(Bad end pt 3, final) You confront the guy and cause a scene just like that cop was worried about

Once again, you're grateful to La Petite Mort, who you've hardly interacted with up until this point until you explained your unfortunate situation to her. She was quite rude and made some rather belittling and judgmental comments about how you got yourself into this situation, even after you explained that you were pretty much **** into it by a supervillainess. And you certainly could have done without her pulling up the video of you fucking Kevin and Lucas in that VIP room, recovered after the League raided that place to arrest the owner for his villain associations...

...but, in a situation like this, needing a chauffeur to drive you around on account of being eight months pregnant by a petty thug, it's very nice to have a driver who either can't or won't offer any commentary, even if he does look like Frankenstein's monster.

On the ride over, you do your best to steel yourself for the contemptible state that you're no doubt going to find this damned punk kid who knocked you up in. Drunk and high in a crack house surrounded by mountains of trash with scabarous rats running around your ankles, most likely. You tell yourself that going in expecting that, it'll almost be a relief when the expected happens and he bolts off, leaving you in the lurch. It isn't much, but you'll just have to savor the moment of mortal terror when he sees you and your swollen tummy as much as you can.

....

"What the fuck?" you ask your sutured-together zombie-like driver. "Are you sure this is the place? There's no way. Check the address again."

Your monster chauffeur just gives you an indecipherable grumble and points at the slip of paper the police station gave you. No mistaking it. This is the address. At the end of a lengthy sidewalk in front of you is an ultra-modern, three-story McMansion with a huge yard and a fucking fountain. It looks like the kind of place where a corporate board member or a rising rock star would have. You urge the monster-driver to take you closer, but he shakes his head, and points to a sign that says 'No tresspassing'.

"Uuuugh." you groan in frustration as you laboriously push yourself out of the seat and stumble out onto the front walkway. In fairness, him pulling up too close would probably get the security company called out here. Which means that you have a long walk to the front door, and as your rotten luck would have it, that provokes your unborn child into a greater than usual burst of activity, frustrating your attempts to plan what you're going to say as you slowly walk up to the front door.

Ding dong. Ding dong. You wait, and wait. Nobody is answering. Looking over your shoulder, you see a luxury sedan with gold 'spinner' rims on the tires and alligator leather seats sitting in the driveway, and a pink BMW sports car behind it.

Over the sound you gritting your own teeth, your super-hearing picks up thumping rap music and the sounds of laughter and splashing water. Your blood starts pumping faster and running hot, heat rising in your face. Somehow, this is SO much more infuriating than the picture of low-class criminal squalor that you'd had in your mind before arriving. Deciding that you aren't going to be brushed off that easily and keeping in mind that trespassing laws are never enforced against heroes in costume, you waddle your way around to the gate leading to the back yard. Even though you brought lockpicks, you don't need them; it's been carelessly left unlocked.

You flinch as you make your way around into the back yard. "Fuck," you mutter, supporting your protruding, spherical abdomen where it's hanging down over the exact same grey bikini bottoms that were pulled to the side to allow Kevin's garbage DNA up into your womb. "Stop kicking already, you little bastard." That insult is a bit more literal than when you normally use it. "I'll go back and lie down as soon as I fucking can but I have to do this."

Sure enough, there's Kevin in the pool in his swim trunks, lounging against the side and looking just as callow, awkward and contemptible as he was when you saw him all-too-closely the first time. He's facing away and hasn't noticed you yet.

There are two beautiful women in the pool with him, both of them rocking the same voluptuous, eye-catching kind of hourglass figure that you HAD, before this guy ruined it. One of them is a latina in a tiger-striped two-piece bikini with her lustrous black hair worn in a ponytail, right at the edge of the pool near Kevin, leaning on the edge. The other is a black woman with wavy permed hair in a teal two-piece bikini and wearing sunglasses, lounging contentedly and sunbathing on a floating chair.

