A Darker Path
Part Ninety-Three: Rude Awakening
[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
Relevant Side-Story (Part 1)
Relevant Side-Story (Part 2)
Relevant Side-Story (Part 3)
Relevant Side-Story (Part 4)
Relevant Side-Story (Part 5)
Glory Girl
Atropos hadn't been kidding.
It was
freezing.
Vicky wasn't sure what time it was, except for 'somewhere near midnight'; heck, she wasn't even sure what
time zone they were in. All she knew was that the only light was from the moon—nearly full, thank God, and almost directly overhead—and the stars.
There were a
lot of stars.
Fortunately, her force field cut the effect of the wind somewhat as they followed a rough path up a hill. There were no trees nearby capable of doing it for her; those few she could make out in the moonlight had been whittled down to stubs by what she suspected was Sleeper's power. Her shiver had nothing to do with the cold. She had faith in her force field, but it could stop an attack
once, as Atropos had so handily demonstrated not all that long ago.
Which reminded her of a question she'd been wondering about in the privacy of her mind.
Well, no time like the present. "Hey, Atropos, just out of curiosity, how many other people have you had to pull up for doing remarkably stupid shit, and was anyone else as bad as me?"
Atropos chuckled. "Oh, honey. You aren't even in the top ten."
"What?" It was simultaneously deflating and encouraging.
I'm not actually the biggest idiot in the city!
"Hah, yeah," Miss Medic piped up from beside Tenebrae. "Goddess has to be up there."
"She definitely was," agreed Atropos. "Also, Janice Templeton and Paul King."
There was a pause, during which Vicky tried to remember if she'd ever heard those names before, because they seemed to ring a bell. Just as she was concluding that she'd been mistaken, Amy spoke up. "They were in the hospital, right? Traumatic amputation and blinding?"
"That's them," agreed Atropos. "She was actively trying to divert funds from the Betterment Committee stimulus payments, and he was attempting to sabotage the drug rehab program so he could pull some of that cash into his own pockets. They were both warned, but chose not to listen. Danny Hebert asked me not to kill them, so instead I chopped off their right hands and gouged their eyes out. Haven't had a problem since."
"I can't imagine why not." Tenebrae's tone was remarkably dry.
Miss Medic snapped her fingers. "Wait, that was back in January, right? Maybe a week after I got into town. I was still finding my feet then."
Part of Vicky's mind wanted to protest that the casual maiming of two people should not be relegated to such banal conversation, but she firmly told it that she didn't want her ass kicked
again, and as Atropos had just said, she could've done much, much worse to them (and to be fair, it had been anything but 'casual'). Also … "Well, okay, yeah, trying to scam money out of the Betterment Committee is about the stupidest idea I've heard yet, and I've heard some good ones."
"They were only mid-level stupid." Atropos' tone sounded like she was reminiscing now. "Surely you remember the Scrapyard plot?"
"Oh. Oh, shit." Vicky remembered it, alright. While she was now aware that Atropos was Taylor Hebert, she hadn't really made that last connection. "When they kidnapped the Hebert girl for ransom? Oh, man. How fucking stupid do you have to be?"
"Really, really stupid." Amy snorted. "Actually, wasn't there a thing when you were dealing with the Gary quarantine area, and a bunch of kid villains attacked you?"
"Bambina, Starlet and August Prince, yeah." Atropos sounded like she was rolling her eyes. "I wasn't even really counting them. Kids do idiotic things all the time, with or without powers."
Tenebrae chuckled, his voice deep and rich. "I can't help wondering what the reaction would be if you went back in time and told someone, say this time last year, what the city was like now. What sort of evidence would you have to bring along to make them believe you?"
"Never happen." As a Brockton Bay native, Vicky considered herself an authority on the subject. "It wouldn't matter what evidence you had, they just wouldn't accept it. The idea would be too far out of their wheelhouse to even get their heads around."
"Mmm." Amy sounded doubtful. "Some of it's
kind of believable, with a bit of a run-up."
"Duck season," Vicky said flatly.
"Okay, yeah, good point."
By now they were walking along the crest of the hill, which was doing exactly nothing to reduce the local wind-chill effect. Vicky privately made a date with the tub, involving lots of hot water and bubble-bath. Atropos lifted her arm, vaguely visible because it was darker than everything else, and pointed.
