Reset 3.06
Noelemahc
These things, they happen
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Reset 3.06
[Rose]
Staring at Carol Dallon's angry, tired face was about as fun as staring down the barrel of a gun. If the gun could also produce hardlight weaponry to smack you with, that is. The good news was that this one didn't hate me for poaching the Golden Healer and arresting her daughter. The bad news… was that I knew enough of Carol to know what to expect, but not enough to know why she was annoyed with us overall.
"Why am I not surprised to learn it's you again?" were the first words she said at me after Hannah and I sat ourselves down across from her and her niece in the conference room. "First it was that odd story with you hoodwinking Legend into considering Skitter a hero–"
Nevermind, I thought to myself, Black-or-white morality and refusal to forgive the one who hurt Vicky. Thank you for consistency, Carol.
"Arachne," Miss Militia corrected almost mechanically, "She's a Ward now, and that involves a rebranding. Since we can't do much about her powers, well…"
"–as I was saying," Carol grabbed hold of the conversation again, refusing to let Hannah drive it to saner territories, "You took the girl that almost killed Panacea and made her a hero, and you used my daughter to do so! Victoria actually refused to tell me whatever it was that you made her do right after losing half her family!"
Good on you, Vicky. I'll find a way to repay you for this, I promise.
"Panacea's aid was necessary to establish certain details related to Skitter's claims of mitigating circumstances," Miss Militia said calmly, relying on the technically-a-truth it was agreed to use when questioned about the incident, "Glory Girl volunteered to keep guard in order to prevent anything untoward from happening, and we didn't dare stop her."
"And what, pray tell, was so important that you thought it worthwhile to upset Panacea's rounds in the hospital following an Endbringer attack?" Carol ground out in a tone that made Crystal slowly twist in her seat to get as much distance between herself and her aunt without actually moving the chair.
If it was someone else, they would be screaming by now. Carol's relatively level voice was unnerving as a result. For better or worse, the context of the situation made her forgo the superhero approach and so we were treated to the discombobulating sight of Brandish the Cape acting like Carol the Lawyer. Cold anger that kept her voice level and word choices elaborate. I had a sudden thought that Mom would have enjoyed having a verbal spar or two with Carol, if things worked out differently in her life. Perhaps, on some other Earth, they had.
Focus, have to focus, make her focus. Taylor is not the subject of this meeting!
"Missus Dallon," I said, swiping my hand across my faceplate to render it see-through, "This doesn't have to be a confrontation. The actions of Arachne – the artist formerly known as Skitter – aren't relevant at this time."
Both of the New Wave capes stared at me as if I just told them Moord Nag was taking Alexandria's place in the Protectorate. Not entirely sure much would actually change… although my interrogation would have likely taken longer. Wait, did I just justify Alexandria's cutting corners on the procedures?!
"Well, they're not," I blustered, trying to shake the image of Moord Nag's possible Protectorate line-up out of my head, "Because there's been debates since the dawn of law enforcement as to what to do about repentant criminals, and I don't think we're going to convince each other in the next few minutes. What matters about her is that since she joined up, the Protectorate stands with her," I paused, "I stand with her."
As an actual response, Carol narrowed her eyes at me. "The way you said that… it's personal for you, isn't it? Girlfriend? Boyfriend?"
I guess she's pretty good in a courtroom, even if she's terrible at being a mother (or a team leader, with Exhibit A still sniffling next to her). But nobody gets away with calling Taylor Hebert a boy.
"She's my cousin, yes." I nodded, before turning to Crystal, reaching out to lay a hand on one of hers that lay across the table, "And for what it's worth, Crystal, I'm sorry about scaring you. I'm… I've had a terrible experience with the PRT's PR before, and this time I have no way to avoid becoming a public spectacle, so feel free to have a laugh at my expense once it spreads." I explained, trying not to trip over the words as they spilled out of me, "But none of that was your fault. I'm so, so sorry, I wish I could do more than just apologize, but my powers are mostly good for hurting people…" I trailed off, watching her face change. She… sort of stepped out of the gloom, if only for a moment.
"You can still use them for good, can't you?" she asked, her voice a shadow of the shadow that it was in the lobby. It made me feel even more like shit, because the girl seriously did not need any more crap piled on her after losing both her parents and her legal guardian trying to force her into a needless crusade. I nodded slowly, making sure to maintain eye contact with her the entire time.
"I do my best with them," I said honestly. "I don't always get it right, but I try."
"I'm… I'm gonna be okay, I think. T-thank you for explaining your side of things. Aunt Carol?"
She turned to her aunt and nodded weakly, probably indicating she was ready to go. Even with the implied confirmation that she accepted my apology, however, I still felt iffy about the whole situation. Apparently, so did Carol.
"This doesn't change anything, Emissary," Brandish spoke up again, "Stay the hell away from my family if you know what's good for you," she added, before standing up, pushing her chair back. It caught on a rough patch of vinyl flooring - if memory served, that came to be when Assault and Dauntless tried to settle a bet involving Molotovs, except this time they didn't have Weaver with a fire extinguisher in hand available to stop them in time. She pushed it harder, and it still refused to budge. Huffing out, she lifted the chair and set it back by hand before turning to me again and continuing as if she hadn't been cruelly interrupted by uneven flooring. "Or you and your cousin will find yourselves on Panacea's blacklist in short order. Is that clear?"
