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elysiality · 5 days ago

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N. SCATORCCIO ﾉ GEN V.

damaged goods ─ 𓉘 01, pre-canon. 𓉝

/ NATALIE SCATORCCIO, no stranger to being a pariah, is now one of the top students at Godolkin University, the most prestigious school (and the only one, if you wanna make it big) for Supes to train and defend the great land of America !

But how did she get there? What is her ineffably tragic backstory? Well, it seems you'll find out that our beloved Guardian is just as ordinary as you and I! (Though, I don't suppose you live in Vought tower with an array of humans at your beck and call now, do you?)

´ཀ` THIS FILE CONTAINS THE FOLLOWING DELICATE INFORMATION:

child abuse ◞ angst w some comfort ◞ vought ◞ fem reader ◞ religious guilt ◞ death ◞ some spoilers for gen v 'n the boys, not much for yellowjackets ㄨ✘✗ﾒ✗.ᐟ wc; 4k.

› NATALIE LESLEY SCATORCCIO was born to two people who, to be frank, would not be winning any awards for parent of the year. Vera and Alfonso Scatorccio were just as douchy as their names made them out to be. Avid church goers and charlatan extraordinaires, Natalie came into their life as yet another excuse to show off their sincere and whole-hearted devotion to their god, a show pony.

Nat had vivid memories of being rocked back and forth in the stifling arms of a woman who smelled like cigarette smoke and swill with a strong scent of cheap perfume that tried to mask it, hearing crooning hymns of the voice she’d later learn to identify with slurring at her to ‘clean her damn room’ or 'make yerself useful 'nd get me some rotgut' before trailing off into snores. A lovely core memory to have, she’s sure.

› Natalie showed the first signs of her ‘gift’ at age three. She was playing in the coarse grass outside her trailer, her lack of toys leaving a lot to be desired in the entertainment department. She had caught a worm inching the earth, holding it upright in her hands.

She stared at it in glee, watching, riveted as it struggled. Her eyes were sharp, a hunter’s even then. She noticed.

The silvery tint on the tip of cherubic fingers, creeping down her hands, almost metallic, almost fluid. How it seemed to seep into the worm, immobilizing it where her fingers met the squishy skin. It would look prettier if it was fully silver, she found herself thinking. A few seconds later, she found herself holding a worm that glittered in the sunlight like a jewel in beach sand. Unmoving, unfeeling. She stared in wonder and then squealed in excitement. Something to show her parents !

Had she known her fate after she darted up the steps of her trailer, tracking mud all over, after she presented the thing to her enthralled parents, she would've just swallowed her need to be loved and chucked the poor sucker in a beer bag, hoping that her parents were too blitzed out of their minds to notice it among the rattling beer cans.

› From then on, Nat was her parents' most prized meed. If they had any sense at all in the fuzz of alcohol and wet sponge that made up their birdbrains, perhaps they would've exploited her power in a better way. A Supe for a daughter was nothing to sneeze at, let alone a Supe daughter with a power that basically rendered her a platinum goose.

But no. Her miserly, money-grubbing parents blew it on booze, on showing off. Her house, instead of being a proper bougie house with linoleum floors they could definitely hire a maid to maintain, was still the same trashy trailer— just with a whole lot more smoke and the faint scent of rubbing alcohol on every surface.

She was paraded around every time they went to church, that expensive church with its marble pillars and mellifluous choir, with the snobby kids who stuck their noses up at her ragged skirt, the one they could barely afford, and ooh-ed and aah-ed over like she was a cracked statue in a museum.

Any form of protests got a, ‘Scatorccios do what is best for their family’ speech, more resembling a harangue, followed by loud screeches of her arguing parents that the sullied excuses for walls did nothing to conceal.

› Her parents didn't appreciate how their darling daughter was single-handedly preventing them from going cold turkey either. They refused to touch her, to let her touch them. Hugs were a scarcity and often given so quickly that she had no time to take in the warmth and giddiness anyway. When her hands had become fully gilded, when they dripped with liquid silver and turned everything they came into contact with into money, her frugal parents splurged on one thing and one thing for her only— a pair of gloves.

