Elephant (a Worm AU)

[Mujaki]

The Mathers Clan is no more. When Gabriel left it behind, all he had were the clothes on his back and the name of a city he'd never been, Brockton Bay, pinning his hopes on finding the one person he knew had escaped the clans. When all he finds is disappointment, he tries to stay under the radar.

Unfortunately, he discovers that there is no such thing as a quiet life when he was once known as the Fallen's ultimate weapon, the one that kept the most powerful heroes in the world away from the clans. Chort is a ghost he can't escape, and Gabriel is meant to make waves whether he wants to or not...

 

[Mujaki]

What kind of cartwheels do I have to pull?

What kind of joke should I lay on her now?

I'm inclined to go finish high school

Just to make her notice that I'm around…​

—



When I was a kid, I always wished I could fly.



I imagined it every time the wind whipped through my hair, whenever my stomach turned as I reached the very peak of my leap into the sky, the split second when I'm weightless in the air. The blink of an eye when there's no push or pull and I hang there, bathed in starlight and I'm free.



And each time I feel the pull of gravity bringing me back down to earth, I'm disappointed.



The ground rushes up to meet me, filling my vision as I hurtle to the ground and when I land, I leave a crater. I couldn't do this in a town, not without hurting someone at best. I've gotten better at my control over the last couple of years and when I leap, I usually have a pretty good idea of where I'll land, my arc sending me over the horizon and away from any passersby. No one around to get hurt. It was the only thing I worried about during my landings.



After all, it's not like I ever got hurt. Not anymore.



I could see the city in the distance, the early morning sun reflecting off of the buildings and painting the landscape orange. Even from miles away, I could smell the salt in the air and hear the ocean churning, barely audible white noise that reminded me that I wasn't in Missouri anymore.



And I'd never go back.



I shrugged off my backpack and started putting on my shoes. As much traveling as I've done in recent days, there was no sense in trashing perfectly good footwear – normal shoes weren't made for high-impact landings or even running at speed. It wasn't too far from the city and it's not like I ever got tired, so I made my way over to the road and started trekking down the highway.



Maybe Brockton Bay would be a good place to start fresh.



—



"What the hell are you doing here?!" Tammi hissed, dragging me into an alley. City life had been good for her, since she looked a lot less gaunt than she did when we were eight. Granted, we were both beanpoles at that age, as were most of the other kids back at the gatherings. "I thought this was, you know, a 'family' thing, not a social visit."



"Nice to see you too," I muttered, "and we're technically kin, sort of."



"'Technically' doesn't cut it and we don't look anything alike."



"I can't come into town and say hello to the only person I know?"



"We barely know each other. Last time I saw you was when we were twelve, just after… you know…" she trailed off, but we both knew exactly what she was talking about. Powers were important in the family, but how you got them was better left out of polite conversation.



"Yeah, I know," I said, running my fingers through my hair. I could see her looking at it, black and thick to her own blonde and thin, my dusky skin a sharp contrast to her milky pale. The Herrens were always the sort to pay attention to that kind of thing and it seemed like Tammi was no different. "But you got out. And you're doing well. Or at least you look like it."



"Thanks," she said, her eyes darting towards the sidewalk, "Look, I can't be gone for too long. I've got a meeting to get to. So spill."



"Fine. How'd you do it?"



"Do what?"



"Make it here in the city."



She looked genuinely confused and I could have kicked myself for not realizing it sooner – she didn't get to the city on her own, she and her folks left the clan together. They were probably supporting her, taking care of her, buying her nice clothes and sending her off to school.



I hadn't been to school in years. Not since I met her.



Tammi was silent for a moment before speaking, her words slow and considered. "I… have an uncle, still with the clan. He knew some people and they got me books and videos. My folks didn't like that, so I left." Tammi's nose wrinkled, a scowl on her brow. "I got caught pretty quick and I got stuck in juvie. They left me there alone with those animals, telling me to treat them like normal folk and I… Well, now I'm like you."



"Seriously?"



"Yeah," she said, a wicked sort of grin on her face, "and when I got out and made them pay for it, my uncle brought me here. I've got a new family now."



A new family. I didn't know much about Brockton Bay, no more than Elijah did when we were getting our "lessons" about the important people to know in our world, but it was easy to figure out who she was talking about.



"I didn't think you'd go Empire."



"Where else was I gonna go?" She shrugged, tracing invisible doodles onto the brick behind her. "Besides, I've got a place to myself. I've got food. I've got money. And I've got more coming to me once we take our rightful place and the dregs of society fall in line."



I couldn't help myself — I snorted. Loudly. And when I saw the look on Tammi's face I laughed some more. "What kind of book did you read that out of. Do you even know what the word 'dreg' means?"



"Do you?!"



Before I could say anything else, I felt a rumble deep in my chest. The ground shook beneath my heels and Tammi flipped a hood over her head; what I thought was a green jacket unfurled into a cloak covered in odd designs I didn't recognize. She clutched at the wall behind her and a chunk of it came loose, wider than she was tall, and she swung it around like an oversized shield just before the alley was flooded in light.



Tammi cursed under her breath as she covered her eyes. "Damn, damn, damn. Not this n—"



"Well, well, lookee what we got here," a voice boomed from beyond the spotlight. Sitting atop a mechanical beast, something that looked like a tractor smashed together with a semi truck, was a skinny black man with a mask over the top of his face, giving me a clear view of his chapped lips and rotted teeth. I could smell him over the garbage cans and smoke that belched from a set of exhaust pipes beside him. "Baby Nazi #1 and her shitstain Nazi boyfriend! Looks like it's my lucky day, ain't it?"



I didn't recognize his accent, but it felt like something I had heard growing up, in the Before Times. Something that should have sounded educated, but he spit his words when he should have been singing them. "Tammi, who's this guy?"



"Call me Rune when I've got my mask on!" She said with a grimace. "That's Skidmark, one of the local druggies who thinks he's people."



"Oh, is that it?" I said, looking at the truck inching closer, tires digging into the concrete and leaving powder in its wake. "Is he a Tinker?"



"No."



"That's all I need to know."



"Hey! You two cunt-nuggets talking about me?!" Skidmark snarled, spit flying with every word. "I'mma 'bout to do the world a solid and make two Nazi fucks into a grease spot. Maybe they'll call me a hero for this!"



He slid down into the cab of the truck and the lights got even brighter, enough that even I needed to squint to keep him in sight. Tammi mewled piteously beside me for a moment with tears in her eyes from the light before she muttered "Yeah, fuck this", threw the chunk of wall to the ground, hopped on top, and then shot into the sky.



Of course she could fly.



"Hey, get back here you little bitch!" Skidmark's voice was louder than before, tinny, like an old speaker. "Ah well, at least I've still got you. What's your name, you little Nazi shitheel?"



"Gabriel. And I'm not a Nazi."



"Nah, boy. Your cape name!"



"I don't have a cape name."



"Well, this'll be easy then, won't it?" He chuckled. There was a growing crowd on the street behind me, onlookers who had stopped to take pictures and suddenly realized that a fight was about to happen. The noise of panic rose as the Tinker truck revved its engines. I hadn't intended to fight, to do anything here other than talk to Tammi and maybe ask to crash on her couch afterwards.



The truck shot forward and I heard a scream in the crowd.



My decision wasn't really a decision at all.



I planted a foot behind me for leverage and time slowed down as the Tinker truck slammed into me, metal bending around my body and going red hot from the sudden friction. If the look of the truck hadn't given away the fact it had been altered by a Tinker, the feel of the metal beneath my fingers as some yielded to my touch while other, more reinforced sections bent and buckled at the force would have confirmed it. During my training, she would have scouts rob the local PRT office and steal any bits of Tinkertech they had in their evidence rooms, making me bend and twist the inventions until I recognized them. Tinkertech was odd sometimes, producing materials that could even make me struggle to break them apart.



But they all did. Eventually.