"Brandish, this is–" Miss Militia protested, but was quickly rebuffed.
"–the only leverage New Wave has, I'm well aware," Carol interjected before Hannah's protest could fully form, her voice now more tired than angry. I suddenly realized that while I was focused on the children of the Dallon-Pelham clan, their matriarch was running herself ragged just as much as them, and this gesture of asserting herself as one team leader to another was important on a level well above me bringing her niece to tears by accident. "So, please, don't make me enforce that."
I had to… do something. Let her know she wasn't alone in this, that there was no need to antagonize the Protectorate and PRT because of me, not with the city knee-deep in murky water and grim prospects on the peace being upheld for much longer. Except most anything I could say here would be taken with a spoon of salt, and I've already had the experience of antagonizing my own Brandish so I didn't care for a potential re-enactment, especially one that would lock me out of talking to this Amy in private.
"Brandish… Carol," I ventured, making her stop dead in her tracks halfway to the door. She turned on her heels, slowly, then measured me with a baleful glare. Crystal took the opportunity to stand behind her, out of the possible impact site. "Please… don't," I began, trying to find the words, "I get that you might not like us right now. I understand that I'm, well, I'm not someone you can really like at all, and I get why." I gulped, "But don't take it out on us–" I gestured both to Militia and the walls, indicating the rest of the PRT, "–because of my cousin and I." I slumped down, "You don't like us, but the city needs us. All of us. You can understand that, right?"
I paused, hoping that Carol would accept the Peace Offering. Better to accept the PRT as-is than to reject it for the sake of spiting the two parahumans that she didn't like, right? Particularly in the wake of an Endbringer attack?
God, I hope that was how she sees it.
"When you put it that way, then yes, I can," she sighed, "Victoria said good things about you, but you're yet to convince me, and whatever kind of Ward–" she paused, until Hannah reminded her 'Arachne?" in a light whisper, "–Arachne will turn out to be, I'm going to keep an eye on her as well. No offense."
"None taken," I replied, still feeling uneasy about how this turned out. "Crystal? Good luck out there!"
The older girl waved weakly before her aunt closed the door after them. I turned to Miss Militia.
"I'm sorry, ma'am, I just–"
"Forget it, this could have gone a lot worse," she interrupted me, dismissing some of my concerns in favor of others. She looked like she badly needed a good night's sleep, but I was sure she hadn't gotten one in years. Why would she? With a power that allows you to go completely without it, sleep can easily be seen as a waste of time, time that could be spent more productively on other things.
Perhaps whatever her concussion did jolted her Corona or Gemma? Wasn't there a documented case of– NOT NOW!
"It does corroborate the report we received from Glory Girl, however," I noted, trying to hold back from asking her directly. If my guess was correct, it would maybe be okay to ask, but if I was off by a mile, I'd just be rude to another heroine for no good reason. Not a good habit to get into. "She's worn out, and it shows. How long until–"
"Don't even go there," Hannah said, cracking her neck as she finally got up from her chair. "You're on Taylor duty until the end of the day, correct?"
"Yes, ma'am," I nodded, pointedly ignoring the term 'Taylor Duty', "Console slot now, followed by a visit to the detention center. The rest of the day is lab time, although for her whenever she's in range is lab time," I offered her a smile, however forced it may have looked, a Daniel Hebert #3 ('A step towards unity') "The testing people said she doesn't seem to have any limit on her multitasking so long as she has enough insects to actually carry out her orders available."
"I've been meaning to ask, any word on why they haven't provided the ratings for her yet?" she asked, retying her bandanna. Once she was sure it would hold in place, we stepped out into the empty hallway.
"Doctor Mendez said something about trying not to think of her in terms of a threat," I shrugged, darkening my visor, "But if you ask me, it's because she and Doctor Pharkas can't make up their minds whether Master or Shaker gets the seven while the other gets the four. At least they're unanimous on Tinker 2."
------
"And I'm telling you, the whole purpose of this thing is to experience the logic and procedure of the ops side without being exposed to danger!"
The argument went around in circles as Taylor and I waited for the boys to come back from patrol. Their fight with the Empire went badly, as Rune and Cricket managed to make off with a few cratefuls of medical supplies from an aid distribution center. Overall, this week seemed to be largely going in favor of the Empire, with them getting increasingly more brazen about the extent to which they poked and prodded the Protectorate-guarded areas and got away with it. At least they helped keep the Merchants from expanding their drug trade with most of the Empire's known narcotics labs demolished by Leviathan's efforts.
"But we're not going to be doing it when we move to the Protectorate?" Taylor repeated stubbornly. I clinked my mug of tea against hers and we both paused to take a drink. The tea was bitter, but some unknown bureaucrat stocked tons of it in the building's storerooms and it had nowhere else to go. "Someone somewhere must have been compiling a temporary list of 'busywork for the Wards' tasks and made it official policy by accident?"
"It's not entirely busywork," I repeated myself, "If it gets you to practice the coordination between the PRT and capes, lets you see more action than the restrictions would normally allow and puts Clockblocker's 24/7 Bad Pun Radio in your ear!"