All three of them are totally oblivious to your presence... until one of your throwing knives pierces through the boombox playing hip-hop music and sends it toppling into the pool. Thanks to your superpowers, your voice comes out as a hellish screech like a demon come to collect the souls of the living. "KEVIIIIIIIN! YOU FUUUCKEEEER!!!!"

Sitting bolt upright, Kevin just about leaps out of the pool when he turns to see you lumbering towards him, skimpy heroine costume doing no more to conceal the firm fullness of your beach-ball-sized pregnancy bulge than it ever did the fullness of your bustline. The latina girl next to him turns to look as well, and the time it takes for you to reach them is enough for the confusion on her face to turn to anger. Before Kevin can get very far she wades right up to him and delivers a resounding slap upside his face. The first thing that she says is something nasty sounding in spanish, which Kevin doesn't look like he understands any better than you.

The next bit is in English. "Your girlfriend is a supe?! You little fucking rat. I can't believe I let you touch me."

"Baby, I-" Kevin starts to protest, but she cuts him off.

"I don't want to hear it! You have a lot of balls inviting me here when you're getting horizontal with one of THEM! You can forget about ever seeing this again," she points to her well-toned beach body and draws a finger over her sizable breasts, "and you can forget about doing business or getting in on any of our plans. If I or any of the other Junglists ever see you around any of our bars or clubs again, the cops 'gonna find you floating face down in this fucking pool the next morning!"

"A supervillain slut. Naturally." you mutter to yourself. "I should've waited another week before coming here, maybe he'd have ruined her goddamn life by not pulling out, too." You walk right past her and loom over the guy in the pool. He's a little on the short side, and you would be able to look down on him, literally as well as metaphorically, even if he was standing in front of you. As it is, your gravid silhouette is casting a shadow on him as he splashes around in the water.

"H-hey baby. 'Sup?" he says with a nervous yet still-cocky smile. "From... the club, right? I don't think I ever got your name. Nightie-wear, right?"

"Nightingale." you breathe through clenched teeth. "I'm so glad you remember me. Because THIS," you point down towards your bulging gut, poking yourself in your strained belly button, "is your fucking fault."

"Hey, wait a second." Unbelievably, the punk actually starts getting an indignant look on his face. "You said you was gonna let me go if I helped beat up those other guys! I did five months in the joint because of you throwing me to the pigs! That was damn cold, girl! And why'd you have to go and lay out my stereo like that? Shit was expensive."

"What the absolute fuck is this?" you sweep your hand in the direction of the enormous, fancy house behind you. "You're rich? Why the hell were you hanging around in a street gang fighting with broken bottles and brass knuckles?"

"Oh," Kevin says casually, and starts to look infuriatingly pleased with himself. "I just moved in here. That crib is all me, baby. Truth, when I first started slinging back in middle school, this one nigga talked me into letting him pay me with this shit called 'ByteCoin' on my phone. I couldn't figure out how to turn it into cash and forgot about it. 'Cept when I got out of the joint you threw me in, I was real hard up for cash, so I asked some old dude at the bank about it. Turns out that shit was worth like four mil. Enough for a baller place like this and a sweet ride."

Up until this point in your life you've been a little bit on the fence about the existence of God, but you suddenly decide that if God decided that this horrible little man deserved to be rewarded for impregnating a woman who got **** into fucking him because she was fighting to save lives, including his, by being showered with millions of dollars, he deserves a kick in his divine gonads even more than Kevin does.

Since you've been rendered speechless, Kevin starts going off again: "Hey, wait a second, I see how it is. You heard I made it big time, and now you're comin' down here since you got yourself knocked up trying to scare me into giving you some money, right? You got a uh, what's that shit they do on the TV shows..."

Showing the first sign since you arrived that she is awake and aware of your presence, the woman sunbathing on the floating chair interjects. "DNA test."

Eyes aflame, you step closer to the pool and turn towards the woman who interrupted. She still isn't even looking directly at you. "Excuse me?! Can you get the hell out of here already? If you hadn't noticed, I have something very important to discuss with your sugar daddy!" you shout at her.