And whatever this truck had been made of, it hadn't been fortified enough, not for someone like me. "W-what the fuck are you?" Skidmark wheezed from somewhere inside the ruined hulk, the tinny speaker cracking with every syllable.



I thought of her name for me and the word soured on my tongue. "The end."



I didn't need a name anyway.



The truck wasn't nearly as heavy as it looked and whatever Tinkertech held it together kept the frame from buckling as I pulled it into the air, scraps and other bits of metal plinking around me as I eyed the skyline, zeroing in on the dark, churning blue of the horizon. Before he could protest, I heaved Skidmark, truck and all, over the buildings and into the Bay, putting in enough strength that it cleared the rusted old boats in the harbor.



"What the fuck did you just do?!" I turned around and saw Tammi floating down from her makeshift platform, her pale skin even paler than before even beneath the domino mask and hood.



"Clean up, by the looks of it." I said, turning my head away from the flashes of multiple cameras in the crowd and strolling down the alley.



No sense getting in the papers over this.



"You have no idea. Of course you have no idea." She whispered. "You can't just show up out of the blue and take out someone with a name! Not without backup—"



"Yeah, good job of backing me up, by the way." I muttered and Tammi flushed before glancing down. At least she had the decency to look embarrassed.



"You didn't need it. You've never needed it."



"It would've been nice to know you had my back. So much for kin."



"Look, Chort—"



"Don't call me that!" I said, turning on my heel to look her in the eyes. "Never call me that ever again. Chort's dead. He died the second I opened my eyes and saw our family wasn't real."



Before she could say anything else, I turned around and leaped into the air. I was angry and it had been dumb to rabbit off like that in the middle of the city, but I was lucky that I managed to head out in the same direction I had tossed Skidmark. And more fortunate still that I landed on the beach rather than the ocean.



I could feel the sand beneath my toes and groaned as I realized why — I hadn't taken off my shoes and they had all but disintegrated when I slammed into the sand.



Damn.



I still had my backpack on me, so I shrugged off the tattered leather and skipped up to the deck of one of the rusted old boats to look at the sea. I had never seen anything so huge in all my life, water so vast and deep that it seemed infinite. The sky had gotten dark, but there were no stars out. Not this close to the city.



With nothing else to do, I laid back on the deck and propped my backpack beneath my head.



Maybe tomorrow would be a fresh start.



—



(Author's Note… So, it's been awhile. This is likely going to get the serial numbers scrubbed off at some point, so stay tuned...)

 

[Mujaki]

You would swear that the one who would care for you,

Never would leave!

She promised and said, "you will always be safe here with me",

But promises open the door to be broken to me...

​

---



When rain came to Brockton Bay, it came hard and fast.



The change in seasons didn't bother me the way it used to when I was younger, in the Before Times. I couldn't remember much, to be honest. Not my old house (though the smell of apples always reminded me of home), and I really couldn't remember my Dad. Not clearly, anyway. I think I hear him, sometimes, in the back of my mind before I go to sleep. No words, just a certain timbre in his voice. A feeling of warmth, of safety.



I remember my Mom, though. Her name escapes me, but her face never does because I look just like her.



At least that's what I remember the aunts and uncles told me, voices little more than wisps of smoke in a breeze. I have her eyes, her lips, her hair. Her skin is my skin, and I'll never forget my name because more than anything else, I remember Mom calling to me when the car upended, the windows shattered, and she came to take me.



My little angel, my Gabriel.



On the beach in the rain, it was nothing like home. But it was still better than Missouri.



Sometimes people would be kind, seeing me walk around without shoes, slipping dollars into my hand even though I wasn't a beggar. Other times I would get run off; the Boardwalk was a place patrolled by men with guns and knives, keeping out the folks who were a little too unseemly to be seen in public. Like me, I suppose.



At least now.



I could have made a scene, if I wanted to. They couldn't stop me, if I really pressed the issue. But that would have brought in the authorities and while she spent many days ranting about the ones who would put us down, the ones who would be punished when the "true" higher powers came to show them their place, I had to admit that there was a point to it. As I trekked across the country, I learned to avoid anyone with a badge. They would poke and prod, asking questions I couldn't answer, and get angry when I tried to leave. And then out came their batons and their bullets.



They always got angry when I tried to leave, but they couldn't stop me.



No one could.



But I didn't want the attention, especially in Brockton Bay. Because here, they had heroes. The PRT was more active here than any place I stopped before. Their hero capes patrolled the streets and talked with the people. They even had kids my age wearing costumes and giving lectures, waving at fans who passed by. I thought about going to them a few times, but then they'd ask questions I really didn't want to answer. I did a lot of things when she would train me and Elijah, telling us that the heathens deserved what happened to them and then shrieking into our minds, fingers clawing at our eyes from the inside if we didn't do what we were told.



No, I didn't want to talk about that. And if it were up to me, it would stay that way. Dead and buried.



Just like her.



I stayed at a shelter for a few nights after my tussle with Skidmark, but then the questions came when they realized I wasn't going to school. I was an avid reader, even in the Before Times. I was decent at math up to a certain point. But it was hard to hide the fact there were vast gaps in what I knew. Arithmetic and times tables were one thing, but I had no idea what algebra was.



And so they asked questions I couldn't answer. I left after that, prying open the latch on the back door and leaving an apology under the door after squeezing the latch back together. I'd pay them back when I could.



Jobs were hard to come by when you didn't exist. Not in the legal sense, at least. I was big for my age, but I still looked like the teenager I was. And a sixteen year old with no shoes and dirty jeans was out of luck for the few places that would hire. I did have a couple of newer shirts, at least — a local baker let me help him load some boxes a few days back, and he paid me in cash after he needed someone to lift the back end of his van to change out a flat when his jack busted.



I had eighty bucks to my name, but jeans were a lot pricier than shirts and buying shoes worth a damn was going to cost me a lot more than what I had. But after spending the last few years ripping off anyone driving down the highway, stealing really didn't appeal to me. Even if it was something I needed. I wasn't that far gone.



Not yet.



Food was surprisingly easy to come by, at least when it came to the basics. I still had enough beef jerky and apples in my backpack to last a few days, if I was careful, but the local Asian markets didn't particularly care how I looked, so long as my money was good. I had packaged pork buns, sweets in all shapes and sizes, fruits and fizzy soda pops stuffed into my little alcove on the boat. I had sheared the rust off of a small, metal panel and shaped it into a small cubby to keep the seagulls away (a mistake I made on my first afternoon eating in the open, because I had never even seen a seagull before).



Flying rats, all of them.



Today had been going well, all things considered. I found a flea market and picked up another couple of shirts with an eye on a good pair of leather work boots that I hoped to scrounge up enough money to pick up in a couple of days. The weather was good, if rainy, but that never bothered me.



Naturally, it all had to go to hell.



It was evening by the time I had made it back to the beach, the light drizzle blooming into a full, hard rain, drops pinging off of my skin like tiny shards of ice that felt heavenly in the humid June heat. There weren't many folks who liked to get close to the Boat Graveyard (as the locals called it), which suited my needs just fine. Even if it was still wet by the time I got up to my alcove, I could just bend part of the old funnel to keep the water away from my sleeping bag. It was blessedly clear most nights, usually, both the sky and the sands.



Which is why the two lights a half mile away from my boat looked particularly suspicious, especially by this point in the evening. And if the lights hadn't tipped me off, a familiar rumble thumping along the ground would have. I suppose Skidmark was back for round two.



The lights suddenly flared bright and the rumble grew into a full roar since he decided he needed a bigger truck to try and run me down. Squinting past the lights, the vehicle speeding down the beach was barely even a truck; a mechanical beast that looked like someone tried to make a rhino out of a monster truck and a tank screamed down the beach, kicking up chunks of muddy sand in its wake. The front end was covered in lights, the heat from them turning the water to steam and churning up a fog when waves crashed into it. It had treads rather than wheels, but it moved like a sports car and I barely had time to jump as it thundered past.



