An Imago of Rust and Crimson
Chapter 2.03
I dropped my bags on my bedroom floor, and flopped face-first onto my bed. Home, sweet home. A bedroom which wasn't an institutional cell, carefully designed so I couldn't hurt myself. A bed which was soft, and didn't have plastic sheeting covering the mattress.
It was great.
I lay there for a while, torn between the need to unpack and the desire to just lie there.
"Taylor? Can you come through here please?" Dad called from just outside my room, making the decision for me. I pulled myself off the bed with only a minimum of grumbling.
"What is it?" I asked, poking my head around the door.
He looked very awkward. "Here," he said, handing a candy bar to me. "I got this for you."
I blinked. "Uh," I began.
"What's the matter? I thought you liked them," he said.
"I know, I only meant…" I trailed away. "Thanks, Dad," I said, giving him a hug. "Thanks for thinking of something like that." I paused. He seemed to want something more. "I think I am better, I really am. The psychiatrist said I probably just had a panic attack in the locker. Things should be fine as long as I don't wind up in somewhere like then again. And that's not likely, right?"
He looked slightly more comfortable at that. "I hope so," he said. "I really do." He paused. "Uh, have you… do you need help unpacking?"
"I'll be fine," I said. "I was… ah, just having a little lie down before I started."
"Don't leave it too long," he said. He massaged the back of his neck. "Anyway, I've taken the next two days off work, and," he coughed, "we'll need to talk about your return to school. When you're feeling ready, of course."
The bottom felt like it dropped out of my stomach. "Yes," I said weakly.
"I'm not going to try to push you back too quickly," he said, "but you do need to think about that."
"I know," I said. I took a deep breath. "I know. I'll… I was doing the work they sent me when I was in the hospital! I'll… yeah, I'll need to see about handing that in. And getting some more." I tried my best to put on a brave face in front of him, but I wasn't having much luck.
"Are you feeling okay?"
"I'd tried not to think about when I was going back," I said in a small voice.
He winced. "Sorry," he said. "But… no, we'll think about that later."
"I know I have to," I said.
"I did check out what'd be required for you to transfer," he said, "but the waiting lists are… well. The person I talked to said that you'd probably have graduated before you got to the top of the list."
"Because they don't want someone like me," I said. The thought of heading back to Winslow had ruined whatever good feelings I might have had. And heaven forbid that Arcadia let me in. Sure, Leah and Sam had been nice enough, but they were just students. God, things would have been just better if I'd applied there for high school in the first place.
"It's not… I did try to explain," my Dad said, reaching out to give me a hug. I didn't try to get away, but I didn't hug him back. "But the waiting list is apparently really long and… it sucks, I know."
"I guess I'll just have to tough it out. Like I have for years," I said.
"No," he said. "No," he repeated, more loudly. "No, no more. You're not going to just sit there and take it. We'll make a difference. Somehow. Even if the school doesn't want to listen."
Yeah, like anything's going to make a difference, I thought to myself. To stop myself from saying that out loud, I instead looked him in the eyes and said, "Dad. Promise me that you won't do anything…" I searched for a good word, "rash." No, that wasn't the right word, but I didn't know what would be.
"Oh, don't worry," he said. "I've been thinking about this. About a lot of things and I…"
"I can't let you get in trouble because of me," I protested. I couldn't. "I can't and I won't. I can just hold on until I graduate. I'll tell the teachers if anything else happens, I promise I will! Just don't… like, go confront Emma's dad or something because," I gasped for air, "because he's a lawyer and he knows all the tricks to make anything that happens look like your fault and… and… and…" I slumped, shaking. "I can't let you do anything that would get you arrested," I whispered.
There was an awkward pause before he wrapped his arms around me and gave me a hug. "There you are, looking after your old man when you're just out of hospital." he said, trying to make it into a joke. "I'm the one who's meant to be looking after you, and I will."
He wasn't joking. I flickered to the Other Place, and he was a blazing inferno. The only thing keeping him in the vague shape of a man were the chains that coiled around him. What would happen if I loosed them? Translated out of the metaphor-logic of the Other Place, that would be getting rid of his control, setting his temper free. That would be a terrible idea to begin with, and even if it wasn't – even if I could see some obvious way to get rid of his stress or calm him down – I couldn't do it. There was no way I was going to mess with Dad's head. It was a line I shouldn't cross.
