead laptop half-opened, papers pushed to the side. Little figurines of shows he likes stood solemnly on the cabinets infested by dust bunnies. It’s hard to breath.
Infume smooths a hand over the cotton cloth and lets out the rest of the air lodged in his lungs. He strips the covers and the sheets and the pillow covers—and brings them to the laundromat to be cleaned.
.
It’s a love that Infume was never able to let go of. Hax isn’t good for him the way cigarettes aren’t good for the lungs, but Infume smokes regardless.
Infume took the heroic academic track in highschool because he knew his ability would be good for it. There was no love or deep seated moral which churned in the hollows of his ribs like Kantian duty suggested—he had no inherent hunger which was sated on moral goodness. Rather, he knew the ways of which his body moved and how the simple whiff of his emitted ability toppled the confidence of veterans on the field.
Infume was never about the moral superiority, even if he never wanted to admit to himself of this fact. Every kid grows up believing that they would be good, and so they often are to themselves.
Hax wasn’t like that. Frostbite knew exactly why he was doing what he did. From the moment they’d first stumbled into each other on the field, trading relentless blows in a way Infume had been unused to with de-abilitied opponents. Frostbite had fought with reckless abandon, somehow higher on the thrill of a true fistfight than turning the streets into frost and ice like he’d epitomised.
It was devastation. Infume had more fun than he’d ever had.
Catching a glimpse of those wild, frenzied eyes behind the soft blue fringe of Frostbite’s hidden identity had been Infume’s coffin. Finding out Frostbite—a physical addiction to fight and tussle, always promising like a quick hit—was Hax, his roommate since University housings who was always enchanting regardless in his idiosyncratic style, was simply slotting two pieces of a hidden puzzle together and realising he could not do without it.
A Northern star.
.
Infume shows up for his scheduled Incense extraction like clockwork, despite being in the middle of his impromptu break.
This time, he doesn’t give what they want.
.
Infume watched the news channel on the day of the break-in with nothing left but the burnt out remnants of overindulgent anxiety. If he had the habit of biting his nails, they would have been bitten raw. A white hot inferno of stark numbness consolidated in his chest.
On cue, a reporter frantically interrupts the mundane local news broadcast, face lined with frantic urgency Infume would have resonated with on a better day.
Now, as she stands in front of the frozen remnants of HBG, Infume feels nothing but sickly satisfaction. Half of the building covered in pinprick frost and smoking in the afternoon air, what must have smelt like burning flesh and iridescent oil spills.
Hemlock’s signature vines and Mongey’s blur of pink come across the screen, and the camera pans into the limp body Mongey cradles in his arms.
Hax.
.
In the end, they don’t end up doing more than a surface level review of Infume’s whereabouts and possible influence in the break-in—partly because of being understaffed in the violent, bloody aftermath—more so because they cannot afford to.
They cannot afford to find Infume guilty of aiding the Mores, because that would mean another top hero down for the count, with an already scrabbling police force to fill the rows of empty shoes.
So, Infume goes home as he always does, and will go back to work the next day.
The TV echo with news of various villain outbreaks through the prisons, empowered by the lack of nullification gas.
In the countless casualties caused by his own action, Infume finds that vengeance tastes honey sweet.