A few hundred yards away, Vicky saw, was a small farmhouse; more importantly, light was shining out through the window. Light, she hoped, equalled warmth. This was important, because she was well on the way to becoming a spandex-clad iceblock.
"As you've probably figured out," Atropos informed them, "he's in there. Now, we're going to walk up all nice and peaceful and knock on the door. Specific things to note: one, do
not touch any pieces of paper that might be lying around the place. Two, Vicky, this is when we need your 'love me' aura up and running. He's a bit twitchy, and if he's startled, it might go very badly for either him or us."
"Um …" The last thing Vicky wanted to do was say no to Atropos, but she also didn't want to lie. "I can't actually do that. Set my aura to 'friendly', I mean. It's dependent on what people think of me."
Atropos turned until she was looking directly at Vicky. "Yes," she said. "
You can." In a seemingly casual motion, she slapped Vicky on the shoulder. "It's amazing what you can do when you really try."
What the hell was that? Just for a moment, Atropos' tone had given her the impression that something was zipping around inside her brain, looking for the person in charge, because if things didn't start happening soon, shit was going to get
real. The sensation went away, but the memory lingered.
"Okay, wow." Miss Medic shook her head. "How did you manage all those overtones and undertones?"
"Same way I do everything else," Atropos said blithely. "With panache and style. And sometimes, the power of friendship." She started down the hill toward the farmhouse. "Remember, everyone, just play it calm. Vicky, aura."
Vicky took a deep breath of the freezing air and released her aura, concentrating on
friendly … friendly … friendly …
To her surprise, it was somewhat easier than she'd expected.
<><>
Aisha
When the key turned in the front door, Aisha stashed her textbook under a cushion (couldn't let people think she was getting all nerdy and uncool) before she popped up off the sofa. The door opened to reveal Theo in the company of Mrs Brown, though for some reason Brian and Riley weren't there. "Heyyy," she said happily. "How's my kickass brother-from-another-mother?"
"Hi, Aisha." Theo dropped his backpack beside the door and returned her hug; she wasn't really a huggy person, but Riley had started it, and he
was a pretty good hugger. "I'm doing okay, how was your day?" He turned to Mrs Brown, who was standing at the doorway watching the interplay. "Oh, sorry, did you want to come in and look around?"
Mrs Brown smiled maternally. "That's fine, Theo. It all looks good from here. You're okay here, Aisha? No problems?"
Aisha figured it was safe to roll her eyes. "What, like being kidnapped by a cape with delusions of adequacy from another dimension? Nah, nothing like that. I only got home a little while ago myself."
"Yes, well, I had trouble believing it myself when I first heard about it. I'll see you on the next inspection." She gave them each a nod, then pulled the door shut as she stepped back out of the doorway.
Aisha took the time to secure the lock—they were a lot more careful about that since the Goddess incident, especially given that Theo was still under potential risk from the remnants of the Empire Eighty-Eight—then turned to him. "So, where's Bri and Ri? The Atropos thing? Did you see her? Did she say something to you?"
Theo shook his head, looking a bit distracted. "No, sorry. They went up to the Director's office to wait for her there, and I got off duty shortly after that and got a lift home with Mrs Brown."
"Then what's biting you on the ass, big guy?" Aisha lifted her hand and rapped him gently on the forehead. "Something's fucking with your head, and if it's not Atropos laying down the law, I need to know what it is so I can hunt it down and kick
its ass."
"It's, ah …" Theo grimaced. "Come on, I need to do something." He led the way into the kitchenette, and turned on the faucets over the sink until they were both running strongly. Then he leaned closer to her and said quietly, "Do you think they're listening in on us, here?"
She looked at the running water and then at him, the penny finally dropping. "Surveillance? Geez, I dunno. They'd have to break a
ton of laws to do it." While she didn't
think they'd go that far, this
was the PRT. They'd been known to bend a few laws before, if some of the comments on PHO were to be believed. "What's this about, anyway?"
