Astro City fanfic, Winged Victory
Title: Safe Spaces
Fandom: Astro City
Pairing/Characters: gen; Winged Victory
Rating: PG
Summary: Winged Victory does her best to inspire women, but sometimes it seems like the whole world is arrayed against her.
Disclaimer: Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson and Alex Ross own Astro City.
Author's Notes: Written for halfamoon, a community celebrating female characters in fandom from Feb.1-14. As far as I know, there is no Astro City fandom. Astro City is probably one of the best comics titles of the last twenty years, but it is little and has a sporadic release schedule, and so does not perhaps receive as much attention as it deserves. Astro City is one of my safe spaces in literature and comics, and I hope I can share it both with people who already know the title and those for whom this is their first encounter.
Word Count: 1,400
For Astro City newbies: All you need to know in order to read this story is that Winged Victory is a superhero whose powers originate from her mission to inspire agency and self-determination in women.
Winged Victory touched down on the rooftop of the Derbyville Women’s Center, faltering as her singed wings lost fine motor control. Folding her wings against her back, Winged Victory leaned against the exterior door for a moment, composing herself.
A regal woman, of a height with most men and broadly built to wield the sword hanging at her hip, Winged Victory was covered in gray soot and bits of scorched wood. Curled chestnut hair tangled in her golden laurels, permeated with the acrid bite of melted plastic. Dents and ragged ends peppered her costume’s bronze and leather armor.
A fire. There had been a fire at one of the other Women’s Centers, the one in Bakerville. She’d been across town in Kanewood, dealing with an idiotic little man on the zoning board who insisted that she’d improperly filed all the paperwork for the half-completed Center there. Her medallion flashed an image of the familiar Bakerville edifice, and three people--two men and a woman, late teens, that age when everything is a challenge--all black, not unusual for Bakerville, breaking the lock on the cellar door. She’d worried, but the little man distracted her, and she concentrated on not strangling him until she could prove the paperwork was properly filed. It had been, it had been from the start, but Kanewood’s bureaucracy was being particularly resistant.
She had already been aloft when the second image flashed, the Bakerville edifice on fire. Heart in her throat, she’d flown there at double-speed and still taken ten minutes to get there. She beat the fire department. Fire spurted out of windows and women and children milled on the street in front of the Center. Lashondra, the Center’s head and only paid staff, waved her arms and Winged Victory landed next to her. Lashondra didn’t know how the fire started, only that the alarms in the cellar had been disabled and it began there. It spread upward quickly, though most of the people on the first two floors had gotten out, there were still women on the third and fourth floors.
Winged Victory spent the next frantic half hour searching, finding and carrying away the people her Centers were supposed to protect. Several of the older women on the third floor nursed serious burns by the time she got to them, and one child might never breathe right again.
The fire department and the police finally arrived, and once she was sure everyone was out of the building, she had to keep the police from haranguing her people. Bakerville was what polite society would call a “heavily ethnic neighborhood”--a ghetto. The women who came to the Center used it for practical, necessary things, from mass babysitting for working mothers (the lucky ones--those who couldn’t get work were on welfare, and spent their time fighting a system weighted against them) to sex education services for sexually active girls to health care for pregnancies and counseling for rape. Several of the neighborhood women held women’s Bible studies classes, English as a second language classes, and like every one of the Women’s Centers around Astro City, Bakerville’s also taught all aspect of self-defense.
Finally, once she convinced the police to let her people go to the hospital or home, she found Lashondra and told her what she’d seen. The police would only have held her people longer if she’d told them, assuming they believed her in the first place. Besides, the Center’s place in Bakerville had always been precarious. She trusted and needed Lashondra more than she did the heads of her other Centers. Winged Victory, for all her “radical-lesbian-feminazi-cult-terrorist” horror for the Man, was still white and, with her superpowers and array of Women’s Centers, far better off than the residents of Bakerville. That residents of Bakerville had set the fire in the cellar was almost certain. Lashondra agreed, but also cautioned against filing a report. The Center was insured against accident. Better not to stir up trouble. Winged Victory agreed, and told Lashondra she’d be back in the morning, barring supervillain activity, to start pushing the paperwork through to get the Center rebuilt. Lashondra looked relieved that it would continue to exist, and told her to go get some rest.
Evening brushed the sky purple and gold. Winged Victory let her breathing even out, concentrating on the cool air ruffling her feathers. Her arms and legs twinged in protest against her use of them.
Voices on the other side of the door alerted her in time to move back as someone pulled the exterior door open.
“. . . saw her land--Oh!” A petite Chinese woman started back when she saw Winged Victory standing immediately outside the door. Kathy Zhuan, the volunteer self-defense instructor, stood with one hand on the doorknob. “Are you alright?” she asked.
Kathy’s girlfriend, a taller white woman named Samantha, pushed past Kathy and put one hand on Winged Victory’s shoulder.
“What happened?” Kathy asked.
Did she really have to go over it? Just going through the ordeal had exhausted her.
Samantha shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, not unless the world is ending, and I think we’d’ve noticed. Come inside, let’s get you some food.”