I landed a few yards behind the metal monster, feeling sharp edges poking into the soles of my feet rather than soft sand. The thing had generated enough heat to turn the beach into sickly green glass and despite being shaped the way it was, all it took was a hiss as the center cab of the tank jolted upwards and swiveled around to face me, the heat of the lights immediately vaporizing the raindrops off of my face.



It looked like someone was itching for a rematch. "What do you want, Skidmark?"



"YOU!"



The voice wasn't tinny, like the Tinker truck had been. It was clear as day, like someone standing next to me and screaming in a fury.



And it wasn't Skidmark. "YOU KILLED HIM! YOU BASTARD!"



He was dead? "He didn't bail?"



"YOU KILLED HIM! YOU'LL DIE FOR THAT!"



It was a woman's voice, shrill and on the edge of tears. Even someone as repellent as Skidmark had a loved one and she was here on a suicide mission. Before I could say another word, the monster rushed forward, the lights splitting along some kind of seam I hadn't noticed to form a mouth of gaping, jagged teeth as it lurched to swallow me whole.



I could have just stood there, let the metal smash uselessly against my skin and the heat pass over me like so much hot air. But when I did that against Skidmark, he was left so out of sorts that he didn't have the sense to bail when he hit the water. And I was tired of death.



So I threw my backpack out of the way and side-stepped the machine, digging my hands directly into the treads, my fingers carving through it like wet paper. The beast hissed and sputtered, but that center cab jacked itself up and swiveled my direction again, lights flickering as the woman inside screeched and howled. "NO, NOT MY BABY! YOU'RE GONNA DIE, YOU BRUTE FUCK!"



The maw split open once more, but I was so close that I couldn't dodge when those metal teeth tried to bite me in half. The belly of the beast was rank, smelling of oil and gas, ozone and sweat, and it tried in vain to chew. The teeth ground themselves dull against my flesh as I reached up and tore them off piece by piece, the woman's screams and the monster's shrieks one and the same. The treads ground against my legs, desperate to find leverage against me and I reached my other hand down against the gears and pried them off, the gargantuan belt snapping and sending bolts flying in every direction.



The monster gurgled and belched black smoke as it creeped out of my grasp, limping backwards as sparks bled out of every gaping hole. A single light remained and it turned on me like a ghastly eye. "WHY. WHY WON'T YOU JUST DIE? YOU TOOK EVERYTHING. I DESERVE SOMETHING TOO." The woman's voice went from shrill to despondent as she spoke, and there was something dangerous there too. "I NEED, I NEE—DIE, JUST DIE ALREADY!"



Something deep inside the beast clicked and a red light filled the machine's broken mouth. A blast of light rocked me hard enough to undermine the ground beneath my feet, and molten glass swallowed them all the way up to my knees, the rain flash-cooling the churning mass and flooding my vision with steam. I dragged myself out of the quagmire, shards of green glass still clinging to my now-bare legs and walked up to the Tinker monstrocity. That single light flickered and popped and with a great shrug, the entire contraption collapsed in on itself.



The cab was heavily shielded, so she had to be using some other means of keeping track of me. A camera or some kind of Tinker nonsense, but when I moved towards the ruined vehicle, there was no sign of life. Over the sound of the ocean, I could hear the sound of dying machinery; steam hissing and small popping noises from deep within. I was certain that the woman had some means of escape, but I needed to be sure. Skidmark had been aching for a fight and Tammi's reputation preceded her, but I hadn't meant to kill him.



I had to be sure.



The metal gave way easily beneath my grip and when I pulled the cab apart, a wave of unwashed odor hit me, more powerful than the salt air and lingering exhaust. The smell of someone unwashed and filthy didn't bother me (otherwise I wouldn't have been able to stand myself until I was able to shower at the shelter), but there was a sourness to the scent. The stench of sickness. Decay. There was a wall of computer monitors in my way, something hastily cobbled together in that strange Tinker way that shouldn't have worked, but worked better than anything you'd buy from a store. Despite the strange beauty of it, I pulled it down all the same and found myself staring at the woman who tried to kill me.



She was skinny, more than could possibly be healthy, but there was enough weight to her that she could have been beautiful once upon a time. The clothes she wore could barely be called such, barely covering what modesty she had. A ripped tank top, shorts made shorter by hand, and a bandana that pulled back a mane of filthy, knotted hair. The woman was in a bad way, her arms covered in strange sores and scars along the insides of her elbows. A cheap domino mask covered her face, but even that couldn't hide her drawn cheeks and sunken yellow eyes. Looking at her, I realized that she really was on a suicide mission. She was dying.



And I was tired of death.



I pulled her free from her would-be tomb over her whispered protests. Her voice, so strong with grief and rage, had been augmented by her machine and without it she had a raspy whisper. The sour smell radiated off of her and perhaps she had known there wasn't much time left, so she went out looking for me ready to die in a blaze of glory. There had been a blaze, alright, and as I leaped into the air I took a glance back at my old alcove. The battle and the beast's final, raging blast had destroyed the surrounding area, what was left of my boat sinking into the Bay. Whatever happened next, I'd have to find a new place to hole up.



Oh well.



---



I had gotten better about jumping within city limits, making sure to angle myself to land at either one of the local construction sites or in an empty section of the park. I chose the park this time, because from there I could sprint towards downtown, my strength lending me speed as I outran cars and leaped over intersections, finally coming to a stop in front of Brockton General. I knew it was a long shot, but her information was never wrong. Not when it came to prospects to add to the family.



Panacea had been on one of her lists, an addition to the cape program the clans were running and someone Elijah had been trained to take when the time was right. A power like hers was something she always wanted in the fold, something that could have made the whole clan invincible.



But she was gone now, and Panacea would never have to see the kind of horror that was waiting for her. She'd never have that look of utter fear in her eyes when She made me—



No, enough of that.



Not now.



I pulled the woman's domino mask off and put it on my own, swallowing the bile as I felt the filth beneath it sticking to my skin. The emergency room was nearly empty, which worked just fine for me. I took a deep breath, knowing full well that what I was about to do was going to get attention no matter what. "Help her, NOW!" I bellowed, lungs tight as they pushed the air through my lips like a foghorn. The floor quaked and the lights flickered as every eye turned to me. No one was ignoring me now -- they were scared.



Good.



Two cops fumbled out of a security office at the mouth of the hallway, stumbling forward with guns drawn before they noticed the dying woman in my arms. One of them mumbled into a walkie-talkie and after a few seconds two doctors stormed out of the back, alarm in their eyes when they took stock of the situation. I was quickly ushered into the back, the cops right on my heels, and I laid the woman down on a waiting hospital bed. The doctors and nurses swarmed around her as they stripped her bare, and I turned away to give her some semblance of dignity. One especially brave cop walked right up to me, looking down into my eyes as he kept his gun drawn. "I'm going to need you to come with us."



I tried not to look bored as I plucked his weapon right out of his grip and squeezed it, the red hot metal dripping from my fingers like clay. "Bring me Panacea."



The taller man went white as a sheet and his partner looked me dead in the eye and muttered, "They don't pay me enough for this cape shit."



One of the doctors sprinted out of the room and down the hall. Before long, the girl in question walked down the hallway, flanked by cops and flustered doctors, her white robe fluttering behind her. She had mousey brown hair in unruly curls that peeked out from beneath the oversized hood she was wearing, freckles covering every inch of her face; if one were unkind, it looked like shit splattered through a screen door. The girl smelled like a vending machine and her lips curled into something not quite a snarl and not quite a frown. "I don't do requests."



"Lucky you, this isn't a request."



"I don't do demands either, unless you want my sister and the PRT to lock you up and throw away the key."



I had to give Panacea one thing; She had a spine under there somewhere. I felt bad for a second, though. Her eyes were bloodshot and dark like she had been up for days and her breaths were shallow… she was a lot more scared than she looked. "Then have some damn compassion. Please."



A mechanical whine shook the both of us out of our battle of wills, and a nurse stuck her head out of the room. "She's coding! It's now or never!"