"Riley." He took a deep breath. "I, um, I was feeling a bit down, so she wanted to cheer me up. She told me about where she really came from, and how she ended up with you guys." After an expectant pause, where Aisha said nothing, he took the plunge. "Right after Atropos killed off the Nine and took Bonesaw away. And just a little while later, the Brockton Bay PRT got a Ward with the exact same powerset, only with a different name, face and personality."
Aisha nodded, satisfied that he wasn't just fishing. "Yeah, that's what happened. I mean, you
know her. She's
Riley. Miss Medic isn't Bonesaw."
"No, that's true. She isn't." Theo heaved a massive sigh. "But when she finished telling me all about that, she said she
admired me, for not breaking under Max the same way she broke under Jack. Riley told me that.
Our Riley. How am I supposed to deal with that?"
She gave him a stern look. "Well, first off, I hope you're not going to be treating her any differently, now that you know. When Atropos kills someone, they stay dead, and that includes Bonesaw. Yeah?"
He nodded. "Well, yeah. She's still Riley. It's more the whole thing about someone who's been through what she has admiring someone like me. I'm not … I mean, why admire
me? Does she even know how much I admire
her, for going through all that and still being strong? Especially now I know what she
really went through?"
"She knows you think a lot of her, sure." Aisha tilted her head. "Though it's okay for her to admire you at the same time. It's not a one-way street, even though I bet your shit of a dad tried hard to make sure all the admiration went to him, and none to anyone else."
His chuckle was reluctant but sounded genuine. "Yeah. That's about as good a descriptor of the man as anything else. He lived for the kudos."
"Given that he named himself after an emperor, I have no idea why you might think that." She snorted and rolled her eyes, then got serious again. "But if Riley saw something worth admiring in you—and to be honest, she's not wrong—then it's not your job to tell her it's not there. It's your job to live up to it." She reached out and turned off the streams of water running down the sink. "I think that's enough testing of the water pressure, don't you?"
"Yeah, true." He leaned on the bench and shook his head. "I just don't feel like I've … well, like I've earned it, you know? Like I'm stealing someone else's glory."
"That's not what's happening here." Aisha wasn't sure how to break through his negativity, or even if it was possible. Then she had an idea. "But you know what? Let's leave this alone for the moment. I've got something a lot better in mind. Back in a sec. Meet me in the living room."
<><>
Paladin
Theo watched her hustle away toward her bedroom and frowned.
What's she up to now? He knew by now that asking her would help very little, so he headed around into the living room, pausing to grab a cookie from the fridge. Plonking himself down on the sofa, he settled back to see what Aisha had planned.
Sure enough, she came out just a few moments later, holding up a brightly wrapped package, about the size of a paperback book. "So, you know how you and Ri got kidnapped by Goddess, yeah?"
"As if I could forget." He eyed the package. It had been inexpertly but enthusiastically wrapped, which gave him a fairly good idea who had done the deed.
She grinned, evidently aware of his interest, and waved it around just outside his reach. "So me and Bri were going to buy you welcome-to-the-apartment presents, and Riley had already told us what she wanted to get you. But when we came back and found the door kicked in and you guys gone, we kind of forgot about the presents in the fuss. Since then, we've been waiting for the right time, but screw it. Here's mine. The others can give you theirs when they get back."
"Wow." He carefully chose to not mention how Riley had spilled the beans.
I thought they'd forgotten. Accepting the present, he knew immediately that it wasn't a book, from how light it was. So he tore off the wrapping, being as neat as he could, getting some tiny measure of revenge on Aisha for her teasing by taking his time while she jiggled on her toes. "Thank you. I mean it."
"Yeah, yeah, you're welcome. Now come on, open it up. I wanna see what you think of it."
He
was getting more curious by the second, so he hurried himself a little more, eventually exposing a game disc case. As he turned it around to look at the front, he couldn't help laughing out loud from sheer disbelief. "Wait, you actually got me
Wolfenstein?"
She bounced on her toes again, grinning broadly. "It'll totally play in our setup, too."
Theo involuntarily looked over at the game console, nestled under the TV. They didn't break out the controllers all that often, but it was fun when they did. "You got me a game about shooting the crap out of Nazis. Holy shit."
"Yup. Wanna have a game?"
His grin had to be as broad as hers. "Oh, hell
yes."