Winged Victory stepped inside and found Kathy blocking her. She was too tired to think why the other woman would be standing there.
“Not like that,” Kathy said. “I’m sorry, it’s just--Wing, you look like you just emerged from the mouth of hell. I don’t think you want the girls to see that.”
Winged Victory shook her head. Kathy was right; it wouldn’t be good for morale. Her costume was in tatters. Wherever it went when she banished it, when she called it again, it would be whole. Her wings vanished. A moment’s more concentration and Winged Victory stood before them in her human form, now slightly shorter than Samantha. She clutched the familiar winged-V shape of the medallion around her neck for strength, and then followed Kathy into the Center proper.
Kathy fed her while Samantha dealt with the rest of the volunteer staff at the Center, keeping them away and reassuring them. Eventually someone ran in to say she’d heard from someone who heard from her girlfriend who heard from her sister that the Bakerville Center had been burned to the ground.
Kathy and Samantha exchanged worried looks. Winged Victory couldn’t talk about it, not yet anyway. She would have to tomorrow morning. But she could put it off until then, at least.
Later, after she showered, she ventured out into the living room--a large room with bookshelves covering the walls, groups of couches and tables, and a few lone chairs for the solitary. People came in and out of this room constantly, trying to find other people, working on homework at the tables, reading from the Center’s library or the newspaper. No one would recognize her in this form. She didn’t often change forms. Winged Victory wasn’t defined by her costume, even if it, and the superpowers it summoned, made up her public image.
The women in her Centers and schools knew her out of costume, even ignoring the wings, they knew the tall woman with the curly chestnut hair and keen brown eyes was Winged Victory. She spent a lot of time fighting supervillains, especially supervillains like Goldenboy, but she always tried to spend at least half as much time in her Centers, with the women she was trying to inspire. No matter where she went, though, she was rarely so anonymous as now.
Curling up on one of the solitary chairs, she closed her eyes and listened. Two tables over a pair of middle-schoolers were fighting over a joint book report--Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, a classic. Five teenagers in the far corner giggled over gossip. Probably about boys, they were that age, though considering the neighborhood, they might be giggling over girls, too. An old woman lay stretched out on one of the longer couches, and her snores had a distinct rhythm: buzzbuzzbuzz-HONK-buzzbuzzbuzz-HONK. Just behind her, a mother gave her daughter instructions on how to do a French braid, and patiently bore the tugs and pain of mistakes while her daughter hummed in concentration and clucked her tongue every time she messed up. The light, soothing chatter of women’s voices all over the Center wove together. A laugh rang out in the hall.
Winged Victory smiled.
.
Fandom: Astro City
Pairing/Characters: gen; Winged Victory
Rating: PG
Summary: Winged Victory does her best to inspire women, but sometimes it seems like the whole world is arrayed against her.
Disclaimer: Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson and Alex Ross own Astro City.
Author's Notes: Written for halfamoon, a community celebrating female characters in fandom from Feb.1-14. As far as I know, there is no Astro City fandom. Astro City is probably one of the best comics titles of the last twenty years, but it is little and has a sporadic release schedule, and so does not perhaps receive as much attention as it deserves. Astro City is one of my safe spaces in literature and comics, and I hope I can share it both with people who already know the title and those for whom this is their first encounter.
Word Count: 1,400
For Astro City newbies: All you need to know in order to read this story is that Winged Victory is a superhero whose powers originate from her mission to inspire agency and self-determination in women.
Winged Victory touched down on the rooftop of the Derbyville Women’s Center, faltering as her singed wings lost fine motor control. Folding her wings against her back, Winged Victory leaned against the exterior door for a moment, composing herself.
A regal woman, of a height with most men and broadly built to wield the sword hanging at her hip, Winged Victory was covered in gray soot and bits of scorched wood. Curled chestnut hair tangled in her golden laurels, permeated with the acrid bite of melted plastic. Dents and ragged ends peppered her costume’s bronze and leather armor.
A fire. There had been a fire at one of the other Women’s Centers, the one in Bakerville. She’d been across town in Kanewood, dealing with an idiotic little man on the zoning board who insisted that she’d improperly filed all the paperwork for the half-completed Center there. Her medallion flashed an image of the familiar Bakerville edifice, and three people--two men and a woman, late teens, that age when everything is a challenge--all black, not unusual for Bakerville, breaking the lock on the cellar door. She’d worried, but the little man distracted her, and she concentrated on not strangling him until she could prove the paperwork was properly filed. It had been, it had been from the start, but Kanewood’s bureaucracy was being particularly resistant.
She had already been aloft when the second image flashed, the Bakerville edifice on fire. Heart in her throat, she’d flown there at double-speed and still taken ten minutes to get there. She beat the fire department. Fire spurted out of windows and women and children milled on the street in front of the Center. Lashondra, the Center’s head and only paid staff, waved her arms and Winged Victory landed next to her. Lashondra didn’t know how the fire started, only that the alarms in the cellar had been disabled and it began there. It spread upward quickly, though most of the people on the first two floors had gotten out, there were still women on the third and fourth floors.
