...May Break my Bones. (Patreon)

A hospital waiting room. Calm. Professional. Comfortable chairs and magazines for people with more money than sense. Private, like everything here.

But private doesn't always mean privacy.

The sound of angry heels, a staccato against the polished floor, and Hood looks up from where he sits, perched awkwardly on the soft couch, leafing through a magazine just to keep his hands busy.

"So, are you to blame for this." A short woman, half his height with twice his energy, eyes narrowing into cracks, thick, black hair piled up in a messy bun. She holds her handbag like a weapon. Does it contain one? Maybe.

"Now, ma'am..." he starts, the magazine he's holding a flimsy shield of home decorations, because this waiting room is not made for Marshals, just worried mothers, and it's not hard to connect the dots.

"Don't ma'am me." Sitting down, he's shorter than her, and she takes advantage of every inch. "That's my daughter in there being operated on." Elena Ortega. That makes sense; he's read the bio, seen the pictures. She's shorter than he thought, harder than he pictured. 

"She's going to be fine." He carefully closes the magazine, putting it back in the rack. He always moves slowly around civilians, aware of his size, aware of how he looks without his helmet. A little more threatening than the regular joe is prepared for, but it doesn't seem to faze her.

"I hope so, for your sake." She looks him over, then relents and sits down next to him, sparing his face from her scrutiny.

"Hmmm," he muses. "I can see where she gets her temper." Julia's eyes, without Julia's smile, but maybe the occasion didn't demand it.

"Don't condescend me, Marshal, just tell me how she is." She takes off her shoes, flexing her feet, heedless of propriety. A small gesture that makes him smile.

"She'll be fine," he assures, trying to remember her bio. Had she been a gymnast? Set on the Olympics before her wedding? He could see it; there's a careful control of her movements that's familiar. "It was mostly mod damage; she cracked the emitters."

"That is in her hands." A small shiver and she flexes her own hands, carefully manicured. 

"Her hands are fine," he assures again because he saw them afterward. All fingers were still connected.

"Gracias a Dios," she mumbles, crossing herself. "I mean, Wei is a darling, but I wouldn't want..." 

"She'll be fine." Another thing he can't promise, but you learn to lie well in this business. And he has enough faith in Julia's usefulness to know the surgeons will do their very best. "Good as new. Even better." There had been talks of upgrades, the things Julia did with her mods weren't within the specifications, but maybe they should be. One of the techs had been very excited about the possibilities. Scientists. They always were.

"As always." The sigh is bitter, filled with knowledge. "What happened?"

"Pushed the system too hard," he says, very carefully. "It wasn't made to redirect that much power."

The internal generators could only hold that big a charge; the system wasn't built for the kind of pressures Julia had put it under. If he hadn't been busy elsewhere, if the rest of the team hadn't had their own problems, if... what a useless word that was. Team fights could be chaotic, something they needed to get better at. 

"Don't tell me she just plugged herself into an outlet?" Mrs. Ortega's voice interrupts his thoughts, and he can't help but chuckle.

"Then, I won't." 

"Dios mio," she mumbles. "She did, didn't she?"

He had seen her, grabbing the live wire, gambling that her systems would shield her from the worst of the feedback, the lightning bolt she generated blasting both her emitters and her enemy.

 "Won the day," he said, quite simply, because it had. Looked good on camera too. She always did. "Fried Flashback."

"Oh, the pretender?" Her amused chuckle is a surprise.

"Is that what she calls him?" He turns to look at her; she's getting her shoes back on.

"She was a bit upset," she admits. "I told her she didn't have a monopoly on electric powers."

"She can be a bit competitive." Quite possibly the biggest understatement he had said today, he learned too late that the best way to get Julia to do something ridiculous was to tell her not to.

"A little bit," she agrees, with the same look on her face. "She likes you, though."

"Oh?"

"Otherwise, I would have given you a harder time." The look in her dark eyes is stern but calm. 

"I'm... pleased?" He's seen those kinds of looks before, in the eyes of people who weren't afraid of him. Small people could be frightening; they knew they had no chance in a fair fight and would escalate things too quickly for him to keep up. He had never thought of Elena Ortega as the dangerous one in the family. Looks like he was going to have to reevaluate.

"She doesn't do well with authority figures," she admits, a fact that is not news to either of them, "but whatever you do, keep doing it."

"I'm doing my job." The chuckle is fond; he likes this tiny dangerous woman.

"I know the business as well as you do, Marshal," she chides. "It's not your job making her feel good about herself."

"Well, someone should." It's not an accusation at her, and luckily she doesn't take it as such.

"How long do you think it will take until we get news?"

"Probably another hour."

"Good, then you have plenty of time to tell me everything about my daughter that I have missed out on."