“Just a precaution, Natalie.”, her mom had told her, smoothing down her dark hair with one tentative hand as Nat pulled on the flaxen, leathery gloves, dark as the night.

They both knew the truth. What it was for, those gloves that were always on her hands, in her sleep, when she was sick. They were right in their precaution, of course, but it's not like it would save them.

› Her favourite Supe from the Seven was Queen Maeve. It always had been. She got one hour of TV time every night. Her eyes needed to remain unsullied, her parents had told her, because they couldn't afford to fork over money for glasses. Lies, of course, but they veered away from that conversation every time. She'd watch interviews, snippets, little moments captured by amateur cameras, watching the rust coloured hair practically fly in the wind as the heroine battled three men at once, teeth flying out like salmon leaping out of bloody water.

How at the end of the day, Maeve wouldn't go stand next to Homelander and play pretty for the cameras, instead going to check up on the young kids who had been unfortunate enough to be around, who would remember the scarring incident and carry it with them eternally. Natalie often wished Maeve could come rescue her. From her parents, from her ‘blessing’.

› It's not like she could blame her parents for shunning her either. But the roiling feeling in her gut was too strong, peeling her open from the inside like an unripe bud. It had to happen one day.

It was an ordinary Tuesday, like any other. Or well, as ordinary a Tuesday as one could get in a rusty, creaky trailer that threatened a fire hazard at so much as a wrong step.

When Nat woke up, she was greeted by the stench of alcohol and vomit, stronger than it usually was which only meant one thing— her parents had splurged her entire school year’s worth of money on getting wasted again.

She was only about nine then. About to go into fourth grade, cheeks that should've been cherub but were hollow and flushed with borderline starvation. Still, she knew how to take care of herself well enough. She could make a mean toast when she pushed her stool up to the counter and smacked the toaster a couple of times.

It's what the original plan was— until something better came along. Opening the rotten wooden cupboard revealed pancake mix— freshly bought pancake mix, if not a little dog-eared at the corners. Her mouth started watering on instinct. Pancakes. When had she last had that? Far too long ago, she was sure.

Its around this point of the story that it starts getting hazy. Little flashes of the story she didn't remember well enough, was too young to remember.

Seeing little gloved hands peeling back the cardboard top. Turning on the stove. A sharp, stinging pain in the back of her head. Swivelling around, seeing her mom and dad at each other's throats. Being shoved off her stool and onto the ground. Looking at those metallic, dripping hands of hers as they seeped into the floor, then crawled up her parents legs like parasites, holding them fast to the floor. A smell of something burning. Her mom’s screams of rage turning into bloodcurdling ones of terror. Her father's harangue was short lived.

She still remembers their faces. Two sets of eyes like hers, staring at her in horror. Mouthing something she couldn't remember. To run, presumably. To save herself. So she did.

Got off her tiny ass and spun around, slipping on cigarette stubs and the puddles of water that were starting to form in the monsoon as she ran for the door. Yanking it open with incredible strength like never before, falling onto the dewy grass palms forward, stifling the plants under her.

She lay flat on the ground, unable to move. Tears were streaming down her face— maybe the adrenaline or maybe the fact of life that she had definitely shattered a bone somewhere she couldn't be bothered to reach. Her face was turned upwards.

The sky wasn't blue or cloudless like it would've been if this was a YA movie. There weren't any birds or a butterfly that came and landed on her flushed nose. Grey was scudding across the sky, laden with relief from the heat and more importantly, relief to Nat. She had to admit, she was grateful that her cinematic moment as the Batman-esque protagonist was interrupted.

‘It’ll clear the fire out’, she thought blindly, reaching a shaky, bruised hand out to the sky, where gentle droplets of water were now splashing onto her face like her mama’s kisses when she was young. She had faint memories of her mother telling her that rain was God’s way of showering praises onto them, of giving them life.