Panacea looked at me again, lip quivering as if she wanted to scream in my face, but she seemed to think better of it and she let out a long-suffering sigh before strolling into the room. I followed close behind, the doctors parting like the Red Sea, and she pulled off a pair of gloves to touch the woman's ankle. "Hmm. Withdrawal, severe heroin withdrawal. Urea in her blood, alongside—god, is that oven cleaner? Clots in her lungs. Should be dead ten times over if it wasn't for the adrenaline… wait, she's a cape?"



The freckled girl spun her head towards me and glared. "Who the fuck did you bring here?"



"Does it matter?"



That brought her up short, her mouth gaping like a fish before snapping shut. "Fine. I'll keep her alive."



"Fix her. Fix everything."



"Are you insane?" Panacea said through gritted teeth. "I can clear the drugs from her veins and repair the damage, sure. She'll be good as new, physically. But that won't fix the mental state that got her like this in the first place. I don't do brains and there's nothing that's going to fix her mind."



"Just… do what you can," I said, feeling the weight of the day pressing on my shoulders. "I'm tired of death."



"Your funeral," she muttered, turning her attention back to the woman, "She's lucky she didn't lose much of her chest, because I'm going to need all of it for this."



Panacea focused and the woman's body began to change. It reminded me of something from school, in the Before Times. A nature documentary where ants would swarm a carcass and reduce it to bones sped up so it happened in seconds instead of hours. Except here it was in reverse; the woman's chest withered to a shadow of its former, ample size, but the rest of her seemed to cobble itself together between blinks. The sores crusted before retreating inwards and shriveling to nothing, leaving baby pink skin behind. Her sallow, paper-thin skin plumped and pinked, filling in the gaps and premature wrinkles whatever sickness she had had inflicted on her. Scars vanished as if they had never been there to begin with and the nearly skeletal sunken eyes came forward and settled into something more human.



Her hair was still matted and filthy and there was still an unkempt sheen on her skin, but the woman looked blessedly normal.



She might even have been pretty, if she hadn't been trying to kill me an hour ago.



"There, she's fixed." Panacea said, and just as the words left her mouth I heard a dozen clicks behind me. When I turned around, I noticed a muzzle for every click pointed in my direction and a man decked out in blue armor standing behind them, a frown the only thing exposed on his helmeted face. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw all the doctors run out of the hospital room, followed closely by Panacea, an ugly smirk on her face. "And you're fucked."



"On your knees," the armored man grunted, drawing a pole from his back. It unfurled like origami, growing longer with a blade on one end. Tinker. "It will be easier for everyone if you comply."



"No."



The muzzles started to give a low whine, as if they were charging up and the armored man's frown grew sharper. "If you don't come quietly, we will be authorized to use force and make you comply."



A whistle pierced the air and two metal-tipped wires bounced off of my shoulder. The armored man whipped his head toward the source of the shot; a cop who was so nervous his hands were shaking, wires dangling uselessly from his weapon. "I'm so—"



"Open fire!"



Whistles echoed in the cramped hallway as the barbs sailed towards me before uselessly clattering to the floor. Three steps and I was at the first of the cops, tapping him softly on the temple and watching him collapse bonelessly to the ground. It was easy after that — three of them dropped their strange weapons and took off running in the other direction. The others fell as I walked through the crowd, light taps from my fingers breaking noses or doling out concussions until I came up to the strange armored Tinker. "A fight, then," he said before swinging his pole in a shallow arc. He was abnormally good with his weapon, dodging the errant bodies on the floor and not even touching the walls or ceiling as the blade flew through the air, changing paths as I ducked and dodged out of the way. He finally came at me just outside of my vision, his blade giving a mighty clang as it connected with my shoulder and snapped off at the base.



To his credit, he immediately danced backwards, spinning the pole gracefully around until the butt of the weapon jutted forward, tipped with a fine point needle that managed to hit my chest and crumple against my skin. Before he could escape, I reached out and grabbed him by the seam of his shoulder and pulled the helmet off, his eyes registering shock for half a second before I flicked him between the eyes and he collapsed to the ground with the rest of them.



A muffled cry made me turn towards the other hallway; it was Panacea, her face gone pale beneath her freckles and one hand over her mouth to quiet her gasping breaths, the other furiously typing on her phone. She must have realized I noticed her, because she swallowed whatever breath she had and lurched towards me, exposed hand at the ready. The armored Tinker was nearly seven feet tall in his metal suit and he had more grace than this girl a third his size. I stepped to the side and let her stumble to the ground, ass over teakettle, before I grabbed the bottom of her robe and hog-tied her sleeves to her stockings. "I don't think so, you little witch."



I didn't think her power could affect me, but there was no sense in taking chances.



After all, she thought her power kept her untouchable.



She was wrong.



I went back into the room and plucked the woman, mattress and all, off the bed and walked out the way I came. The rain had stopped at some point while we were inside and the night air was humid and strong with the salt air coming off the sea. In that moment, I really missed my boat.



"W-where are we?" a whisper came from inside the blankets. The mystery woman had finally woken up. "Who the fuck are you?"



"The hospital. Panacea fixed you."



"Are you kidding me?" She mumbled, more to herself than anything. "Fine, whatever. What do you want?"



"Nothing. Just tell me where you want me to take you."



She went silent, so quiet I thought she had fallen asleep before she spoke up with a strong voice. "Home. I want to go home."



"Okay, where's home?"



She pointed towards the docks and with the sound of sirens closing in, I leaped into the night air.



---



(Author's Note... The story is going to be QQ and SV exclusive, because we're only now going down the rabbit hole. As this is a Dark Fantasy Romance of sorts, there will be certain things that occur that I'll edit out of this version of the story. When they happen, I'll let you all know upfront. See you soon...)

 

[Mujaki]

You're given a flower,

But I guess that there's just no pleasing you!

Your lips tastes sour,

But you think that it's just me teasing you!

---​

"Hey!"



I felt something push against my shoulder and when I rolled over, there was a short, ugly man jabbing me with his foot. "Hey, wake up!"



"What?" I yawned as I sat up, pulling my backpack out from where it had served as my nightly pillow. It took me a moment to adjust to the odor around me, the scent of stale beer and old piss, of rust and oil. And as I blinked the sleep out of my eyes, I suddenly remembered where I was and what had happened.



"You got any dope?"



"Any what?"



"What do the kids call it, damn. You got any junk. Dope. Smack. The good shit, ya know?" The ugly man said, giving me a once over before he sighed and slumped down against a staircase. "And by the look in your eyes, you've got no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, do you?"



"What?"



"Fuckin' figures."



Now that I had a better look at him, it was easier to tell that he had powers. His skin was downright odd, baby pink and smooth in some spots and raw and scabbed in others. His hair was brown, but so thin and wispy that he may as well have not had any at all. His limbs were frail and shrunken compared to his stocky frame, a middling beer gut swelling out of an old t-shirt and hanging over the waistband of a ratty pair of sweats. He had a familiar set of strange sores at the crease of his elbows, but he seemed less affected than the woman had been. "You mean drugs?"



"He speaks!" the ugly man chortled. "I thought you were a broken record for a second there, kid." He shifted his bulk around to face me, his mottled face breaking into a smile that revealed perfectly white teeth. "Yes, drugs. That's why I'm here. And if you've got none and Squealer got none, that means I'm taking my services somewhere that does."



"You work for, uh, Squealer?"



He stared blankly at me for a second before bursting into laughter. "Ha! That's rich. Me working for her? Get out of here. Nah, I worked for Skids. He had the good shit and was willing to pay me to make sure the dealers paid him. He ain't around anymore, you made sure of that"—he leaned in, as if sharing a secret—"and I'm not crazy enough to make a play for Squealer's crazy ass or hang out long enough for you to bring down the heat. So I'm getting the fuck out."



"You don't have any loyalty after she took you in?" I fumed. Realistically, I didn't know anything about the woman beyond her pain and her fury, but I felt like I had to be indignant on her behalf at that moment.