I couldn't help but laugh at the pained expression she made. "Are you sure we're related? His name is his least unfunny pun, and that's saying a lot."
"I didn't say it's a pleasant experience, but that's also training," I said in a lecturing tone, barely resisting the urge to grin like Sarah again. I wasn't blind to the fact that Taylor became more guarded every time she saw me using a borrowed smile, and of these her villainous best friend always hurt her the most. "Being able to keep a Straight Face under pressures, both good and bad, is a valuable resource."
"Well, then yours still needs work," she stated flatly, turning her swivel chair back to the Console for a moment. "Kid Win, be careful flying in that area, we have a report about downed power lines there. Try not to get tangled up and/or electrocuted."
"Roger that, Console. Will do, gaining altitude," came Chris's slightly crackly voice from the speakers.
Taylor let go of the transmit button and returned her atten– no, that's not how she's wired. Not even like Weaver. Every bug is her eyes and ears. If she's not alone, she's not unarmed, if she's in the dark, she's not blind, if she's lost, she's done it on purpose. In any case, she turned back to face me.
"What do you mean by 'needs work'?" I asked when it became clear she wasn't sharing it on her own.
She scoffed at her tea, making the steam wafting above it whorl in a pretty pattern. "Aegis. It's clear you like him, but… it's like part of you still hopes he'll get the hint that even though you gave him his promise back, he'll ask you out."
"Oh really," I said dryly, my expression carefully blank, "So you think you can see into my mind? That you know every little detail about me?"
She looked at me over her glasses, suddenly serious, so very much like Mom when she was about to dispense an Important Fact of Life that it physically hurt. And suddenly I realize why Dad may have been getting distant from us after she died. Huh, I guess this is why Taylor hates me using borrowed smiles, too. Whoops.
"But I can see into your mind, Mighty Owl," she said ominously, reaching out to place her outstretched fingertips onto the crown of my head, "For I am the Mistress of Insects, and your mind is mine to command!"
I blinked owlishly at that. Perhaps her earlier irritation at the idea of Clockblocker was merely displeasure with a competitor? "Mighty Owl? And owls aren't insects!"
"Yep. Calling you Ems may be funny for the sake of watching you squirm, but not when it makes my own skin crawl," she admitted, "So since we both were Little Owls once, you shall henceforth be Mighty Owl, and I shall be Smarty Owl."
I snorted a laugh at her, "More like Snooty Owl, if I say–"
Voices in the Commons made me pause, then turn around in confusion. There was no mask-up alarm. Intruders?!
"Where is everybody?" came the familiar warmth of Carlos's voice, outlined in a faint buzzing sound I was used to associating with Weaver's presence. I glared at Taylor, but she only took a smug sip from her mug, perfectly channeling Sarah in that moment herself.
"Yes, I think I figured out how to do noise canceling so long as the target isn't paying attention to the background noise, why do you ask?" she said innocently as a moth brushed against my nose. I refused to flinch on sheer principle, then kicked myself away from her, reveling in the way she struggled to keep her tea inside her mug following the jolt as her swivel chair jerked aside. In the meantime, I rode my own chair out into the Commons to greet the boys.
"We're in here, what took–" I began, but then stalled out as I took in the sight of Carlos taking his helmet off. He had helmet hair, but I didn't care much for that. "Is that what you call 'a grazing hit'?" I hissed, abandoning my ride to take the two steps necessary to grab his helmet out of his hands.
"I'll, uh, I'll be in my room? Writing my report?" Chris offered to no-one in particular, although I thought I heard Taylor mutter something from her post at the Console. That rang bells in my head for some reason, but I barely paid attention as the Tinker sailed past me on his hoverboard, riding it like a surfer that was catching some sun.
"Come on, you know I'll heal," Carlos protested as I studied the yellow-black bruises across his cheekbone, spread out across his neck and half a black eye. The eyeball itself, even if it was initially damaged, looked intact, and even the bruising looked a few days old in normal people terms. Which meant it was a terrible mess during the fight, but he didn't report it!
"I also know that you need to stop pushing yourself as if you don't have any limits," I hissed before catching myself. Thankfully, so did he, and I was certain Chris was out of earshot.
"Rose… Taylor… Listen to me," Carlos whispered, putting a hand on my shoulder. I didn't feel the squeeze through my armor, having not dressed down after the morning's functions, but the weight of it was comforting by itself, "You can't do this every time I go out on patrol. I've done this dozens of times before, and knew full well I wasn't in any danger." He spoke in a clipped way, as if holding some emotion back, but I had trouble figuring out what it was based on his words alone, the whisper killing half the inflections at the outset. "Look, the paint isn't even scratched." He tapped the helmet I held in my hands and I looked down. It looked back at me with its empty eye-holes, bringing back unpleasant memories of me holding one just like this – or maybe the exact same one – except cracked and spattered with blood.
I looked back up to him, then froze, wide-eyed, as I realized me moving my head resulted in me getting someone's hand in my hair for the second time in the past ten minutes. Except this time it wasn't Taylor.
Was he trying to pat my head? Brush my hair? Drop something in– stop that, Carlos would never do that to me or anyone else for that matter, besides I can feel the hand is empty.