Winged Victory spent the next frantic half hour searching, finding and carrying away the people her Centers were supposed to protect. Several of the older women on the third floor nursed serious burns by the time she got to them, and one child might never breathe right again.
The fire department and the police finally arrived, and once she was sure everyone was out of the building, she had to keep the police from haranguing her people. Bakerville was what polite society would call a “heavily ethnic neighborhood”--a ghetto. The women who came to the Center used it for practical, necessary things, from mass babysitting for working mothers (the lucky ones--those who couldn’t get work were on welfare, and spent their time fighting a system weighted against them) to sex education services for sexually active girls to health care for pregnancies and counseling for rape. Several of the neighborhood women held women’s Bible studies classes, English as a second language classes, and like every one of the Women’s Centers around Astro City, Bakerville’s also taught all aspect of self-defense.
Finally, once she convinced the police to let her people go to the hospital or home, she found Lashondra and told her what she’d seen. The police would only have held her people longer if she’d told them, assuming they believed her in the first place. Besides, the Center’s place in Bakerville had always been precarious. She trusted and needed Lashondra more than she did the heads of her other Centers. Winged Victory, for all her “radical-lesbian-feminazi-cult-terrorist” horror for the Man, was still white and, with her superpowers and array of Women’s Centers, far better off than the residents of Bakerville. That residents of Bakerville had set the fire in the cellar was almost certain. Lashondra agreed, but also cautioned against filing a report. The Center was insured against accident. Better not to stir up trouble. Winged Victory agreed, and told Lashondra she’d be back in the morning, barring supervillain activity, to start pushing the paperwork through to get the Center rebuilt. Lashondra looked relieved that it would continue to exist, and told her to go get some rest.
Evening brushed the sky purple and gold. Winged Victory let her breathing even out, concentrating on the cool air ruffling her feathers. Her arms and legs twinged in protest against her use of them.
Voices on the other side of the door alerted her in time to move back as someone pulled the exterior door open.
“. . . saw her land--Oh!” A petite Chinese woman started back when she saw Winged Victory standing immediately outside the door. Kathy Zhuan, the volunteer self-defense instructor, stood with one hand on the doorknob. “Are you alright?” she asked.
Kathy’s girlfriend, a taller white woman named Samantha, pushed past Kathy and put one hand on Winged Victory’s shoulder.
“What happened?” Kathy asked.
Did she really have to go over it? Just going through the ordeal had exhausted her.
Samantha shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, not unless the world is ending, and I think we’d’ve noticed. Come inside, let’s get you some food.”
Winged Victory stepped inside and found Kathy blocking her. She was too tired to think why the other woman would be standing there.
“Not like that,” Kathy said. “I’m sorry, it’s just--Wing, you look like you just emerged from the mouth of hell. I don’t think you want the girls to see that.”
Winged Victory shook her head. Kathy was right; it wouldn’t be good for morale. Her costume was in tatters. Wherever it went when she banished it, when she called it again, it would be whole. Her wings vanished. A moment’s more concentration and Winged Victory stood before them in her human form, now slightly shorter than Samantha. She clutched the familiar winged-V shape of the medallion around her neck for strength, and then followed Kathy into the Center proper.
Kathy fed her while Samantha dealt with the rest of the volunteer staff at the Center, keeping them away and reassuring them. Eventually someone ran in to say she’d heard from someone who heard from her girlfriend who heard from her sister that the Bakerville Center had been burned to the ground.
Kathy and Samantha exchanged worried looks. Winged Victory couldn’t talk about it, not yet anyway. She would have to tomorrow morning. But she could put it off until then, at least.
Later, after she showered, she ventured out into the living room--a large room with bookshelves covering the walls, groups of couches and tables, and a few lone chairs for the solitary. People came in and out of this room constantly, trying to find other people, working on homework at the tables, reading from the Center’s library or the newspaper. No one would recognize her in this form. She didn’t often change forms. Winged Victory wasn’t defined by her costume, even if it, and the superpowers it summoned, made up her public image.
The women in her Centers and schools knew her out of costume, even ignoring the wings, they knew the tall woman with the curly chestnut hair and keen brown eyes was Winged Victory. She spent a lot of time fighting supervillains, especially supervillains like Goldenboy, but she always tried to spend at least half as much time in her Centers, with the women she was trying to inspire. No matter where she went, though, she was rarely so anonymous as now.
Curling up on one of the solitary chairs, she closed her eyes and listened. Two tables over a pair of middle-schoolers were fighting over a joint book report--Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, a classic. Five teenagers in the far corner giggled over gossip. Probably about boys, they were that age, though considering the neighborhood, they might be giggling over girls, too. An old woman lay stretched out on one of the longer couches, and her snores had a distinct rhythm: buzzbuzzbuzz-HONK-buzzbuzzbuzz-HONK. Just behind her, a mother gave her daughter instructions on how to do a French braid, and patiently bore the tugs and pain of mistakes while her daughter hummed in concentration and clucked her tongue every time she messed up. The light, soothing chatter of women’s voices all over the Center wove together. A laugh rang out in the hall.
Winged Victory smiled.
.