‘God will keep them safe’, she thought, her aching cheeks curling upwards into a smile. That was what she had been taught to do in face of adversity. Place her faith in God.

Spoiler alert: of the many things that happened that day, her parents being ‘safe’ was one of the many things that did not happen.

› There was a lot to be desired in terms of Wiskayok police performance and childcare services. Watching the corpses under two shrouds roll by, a glint of her mom’s ring peeking out from under the smaller one while the stench of charred skin filled the air wasn't very fun.

It was even less so when she didn't receive medical attention for her leg (which, by the way, felt like it had been splintered by a baseball bat— a steel one, at that) for a solid hour before someone noticed the sickly kid with metal dripping from her hands and a leg twisted at an odd angle, sitting on the ledge of an open-gated ambulance that was so run down, it vaguely resembled a kidnapper’s seedy hideout.

So much for prioritizing the living.

› Still, she had to give them something for caring about her two cents. She didn't have any living relatives she knew of— no one who hadn't been estranged already, at least, and she didn't want to use her ‘gift’ to keep herself fed and get herself a doting foster family, so they did the next best thing— packed her up and shipped her off to the Red River institute, orphanage for supes and harbourer of despair.

› She didn't have many belongings, Natalie. Nothing of any importance had been salvaged from the fire and she wasn't sentimental enough to have a photo of her parents with her. She had just what she had on her— so she left bare, with the cross necklace she no longer believed in and the ripped clothes that were still singed with smoke. She had no doubt many people were glad to see the back of her. The trailer park wasn't very Supe-friendly when most of the people there were placed because of Supes.

› Red River was essentially a place for parents to chuck their unwanted kids, the freaks that developed with powers that endangered them. Natalie was quite disappointed that her parents hadn't sent her there sooner— she would've had a better childhood raised here, in this giant gilded incinerator with no working air conditioners in the dead-centre of summer, than she would've ever been in her rust bucket of a trailer, living amongst people who gave her shit for literally just breathing.

› For the first week, it was just watercooler chatter. That was fine with her. She (and her new, dripping metal-proof gloves, chucked in her general direction with a ‘complimentary gift from Vought’ tag on it) needed to scope out the new place. Truth be told, she felt a bit like she was strolling the halls of a pre-school; smiley pictures of the Seven, rainbows and Brave Maeve slogans scrawled onto every wall and rugs that should've been retired in the 50s. But with fireproof walls and musty dorms cramped together like sardines.

Another thing she caught onto quickly was the habit of calling kids by nicknames corresponding to their powers.

There was the duo/couple/siblings (she was still a bit muddled on that one) creatively named Shark Boy and Lava Girl for well— obvious reasons, she thought snidely, watching as the short guy nearly ripped a juice box out of the girl with flaming hair’s hands with sharp, jagged teeth. She was observant like that.

There was Mother Nature (earth manipulation), Lightbulb (either his power was electricity manipulation or he just stuck his fingers into a power socket as a child and never got over it), and a bunch of others who evaded her. Hey, a girl doesn't have time to socialize much when she's in a state of perpetual doldrum, alright?

Since her gloves were now on her hands all the time like a second skin, (yes, even while she was using the little girls' room if you must know) and she refused to tell anyone what her powers were, she had very radically earned the nickname ‘Goldielocks’ for the sun-bleached hair look she sported all the time.

› The faculty were more or less bored teenage Supes who needed a summer job or were cooerced by their opulent parents into volunteering at this place in the name of charity. She found very quickly that they couldn't have cared less if she had grown a beard and an extra arm.

The teachers were dry oatmeal, droning on about concepts that Nat couldn't be bothered to listen to and would probably never use, given where she was heading. They'd have to pass her no matter what anyways. And thus she adjusted to life at camp, with posters of her favourite alt bands plastered on her pocket handkerchief of a corner and the impromptu poke and stick tattoo she had given herself right after coming.