"Ah, screw it," I exhaled, not letting go of his eyes with mine, "I know I promised I wouldn't do it, but this week has… made me rethink some things," I paused, biting my lip, then plodded on, "Carlos Santiago. Our patrol schedules share a break this coming Tuesday. Will you go on a date with me?"
Noise cancelling had nothing on the knowledge that Taylor could apparently squee through her swarm.
------
[Taylor]
My outfit as Arachne was still incomplete, but at least it looked less kitbashed than Rose's temporary solution for having her entire Emissary outfit stuck in the repair shop.
I already had my borrowed spiders laying down the prep work for what would become my actual hero outfit and also for a spare bodysuit for my double to wear. However, the real stuff would come after I was done experimenting with the web-strengthening methods Chris suggested I look up. My main concern with the whole 'feed spiders water laced with X, then their webs will be exty times stronger' method was whether it would make them less flexible and/or more rigid and brittle, which could pose serious issues for their use in costume-making.
The elevator doors interleaved open, letting us out onto the detention level. Rose was in most of her regalia, clearly enjoying being able to wear her own armor again, and together we must have looked like quite the pair, faceless masks and visible holsters and all. Sure, mine only held a standard-issue stun gun, not the Lightning Rod of God that my double used, but given that it was supposed to be a holdout weapon, I wasn't even certain I'd be using it any time soon. I still had my batons and my swarm, after all. And that was before I got into how weird it felt against my thigh when I walked, having gone for a hip holster, tacticool-style. Only way to tell if I could make the Miss Militia approach work would be with practice, which I was scheduled to start on Monday.
"Give me a moment, alright?" Rose said suddenly, half-turning to me in front of the door to the corridor with the cells. There were several of them radiating out from the central axis of the elevator shaft, still underground like the Wards base, but not intended for use as a shelter. Despite the evacuation on Sunday, the place looked like it hadn't taken any water damage whatsoever. Perhaps the pressure doors separating each of the 'spokes' held well enough for keeping things out just as holding them in?
I nodded to her, then threw a glance at the trooper on duty behind the Tinkertech armored glass. Its bluish sheen was the main giveaway - the stuff was pretty expensive, but in a city where villains attempting to break out Birdcage-bound comrades wasn't so much expected as much as it was a given, it made sense to provide adequate protection to the people at ground zero. My scouting parties consisting of cockroaches and fruitflies (why does this place have so damn many fruitflies?!) informed me that he wasn't the only Trooper on guard, just the only visible one. In that regard, the extra protection made sense - he'd be drawing fire from the hypothetical attackers while his buddies would flank them.
Not that it helped curb the breakout statistics any if the villains still broke the prison transports up to get at their imprisoned allies.
"Ma'am?" he asked politely. He still wore the faceless helmet all Troopers did, but something in his posture told me he was pretty scrawny under all that high-tech chainmail. Two beats later I realized I must have looked like I'd been staring as I maneuvered the flies that followed Rose down the corridor into a better viewing and listening position, while my other fliers took count of the four Troopers watching the screens behind a concealed door, while my other fliers checked and rechecked the people milling about the building's ground floor entrance watching the ongoing repairs to the façade, while my spiders upstairs wove another layer of the mockup for the new mask that would be Arachne's instead of the repainted Skitter one I was wearing now.
Of course, the real reason for my distraction waited in the glass-walled cell that Rose just stopped in front of. The only occupied cell in the block, since for obvious reasons Alabaster was being held in a different spoke, still waiting for a transport to a more permanent holding facility or for his comrades to break him out. With the city being what it was, neither was likely to occur for at least another week. A lot less could be said for the one we were here for. Shadow Stalker. Sophia Hess.
The two mercs Rose and I caught a few days earlier were upstairs, one in the medbay (thank god I thought to pack epipens), the other under questioning. Other than their names and reputations are mercenaries, the PRT hadn't been able to figure anything out, but the supposition that they were Coil's was pretty obvious.
"Sorry sir, I wasn't looking at you, specifically," I hurried to explain, feeling flushed and glad the Trooper couldn't see my face, "I couldn't get a good scan of this level before, so I got a little caught up in mapping it out."
My scouts registered the click-clack of Rose unclasping and removing her helmet, the rustling of fabric as Sophia turned around to face her, while I positioned my fruitflies and spiders and one errant moth on the both of them. After all, if I couldn't bring in enough of a swarm to watch them, I could at least get a sense for what they were doing with their bodies. I still focused on getting some proper flies and mosquitoes through the newly-discovered air vents. There was at least one security gap I'd be reporting to Miss Militia later today, that much was certain.
"Is this something I will have to report?" the Trooper asked warily, his hand hovering in the general direction of one of several landline phones on the console in front of him.
"What? Oh, no, not really. It's in my file: I'm running insects across everything I can reach, then reporting back to Miss Militia on possible access points," I explained hastily, "Lets me be aware of potential threats in case normal warning systems fail, lets me warn the higher-ups if there are ways for someone like Fog to slither in. It should be in the system under the Deputy Director's orders?"
I felt the need to be specific because the talking-to I received from Deputy Director Renick regarding my display from my introduction to the Wards was still reverberating in my skull. It was incredible how he managed far more with a chastising tone than Director Piggot could with a threatening one, but in the end he agreed that my habit of not walking into a place I haven't scanned with my bugs beforehand could be used as an additional layer of defense for the PRT HQ, especially if I was confined to it for the time being whenever I was on duty.
