Chapter 8 : Livewire
January 2016 — CatCo Worldwide Media — Two Weeks Later
Leslie Willis had a voice like broken glass.
I stood at my desk, supposedly debugging a printer queue, while her broadcast played on every screen in the bullpen. Radio simulcast, piped through CatCo's internal feeds because Cat Grant believed in knowing what her employees said about her.
"—and let's be honest, folks. Supergirl isn't a hero. She's a liability. How many buildings got damaged in her last fight? How many taxpayer dollars are we spending to clean up after this flying menace?"
She's not wrong about the collateral damage. But she's definitely an asshole about it.
Kara sat three desks away, jaw tight, pretending to work on an article that hadn't progressed in twenty minutes. Every word from Leslie hit her like a physical blow.
"Someone should take care of that," I said quietly, appearing at her shoulder with coffee.
"Cat already reassigned her. Weather helicopter coverage." Kara's smile was brittle. "I'm not petty enough to enjoy that."
"I definitely am. Drink your coffee."
She laughed, some of the tension bleeding away. "You're a bad influence, Winn."
"The worst."
The helicopter accident happened three hours later.
One moment Leslie Willis was broadcasting from ten thousand feet, sneering about how Supergirl couldn't even control the weather. The next, lightning struck the aircraft, and the feed dissolved into screaming static.
Kara was gone before I could blink. I tracked her on my modified tablet, watching her heat signature intercept the falling helicopter, catch Leslie's body as she tumbled through electrified air.
Lightning strike. Direct hit. Nobody survives that.
Except Leslie did. The hospital reports came in fragments over the next day—coma, severe electrical burns, readings that didn't make sense to the staff. And underneath all of it, energy signatures that made my electromagnetic sense itch from across the city.
She wasn't just surviving. She was changing.
CatCo Worldwide Media — Three Days Later
The attack came at 11:47 AM.
I was explaining to a junior accountant why the PDF printer wasn't a separate machine when the lights flickered. Then died. Then exploded.
Leslie Willis—no, Livewire now, because National City apparently couldn't resist giving supervillains dramatic names—materialized from the electrical grid itself. She crackled with blue-white energy, eyes solid lightning, skin faintly translucent.
"WHERE'S CAT GRANT?"
The bullpen erupted in screaming chaos. People scrambled for exits. Livewire laughed, firing bolts that shattered windows and fried computers.
I shoved the accountant toward the stairwell. "Go. Now."
"But—"
"Now."
He ran. I turned back toward the destruction.
Livewire floated through the newsroom, trailing sparks, methodically destroying everything Cat Grant had built. Her rage was physical, incandescent. Every piece of equipment she touched became slag.
Then she spotted a cluster of interns huddled behind a desk.
"Oh, how cute. Little worker bees."
She raised her hand. Energy gathered.
I didn't think. I moved.
The bolt hit my chest.
Pain. Unimaginable, absolute pain—and then something else.
Hunger.
My Lightning Logic activated without conscious input. The electricity that should have killed me instead flowed, channeling through pathways that felt simultaneously foreign and perfectly natural. It filled spaces I didn't know existed, charged reserves that ached for exactly this kind of power.
The bolt lasted maybe two seconds. When it ended, I was still standing.
Livewire stared.
"What the f—"
I slammed my palm against the nearest computer terminal and pushed. Every kilowatt she'd just fed me discharged into the machine. Sparks erupted. The monitor exploded in a shower of glass and plastic.
Livewire screamed—whether in pain or rage, I couldn't tell—and dissolved back into the electrical grid. The lights flickered once, twice, and then she was gone.
The bullpen was silent except for crackling fires and distant alarms.
My hands were still sparking.
DEO Desert Facility — That Evening
"How much did you absorb?"
Alex had me hooked to three different monitoring devices. Electrodes on my chest, sensors on my temples, a blood pressure cuff that felt like it was trying to amputate my arm.
"I don't know. A lot?" I flexed my fingers. Tiny arcs still jumped between them, residual charge that wouldn't quite dissipate. "It felt like... being full. Like my entire body was a battery and someone finally plugged it in."
"That should have killed you."
"Yeah. I know."
She frowned at her tablet. "The electrical patterns in your nervous system are off the charts. You're still holding charge—significantly more than baseline."
"Can I release it?"
"Not safely. Not here." She tapped something on the screen. "We need a controlled environment. Something insulated."
"There's an old power substation in the industrial district. Abandoned after the earthquake last year. I used it for practice before—" I caught myself. "Before I got sloppy enough to get caught."
Alex almost smiled. "5 AM tomorrow. Bring aspirin."
I leaned back against the medical bed, exhaustion finally catching up. The charge hummed inside me, warm and strange and strangely right.
I absorbed a supervillain's attack. I survived.
More than survived. I'd used it. Turned her own power against her.
"Livewire will come back," I said. "She's not done with Cat."
"I know." Alex was already pulling up tactical files. "But next time, you'll be ready."
"We'll be ready."
She glanced up from her tablet. Something shifted in her expression—grudging respect, maybe. Acknowledgment that we were actually doing this together.
"Yeah. We'll be ready."
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