› She remembered the first time she met you in excruciating detail. She was lying on the floor, face down and groaning in pain, wondering if it was possible to drown in her own sweat. Her hand was lying limp at her side, weeping blood in a thin line and completely soiling her shorts.

Natalie had just turned ten around that time. A year at Red River had altered her in more ways than one— psychologically. But she still had that same stark look on her face she knew she once had when she stumbled out of the burning wreckage of her home.

Perhaps that was what drew you to her. She was lying flat on the ground, her thoughts messy like a crayon drawing and ranging from ‘I’m gonna kill that guy’ to ‘I wonder if I still have cash for toffee after I get up. If I get up.’

And then, she felt the tip of a shoe nudging her gingerly. As though trying to assess whether she had tapped out or not. She twitched her free hand in assent.

“You're not dead, are you?” She heard a voice wonder out loud— or perhaps you really were speaking to her. That was something new.

“Don't think so.” She answered truthfully, shifting herself onto her side so she looked a bit like an underweight seal. It was then that she came face-to-face with you for the first time.

You were…..completely unbothered. Tranquil face, arms crossed, looking down at her like she was a bug you caught crawling out of the dirt during the rains. She didn't notice any immediate indicators to your power nor did she bother asking. She was never a brown-noser.

“They sent me to check on you.” You said in the most droll tone Nat had ever heard. “Said Shark Boy got to you.”

Nat gave you a half-smirk which quickly turned into a wince. “Mm. He scratched down my arm.” She nodded as best as she could to the arm that was still lax against the ground and now bent at an odd angle.

You looked incredulous, face contorting in disbelief. But not out of indignation, oh no. “Seriously?” You said in that tone Nat had only heard when her mom realised they were out of their usual stock of booze. “Well, get up then, drama queen.”

You poked her again, like you were trying to check if she was a half-baked cake. She sure felt like one, but it was a completely unwarranted poke in her humble opinion. She grumbled as the end of your muddy converse made contact with her left cheek. “Ugh, don't do that. He grazed my ribs too.”

You raised a critiquing eyebrow as you crouched down next to her, feeling the underside of her chest. Like a tiny neurosurgeon. “What'd you do to get that treatment?”

Natalie shrugged. “Asked him if Lava Girl really liked guys who looked like they had a fork jammed into their mouth repeatedly.” She chuckled at the ensuing wolf-whistle as you lifted up her wounded arm like a spoil of war.

“He's got a set of canines on him but you've got the mouth.” She heard you murmur, half out of it.

“He tore up my vintage poster of Nirvana, okay?” She huffed defensively, swatting your arm away as you felt around her bony collar. “I got that for my birthday. The teachers gave it to me.”

“Nirvana? Isn't their target audience like way out of our age range?”

“Well I think they were just relieved I didn't ask for a freaking gun, the way they looked at me, so….oh!-”

Her squeak of agony turned into one of surprise as you suddenly yanked her arm towards you— and completely extinguished the pain. Her ribs received the same manhandling a second later.

She sat up slowly, convalescent, rubbing a finger along her arm. Completely clear, no scar. She looked up at your cryptic face in awe. “So healing’s your power?”

You gave a shrug that was non-committal, bored and entirely unhelpful as a response. "More or less." Getting to your feet, you dusted off specks of imaginary dust and hauled her up with that surprising strength she had learned to associate with all Supes.

For a minute, you stood eye to eye, sizing each other up. You finished your judgement faster than she did. “I like you.” You declared after a moment’s pause and scrutinising assessment. “You should hang with me. And Marie, cuz’ I like her too.”

“Well, don't you have a lot of confidence.” she drawled, hands stuffed into her jeans in a way that gave her a swagger she had long deemed cool. “I don't even know your name.”