And if he mentally assigned some of the bad guys names from the Empire, that was entirely his business.
<><>
Atropos
I could feel the constant tiny background buzz from Vicky's aura in my head, but my power was converting it to white noise rather than let me feel the good vibrations that everyone else was experiencing. Strolling up to the farmhouse, I knocked on the door. It wasn't in the best of shape, but courtesy is underrated.
A moment later, he opened it. I could see the twitchiness in his eyes that indicated his power bridging over brain malfunctions as they happened, but he wasn't exerting it outward at all, which was smart of him. This meant he'd read the note and made his choice; either to lose his power or accept exile to a world where he couldn't hurt anyone. I wasn't sure which one it was, but there was a fifty percent chance I'd need Amy and Riley, so I'd brought them along.
"Hi," I said; or rather, my lips uttered a word that my power translated to me as 'hi'. "I'm back."
"You are powerful, for a ghost," I understood him as saying. "Can you take away the pain and the noise?" His twitchiness increased as the others followed me in, but I could see Vicky's aura soothing his agitation.
"I can totally End your powers and let you relax," I promised. "The pain and the noise won't bother you anymore. Is that the choice you've made?"
He took a deep breath and visibly fought down the impulse to release his power and annihilate us all as intruders—ghosts—in his space. This would not have been a good move on his part. "I want to sleep without the noise," he said simply.
"We can do that. You like the darkness and the quiet, yes?" My power had already told me how the damage to his brain followed the pattern of several types of neuro-atypical brain patterns, making him susceptible to extreme agitation when faced with excess stimulation. We absolutely did not want him agitated.
"Yes. Darkness, good. Quiet, good."
"Totally doable. Please, sit down." As he did so, I turned to the rest of the group, who were watching me with varying expressions of
what the heck are they talking about? "Guys, he's chosen to lose his powers. We're going to need to time this very carefully, because he's got bits and pieces of a bullet in his head, which will kill him rather quickly once his powers stop standing in for the damaged bits of his brain. Panacea, I'm going to need you to keep his body going, and stop his brain entering total shock. Miss Medic, you need to go in, get the bullet fragments out, and fix enough of the damage that Panacea can deal with the rest. Tenebrae, he's stimulation averse, so if you can generate darkness around his eyes, that'll be very helpful. And Glory Girl, sit opposite, hold his hands, and sing to him. Keep him calm."
"Sing?" asked Vicky. "I don't know any Russian. What do I sing to him?"
"It's not the words, it's the tune," I said, reaching into my pocket. There were two grapes in capsules there; one held just the antidote to the substance I'd dosed him with twenty-four hours previously, and the other held the power-removal stuff that I'd used on so many other capes. My power allowed me to select the right one without even wondering if it was correct. "He needs to feel comfortable until his powers are totally gone. This is what you're here for, right now."
The Glory Girl of two months ago would have outright refused, and even a month ago she would've argued. But Victoria Dallon had grown and matured in the interim; she sat down across the table from Sleeper, and gently took his hands in hers. To my (concealed) amusement, the song that came out of her mouth was the anthem for Mouse Protector's official fan club.
She had a nice singing voice, and I figured that with her active aura, she sounded magnificent to everyone else. But we had a life to save and a promise to keep. "I'm going to give you something to eat," I said to Sleeper. "Then I'll need you to close your eyes. For the darkness."
"Darkness is good," he agreed. He opened his mouth to let me pop the grape in, then closed his eyes. I gave Tenebrae the nod, and he began cascading pure unmitigated darkness down over Sleeper's face.
If his power was going to fight back against being Ended, especially as Amy was already laying her hands on the back of his neck, now was the time. I could see the twitches in his body and arms as the subconscious control tried to override the soothing influence of Glory Girl's lullaby and Tenebrae's darkness, but it was too little and too late. Far slower than with any of my other subjects—I suspected his power was working to slow down its effects, even now—the substance reached his brain and sought out his corona pollentia.
"Whoa …" murmured Amy. "What
is that stuff? And holy shit, his brain's a
mess."
"A little something-something I picked up around the place," I replied, just as quietly.
Vicky kept singing; she was into the second verse now, and really giving it her all. The Lil' Mousey Fan Club had never sounded so good.