With a sigh, I added, "It also keeps me occupied whenever I have nothing better to do as well." With that, I turned away from him (name tag says Jeong, it must be difficult being Korean and PRT in the ABB's home town) and focused my attention on Rose. And Sophia too, if only out of necessity.
"Oh, look who it is. Finally found me, huh?" Sophia quipped, her anger translating both into her voice and the minute shudder of anger that she suppressed for the time being. The way Rose stiffened told me that it didn't go unnoticed. "Or maybe remembered me is more like it?"
"Tag, you're it," Rose replied evenly, tapping the glass separating them lightly enough to not make a sound with her gloved hand. "I'd have been down here yesterday, but between New Wave falling apart and dealing with the aftermath of me bringing Skitter in, I barely had the time to sleep last night."
I frowned. She's… making excuses? What is she– wait, did Sophia just laugh or was that a cough?
"Ha! You finally arrested that bug bitch?"
I clenched my fists. I knew that it was her dislike of the Undersiders talking, because she had no way to connect Skitter the Undersider to Taylor the Punching Bag, but it still grated. Unfortunately, distracting myself from getting angry just gave me too much information on something moving swiftly into my area of effect. Or it could be considered fortunate, given what I was sensing.
"Trooper Jeong?" I spoke up suddenly, making the man's head snap up sharply, "Can you reach the dispatch console from here? There's a van approaching this location with armed people inside and I doubt they're friendly."
"Direction?" the man asked, punching keys on his console and reaching for one of the landlines.
"West, down King's Street, I think?" I replied, making a tally of the van's contents. "Six men in the back, all with rifles of some sort, at least one Tinkertech. One more in front with the driver, that one only has a sidearm."
As Jeong related what I just said into the phone, elsewhere in the building I felt the bug I marked Dauntless with jerk upwards sharply, then zoom down what I thought was a hallway. As the guard detail in the lobby tensed, I turned my attention back to the prison cell, leaving it for the adults to deal with while beginning to gather a swarm in case they couldn't.
"Arrested? I believe you were there when I said I was recruiting her," came the reply to Sophia's question, still odd to hear in my voice, with just a hint of smugness to mark that it wasn't me speaking. Yeah, the bank robber is above you on the totem pole now, Shadow Stalker. I hope it grates.
"And so what, that's supposed to make me feel better about you sticking me in here?"
Sophia was indignant, and I took the way Rose gently prodded one of the beetles perched on her hip to be my cue. "No, it's supposed to clue you in that maybe there was some sort of mistake you made along the way that she hadn't."
The door swung open before me, but Rose didn't turn her head. Neither did Sophia, actually. The silent staring match continued unabated until I was standing next to the other me, looking at my former tormentor through the armored glass rather than the eyes of my bugs. Now, however, I could use them freely, setting a few members of the swarm I kept parked in my hair to circle around my head in an imitation of an Egyptian halo again.
"The fuck? You're letting her see my face?" Sophia sputtered, but Rose only smirked that Aisha-like smile again.
"Knowing your identity was part of the payment for my recruitment, Hess," I hissed back, pulling my mask off. By the time I had my glasses back on, Sophia was scowling at me full bore.
"Hebert," she hissed before going on the offensive, "What is this, you're trying to ride your cousin's coat-tails out of jail and onto the Wards roster?"
"And why the hell not?" I shrugged, "Worked out wonderfully for you after Emma's dad vouched for you, didn't it? You even got to have the school get paid to cover for you."
"Right," she snorted, "As if without that there would be anyone–"
"ENOUGH," Rose bellowed, making us both (eugh, I just included myself in an 'us' with Sophia) look at her in surprise, "Whether you like it or not, Sophia, Taylor is a Ward now, and I wanted you both to know what exactly you are in for."
With the attention shifted away from me, I refocused on finding the beetle that was on Dauntless. It wasn't anywhere in my sense area, so I changed targets, opting for the mosquitoes keeping track of the troopers from the lobby. One of them, a tall one whose gender I couldn't tell in the armor, was down, bleeding profusely, two more were barely upright while the rest held defensive positions, exchanging fire with the men from the van. A quick visual scan from the slowly massing swarm (why had I exterminated so many bugs in that goodwill effort? Oh right, it was mostly cockroaches, they wouldn't help much here) told me Dauntless was zooming around using his Mover boots, so the beetle I marked him with must have simply died in the fighting. Just then, the butterfly I managed to land on his back to keep track of him again got squashed because Dauntless was hurled aside by a second van, as disreputable-looking as the first, and as rich in insect life for me to co-opt.
I formed a swarm clone in full view of Jeong, trying to remember how I had used the chittering and buzzing of the chitinous mass to emulate speech before. "Dauntless is down," I told him, "Second van hit him. When is Battery due to get back from her patrol area?"
"Seven minutes," he replied, completely collected. "Only other capes currently on the premises are you two and Vista on Wards Console."
"Call her down, we're going out there before the wounded bleed out," I buzzed at him, then dissipated the clone.
While this was going on, the exchange in front of my actual face continued.