“And I don't know yours either. But I've been here the longest. And you're not as annoying as the other kids, Goldie. I need not annoying friends. And Shark Boy fears me. I'll get him to leave you alone.” You held your hand out to her, adorned with a simple, gold ring glinting on one finger.

“Truce?”

“Are you asking me or telling me, Doc Mcstuffins? ” Natalie smirked, even as she slid her hand into yours. And so started a very long (and possibly the only friendship) she would ever had. Besides Marie, obviously, who was mildly inconvenienced by the whole meet-cute, given that the carpet Natalie had moaned her sorrows into was a carpet she had laid there. But something something bygones right?

› Your trio was quickly another that the others learned to avoid. Those who didn't get the memo were sent to ubiquitous Coventry in the most dignified punishment you could manage without getting booted from the only home you knew (though there was a time when you had seriously considered letting Marie do her blood ritual on the guy who ejected slime onto your bed. Eugh. Gloopy footprint much?)

Nat found that the three of you gelled well enough to stick together through thick and thin. She grew close to Marie, who had also killed her parents in a freak accident and closer to you still. The faculty veered away from the three of you, relying on you to be the silent kids who trained within bounds and kept their heads down after papers, which worked out amazingly well for Natalie, who had a penchant for straying off the moral grid to pander to herself.

Nat would never admit it to your face, so help her god if you started taunting her about it, but you were her favourite. Like her uber-favourite. As in, she started floundering when you threw a casual compliment her way kinda favourite.

Man, crushes are a pain in the ass, huh? All the fuss for a relationship that could turn out like her parents. But she liked it. Liked having something to take her mind off everything. Liked having someone to rely on, even if it was you and your ice-queen, scold her for sneaking out and then heal the scrape on her wound from falling off her bicycle on the way back without another word act. No pain, no gain?

› She was sixteen when you first told her of your power. It was right after she had caught wind of the rumour that Marie supposedly knew what it was and she had confronted you about it.

You sat on the ledge of a windowsill, feet dangling into the noisy city below, her smoking and you staring out at the bird sitting on the window jamb of the opposing building.

“It's really stupid.” You warned her. “Packing peanuts could have my power and it wouldn't make a difference.”

“Don't care.” She shrugged, taking another hit of the blunt she had almost finished to close the verbal gap between you. She crossed her arms in that leather jacket she donned all the time, which gave her the look of a scrawny gang leader.

You let out a longsuffering sigh. You of all people know how utterly stubborn she was, having dealt with her for 5 years straight.

“I’m…immune.” She stared at you completely blankly, blinking like a frog out of water.

You rolled your eyes and rucked off your jacket, chucking it indoors. It landed on a crumpled heap on the rug, causing a mushroom cloud of dust to errupt. “To other Supes’ powers, idiot.”

“Oh.” Natalie commented unnecessarily. She tossed the smoking end of the blunt into the bin below, watching as it dropped in among plastic that should've very clearly been in the next bin, possibly starting a fire.

“Thats cool.” You waved her off. “Don't.”

“How can you heal people though?” Nat asked curiously after yet another cumbersome, pregnant pause.

“It's called projecting. Or atleast, I've coined the term that way. It's this thing I can do— project my invulnerability onto other people's Supe-inflicted wounds just long enough for their healing factor to kick in. Learnt it a bit too late, though.”

“The fuck does that mean?” Nat chortled half-heartedly, feeling a sinking pit form in her stomach— she had a feeling she knew what the answer was.

You inhaled deeply, coughing a bit as the smoke from her blunt wafted towards you.

“Both my parents were Supes. My mom had telekinesis, my dad could do this thing where he could shapeshift parts of his body into fire. Like full-on inferno type stuff. They got into a fight one day and he just…sort of let it consume him. I was only six."

"I dragged my mom out the best I could, her powers assisting me but….there was nothing invulnerability could really do against third degree burns. And I didn't have a carrier pigeon or fax machine to send an SOS to the nearest hospital so….I lost them. Both of them.”