"Hell no," he shrugged, dragging himself to his feet. "I dunno what you did to her last night, but she was all kinds of pissed and she tried to stab you a few times. Didn't take, obviously." The ugly man pulled a hoodie over his shoulders and started shambling towards the door. "And before that, the crazy bitch was running on fumes trying to get that fucking rhino thing built. Tried to tell her that anyone strong enough to toss Skids into the drink from midtown wasn't anyone to fuck with, but she tried to do it anyway. Had to hide the stash from her too, otherwise she would've shot it all up with nothing left for me."



Now my indignation was real. And growing. I stood up to meet his eyes and realized that I towered over him. "You knew she was dying from whatever drugs she didn't have anymore and you stole from her?"



"Hey, I'm not trying to beef with you, kid," he said, eyes wide and hands up. "Not my fault I can handle my shit better than she can. Powers are funny like that."



"Do I look like I'm laughing?"



"Look," the ugly man huffed, "I'm leaving. You wanna deal with her? Go ahead, she's upstairs. You'll probably take off after too long anyway." He made it to the door and shimmied out sideways, giving me one final nod. "Besides, she's not much to look at anymore, so what's the point?"



The door closed and I was left alone with my thoughts. Glancing around, I realized that I was in a garage of some kind, old tires piled up in the corners alongside beer bottles and what looked like dirty needles and spots of old oil dotting the concrete floor. I had brought the woman—Squealer, he had called her—to a place that looked like an old store from the outside, derelict with windows that had been boarded up and a tower that looked like an old lighthouse attached to the side. After putting her down and with no place else to go, I used the hospital bed for myself and tucked in for the night.



If the ugly man had been right (and judging by the shards of broken metal and the butt of a broken screwdriver next to the mattress, he was), she might still be holding a grudge.



Not that it mattered too much.



I still needed to go check on her. Just to be safe.



The garage had a high ceiling, as if it had been a warehouse in another lifetime, and a rickety stairwell led up to the base of the tower. I cleared it in a few short hops and knocked on the door.



"Mush, I told you to get the fuck out!"



If nothing else, her lungs were healthy. "He's gone. It's just me."



There was nothing but silence for a long moment, though if I tried, I could hear her heart skip a beat before thudding harshly against her chest as she gasped for air. "Why are you here?!"



"I just wanted to make sure you were okay."



"Sure you do, you murdering fuck," she wheezed, as if the act of speaking was sapping her strength. "You wanna finish the job?"



I sighed and leaned my forehead against the door. "I wouldn't have taken you to the hospital if I wanted you to die. You were doing that just fine on your own."



Maybe it was low to say that, but sometimes you need a little harsh truth to cut through the heat and anger. She was quiet again for a minute, her breathing slowing down to a steadier pace, before she whispered, "You should've left me there."



"I couldn't do that. I don't want to kill anyone."



Anymore.



"You killed him."



"I did," I said, "I didn't mean to."



The door unlatched with a soft click. "Come in."



Compared to the rest of the garage, Squealer's bedroom was surprisingly neat; the carpet was lime and newly vacuumed, the floor beneath it a sturdy hardwood, and the walls draped with fabric in varying shades of green. The only unfortunate odors came from a bundle of old, ratty clothes piled in one corner that presumably belonged to the late Skidmark. And in the center of it all, sitting on the biggest bed I had ever seen in my life, was Squealer.



She was wearing the same clothes as yesterday, though they fit on her differently due to how Panacea reshaped her form to heal her. The tank top, still torn and stained with flecks of motor oil, draped off of her shoulders in a way that would have looked obscene if she hadn't been so diminished. Her denim shorts hung loose on her hips, even as she sat, though a belt strapped to the smallest hole kept them from falling off. Her bandana was gone, though her hair was still tied back in a knot due to how badly matted it remained. Without her mask, she looked younger than I thought she was, and she stared at me with clear, blue eyes. "You… you're just a kid."



"I'm not that young."



"Young enough to argue about it," she mumbled, absently picking at a hole in her shorts. "So what do you want, really?"



I opened my mouth to reply, but the words caught in my throat. What did I want?



I came to the city for a reason that didn't pan out, Tammi made sure of that. Part of me wished I could just… pull her away from whatever nonsense she managed to get herself into. But that wouldn't solve anything, not really. She had a choice and she'd made it.



I could take her away from it, from everything.



I… didn't want to. Not anymore.



Not after her.



Choices didn't matter to her. You did what she told you to do and that was that. When you disobeyed her, she would punish you in ways I never wanted anyone else to feel.



So no, I wouldn't take that choice away from Tammi. Not unless it meant more death.



I was tired of death, and that's the only reason Squealer was here and whole. "I don't know. All I know is that I didn't want you to die."



She looked gobsmacked, barely able to stutter out a reply. "T-that's not a real answer!"



"That's all I've got." I said. "What about you? You're the one who showed up at my place looking for a fight."



"I wanted you to die," Squealer said, her voice low and intense. "I wanted it so bad I could taste it and I didn't care how bad it hurt when I was fixing up my baby and getting her ready. Skids was"—she swallowed a sob, tears streaming down her face—"gone and everyone was leaving and all I knew was that it was because of you. So I went out and found you."



With every word, it was like the fury drained out of her. It was physical; her shoulders drooped and she slumped forward, her voice straining as she unclenched her jaw. Now she just looked tired and sad, dark rings around her blue eyes. "Fat lot of good that did me, huh?" She looked up, lips trembling. "You didn't even feel it, did you? You just tore my baby up like nothing. I came downstairs, you know, afterwards. When you were sleeping. Tried to fuck you up and broke my good screwdriver. Mush, the fucker, laughing his ass off when I lost my breath coming back upstairs and laughing harder when my pants fell off. But he left too, didn't he?"



"Yeah."



"Fuck 'em, don't need him. He probably took all my shit with him anyway."



"He said he took the drugs."



"Of course he did, the asshole," Squealer spat. "Probably wouldn't do me any good now, anyway. How the fuck did you convince that prissy bitch to help me?"



I shrugged, running my fingers through my hair. "I asked her."



"Bullshit."



"Nicely."



"Whatever," she said, slumping backwards against a small mountain of worn pillows. "I don't know what the fuck I want. You should've left me on the beach."



"I couldn't," It took me a moment to realize I said it out loud, and the words kept flowing. "Leaving you there would mean leaving you to die. Maybe you wanted to die, maybe you were just too mad and sad to care, doesn't matter. It wouldn't have been decent to leave and gamble that someone else might have been brave enough to help."



Squealer went quiet again, her breathing soft and slow, and I thought she might have fallen asleep for a moment before she spoke up again. "You didn't mean to kill him, did you?"



"No," I sighed. "It was a Tinker truck, so I figured he would have bailed out."



"That dumb motherfucker," she muttered, pulling herself back upright. "I'm hungry and I don't have the energy to go grab something. You got someplace to be?"



"I can find somewhere else to sl—"



"NO!" I was startled by the sudden volume, her eyes wide with fright for a split second before she frowned. "I mean"—she closed her eyes to collect herself—"ah fuck. You can stay."



"I don't want to make a fuss."



"Nah, you won't. You owe me, anyway."



She eyed me with a crooked smile and I felt utterly lost. "Wait, how do you figure that?"



"First," she said with an imperious tone. "You trashed my rig when you tossed it in the fucking ocean. That dumbass took the mobile safe with him because he was a petty bitch like that and now I'm down $10k, so you're gonna help me find it. Second, you trashed my new baby on the beach, so you've gotta help me make another one. You want a place to sleep where the fucking birds won't fight over your pizza crusts, that's what you've gotta do. You hear me?"



It sounded simple enough, but there wasn't a lot of kindness to be found in Brockton Bay. "What's the catch?"



"No catch, just work."



There were worse things I could do with my time.



Plus it would be nice to stay out of the rain. "Deal."



"Good!" she said, swinging long legs over the edge of the bed to stand up.



And stand. And kept standing.



I had to look up at her, since she was a good half a head taller than me at least. Without her old weight, she looked almost boyish with her clothes hanging off of her. Gangly, if there was any word for it. But with that grin of hers, she looked almost normal. "So what do I call you?"