"And what's that? So I don't scare your weakling cousin away?" Sophia asked, surprisingly civilly as far as I was concerned. Perhaps, she did make allowances for Rose? How long had they known each other? A couple of weeks? Just like with Emma when she…
"So she doesn't decide the Wards are all like you, actually, and you get to live with the responsibility of making someone Trigger." Rose parried, then pressed her advantage before Sophia could recover from her frown, "I was waiting for–"
"There is a fight in front of the lobby," I interrupted, my hand on Rose's shoulder, trying my damndest not to show that being reminded that Sophia had a part in me getting my powers had gotten to me. "Thirteen Empire guys with assorted rifles, Dauntless was handling it until he got run over by the van of their backup. The troopers aren't doing too well because a couple of the guns seem to be Tinkertech, backup is seven minutes out, and Vista, me, and you are the only capes on-site. We need to go now."
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?" she asked, a momentary flash of irritation on her face making me realize it made me look ugly. Uglier. Whatever. We were already moving back out of the corridor with the cells, returning our masks back into place and ignoring Sophia's cries of damnation at our abandoning her.
------
We returned half an hour later, lightly bruised and very proud of ourselves. The men in the vans turned out to be a bunch of Empire footsoldiers that decided to show their new cell leader - Stormtiger, it seemed - that Hookwolf's death meant nothing in the grand scheme of tearing the Merchants apart for fun and profit. The fun lay in the tearing, and the profit in the looting of a drug lab which seemed to confirm the earlier reports that the Empire had lost at least some of their own. It was expectable that with the state of the city being what it was, some of its citizens would turn to various ways of escaping reality, drugs among them. After all, it was the main strategy of dealing with the steadily decreasing economy before Leviathan hit, so why should things change now? With the Empire's own means of production lost to them, a pogrom on the Merchants would be triply beneficial. Or would have been, at least, until we stopped them.
"Sorry about that," I chimed lightly, peeling off my mask once again with one hand while reaching for the armored case I was provided for my glasses with the other, "We had actually important things to do with our time." I waved a hand in the air, having trace fruitflies fly off to leave a trail behind it, almost looking like fairy dust in the artificial light. In fact, I bet I could do it right if I get a few moths large enough. "But now that nobody's dying, we can get back to you."
Sophia's indignant stare merely moved from the bug clone I left to keep watch over her to me as we walked back in, Rose following behind me this time around. I was surprised to discover that as long as I kept my mind focused on a single clone, I could keep it relatively stable longer than I thought possible, or, perhaps it was due to how sparse the bug cloud constituting it was. Then again, I haven't done much with the concept since using them to distract Leviathan. One way or another, the trick seemed to wipe away the last doubts Sophia may have harbored that I was who we said I was and not some idiot using the real Skitter in a ploy to play her.
"So if you Triggered in that locker and not later, why did it take so long?" she asked outright, confirming my conclusions. "January to what, April? When you robbed that bank? Three and a half months is a heckuva long prep time."
"Did you go out the day after you got your powers?" I asked in lieu of an answer. The glare I got in response was louder than any words.
"Then why didn't you–" she began, then thought better of it, growling and waving me off and turning to Rose. "What's the point of this? I'm still locked up, and if you thought showing me that your weakling cousin has powers now would change anything, then you thought wrong."
"I want to see what kind of person you are, Sophia," Rose said earnestly. Now it was her turn to emulate our mother's lecturing tone, so much like the time we argued back and forth on whether Boromir could be considered a true hero or not (I won the argument, having proven that he could and– oh. OH!). "When you can't run away, hide behind numbers, adults or a weapon."
"Yeah, well you're looking good yourself, talking from outside the cage you put me in, Rose," Sophia retorted, bringing my brain to a screeching halt as I realized the only person I've ever heard her address by their first name to their face without insulting them was Emma. I wonder, if we tell her Rose's secret, will she Trigger again? No, shit, bad Taylor, that is a fucked up thing to wish on anyone.
"To be fair, you kinda deserve it?" Rose offered with a slight wince and a so-so hand waggle to make the emotion more specific. "I mean, not only did you break the terms of your probation pretty badly, you also colluded with your handler to cover it up, used your cape identity to harass Taylor on top of what your civilian one was already doing…"
"...the flute," I suggested darkly. Sophia's face didn't change a bit, not even a hint of recognition.
"Good point," Rose continued, her tone equally unchanged, as if she was completely divorced from our shared history in that moment. Of course, having gotten to know her in my natural habitat, I already knew what a load of bullshit her perceived stoicism was - as soon as nobody was looking, she'd probably crash again. Sure, I did something like that with my swarm, but she didn't have a thingy in her brain helping her offload that stuff into 7.3E6 insects, give or take an order of magnitude. "Let's add theft and destruction of personal property to the list. All of the above would be enough to get you jailed as-is just by stripping your Ward status away, but combined with the actual shit you pulled when breaking said probation, we can probably get you tried as an adult. Send you to grown-up prison, let the big bad predator have her–"
My hand on her shoulder stopped the tirade. "Step back from the Abyss, will you, Nietzsche?" She nodded appreciatively and jerked her chin at Sophia.
"My point was, the city's short on heroes, people to help keep the peace," she explained, "There's some pushback to let you out, shackled in some way so the PRT can keep track of you, properly this time, but without neutering your power in a way that gets you killed. Compliance brings leniency, the whole Snake Plissken treatment."
