Callisto and Garrison

[x-callisto.livejournal.com]

Callisto and Garrison intervene in a mutant-bashing incident. Garrison is sensible and pragmatic, Callisto is raging.


The kid hit the ground, hard, his face scraping along the sidewalk, and he screamed out as one of the thugs aimed a kick to his kidneys.

"Fuckin' freak," one of them offered, throwing his half-full beer tin forcefully down at the kid's head. It bounced, showing him and the pants legs of the boys around him with cheap booze, earning him some tuts of admonishment and a token shove before they turned their attention back to the young mutant lying, curled up on the ground. His skin, previously a light blue colour, seemed to be changing a little, losing its hue and growing pallid and grey.

"Still fuckin' wrong, freak, try again," the first thug said with a laugh, once more putting the boot in.

Once again, the skin shifted, trying to mimick the environment around him. His chromatophoral epidermis and zygodactylous feet often drew stares, even bullying, but this was the first time it had amounted to more than slurs and shoves. He tried to roll away from the boots, towards the brick wall, but a foot came down hard on his knee, pinning him there.

"Where the fuck do you think you're going?" one of his attackers asked, reaching down now to grab the back of his collar, pulling him up by it, half-choking him, and he began to cough, drawing snickers from the small gang.

With a sudden shove, he tore free of the grasp on his collar, pushing past two of the men in a stumbling, weak-kneed run. He staggered, putting out his hands to stop his impact to the pavement. Somewhere, he found the breath to muster a single cry for help, as loud as he could, before the first of the gang crashed into him.




Callisto was on a roof, eating her lunch (a hotdog). Going from place to place in town, her bike parked wherever she could (which invariably meant nowhere near where she needed to be), the rooftops were easily the easiest way of avoiding people - other, that is, than the sewers. And she wasn't using those.

As it was, then, when she heard the call for help from somewhere below it took her a moment to place it, and she'd trotted along the full length of the block before she noticed the narrow sidestreet below, a small group of people laying into someone curled up on the ground between them.

Hesitating, Callisto glanced at the external fire escape, all fourteen stories of it, mouth flattening to a line. Then with a sigh she wrapped and pocketed the half hotdog she had left, and jumped.

The first couple of kicks - and the accompanying shouts of pain - obscured the heavy sound of boots on the metal fire escape. But it was impossible to miss the crack of brick and the tortured sound of metal twisting in the air. They looked up as ten stories above their heads, a narrow feeder bracket, used to support hoses coming up from the ground, parted ways with the wall and lurched out over the alley. It bent down, and a figure in black leapt from the bracket once it had reached the bottom of its arc, on to the fire escape of the much lower building on the opposite side.

"What the fuck--" They stared at the improbably sight as the woman went down the outside of the escape, dropping a story at a time using a long rappalling based hand over hand descent, before dropping the last several metres and landing with an impact killing crouch on the top of the dumpster beside them.

One of the men was idiotic enough to turn and take a couple of threatening steps toward her, mouth open to say something only to be silenced by a boot to the face, so fast he barely saw it coming and so hard it sent him staggering backward, spitting teeth.

Callisto hopped down from the dumpster, then, looking both irritated and slightly bored. "Get gone," she said - it was framed as a casual suggestion more than an order, as though she was really not terribly invested in their swift exit necessarily being voluntary.

Typically, the ringleader pulled a knife from his waistband; short, serrated and curved, and grabbed the kid from the ground. "Fuck you, bitch!" He spat. "I'll cut his fucking throat right here."

"Hey, now..." Callisto said, gaze flickering between the knife and the young man's eyes. "You don't want to do that," she said. "You want to play with knives, why don't you come and play with me, huh?"

"She's another freak." One of the others hissed, and their leader scowled.

"Of course she is. She just spidermanned down the side of the building." The knife tip dug in, just under the kid's eye. "They always come in packs, like with Apocalypse. So unless you want your little freak baby carved up good, you better walk away."

Callisto sighed, pursing her lips. "Get real, kid. You didn't come here to knife anyone. Why don't you put the knife down and get out of here before you get yourself in more trouble than you can handle?" An observant type would have spotted the slight note of worry to her expression. But then, these kids weren't necessarily observant types.

It was the worst kind of stand off; two sides, one too scared or threatened to back down, and the other unable to walk away without knowing the hostage was going to be safe. These situations were the nightmare of any police officer, which fortunately, suddenly seemed to get involved as the wail of a siren and a flashing red light started up, at the far end of the street behind them.

"Shit, cops!" The other two fled immediately, one holding a hand to the steady stream of blood running from his mouth. The leader hesitated and then shoved the kid directly at Callisto as he turned and ran, cutting out of the alley and down the street, looking for the safety of crowds and confusion.

Wrapping her arms tightly around the kid, whose legs had buckled beneath him, Callisto watched them disappear, scowling after them.

"Trouble?" The arrival of Garrison Kane wasn't entirely unexpected. They had agreed to meet in the city today by the sheltre, but his sudden appearance in the alley was less anticipated. He took a quick look and raised his phone. "It's alright, Dan. You can kill the cherry and the siren. They legged it." The sound suddenly cut off, and they could see a non-descript car pull away from the street.

Callisto raised her eyebrows, one arm still wrapped around the kid, whose skin was slowly returning to its usual blue hue. Hauling him to his feet, she reached into her pocket with her free hand to retrieve her half-finished hotdog.

"You all right, kid?" she asked gruffly.

"My ribs hurt." He muttered, trying to curl in on himself. Kane took one look at the damage and shook his head.

"He's going to need to go to the ER. I'll call an ambulance."

Callisto nodded, pocketing her hotdog again with a sigh and giving her full attention to the kid in her arms, taking his weight and helping him to the ground with no apparent effort. Stooping, she listened close to his chest for a moment. "Your lungs are fine," she muttered, unable to inject any concern into her voice, although it showed clearly on her face. "You'll be okay."