"Keep going?" asked Tenebrae, his voice tense.
"Little bit longer," I confirmed. "Panacea, you call it."
"Starting to get a little stutter," Amy reported. "Okay, picking up functions now. His powers are nearly … gone, they're gone! Miss Medic!" As she clamped both hands onto his forehead and lower jaw to keep his head steady, I could tell she was forcing his faltering body to keep maintaining the rhythms of life.
"On it!" Riley had been sidling around to get a good angle. Now she leaned in and snapped her fingers; surgical tools popped out of her bracers and she went to work. Scalpels flashed, tiny clamps peeled aside a patch of scalp, and antiseptic sprays hissed as miniature cutting saws sliced out a section of skull. Less than a second after she'd commenced operations, she was in.
Glory Girl looked up at me, her expression questioning. I signalled for her to keep singing; even with the two top cape healers in the continental United States working on him, Sleeper was going to need every bit of help he could get. If he'd been on a gurney in front of mundane surgeons in the best-equipped trauma ward in the world, I would've given him no more than twenty-five percent chance of survival, and ten percent of any actual recovery.
Here, in a powers-battered farmhouse in the middle of Russia, his chances were much better.
"Fragments!" sang out Riley. I handed Tenebrae the shallow dish I'd brought along, and he held it for his cousin, the darkness no longer necessary. One after another, the tiny bits of lead dropped into it as she delved into Sleeper's brain.
"How you doing there, Panacea?" I asked casually, not pushing the urgency.
"I've got this," she replied. "But I've never seen so much damage in anyone still walking around."
"Powers." I shrugged to indicate that yes, they were bullshit.
"True."
"Last fragment."
Ting. "Fixing the worst of the damage."
"That'll be nice, thanks." I looked at Amy again. "You're okay with working on his brain?"
She rolled her eyes. "You're asking me
now?"
"Hmm." I chose to acknowledge the point. "Sorry. Should've clarified before we proceeded."
"It's all good. Anything I do right now will be a downright improvement." She shot me a tiny grin, and I knew she was feeling good about actually getting me to apologise about my high-handed manner. Even if (as she had to suspect) it was all scripted by my power from the get-go.
"Well, that's enough scar tissue bridged that he should be able to function unaided," announced Riley, even as her surgical bracers whirred and clicked and did amazingly precise things to the semi-conscious man's brain. "Want to take over while I close up, Panacea?"
"Absolutely." Amy didn't hesitate, closing her eyes so she could concentrate better. "Damn, you do good work."
"Thank you." Riley beamed at her. "So do you. This is a bit of a step-up from Damsel of Distress, though."
"Meh, you deal with one horrifically powerful Blaster, you deal with them all."
As Amy bent to her task, Riley finished gluing and stitching where she'd been, leaving a neatly clipped section on the side of his head. Tenebrae was studying the bits of bullet in the tray, and Vicky seemed to be wondering if she needed to keep singing.
"We're good now," I told her. "Nice job, though. Music soothes the savage beast, and all that."
"So, you didn't just have me do it to keep me busy and feeling like I was achieving something?" she asked, raising one eyebrow.
"Nope." My tone was totally serious. It would've been just as serious if I was lying to her, but in this instance I was telling the unvarnished truth. "Because of his brain damage, his power had far deeper roots into his subconscious and conscious mind than most people, and it was able to stave off the power-killer for longer. It was trying hard to get him to lash out before it lost all grip, and between you and Tenebrae, you managed to keep him calm enough to maintain control."
"And if he had lashed out, we would've died?" She didn't look happy at the prospect.
"Actually, no. See, I planned for the chance of him telling me to fuck off. Given that I'd already dropped in on him once, he could've made it a lot harder for me to repeat the trick and come out alive. So the note I gave him, that one right there on the table, which absolutely
nobody is to touch, had a variant on the power removal substance on it."
The benefit of the morph mask was that nobody could see my sly sideways glance at Riley. Everybody was looking at me, so no-one saw the tiny grin on her face, either.
"Okay, I'll bite," Tenebrae said. "If it didn't remove his powers, what
did it do?"