That finally gets the woman to sit up. She gives you a sassy toss of her head and runs a hand over the stiff, glossy hair going down to her collarbone. "Excuuuuse me?" She speaks with an indignant tone, but she's actually smirking as if pleased with herself. "Check yourself, bitch. You talkin' to my son."

You glance and Kevin, and he confirms it with a shrug. Your mouth gapes as you turn back to her. "Wh-what the... why are you sunbathing in a pool, wearing a skimpy bikini, with your SON?" you say, your voice dripping with disgust.

The woman - apparently Kevin's mother - is unfazed, and just blows air through her lips. "Coz I done had to drop out of high school to raise his dumb ass, and it's MY house and MY pool, too! And ain't none of it yours, slut, so don't be comin' round here with yo' fat ass trying to steal Kev's computer money unless you got a lawyer!"

"I'M NOT HERE FOR MONEY, you ghetto trash!" you shriek back at her with a sneer. "My father was a coach for an Olympic gymnastics team! I live in a penthouse apartment downtown!"

Kevin looks more than a little relieved. You suspect that he might not have that much left after blowing all of his newfound wealth on conspicuous consumption. He comes a little closer and speaks to you in a low voice so that it'll be slightly less audible to his mom. "Yo, listen, Nightie. I'm sorry you're havin' a baby and all," he says in the same dismissive tone as if he was apologizing for putting a ding in someone's car in a parking lot, "but IF it even is mine, this is on you, girl. Why didn't you, like, say you needed to use protection? You were goin' out dressed like that - I mean, daaamn, you were looking really fine - but without bein' on the pill or anything?"

Of course, it isn't common knowledge that over-the-counter hormonal birth control doesn't work very well, if at all, for supers. You're not even the only superheroine in Acropolis at this very moment swinging around a big belly on account of that failure by the pharmaceutical industry. There are at least three others nearly as far along as you with no husband in sight, and those are just the ones you know of.

And the hell of it, the absolute hell of it, is that if you face facts, the people of this city and this country don't particularly care, about you or any of those other girls who stumbled their way into conceiving a child in a garish costume. If Kevin goes around bragging to his lowlife friends about having knocked you up after you'd showed up to bust him for brawling in a club, they won't be breaking out the torches and pitchforks, they'll be giving him high fives and congratulations. You remember the words of your mentor from college, who you should've listened to more closely: 'The attention that the masses give you might feel like love or respect sometimes, but it isn't. What they're showing you is amusement. They'll be just as happy to watch you in shame, failure or disgrace as they will in glory. If the acclaim of the average people is why you want to become a hero, you need to stop right now. Because no matter what Maiden America says... ordinary Americans are not the real heroes.'

You blink tears out of your eyes, thankful that your domino mask hides them, and sniff heavily as you feel your throat tightening up again. Well, why should they see your fate as some kind of tragedy, they might say? You, Rikki Drakeson, are a rich celebrity with a license to ignore half the laws on the books, and a nigh-supernatural physique that will bounce back from being bloated and stretched out like this within a month of delivery. Why should they owe you sympathy for having to go through something that many of them have to face with far fewer resources?

With a groan, you drag your gloved hand over your perspiring forehead. "Why did I come here..." you mutter to yourself. But then you realize: you HAVE to hold yourself above them.

Kevin's mother is grumbling and climbing out of the pool, water cascading off of her shapely body, and stepping up to you. Even though she's a good half foot shorter than you are, she puffs her chest out threateningly. You have to remind yourself to look up at her face. You do really have to hand it to her: as terrible of a mom as she clearly is, she looks great for a woman with an 18 year old kid. On the other hand, that's probably in no small part because she's no more than 7 or 8 years older than you are... ick.

"Ghetto trash, huuuuuuh?" she demands loudly. "You racist bitch. Get yo' ass out of here or I'm calling the cops. If you weren't knocked up I'd be whooping your ass right now."