"Gabriel. What about you?"



"Your first gig is getting us something to eat while I shower," she said, digging through her pockets and then tossing me a few crumpled bills. "And call me Sherrel."

---​

(Author's Note... okay, I lied. This is the last chapter of this thing that will be on Spacebattles. As I mentioned in the last chapter, this story will have certain bits edited or excised to fit within SV standards, but I'll also let you know upfront what has been done to a given chapter. We'll start picking up the pace a bit from here on out, but our two major players for this arc have been introduced. See you on the other side...)

 

[Mujaki]

Lots of people in this world,
But I want to be your boy.
To me that thought is sounding so absurd,
And I don't want to be your toy...

---
​

The locals weren't kidding when they called it the Boat Graveyard.

Beneath the waves, deeper than most would dare to go, rusted hulks reached up from the sandy depths like bony fingers reaching towards the light. Sediment crusted the edges, making them shimmer in a rainbow of color when the sunbeams hit them just right. There was beauty down here, if you knew where to look.

It was just unfortunate that this little slice of heaven was born from hell; monsters walked the Earth, at least for a little while. And where they went, chaos followed. Cities ravaged, water poisoned, people turned into weapons… or worse. This was a graveyard in every meaning of the word. Ships docked and forgotten, left to rust and rot until the ocean took them back. That was the real cost of the Second rising from the seas. It had been infuriating to see the Crowleys spout their filth, knowing they never believed, not really. They talked a big game and liked to throw their weight around, knowing they were better at blending in than the rest of us in the Clans. All that talk from Sabrina and I doubted she had ever been swimming, let alone seen the ocean even once in her life.

The McVeays had never been right in the head, looking back on it now. They saw the First, the Herokiller emerge from the soil, huge and inhuman in a way I don't think they really understood, and saw it as a savior. A mountain given form and fury with no other purpose except death. They believed and that's how they would act. Salvation reserved only for the dying.

And then there was the Third, the goddess. I had only seen It once, when I was seven. New to the Clan, in a wide tent with the other kids, we were turned loose as she gave a sermon, all icy hate and low words. She had started dyeing her hair by then, snow white to match the face on the old boxy television screen. But for all the fervent belief she possessed, it wasn't like the face on the screen. Pretty, the way a feather or a piece of glass was pretty. Delicate. But when I saw those eyes, I knew. The beauty, the delicate feminine grace was a lie.

She called It by many names; the goddess, the Third, the Simurgh, though she liked Ziz the best, the way it rolled off of her tongue when preaching. It thrilled her the way men of flesh and blood could not. She loved It and It alone. And she believed.

But it was a lie. And even though the screen was supposed to be paused so the other clan members could admire the thing's beauty, It turned that angelic face away from wherever It had struck and looked at me.

It was different from the others in a way I couldn't explain. The Herokiller and the Leviathan were monsters; uncaring, unfeeling avatars of death and destruction. But when the Golden Man vanished, so did they as if they were never there to begin with. Cities turned into wastelands and a whole country cracked in half and sunken beneath the waves, a legacy of death I couldn't begin to fathom.

But It was different. It hadn't disappeared, not really. After the final time It ventured down to Earth, not long after the first time I met Its gaze, the thing had simply taken to the skies and stayed there, cocooned within innumerable wings completely hidden from view. Even now It was up in the skies, at the edge of the horizon where the day turns into endless night. Tainting the stars by Its very presence.

Memories, ugly and dark. I didn't need to think about that, not when I had a job to do.

I was heavy enough that I would sink gradually, but I didn't have much daylight left. I could have reached the bottom faster if I just breathed in the seawater, my lungs able to take whatever I needed from it, but then getting back to the surface would be a problem.

And to be honest, I didn't feel like throwing up a bucketful of water once I got back to shore. It didn't hurt, but it was a hassle.

I jerked sideways a moment as a riptide caught hold of me, but a flutter of my legs pulled me out of it. With my whole body leaning into the movement, I shot down to the bottom. At this depth the light would have been dim even at noon, but my eyesight was sharp enough that I wouldn't be in trouble until close to sunset. Grabbing a clump of seaweed to steady myself, I started the slow process of trawling through the muck. This was my third day out here looking for what was left of Sherrel's rig; the first day I had managed to find the exact place Skidmark had hit the water, one of the huge, rusted shards scarred and dented from where the machine had sunk beneath the waves. But the tides were strong out here, so it must have been pulled along before hitting bottom.

Yesterday was spent mostly riding the tides to test where they would take me, though I usually swam free before I ended up too far from shore. Most of them tracked towards the north, but nothing had come from digging. Plus it was a little too close to the strange Tinker fortress the local PRT branch called home, an old oil rig that had been gussied up to serve as a base. I had no idea if they were able to track movement as deep as I was, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

Today I was further south, away from any scrying Tinker eyes and close to where I felt the edge of town might be. And luckier still, I hit paydirt; Sherrel's Rig, still mostly intact, was half buried in the silt. I swam around to the busted cab, half expecting to see what was left of Skidmark still stuck inside. Instead, the cab was empty, the windows broken and if there had been any blood, the sea had long washed it away. The cheap spandex skullcap he wore as a mask was still stuck to the windshield, wedged between two sharp pieces of glass alongside a chunk of his hair.

He made it out, alright. Just too late for it to matter.

I worked my fingers in-between the seam of the windshield and the frame until I could find purchase, and then I pried the whole thing off so I could slide inside the cab. There wasn't much left behind after the tides and the fish had their way, but beneath the seat was my prize: a dark metal box so smooth I couldn't feel any seams was wedged between an old thermos and a tire jack. I yanked it free and slid out the way I came, sinking my feet into the mud for just long enough to kick off towards the sky.

I rocketed towards the surface, the water shifting around me from a deep blue to light green as I reached the surface and shot upward, the sun filtered through the drops around me and for the blink of an eye, I was encased in light of every color. Gravity did its dirty work, though, and I fell back into the sea, the metal box clutched safely to my chest as I righted myself and started swimming towards the shore.

---​

"I can't fucking believe it."

Sherrel eyed the box, oblivious to the fact that everything in the room smelled like seawater, including me. There was only one working shower in the garage, so the two of us had to share most days. Simple enough when I rose with the sun and Sherrel had a habit of sleeping in until noon. I hadn't bothered with it this morning, though, knowing the task I had been assigned. She had been adamant that I wasn't an "employee" but a contractor and she paid me per task I managed to accomplish.

I'd been here for two weeks now and it still felt very strange, most days. She had sent me out for takeout the moment I had gotten back with the box; a celebration, she called it. Sherrel had scrounged up a small cabinet's worth of decent plates and trays after the first week, insistent that I eat upstairs with her so she wouldn't have to yell downstairs anymore.

And as always, my favorite place in the Asian Market didn't care about how I smelled, just that my cash was good. "What? That I was able to find it?"

"Yes! Exactly!" she said, reaching over to steal a dumpling right off my plate. Naturally, I had gotten a double order because it hadn't been the first time she'd acted like a dirty thief. "Like, I know you can do some serious Brute shit, but what the fuck? Can you breathe underwater or something?"

"Yeah."

"You're shitting me."

"I didn't need to this time," I said, pausing to mull over a particularly crispy bit of General Tso's. "But yeah, I can."

"Powers are bullshit," she muttered, stabbing a noodle before twisting it into a neat, little nest to swallow. There was a whole drawer full of half-empty makeup bottles in the bathroom, but she only really used a slash of bright red lipstick and she was careful not to smear it no matter what we were eating. "Wish you'd been able to grab a few bits from the old Rig, but it doesn't matter too much. I used a lot of old shit putting it together and only kept it around because I can't toss projects aside anymore."

"Have you been, uh, Tinkering?"

A sour look crossed her face. "Hell no. I tried going downstairs again while you were out in the drink and had to stop to catch my breath after ratcheting a bolt. Just one fucking bolt!" She pointed to the edge of the bed where a hill of graph paper sat, covered in indecipherable squiggles. "I've been planning shit with that notebook you got me, thanks by the way."