I grinned. "Removed the required secondary powers necessary for him to
survive using his powers. If he'd tried to use them to ambush me, he would've exploded, very messily indeed. Basically, he would've died in exactly the same way he's killed a great many other people."
Amy snorted with amusement. "Okay, yeah, that's ironic as fuck. I just have to wonder … where the hell did you get it from, as well as the power killing one? This is the first chance I've had of watching that one in action, and it's goddamn
scary. Zeroed in on his corona and just
murdered it."
"Sorry, but I don't reveal my sources." I nodded at Sleeper, who literally had his head down on the table, asleep, as Amy took her hands away from his head. "Is his brain unscrambled?"
"As much as I could manage." She shrugged diffidently. "He's likely to have a few gaps in his memories, but he's functional in every way that counts."
"Excellent." I popped the cover on my teleporter and tapped in a new destination. "I think it's time we sent him on his way, then."
"What?" asked Riley. "Where to?"
Reaching out, I shook the recumbent man by his shoulder. Grunting and snorting, he woke up and looked around. "Is it done?" he asked in Russian.
"It is," I agreed in the same language. "Now, I'm pretty sure there are still warrants active on you in St Petersburg, Sergey. You've had your little holiday. Time to go face the music."
"What? No!" He came to his feet and tried to push me aside, but Tenebrae was there, and he made matters so much easier.
Despite being maybe half Sergey's age, he was taller and broader, and was
far better trained in close-quarters combat. He locked the Russian up into a compliance hold, and looked over at me. "What do you want done with him?"
Dependable minions, I decided, were worth their weight in gold. Even if they didn't know they were minions. Or maybe 'especially'.
"Just shove him through there," I noted as the portal formed beside us. "One-way trip, no backsies."
Tenebrae was entirely equal to the task; he gave Sergey the bum-rush through the portal like he practised the move every day. The smoky gray doorway popped out of existence half a second afterward. "Okay," he said, dusting his hands off. "So where did I just send him, and why?"
I noted that he'd done what I wanted
before asking questions, which was a useful trait in any definitely-not-a-minion. Leaning back against the chair, I looked at four faces showing various levels of curiosity, as opposed to accusation.
"Sergey, there, was a second-rate Russian mobster from St Petersburg, who'd skipped town ahead of a few warrants, including one for murder. He had the opportunity to walk away from the life, but chose not to, and got caught up in a firefight in Moldova, where he got shot in the head with substandard ammo from a substandard gun. It didn't quite kill him in time before he triggered from shock and panic. Thus, Sleeper."
"Ah," Vicky said. "So … an actual bad guy, not just someone in the wrong place at the wrong time?"
"An actual bad guy," I agreed.
Tenebrae rubbed his jaw. "You went to extreme lengths to give him a warning and save his life after he chose to lose his powers, but then you turned him over to Russian authorities? Not judging, but that feels a little … contradictory."
"Not if you look at it in the right way." I grinned under my mask. "This whole exercise was never about saving his life. It was about me and my power proving that yes, we
can and
will do what we say we're gonna do. Deliver a message? Check. Safely depower him? Check. After that … well, I don't really give a damn about his ongoing well-being, and he is kind of an awful person. So, to the cops he goes."
Amy blinked. "Is it bad that you're actually making sense to me?"
"Nope." Riley grinned and patted her kindly on the shoulder. "Welcome to Atropos logic."
"So I'm learning." Amy shook her head and grinned at me. "You're a pretty terrible person yourself, but damned if I'm not beginning to like you."
"Aww, thanks. I wuv you too." I put my arm around her and gave her a quick side-hug.
"Get
off," she grumbled, but she didn't shove me too hard. I let go anyway, of course.
"So, what
are you going to do with that paper?" asked Vicky, indicating my note, but keeping her distance. "If it's still got any of that stuff on it, it's dangerous to all of us."
"I thought you'd never ask." Grinning again, I delved into my pocket and pulled out a good old-fashioned cigarette lighter. "I always come prepared."
"Yeah," agreed Amy as I applied flame to paper. "No shit."
We stood there and watched as it burned to ash. Finally, as the last ember flickered out, I opened the cover on my teleporter. "So, who wants to go home?"
Four voices replied at once. "Me!"
End of Part Ninety-Three