The heat of his rage couldn't actually burn me, but I still flinched away from it. Mentally retreating back to normalcy, I found him frowning at me. "Taylor," he said, "what's wrong? You didn't used to try to escape hugs."
I couldn't explain why. "I didn't use to do a lot of things," I said bitterly, and then blinked. That didn't really mean anything, as a sentence. Hmm. "I mean, I didn't… I used to do different things. Oh, forget it." I snorted. "I… I just sort of mucked up that sullen teenager comeback, didn't I?"
He gave a weak grin. "Yeah, you sort of did. Want me to help you unpack? And then we can head to the shops. We need food and you probably have stuff you need, too."
I blinked. "Yeah, thinking about it, I do need some things. More toothpaste, a new toothbrush, maybe some pens and a notebook or something. I think I should keep a new diary." I cleared my throat. "And speaking of diaries…"
…
It was dark outside. Through my curtains I could see the rain falling, lit by the orange of the sodium street lights. I glanced over the spines of the new books I'd bought, but I didn't feel like reading Hopscotch, Foucault's Pendulum, or Messenger 13. Leah had recommended them, but they didn't look quite like the kind of thing I'd normally read, and I was feeling exhausted.
It wasn't just from being out of the routine I'd built up in hospital, or from a cold, damp shopping trip. I wasn't the most sociable sort by short, and having my dad want to spend so much time with me was mentally exhausting. I needed time to recharge my batteries. I appreciated why he was treating me with kid gloves, butit was getting just a bit annoying.
I'd shown him the old diary of the things that the bullies had been doing to me. That hadn't gone well at all. I'd thought for a moment that he was about to explode. He was planning to bring that up when we met with the school to talk about me going back to school. I'd extracted a promise from him that he wouldn't do anything until then.
Telling the truth about things was really hard work, and I wasn't even sure it was the right thing to do. I'd had to beat down Madame Secret again today, just so I could show him the diary, and all it had done was make him even angrier, burn more furiously in the Other Place. I couldn't go a full day of interaction with my own father without having to chain down facets of my own personality in a creepy alternate reality. Twice. Maybe I just wasn't cut out for acting like a normal person?
God, I was so fucked up. Why couldn't I have had some nice clean and simple Alexandria package?
Oh wait, because I got my powers when I was locked in the sort of thing that third world countries might use to torture dissidents, apparently tried to kill myself, and nearly died. It wasn't my fault my powers were like this. Emma, Sophia and Madison were the ones who put me through this. Their fault, not mine. I just had to play the hand I was dealt.
I lay back on my bed, and let the Other Place impose itself over my senses. It didn't lie to me like the normal world did. I could see the truth hidden in things when I looked into it. It was horrible, yes, but the normal world was horrible too. At least the Other Place was honest about it.
My room wasn't the worst Other Place reflection I'd seen. Not by far. It was mostly just bare concrete. There weren't any creepy scrawlings on the walls and the metal was mostly intact. Everything was damp and there were pools of dark water on the floor, though, and when I gingerly tasted the water it was salty. Yes, I suppose I had cried in here quite a bit.
Well. That was going to change.
I picked up the remote from the pool of water it lay in, and turned on my television. The cathode ray hummed like a swarm of insects in the Other Place, and I flicked through the channels to leave it on the news. That should give me some background noise and make it sound like I was watching something.
"Paranapiacaba at twelve hundred hours," said the vapid blonde newsreader with the plastic face, smiling with lips fixed into rigid fake-happy curves. "Elisenburg via Merkland and Lvivsaka Brama at thirteen thirty."
The plastic man beside her with lipstick kisses over his sallow cheeks chuckled. "Chamberí at fourteen thirty," he said. "Kymlinge and Stadion Spartak at fifteen forty five, Dachnoye at sixteen hundred hours. And now over to Sasha for the weather."
Hmm, actually, I should change to another channel. He'd probably be a bit suspicious if I just had a 24 hour news channel on.
"At least we're getting paid for this, right? Fuckers better not try to cheat us out of this," said a gaunt corpse in a fancy long dress and wig.
"I used to be on Broadway," the man with fly's eyes standing beside her said morosely. "Shakespeare, Stoppard, proper period pierces. Now look at me. Dressing up in a powdered wig and prancing around to this script written by a bloody hack who thought it would be great to put parahumans in a historical film. Fuck this. So much for artistic integrity. What's next, I'm going to end up as an evil wizard in some film for little kids? I'm going to have words with my agent."