"Oh, is that so?" You ask, your voice suddenly calm and steady again. "Then I guess it's a good thing _you _aren't. I hope." Before she can respond, you put all your weight on one foot and deliver a snap kick right to her stomach. Even in your current state, it's nowhere near as hard as you could have thrown, hitting her in the lower stomach rather than aiming for the solar plexus. It's still plenty to send her toppling backwards into the pool with a splash. "Augh, fuck!" she screams. "My hair!"

"HEY!" Kevin raises his voice to sounding actually angry for the first time and vaults out of the pool... but you just stare him down. There's a profound psychological advantage in being taller than someone. He takes a half-step forward as if to manhandle you, but then he stops.

The cool wit that you cultivated as a superheroine starts emerging from hibernation as you begin to feel something close to catharsis. "So, I guess the question is, are you backing off because I'm carrying your baby, or because you realize that even if I'm like this, you're still going to wake up in the emergency room if you try and put your hands on me?" you ask. His mother half-climbs out of the pool again but then stops when she sees you glance at her.

"Racist, huh? I don't really know how these things work," you say flatly. "I would've thought that the fact that I'm about five weeks away from giving birth to a 'person of color' would immunize me from that, but what do I know? I'm just a privileged whore in a lewd costume who can't keep her legs together, right?" All of this exertion, walking, and throwing a kick is making you a little light-headed, so you walk back to one of the pool chairs and flop down into it heavily, crossing your legs. "I'm not going anywhere, assholes. If I'm going to be changing diapers and wiping up puke for the next few years, just because a CERTAIN SOMEONE was holding on to me and wouldn't let me hop up off of his dick before it was too late like I was trying to... then, so are you. It's not about money, it's about... justice."

They're gratifyingly silent. You turn onto your side and rest the palm of your hand on your stomach where it's hanging down over the side. "I sure as hell don't want to marry you or shack up with you or anything like that. But I am going to be coming over every evening so that you can watch after the fruit of your crappy genes, Kevin, while I go out and fulfill my oaths to this city, and salvage what's left of the mantle of Nightingale. And if someone happens to see me coming over here in costume carrying a kid, that's fine, let those tabloid jackals have a field day with it, I don't care anymore. Enjoy the next few weeks of peaceful sleep in your big, flashy house bought with **** money while you can, both of you, because you've got a lot of sleepless nights ahead in your future. In between the vaccinations and checkups and God only knows what other doctor visits, if you want to take the time to get a DNA test, be my guest."

The woman climbs out of the pool at last, but rather than coming at you again, she puts her arms around Kevin and pulls him into a hug. "It's gonna be okay, my little man. We can work something out, get a lawyer, tell the cops that-"

You laugh sharply, interrupting her. "Oh yeah, the cops! Considering that superheroines have the same weight in a court of law as any police officer, if not more, then by all means, GO AHEAD. Considering that you just confessed to felony money laundering within the last two months. I guess if you want to spend the next few years in jail instead of sharing the responsibility for your kid, I'll have to take a chunk of whatever this overpriced eyesore," you wave your hand at the house, "sells for at the police auction as a consolation prize. I mean, I don't necessarily need the money, but it couldn't hurt."

There is an awkward silence. Kevin leaves his mom's arms and smiles, suddenly trying to look contrite through his nervousness. "Nightie... honey... okay, you got me. I did you wrong, I see that now. But c'mon, give me a chance. Don't you think we can make this work? My crib back there got plenty of rooms I don't even use. Are you sure you won't give me a chance, and, like, go ahead and move in with me? I prom-"

"VERY." you say loudly. "VERY, VERY SURE."

They have no more fight left in them. Even though a huge physical weight is still pressing down on your bladder and making you need to pee like crazy, even though you just went before leaving the police station, an even greater metaphorical weight has been lifted. You've salvaged some small victory, over these lucky idiots, and over yourself. You're no longer afraid to admit what happened at the League, nor are you afraid that you'll be a bad mother. Maybe you will be by someone's standards, but if THIS is the bar you have to clear, how much worse can you possibly do? You're no longer even afraid of finally biting the bullet and addressing the (half) white elephant in the room with your own mother.

Actually, no, you're still pretty terrified of that. One step at a time.