You finished in one breath, displaying excellent respiratory control and an underlying sense of rancour. Nat knew what that felt like. The guilt of not being able to control your powers better.

So she did something she hadn't done in years, unless it was for one-on-one training with her and herself, behind doors that she had jammed with stools (the locks never worked in this place). Pulled off her gloves. Showed you her metally hands. Told you the story behind them as they dripped onto the windowsill, granting it a blinding gleam of silver, like a row of teeth.

You listened quietly, your head quirked to one side. You've always been reticent like that.

You reached out for her hands when she was done. She jerked away instinctively, that primal fear she had only felt once before evoking something deep inside her gut. But you took her in your hands anyway.

She winced. It had been so long since she had felt human contact on her hands. It was warm. Comforting. Just like human skin on human skin, which wasn't like anything she had expected.

“It's….silky.” you commented, your eyebrows doing that cute, cute thing where they tried to disappear into your hairline. “Didn't know silver could do that.”

She smiled wryly. “Always the tone of surprise, huh Doc?”

You shoved her playfully with your shoulder. “Don't be a jerk now. We were having a moment.”

So Natalie enveloped you in a hug, a desperate, trembling one, a second later. You returned it with equal fervidity, despite the fact that the metal was melting into your shirt and completely disfiguring it.

› The news of Compound V was one that broke headlines world-wide. Literally. The TV did not recover from the attack launched on it by Ursa (is the nickname not self explanatory?) and Vought were scrimping on money far too much to afford another one. Possibly to fuel more of Homelander’s PR disasters.

She sat next to you and Marie on the kiddie stools they had never bothered to replace, tight-lipped and knuckled.

Marie was shaking furiously like a blender on crack, making choking noises into her arm that were tantamount to the cries of a lost puppy.

You? You sat, stark and cheeks flushed red, gripping onto her quavering hands, the words taken out of your mouth for once. Perhaps you thought she was grieving tremendously. Or shaking with scathe towards her late parents.

Both were true in their own rights but all that Natalie could think of was— ‘It wasn't my fault. It wasn't my fucking fault. It was theirs. They chose to shoot me up with some sick drug when I didn't want it, when all I could do was babble and gurgle. It wasn't my goddamn fault.’

Unironically enough, it would be one of the better sets of news that she would receive in her life.

› God-U was a beacon of light in the depressing cesspool that was life at Red River. The prospect of actually being able to use her accursed powers to help someone else was a secret desire Natalie had long-harboured since way before the dark days.

Strenuous training, enough pressure to crack a steel rod in half and three sob stories later, you, Natalie and Marie crowded around a single laptop in the IT lab (or what was labelled the IT lab, anyway) after driving away the lousy and mousy teens alike there to get their rocks off.

The silent room erupted in cheers as you opened the confirmation mails, one after another. All three of you had gotten in, due to start as soon as possible. Yes, all. fricking. three. Honing your skills actually got you into a program to better improve your prowess in life-saving. Who woulda thunk?

It was a high point to add to Natalie’s scoreboard of rock-bottom naught, a consistent line that stayed about as flat as her parents’ pulses (may they rest in scorched pieces) and a definite improvement from the ‘gas station employee fending off yellow-bellied robbers every now and then’ future that Nat saw for herself.

Although, in hindsight, if she had heeded the warning that Vanessa, the supervisor of Red River had been kind enough to give her before she set off with you, if she had known that what awaited her was a fate far worse than what the prestige of Godolkin University promised, she probably would've run in the opposite direction from those pristine campus grounds, screaming her head off and running towards the pile of mildewy magazines that needed stocking in that dang gas station. Hell, they practically called her name, future Nat's.

AIRI'S musings ⋮ this is so niche i fear it may get buried in the Tumblr archives..... it's not a series per se....just a concept ? I'll post the canon work after a bit of ruminating and procrastinating and then do some drabbles if anyone wants them :3

TAGLIST : @silkchiffoner , @f4riedimples , @scatorcciosbabe

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