Thrown [Impact, Aurora]

[Aurora]

Walking down the long steel hall, he vaguely wondered where Gracie was. Then he wondered why he was wondering. Well. It wasn’t as if Gracie wasn’t always on his mind these days, but did he think of her out of some sort of guilt? He decided no, no reason to be guilty. Aurora was a flirt, nothing wrong with that. And she was ridiculously hot. Could he be blamed for looking? Could he be blamed for anything more than that?

Lucas grinned to himself, rubbing his face to wipe the expression away. He always was one to play with fire… and if Gracie thought he was her boyfriend, well… she was being naïve. They’d done little more than fight and fuck the last few weeks since they met. Did that make a relationship? Lucas didn’t want to think about it too much. The implication kind of spooked him.

Opening the door to the training yard, he squinted a bit in the sun until his eyes adjusted.

The door slammed shut behind him, and what was little more than a blur the height of a person sped past Lucas’ side. Aurora came to a stop a few feet from him, turning in her place as she slowed from about one hundred miles an hour to zero. Her ponytail swung with the sudden stop, and wisps of it had been pulled loose with the friction of the wind. Though her skin was tough enough to not be harmed by the friction of moving against the air at such high speeds, her hair was forever whipped around by it.

She reached up and pulled her hair free, sliding the ponytail holder around her wrist. “So does your impact equal the force the thing was coming at you with?” she asked in mild curiosity, running a hand through her hair as it fell to her shoulders.

“Not quite equal, but pretty close. Momentum and gravity slows it down a bit. So be careful- if you really hit me, it’ll come back at you. But if you can tap me like you say, it might not work that way.” He looked back at the building. “Just in case, be prepared to run for Angie.” He nodded as if to agree with himself.
Walking closer- maybe too close- he looked down at her, tilting his head as if appraising her.

They were well within arm’s reach by the time he stopped, and Aurora took a small step forward herself to eliminate a bit more distance. She held his gaze, noting how dark his eyes were. After a few moments of still silence, she moved.

She moved with natural speed, nothing faster than the average person would be able to move their arms with. Her arms lifted to shove him back. If he blocked her with the use of his own power, she’d likely be thrown back. But if not, her hands would find his chest and shove him back maybe five feet – enough to perhaps cause him to fall, but not enough to lift him into the air with the force of it.

Lucas staggered backward quickly, boots scraping the flat earth beneath him. Absorbing much of the shock of Aurora’s strike and throwing it back at her, it nonetheless toppled him backward and he landed hard on his back, the ground thudding with the force of his movement as if a truck had been dropped there instead.

He coughed as dirt and dust clouded around him a bit, waving it away, then chuckled, looking up to see if she was hurt.

[Aurora]

Though she’d steeled herself to be hit with Impact’s force, it was nonetheless a jarring experience when she was knocked backwards, hit with too much force to keep her balance and sent toward the ground hard. She turned as she fell, reaching as if to hit the ground with her hands rather than her face and body. But she didn’t hit the ground. Mere inches from it, she lifted upwards, as though grabbed and pulled up by someone standing over her, from being parallel to the ground to an upright position five feet above the ground.

She turned, with steadying movements of her arms and legs, as though floating in water. Her heart was beating quickly with the adrenaline of the hit. Her chin was nearly to her chest as she looked down at Lucas. She didn’t say anything, but laughed under her breath at how their powers had worked against each other’s.

Looking up at her, he sat up, elbows on his knees, and brushed his short hair free of dirt. “Heh. Guess we know how that works out then. Pretty cool though, kinda like getting hit by a linebacker. You’d be one hell of a rugby player too.”

Aurora smiled as she lowered herself down to the ground, reaching down and offering him a hand up as she went from three feet in the air to two feet. “So if I came at you at a hundred miles per hour…you could throw me back at just about that speed?” she asked, already thinking of possible ways to test their powers against each other’s.

“I wouldn’t want you to get hurt, but it should do just about that, yeah. I mean honestly, I haven’t tested it against a train or anything. I don’t know if there’s a limit, but… I haven’t found it.”

As he hoisted himself up with the aid of her hand, he pulled her down a bit in the motion, and they sort of collided with her midair. He set a hand on her shoulder, still holding the other. “Sorry.”