"Until they come back again." He muttered.

"You know those guys?" Garrison said, cop mode now fully engaged. "Names, where they hang out?"

They watched the kid begin to close off. He shook his head - then winced. "Nuh uh," he said.

Garrison gave Callisto the look of every long suffering cop in the face of a recalcitrant victim. You understood their thoughts, but it all but ensured they'd get the chance to do it again. "Callisto, you seen these mouthbreathers before? Pretty ballsy to curbstomp a mutant this close to the centre and inside District X. Sounds like they're from the area."

Callisto pursed her lips, brow furrowing as she sifted through memories. Eventually she shook her head. "I'll find 'em, though," she directed at the kid, "so it really doesn't matter if you tell us what you know. So you might as well."

"Yeah, and when the cops say there's no evidence to press charges, who do you think they're going to come looking for. Forget it!"

"Sounds like this has happened before." Kane scowled. There were serious problems with the NYPD around District X. Some had done well to adapt to the new circumstances. Others had used it as an excuse to let their own anti-mutant biases show. The NYPD had suffered disportionately during Apocalypse's attack, and there wasn't a cop that hadn't lost a friend or former partner in the invasion.

Scowling, Callisto sat back onto her feet, then stood in one fluid movement. "I'm not the cops." She stuck her hands back into her pockets. "I'll find 'em," she said again.

"That's not going to solve anything." Kane said. Callisto at least had an excuse for visiting violent vigilantism on anti-mutant pricks. The cheerleading he heard at home for it made him uncomfortable. "Those three get, what, a beating? They become heroes for every FoH mass e-mail about mutants taking the law in their own hands when it involves their own. If you can find them, there's other ways to make sure they pay for what they've done without circumventing the system."

Callisto raised an eyebrow. "Fuck the FoH," she said, "they can kiss my mutant ass. Besides, never said I'd give 'em a beating. Just a good talking to." She accompanied this statement with a mirthless, rather dangerous looking smile. "Fear can be better than violence - I used to be pretty good at that stuff."

"Justice is better than either of those things."

"Well, I'll tell you what, you try an' find 'em to bring 'em to justice, I'll try an' find 'em to scare the living shit outta them, and we'll see who gets their first, huh?"

Garrison sighed. It wasn't his neighbourhood or his beat, and he had nothing in his particular range of abilities to make finding three random punks in the middle of New York possible without help. And he certainly wasn't going to sell Callisto on anything but her own approach. "Alright Callisto. Do it your way." he said, resigned as he turned and headed for the street. Hopefully he could get a cab over to the train and back into Westchester.

"Hey, hang on," Callisto called, trotting after him to catch his shoulder. "That's it? You're just gonna let me take the law into my own hands?"

"Would you prefer I arrest you? Actually, I can't. Saying immensely stupid macho bullshit isn't technically illegal yet." Kane said, with a healthy slather of bitterness. "I can't make you help me find these kids. I can't make you do the right thing when you go off on your own. And I can't throw you in jail until the stupid wears off and your brain kicks back in."

"You could tell me what it is that you're going to do that's so much better than scaring these kids so badly they never go near a mutant again," Callisto said, releasing Kane's shoulder with enough force that it felt almost like a punch. "Instead of assuming I'm just some dumb-fuck reactionary who's too stupid to understand why violence might not be the only answer."

"I already told you. Justice." Kane said. "They performed their attack in front of an officer of the law, which means I can press charges regardless of what the victim wants. Assault with a deadly weapon is easily upgradable to attempted murder, if the DA chooses. Attacking a mutant makes it simple to charge them under article 485 as a hate crime, which automatically bumps the penalty up to a class A-1 felony. That means he and his buddies could be potentially facing the same penalties if convicted as a first degree murder charge - thirty to life in a state penitentiary."

"You really think you could make any of that stick?"

"I doubt there's a DA in the city that would try, because throwing even an eighteen year old in jail for thirty years for brandishing a knife makes no sense. But that's what they'd walk into the room with, and let that sink in good and hard before offering a reasonable deal for a guilty plea." Garrison shook his head. "Groups like the FoH operate on fear; get together in a room with a hundred other headcases chanting hate speech, and mutants don't seem so scary any more. And then the anger comes from being scared at all. A few hours later, with that burning in you, the next mutant you see gets to be the example to show those muties cunts that you and your crew aren't going to take it. It's harder to do that when it's human cops, human lawyers and a human judge dropping the hammer on you. You don't get to be a martyr to anyone but, well, 'the system', and everybody thinks that already."

Callisto was silent for a long moment, the muscles tightening in her jaw as she processed the unwelcome but, of course, perfectly true information. "Kane, I hate this." She paused, trying to articulate something more intelligent, and managed, "I really hate this. I just want something to punch, you know?"

"I know. Fuck, I wish it was that easy." Kane shook his head. "If it's just us, nothing changes when we're gone."

Callisto glanced back at the kid, then reached into her pocket for her phone. "I'd better call this kid an ambulance."

"Go with him?" Garrison suggested. "See if he's willing to talk to you about those guys."

Callisto made a face. "He's not gonna talk to me," she said, though she looked a little hesitant now.

"Maybe. Worse case, he'll still likely feel better to have someone with him."

"I... guess." The young woman frowned, staring down at her phone a moment. "Listen," she said, looking back up at Garrison, thumb posed over the '9'. "Thanks, I... Well. Thanks. Yeah?"

"Don't mention it." He nodded. "Just... keep an eye on him, eh?"

Sighing, and nodding in return, Callisto dialled '911' and lifted the phone to her ear.

"Hey? Yeah, ambulance, please..."