"You're welcome."

"Heh. But it's not the same." Sherrel jabbed a fried prawn with a chopstick, swirling it around to catch the dregs of sweet and sour sauce. "I can see everything in my head, kinda, and it helps to see the pieces when I draw them out. But I've gotta be down there with a tool in my hand for it to really sing, you know?"

I thought I knew about Tinkers before Brockton Bay; people who could create impossible things from almost nothing and nearly unstoppable things when they had enough resources. They were one of the few things she was ever scared of when I was a kid, the major reason the Clan was always on the move. Once I got my powers, though, she decided that we could put down roots and my education after that consisted of dismantling the random Tinker creations she was able to get ahold of. Looking at a piece of finished Tinkertech was like looking at a finished painting or a novel. What actually went into making such a thing, as I was learning through Sherrel, was very different. "I could help, you know. We can use that car seat thing you built."

"It's not a car seat, you ass!"

"You sure about that?" I pointed at the suspiciously seat-shaped pile of cushions and belts next to the bedroom door.

"It's a harness, for one thing. And second, it doesn't work."

"It worked just fine to me? I mean, you're not heavy or anything."

Sherrel's face pinked a bit at that and she opted to take another bite before muttering, "Not the point. I looked fucking stupid."

She had a point there. The seat had been cobbled together from an old office chair, a tangle of old seat belts that had been laying around the garage, and the innards of a microwave she'd used to make a motor that could run the pneumatic piston to raise her up and down to grab things I couldn't reach. I'd worn it like a reverse backpack, strapped her in, and walked around the shop a little bit. From my end of things, it worked like a charm. Of course, Sherrel was so much taller than me that her legs dangled low enough to touch my shins and she'd tailored the seat to how she used to look, so she would slide out from between the straps if she leaned too far to one side.

I told her that the only thing that really needed to be fixed was the straps, but she declared the whole project a failure and went back to the drawing board. "I could just carry you."

"Maybe, let's put a pin on that," she said, nibbling on the end of a chopstick as she looked off to the side. There was a mirror next to the closet door, big enough it covered from top to bottom. I would catch her staring at it sometimes, like she didn't recognize the person staring back. Sherrel didn't stare at it for long, though, and shook her head before diving back into her noodles with renewed gusto. "Anyway, you figure out what you're wanting to do?"

"I think so," I said, spooning a bit of sauce over the last bite on my plate. "I think I want to go back to school."

There was a soft clink as her chopstick dropped out from between her fingers and landed on her plate and it took me a moment between bites to notice that she was staring at me with wide eyes, mouth agape as if struggling to find the words. "Why?"

"What do you mean 'Why'?" As nice as the last couple of weeks had been having a roof over my head and something of a job, it still didn't feel all that different from my time on the boat. I was under the radar, but it wasn't normal from what I read in books and I felt strangely defensive. "Don't people normally go to school?"

"You're an unstoppable force! The hell you even need school for?"

"To feel normal?"

"Well, the ship's sailed on that one!" Sherrel said, arms wide and food forgotten. "I'm not trying to be mean here, but where are you gonna go? Do you have papers or an ID or something?" At the shake of my head, she sighed, "Winslow's a fucking hole, but even they've got standards, Gabe. You've got to exist before you can even set foot inside."

The tiny hope I'd kept alive since leaving the compound, carefully tended like a flame from an ember, withered at her words. I hadn't thought about that, not really. I assumed… no, I hoped that I could just walk in once I got ready. Once I'd picked up enough of the basics to get by. As many books as I devoured when I was bored, I knew I was a quick study.

I just needed a chance. "What would I need? What kind of ID?"

"A state ID. Probably your birth certificate. Social, shit like that."

A birth certificate?

I didn't even know my real last name.

"Look," she said, reaching out to put a warm hand on my knee. "I know a guy, kinda. Skids used him to set up some deals and cash out a few bonds he got ahold of. He can probably get you what you need, but he doesn't come cheap."

"Think he can get me enrolled in school?"

"I dunno, but you might want to try something else instead, just in case. Or"—she paused, biting her lip—"Get your GED. Might be easier that way and you won't have to deal with kids and shit." Sherrel shifted, uncrossing her legs to rest her head on a knee. "Some of the guys who used to be runners for Skids and got in too deep, they'd go somewhere. Get clean. And when they got out, they'd head over to Captain's Hill. There's a center there for people like them."

The words like us were soundless, but I heard them all the same.

"How long do you think that would take?"

"That ready to get out of my hair, huh?"

"No, I like it here. It's nice," I said, and Sherrel turned her head away. "I just want to try. I never had a choice before."

---​

They called it a 'Community Center'.

I walked through the doors, dressed as nicely as I could manage. Sherrel didn't want to send me out the way I normally dressed when running errands or cleaning in the shop, so she had me head over to the swap meet with a few hundred bucks in hand to buy clothes for the both of us. After a lot of hemming and hawing, she finally admitted defeat in her fight against her old wardrobe; none of it fit anymore, even after I took a masonry nail to punch extra holes into her belt. The weight just wasn't coming back as fast as she wanted. Her particular style was usually 'as revealing as possible', her excuse being that the shop got hot when all the machinery was going.

Truth be told, I think she just liked dressing to scandalize for the fun of it.

But she had a better eye for me, thankfully. I showed up at the Center in a brand-new black shirt, sleeves cut away at the shoulders to leave my arms bare and tucked into my new blue jeans.

I finally had new boots too.

The lady at reception was all smiles, pointing me down the hall past an enclosed garden surrounded by walls of glass. As much as I tried to enjoy the scenery, I couldn't help but wonder if she still would have been kind if I had shown up dressed as I was a week ago. It soured my mood a little, but I pressed on past the garden and the clean brick walls through a set of double doors. The sun streamed in through high windows, the bright yellow walls making the whole room glow. Below the windows were shelves full of books, more than I had ever seen in a single place before. I knew that there was a public library in town, but I wasn't sure if it could hold more books than the length of this room. More than I could read in a whole lifetime—

"Can I help you?"

A voice broke me out of my silent reverence, sharp and feminine. I looked down at the desk to see a girl scarcely older than me in a blouse the color of cream, her brown hair pulled back into a tight bun held in place by a pair of sky-blue clips. At a glance, the girl was short; shorter than me and much, much shorter than Sherrel. Petite. She had a pair of glasses that made her eyes look much bigger than they were, and her expression shifted from annoyance to something like curiosity. She seemed to be waiting, so I collected myself and answered. "Yes, I was here to see the GED tutor? Miss Donna sent me here from the front."

The petite girl eyed me up and down for a moment before a smile crossed her lips. "That's me! At your service, um…"

"Gabriel."

"That's such a pretty name!" she said, though she immediately covered her mouth in shock. "Oh! I'm sorry, I know how boys feel about that."

"It's alright. I'm looking for a Miss Clemmons?"

"Clements," the girl said, taking my hand with a firm shake. "Madison Clements."

---

​

(Author's Note... Did I say our major players were all introduced? Well, not quite. Now all the pieces have taken the board. Gabriel has a few unresolved issues regarding his past, but I'm sure most of you noticed the For Want of a Nail that shifted this universe. For the curious, this story began the summer before Worm canon begins. I do hope you enjoy our merry band of fuck-ups as we fall further down the rabbit hole...)

 

[Mujaki]

You don't know how lips hurt
Until you've kissed and had to pay the cost!
Until you've flipped your heart and you have lost,
You don't know what love is...

---
​

"Gimme the socket set, will you?"

I grabbed the old, dented box off of the workbench and slid it beneath the frame to Sherrel, her long legs the only visible part of her as she worked on the "mounting frame", as she called it. It was nice to see her so excited, especially after so many days of her being confined to the bedroom. I had the good luck to find a nearly intact Volkswagen minibus at a nearby junkyard walking home from the community center that first day and, after a week of scouting, managed to haul it out in the dead of night back to the shop. When I presented it to her this morning as a way of thanking her for letting me sleep in the garage, she broke into tears.