I tilted my head. Well. That was something. I was going to have to go work my way through some films and see if anything else was like this.
But I was getting distracted.
It was time for something I'd been thinking about, ever since I'd found that I could send my constructs to fetch me things. I couldn't test it much in the hospital for fear of being caught, but even there I'd managed to work out that I could recover things from outside my visual range, even on the other side of the building. What I was about to try would be a much more challenging test for my powers.
Carefully, I fetched one of the photo albums from my book shelf, and set it down on my bed. Crossing my legs, I flicked though it. I sighed. I was smiling a lot more in the photos. And didn't have pink self-inflicted scars on my face. I found what I was looking for. The photo was slightly faded, despite being kept in this binder.
"Things could have been better," I told the picture of my mother and a twelve year old me, beaming out through time. "Why did you…" My voice cracked as the things I'd seen in the locker forced themselves back into my consciousness. Had that really been real, or had it just been me, imagining how it might have happened? I'd asked myself that a few times when I was in the psychiatric hospital, and hadn't been able to come to an answer.
I had more reason than most to think it might have been real – after all, my power gave me psychometry. I
could see the past, in one sense. On the other hand, what I'd seen had been clear, free of symbolism and twisted imagery. It was just the sort of delusion a near-death experience might provoke, wasn't it?
Did I want to know?
I'd leave that thought for another day.
I'd been thinking about how my power worked. Clearly my constructs could find things which I could see, but there was no way they'd be able to find my mother's flute unless they went and searched everywhere. That just wasn't plausible. I couldn't sustain them long enough to have a chance to find it unless I knew where to send them.
But making constructs wasn't exactly my main power, was it? That was just a thing I did in the Other Place, and that was the real trick I had up my sleeve. And in the Other Place, things left a mark, an emotional residue, that lingered long after the actual events. I could see where someone had tried to kill themselves, sense the despair of the shanty town, and feel the depression coming off some of the other patients.
Maybe a construct could track the trail between the flute and me, to find it. After all, it had mattered a lot to me. I'd already found I could track the books I'd leant Leah, back when I was in the hospital, and they hadn't been anywhere near as important.
I smiled softly to myself. Perhaps leaving some books with her had been an act of accidental brilliance. I could track them back to her, and so check up on her and Sam.
Surely a book would have a lot less of a 'trail' than my mother's flute?
I got up, and sat myself down at my desk. I was going to do this properly. I was going to plan every step out, making sure that I didn't have to make things up as I went. I wouldn't be much good if I couldn't do things that I planned out properly. Opening up one of my new notepads, I dug out a pencil and idly started chewing on the eraser at the end.
I want to find the flute.
-> Searching, use Sniffer for it.
I paused and tilted my head, thinking hard.
Add camera to her, so I can see what she finds. Might need to take a long time, several hours, so reinforce her. Lots of details.
- Big eyes + nose + hands
- Memories of the flute. Integrate them into her. If I feed her my flute memories, she'll know what to look for.
- Bigger head? To hold memories?
- Does clothing matter? Maybe – extra detail. Makes it harder, but more detail = lasts longer.
I kept on thinking, and started to sketch out a labelled stickwoman in the margin. Big eyes, big hands, a long tongue drooping out of her mouth. Cameras on her shoulders. Eventually, I felt I was ready. Closing my eyes, I got to work.
It was hard. Not in the sense that chaining Madame Secret was hard – that was a physically exhausting struggle. This was hard in the sense that trying to memorise a long string of numbers was hard. I kept on forgetting things, losing track of things I'd already added, and my mind wandered. I was thinking about how I'd probably eaten too much when I was meant to be trying to make a hunting-construct to find my mother's flute.
Okay, I'll admit it, I also had to scrap my work a few times when I got distracted by imagining about whether I could make something which could hunt down the bullies and make them suffer. The kind of changes that were made to my design by that train of thought suggested that I could, but I wasn't going to think about that. I wasn't a villain, and sending invisible monsters made of barbed wire and thorns to hunt down bullies was a definitely villainous thing to do. They were the bad guys, not me.