As Aurora was tugged down the last foot and a half from the air, she automatically reached for something to brace herself with. Lucas was the only thing around, and he was quite close and the logical thing for her brain to tell her to grab onto. So her hand found his side, her palm pressing over his hip bone and her fingers grasping to steady her.

Aurora tried to determine whether she thought the collision had been an accident on his part. It seemed innocent enough – at least, his hand had fallen on her shoulder rather than a few other places he’d have probably put it if he were placing it purposefully.

A few, like closer to where hers had ended up.

“Don’t be,” she said smoothly. Her hand rested there a few moments more, before she slid it from his form. She didn’t move away from him; didn’t want to seem like she detested the closeness.

Lucas grunted a little, a verbal confirmation Gracie would have recognized straight off for what it was. Someone- a woman, at that- who didn’t know him, might not have picked up on it so easily.

But then, he didn’t back away, either. “Flight- hovering, whatever the shit is you’re doing- and those other powers. Pretty cool. I’m looking forward to seeing how the group works in action.” Particularly you. But hey, he wasn’t that forward.

“You’ve got a hell of an ability yourself,” Aurora replied, tilting her head in one direction just so. “So, are we going to stand here like this all day?” She spoke with a hint of amusement, and an even bigger hint of certain suggestion. Despite what she said, the second the words left her lips he could feel her hand returning exactly as it had been; low on his hip. It was a question, it was something of an invitation – call it what you will, but it was there, for Lucas to explore or give her a sign he wasn’t interested.

There was something about Lucas women loved and men feared; that habit of his to pursue what he wanted with an intensity bordering on violence. When she touched him, thought left his mind. Pursuit became his focus, and no dissuasion could be entertained.

“You’ve been looking at me like that since we first met in New York,” he said in a low voice, that half growl coming deep from within his barrel chest. He seemed to grow another foot in stature, the way he could lean over a person like a skyscraper. It was little wonder in that moment how he’d garnered the reputation he had on the streets.

And Aurora had thought he was intense before. Clearly, that was his casual intensity. From the time she put her hand on him a second time to the time he spoke, his gaze, his stature, everything about him seemed to intensify fifty times over.

The fact that he came out and laid her attraction on the table was a turn-on for the dark-haired woman – and it spurred her toward what she did next. Her hand slid up and more onto his side rather than his front, settling towards his back. She applied pressure there to say without words that she wanted him to move closer, but he didn’t need to, because at the same time, she moved toward him – with a shift of her weight, closing the little space between them until their chests were brushing lightly.

She spoke, explaining herself in answer to his statement. “I like what I see.”

And then she kissed him, not bothering with teasing brushes of her lips, but kissed him full-on, her eyes closing and her hand tightening on his side.

[impact]

It was surprising how swiftly a man of his size could move.

One arm snaked around her waist, pulling her to him; he might have crushed the air out of her if she wasn't strong enough to take it. The other arm lifted and his hand made a fist in her hair, pressing the kiss on.

He kissed her hungrily, not thinking about anything but the act, lifting her a bit off her feet with the motion. He held here there for a few more seconds, not wanting to break off the kiss.

But he did, and rather suddenly. Dropping her back to her feet, he pulled her head back by the hair, and looked down at her. Something hard and distant shone on the surface of his eyes for a moment, and his hand dropped out of her hair. He let her go.

Taking a breath in, a moody frown on his face, he turned and walked back into the compound, the door shutting on its own gravity behind him.

[Aurora]

Holy...What the hell?

The kiss had been like a flash of passion and force...and then, like that, he was walking away? Aurora was left to watch him go, her mind still whirring from the moment shared. She didn't want him to go; definently didn't want things to be cut off so quickly - but she wasn't about to call after him. She wasn't even going to stand to watch the door slam shut behind him. Before it closed, she had lifted into the air and, with a last long look at his retreating back as he disappeared into the compound, became little more than a blur, streaking up and over the training yard's wall.

She'd learned a lot about Impact in that one meeting. She'd learned that if he was anything, he was intense in everything that he did. And past that...there was something about him, something just under the skin. She had seen it in that moment when he had kissed her and directed her head by her hair. She didn't like being pushed around, but there was something about the way he'd done it that had blown her away.