I didn't know who that was, but the way Sophia's gaze shifted, she seemed to get the reference. Is half a year really long enough to stop being the same person? Or are there other differences we simply haven't realized yet?
"The obvious problem is, they trust you about as far as I can throw you," I took over, interrupting Sophia just as she was about to open her mouth. "Which is quite a lot more than I would ever trust someone who only became a hero to maul people without consequences."
"Are you two done?" she sneered in response, burying her hands in her pockets. "Gawd, it's like I've got three Gallants in here preaching at me," she drawled, but then seemingly caught herself, freeing one hand to wave in a shooing motion, "Yeah, yeah, I know he's dead, but that doesn't stop him from being an example. I didn't do this shit just to beat people up."
"Then why? I know Doctor Yamada will be asking you the same thing come Monday anyway, and Doctor Karpenko probably already has, but it's clear that you saw something in me that you didn't see in her." The way Rose said that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Instinctively, I knew that she was only doing it as part of mirroring Sophia, to get her to talk, but a part of me couldn't help but whisper that Emma must have started small too. "I'm trying to figure out what it was, and what it says about your… continued worth, as a hero."
"I couldn't not be a cape," Sophia said hesitantly after a short pause, eyes still boring into other-me's. "And when the options pretty much are 'sideshow freak' like that doll-girl, 'primped-up skank' like Gory Girl or stooping to the same level as the fucking Nazis…"
"Thus, the vigilante thing. And then what, the violence turned out to be a fun bonus?"
"...I don't know. Maybe. Something pisses you off, you better do something about it, y'know," she paused to shrug, her pocketed hands making the gesture extra exaggerated. "Nazis piss me off. Merchants piss me off. Taylor fucking Hebert pisses me off," she added, finally turning to look at me.
"Because you think I'm weak or because Emma does?" I ventured. It wasn't something Rose told me to push for, but it was something that still bothered me. Whose idea was it to go after me to begin with? Rose's Emma shouldered the blame, but then again, she was also institutionalized, which kind of makes you take any statements that kind of person makes with a spoon of salt. Even if they used to be your alternate universe best friend.
What's more, I had learned the lesson that my other self was evidently still struggling with: not everything in our worlds matched.
"Does it matter?" Sophia shrugged again, "She's my friend, we share a lot of things, opinions on prey included."
"There was a time I could have said the same about her," I replied, refusing to take the bait. "But let me make something clear. You seem to be laboring under the delusion that I did nothing useful with my powers. What did you expect me to do? Go Carrie on you three?"
She just laughed at that, making me curl my upper lip in a decidedly Rachel way. In a way, I felt that she would be living on in me as more than a month's worth of a dysfunctional almost-friendship based on beating the shit out of–
Holy shit.
"Holy shit," I repeated out loud, just for the sensation of a Eureka moment. If this is how Lisa feels all the time, I can understand why she's so smug. "You're like Rachel. Powers fucking with your head make you want to fight all the time!"
Rose blinked at me, then at Sophia. "That actually would make a lot of sense, given what your mother told me yesterday."
That seemed to get a rise out of Sophia, stifling her reaction to being compared to an Undersider. "She was here? And didn't–"
"No, she didn't," Rose repeated, her voice tinged with sadness. "Even after I begged her to."
A distant part of me cheered at the fact that even Sophia's mother no longer wanted to have anything to do with her. A larger part of me fought back the traitorous tears at the thought of a mother being fed up enough to abandon her daughter with such finality. This leniency towards Sophia I could allow Rose, as she probably pleaded with Mrs Hess after making a similar conclusion as I just had.
It seemed like an hour passed until one of us spoke again after that, although the spider watching the digital clock in Trooper Jeong's armored cubicle (I found the chink in its armor, it would be going on the report as well) told me only a couple minutes passed at best.
"I saw someone I could possibly call a friend," Sophia admitted quietly, "Someone who had powers, valued strength, someone–"
"–you thought you could share your ideas with, like you did with Emma?" Rose finished for her. "Was that before or after you two decided to make me a trophy to rub in Taylor's face?" she snapped, seeing Sophia's crestfallen face, "Oh, don't look at me like that, the PRT has people for doing that kind of stuff to phones just as the police and FBI do."
"...it was part of it. You're strong, smart, attractive. Everything–"
"–that I'm not?" I snapped, getting riled up myself. "You thought she'd be like a better me, to replace the me in Emma's mind completely?"
"Something like that, yeah," she shrugged again, resigned this time. Whatever her reasoning, she seemed to understand that after what she just admitted to, there was no way Rose would petition to have her released to patrol again and it looked like it broke something in her.
"You know what the most fucked up thing is about this situation?" my other self said, fiddling with her helmet for some reason. "Knowing what I know now, I can say with certainty that had you not been a bitch to her on day one, Taylor Anne Hebert would have probably become your fiercest friend and kept you from doing half the shit that landed you on probation to begin with."
"...or maybe made it worse," I admitted darkly.