After starting over for the sixth or seventh time, I finally managed to hold the image in my mind, complete. I exhaled, and opened my eyes. A lanky giant with spidery limbs stared down at me with oversized camera lenses instead of eyes. She was bent in half just to fit in my room, and her knees brushed against the roof. Her head was too big for her body, easily the size of my torso. I tried not to flinch, but I couldn't help it. I hadn't quite expected to make Sniffer this large. I checked the chains were secure around her wrists and legs, and added an extra layer for good measure.
The construct snuffled at me, opening its mouth and letting its twisting tongue fall out, tasting the air.
I turned around, and picked up the photograph. "Here," I told the construct quietly. "See this flute. Find it! Do it!"
Sniffer snuffled once, and bounded off through the window, which rippled like a pond which just had a stone thrown into it. I really hoped I hadn't let loose a monster.
Closing my eyes, I made the same set of flying barbed wire baby dolls and flat screen TV I'd made to spy on dad and the doctors. It was much easier than Sniffer – was it because they were less complicated, or because I'd made them before? Either way, it seemed practice made perfect. The screen crackled with static, white and black dancing across the screen in chaotic patterns, before cohering into an image.
That was fast.
I stared at the screen in the Other Place. I could see swirling dark water, filled with floating bits of something which was maybe mud and maybe sand. And yes, half-buried in it next to a discarded shopping cart and an empty beer can was my mother's flute.
I pursed my lips. Those
bitches. They'd stolen it, and it hadn't even mattered to them. They hadn't kept it under one of their beds, or hidden it in some secret place, or even sold it to a pawn shop. They'd just tossed it into a pond, or maybe the harbour, and forgotten it even existed. They'd got nothing out of it. They'd done it just to hurt me.
I knew where it was. I could see it. It was on the other side of the screen, almost close enough to touch.
Next step.
"Go!" I told one of the barbed-wire babies. "Bring it to me."
The construct didn't do what I expected. Rather than disappear as Sniffer had, it flicker-teleported over to the screen, and slit it open with a hand, like a knife through a plastic bag. The screen flopped open, but remained showing the image.
No. It wasn't an image.
The doll-face of the barbed wire babies stared expectantly at me.
"You want me to…? I can…"
They stared at me mutely.
I took a deep breath, and stood. I couldn't let myself wonder what I was doing. In one movement, I thrust my hand through the split open screen, into icy water, and felt my fingers close around the cold metal of the flute. I yanked my hand out as soon as I could, and not too soon, because I was barely free when the screen fuzzed back into static. I felt my legs sag. Numbly I staggered back to my bed, the patinaed flute dripping water, and I sat down heavily.
This was my mother's flute. I'd found it using my powers. I'd made Sniffer and she'd made it, and then once I'd found it, the barbed wire baby had turned the screen into a hole in the world.
Except it hadn't been quite a hole in the world, had it? The water hadn't come through. I massaged my hand, the one which had been through the hole in the world, noticing with some surprise that my fingers had started bleeding again.
It really, really stung. The harbour, then - it had to be salt water to hurt that much. I'd need to go clean it off. But first, I switched back to the real world, and waved my hand through the spot where my television-portal had been. Nothing. My hand just waved through normal air. It didn't pass through an invisible portal, or smack a hidden barbed-wire cherub.
So, that hole in the world was a portal through the Other Place. It didn't exist in reality. And I'd made it. I'd already seen that there were doors in the hospital which hadn't lined up properly with the real ones, but I'd never worked up the nerve to walk through one.
I was beginning to realise that the Other Place was more than just some way for me to parse the information my power was giving me. It wasn't just a creepy, informative filter I was putting over the normal world. I suspected it existed outside of my head. It was a place where space and distance – hell, maybe time and God knew what else – didn't quite work properly.
This success had taught me something else too. Most of my powers weren't exactly world-shaking, sure, but I was
really flexible. Hah. Out of all the powers I'd read about, maybe I was most like a Tinker. I didn't have real powers in my own right, but I could
make things that did.
I wouldn't be punching out an Endbringer any time soon, but I had my mother's flute back. I gripped it tightly as I walked to the bathroom. I'd
beaten them at something. I'd do so again.
That night I dreamed I was in the locker once more. My life tried to escape me, and so did my spirit, blackness oozing out from my open wounds along with the blood. I struggled, fought, tried to stop it from escaping me. But it was getting harder and harder and I was getting so tired. The rot was everywhere and it was creeping and squirming over my skin. I was dying. Everything was going cold.
I woke, gasping for air. The clock on my bedside table flashed 03:58.
I didn't get back to sleep.
