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[be_themoon]

 In the interest of staving off imminent self-loathing, can I ask you guys to participate in a sort-of-meme for me briefly?

Namely, drop me some sort of writing prompt! A quote, a color, song lyrics, whatever.

It's going to be original stuff - if you want to see it just note in your comment and I'll reply with whatever I come up with. If you don't

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[be_themoon]

Kestrel swings through about half an hour before dawn. His route choices are still terribly predictable to someone who knows him as well as I do.

“Mel,” he says, and I nod but don’t turn.

“Kestrel,” I say. I never call him Fred out here on the roofs, but he’s never really sure what to call me these days. He gets a look on his face when he says Nyx like he just tasted something bad, and the one time he tried to call me Hawkwoman I shut him down. He comes over to sit beside me, legs dangling over the edge of the roof.

“It’s been a while.” It’s neutral enough, but I can hear the faintly accusatory edge in his tone. It’s always there, that lingering hurt that I cut ties so harshly, the resentment of my long-delayed and always short visits.

“I’ve been busy.” I shrug. How can I be angry about his resentment? It’s fair enough.

“I heard you almost bought it in Canada,” he says, and there’s the familiar big-brother worry that always comes through in the end. “Actually, I heard that you did get caught, but that was from a government broadcast so I was still hoping it wasn’t true. And here you are.” I swallow but don’t say anything. Canada was… unpleasant. I’m not in a hurry to revisit any of those memories. He takes my silence as permission to keep chattering, like he always does. “Hawkgirl will be pissed if you don’t drop by to say hi to her, you know. And Red says thank you for the birthday present - can you seriously believe the kid’s twenty three? It seems ridiculous.” He pauses, then, looks over at me for some sort of reaction to any of this. “You okay, Mel?” he says, and I sigh and turn to look him full in the face for the first time.

“I’m going to do something stupid,” I tell him. “Hawk’s going to disown me permanently after this.”

“How stupid?” he asks, and he’s serious. He knows me well enough to know that tone of voice, the one that means I’m dead set on something.

“Remember Eleanor Simons?” His face twists. Of course he does. “What about her?” There’s a short pause as I look away again, and then realization dawns on him. “Fuck, Nyx,” he says. It’s the first time he’s called me my codename by choice, and there’s a small part of me noting that as a victory. “She almost killed you, you can’t be serious. She belongs in that asylum and you know it!”

“Told you it was stupid,” I say.

“This is past stupid.” His scowl looks more and more like Hawk’s every time I come to visit. “This is irresponsible and reckless and dangerous, to yourself and others.”

“Yeah, well, nice speech but it’s not working. I can use her.”

“She’s a serial killer with delusions of invincibility and messages from god,” he says flatly. “You cannot use her. She will kill people.”

“Yes.” I say it simply as I stand up. “But this time around she’ll be killing the bad guys.” He’s very silent as I walk away.

“Hawkwoman,” he calls eventually, standing up. It’s a calculated move on his part, an attempt to remind me of the code I abandoned seven years ago in a motel room, standing over the body of a government agent. I don’t stop.

“Nice try,” I say. “I’ll see you around.” By the time I reach the ground the sun is starting to come up, purple and yellow.