"But instead you, having already had your Trigger event, resolved to push this girl that never did anything to you, push again and again until she had her own," Rose went on, almost absently, as if she wasn't actually airing her own feelings. I knew, going in, that we weren't doing this solely for my own peace of mind, but hearing her speak made me realize that maybe she needed this more than she let on. I had made a sort of peace with just wanting to leave all this shit behind me a while ago, but it took me getting powers to do so. She never got that option, and apparently never getting to talk it out with either Sophia or Emma gnawed at her on some level. I felt oddly pleased that it didn't for me, that I was content to have them be locked away and forgotten as a bad chapter of my life. "So I don't know what exactly happened to you to make you this way, but I do know that you're a waste of a perfectly good set of powers, Sophia Madeleine Hess."
With that, she pulled her helmet on and walked away without a further word, clasping it into place already on the way. I looked at her retreating back and then at Sophia. More for theatricality than anything else, I spared a glance down at the spiders I planted on Sophia to give her a jump scare if she started acting up left her cell and climbed up my legs, then looked back at her face, an expression of dawning disgust upon it. Pulling off my glasses, I stowed them in my back compartment, turning away as well, and pulled my mask on as I walked to the door. Sophia said something that I didn't quite hear, and I didn't care to, but the moths I left behind did anyway.
"Fuck."
------
Saturday morning came as more of an inevitability than a necessity, and my mixed feelings on the subject persisted all the way through our morning showers and breakfast and Dad's departure to help Kurt and Lacey out with their own home repairs. Oh crap, at some point we're going to have to tell them something about Rose. But first she and I have to start talking again.
Last night ended on an argument as I came to realize most of what we did was a well-measured psychological grind-down. Rose used me to do to Sophia in an hour what the Trio did to us for over a year. The only difference was that she used her knowledge of Sophia's private life, prior experiences and whatever training she may have had on the subject to achieve results worthy of an actual Thinker. Just like Tattletale. I scored a vicious hit when I told her it was the kind of thing that I'd seen Lisa do to Panacea at the bank, causing her to step back as if slapped. The following argument only stopped when Angelica started growling at us both, and then stared us down until we stopped.
Yet another comparison of what Rose did to Tattletale sobered me. Lisa was my friend, she was kind and helpful even when she tried to use me in her play against Coil, as Rose surmised. But she was also rather sharp-tongued, pulling no punches in her enmity with Glory Girl and her family, and having seen Crystal Pelham and Victoria Dallon being teary-eyed messes must have displaced something in me. Pretty girls can have fucked up life situations too. They can come from broken homes, like Sophia did. They can have infirm parents, like Victoria did. They can have parents that hate each other, like Missy did. Or they can have no parents, like Flechette, our soon-to-be teammate, did.
Or they can be broken until they turn into monsters, like Emma was.
I looked up from my silent contemplation of clothes Lisa helped me pick out to see my double, my other, my not-twin, my "cousin", my… sister? Sister had a nice ring to it. She stood in the doorway of my room, a constipated look on her face that was very much like the one I had on mine this morning after showering. I occasionally had the same look because of Dad, and I was willing to bet all my black widows that so did Rose. Angelica sat next to her, her best "look what I brought you" face on display.
Before I knew it, Rose and I were hugging each other. "I'm sorry," she gasped, "I'm so so sorry, I shouldn't have, I kept feeling like you would agree with me no matter what because you're me and–"
"–and I'm not you, not all the way," I finished as I squeezed her harder. "I'm sorry too, I mean, yes, you did a shitty thing and you did it to Sophia fucking Hess but it was still shitty…"
I felt my hair in the general vicinity of her face get heavier as it became wet, but ignored it. I tried to pretend the shoulder of the hoodie Rose was wearing was still dry as well. It seemed to be a mutual unspoken agreement.
I gasped, "And I know you needed it, but please don't use me like that again without me knowing." I pulled back from her. "I got enough of that manipulation bullshit back at Winslow."
She winced. "Agreed. I see where you're coming from, Smartie." She leaned back into me, and the two of us just sat there for a moment, before she gave a loud sniff. "So… uh… Shall we put this whole thing behind us?"
"We are already doing the awkward sibling hug thing anyway. Would be just a waste of a hug otherwise?" I proposed.
She nodded again, and we disengaged. I pretended not to notice how she pretended to scratch her nose while surreptitiously rubbing her cheek along the way. "So… ready to do some shopping? I did threaten you with new clothes after all."
I took the obvious out at face value. "Ugh. Do we have to? And… what did you just call me?" I furrowed my brow at her and she laughed, ruffling my hair with the hand she wasn't using to lean against the doorframe.
"What you wanted to be called, T. Heh, it sounds like Smar-T if you say it just right," she went on, making faces and jazz hands at me each time she said my suggestion for a nickname, "Smartee, smartie, ess-mart-eee… Do you feel like a supermarket yet?"
I gave her the flattest look I could muster while the insect life around our home laughed for me. "You realize of course that I can still call you Mitey to justify using my powers on you? Maybe it will work just like it does with craaa-ha-haaaaabs!" The last words came out in a fit of hysterics as my self-control broke down and I spiraled into a laughing fit, snorts and all.
------
Angelica remained where she was, however, her face a perfect expression of utter bafflement at the odd behavior of her two newest pet humans. She still missed her Mistress, but she was now sure these identically-smelling girls would do right by her until Mistress returned. Until then, she would watch over them as she was supposed to.
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