She bounced back pretty fast after that. When the tears were done and biscuits eaten — two with sausage for me, three with taylor ham for her — I carried her downstairs to the shop and we got to work.

"Will you pick the back end up for a sec? I'm coming out."

I did as she asked, the old bumper groaning a bit beneath my fingers as I pulled it up. Sherrel shimmied out, face ruddy and her brow beaded with sweat. "I think I'm tapped out for now."

"I've got you."

Her nose pinked a bit and she gave me a smirk as she raised her arms. "Yeah, yeah."

"I can help, you know." I said, scooping her up and heading back into the garage.

"Please. The last time I asked you to screw something in, you stripped the threading and broke off the head."

"That's because you fell over."

"I was laughing, Gabe," she said, giving me a light tap on my chest as I walked upstairs. "Besides, you did good finding that beater. And with you around, I don't need to fix the garage jack either."

Once we were back in her bedroom, Sherrel squirmed out of my arms and tumbled to the bed, bouncing with a big grin on her face. She was wearing her new denim overalls, the legs cut off into makeshift shorts that were mildly less revealing than the pair she originally owned. Beneath that was one of my old shirts, also cut and trimmed to be sleeveless and would have shown off a good bit of belly if she hadn't had the denim over it. She had finally started filling out again, thankfully; her legs less knobby, her shoulders and neck no longer distressingly frail. Her cheeks had color to them again and weren't hollow at all anymore.

The most surprising part, though, was her hair. It had taken several hard scrubs, but Sherrel had gotten most of the grime out. The matting had been a big problem, and she eventually took a pair of shears and cut the offending clumps off entirely. In the end, her hair was a lot lighter than I thought when it was all said and done, more golden blonde than brown and with her new bob she looked like a whole different person than the sickly, dying woman I met a month ago.

Truth be told, Sherrel looked good. "Nice to know I'm some use around here. Made you laugh and you don't need to replace some fancy gadget? Looks like I'm earning a spot for my mattress downstairs."

"Hey! You do more than that," she said, rolling over to give me a playful shove. "You bring us food."

"On your dime."

"And you carry me downstairs when I get the itch to go fuck around with my tools."

"Only because you won't use the car seat."

"It's a harness, you ass!"

"You still don't use it."

"Well," Sherrel mumbled, her face half buried in a pillow."Turns out we didn't need it, did we?"

We really didn't. My arms were enough and she'd gotten used to it, so why fuss at this point? "That's fair."

"Glad you think so," she sighed, flopping over onto her back. "I dunno, Gabe. It feels good to get back to Tinkering, but what the hell am I gonna do with it?"

"Well, what did you do before?" I said, scooting over to give her plenty of room to spread, though she dug her fingers into my shirt and I let her yank me back. "It feels like there should be a lot of opportunities for a Tinker."

"You'd think so, but nah. Nowhere I'd wanna go, at least."

"The PRT?"

"Fuck the PRT," she said, "I go there, then there's paperwork and licenses and red tape and all the bullshit I left behind in San Antonio."

That was different. "Texas?"

"Fuck no. New Mexico," Sherrel still had the hem of my shirt between her fingers, her nails tickling the bare skin of my back. "You think there isn't shit to do here? Back home there's only three restaurants, two bars, and the closest supermarket that didn't charge out the ass for eggs or gas was twenty minutes away." She started tracing lazy loops along the fabric with her thumb as she continued. "One main road went right through the town. If you didn't want to get wasted, you went out dragging on that road for fun. Had to do it in the middle of the night, though, 'cause the state troopers liked to try and fill their quotas out there. Fucking pigs."

I thought back to the time a trooper caught me sleeping on a park bench in Lexington and tried to make me "vacate" the area at 3am with a baton and three of his friends. I wondered if the local capes managed to get them out of their patrol unit after I crushed the doors shut and bent the frame around them. "Can't say I'm a big fan."

"You said it, Gabe!" she preened, cheeks flushed and I hoped she hadn't overdone it downstairs. "But yeah. We used to clock ourselves, see how fast we could drag to White Sands. We used to race, but after the local college started testing their explosive shit out there, there got to be too much traffic." Sherrel's smile dropped. "Hit a townie by accident and damn near every cop in the state'll show up. Hit a drunk piece of white trash? No one gives a fuck about that. No ambulances for hours. No one in town with a car fast enough to get them to a hospital gives a fuck. And the only person that did, well… they had to run. As far and as fast as she could."

Sherrel got quiet after that, staring right up at the ceiling, one hand clutching her pillow and the other still holding fast to my shirt. I wanted to say something, but the words were sticky in my throat. I felt them, rolling around my mouth, ugly thoughts that she didn't need to hear. Not right now.

And I'd be a hypocrite, worse that she ever was. Skidmark was the last, but he wasn't the first. Not by a long shot. "You did. You cared." Sherrel remained silent, so I let the words sit for a minute before pressing on. "It's worse when no one cares. I always thought being kin meant caring about your family. But no one cared, not really. Just a bunch of jackals looking out for themselves and turning on you when they can't use you anymore."

"There's no such thing as kin," she spat the word, a snarl on her lips. "Just a bunch of fuckheads you're unlucky enough to be related to."

"No one helping each other."

"Calling and begging you to turn yourself in and then begging you to come home and help them rob shit when they find out you've got powers."

"No one treats you right when you have powers."

"Not like a fucking person, not like you're more than a fast car and a faster lay."

"They tell you you're family from the day you get there, fill your head full of filth and lies, and make you"—I shut my eyes and clench my fists at the phantom pressure of bony arms around my shoulders, of a ghostly whisper from thin lips in my ear that I would always belong to her—"do things that no one should ask their family to do."

I killed for her. But she wanted more than that.

She shifted behind me and I tried not to flinch when warm arms wrapped around me, snaking beneath my own to meet over my chest. I felt Sherrel's weight press against my back, soft against my neck as she perched her chin on the top of my head. "You're not there anymore, Gabe, you're here."

I nodded and tried to swallow, my throat suddenly dry. Sherrel wasn't her; she wasn't threatening or cajoling, she wasn't whispering poison into my ear, trying to dig her fingers down my throat and into my heart to tear away the last piece of soul I had left. Trying to lick away the blood that dripped from my fingertips.

And I wasn't in Missouri, not anymore. Never again. "Thanks, Sher."

She smiled against my hair and we stayed like that for a little while, up until her legs started shaking and she had to sit back down, looking in the mirror as if staring at a stranger who shared her skin. I felt like that some days; wearing new, nice clothes and boots and wondering who the person in the reflection really was.

Her hands were just as stained as mine.

---​

"Gabriel, are you alright?"

I nodded, shaking myself out of a daze. Miss Clements leaned over to glance at my paperwork, her shoulder brushing against mine. She wore a sweater today despite the humidity outside, short-sleeved and snug in the same pale yellow as the walls and a black pencil skirt over equally yellow tights. Her hair was still up in a bun, though she had arranged her hair clips along one side, making it look as if it had been swept upwards in a wave. "Yeah. Just had my head in the clouds."

"Rime of the Ancient Mariner will do that, just saying," she said, scanning through my notes. "Huh. Why did you write that particular passage down?"

I followed her eyes down to the bottom of the page, where I had written in a tidy scrawl:

Four times fifty living men,
(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)
With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They dropped down one by one.​

Missouri flashed in my eyes, but I blinked it back. "It stuck out to me, really."

"Coleridge can be very vivid. When he wants to be, at least," Miss Clements let her finger drift away from my notes and the tip of her nail trailed along the skin of my hand and the back of my neck prickled. "You have very nice handwriting, has anyone ever told you that before?"

I hadn't given much thought to my handwriting in years. I was the first of the kids to really pick it up, back when we were travelers moving from state to state, one step ahead of the PRT. After I learned how to write, one of the other adults set me up to teach the little kids. I liked it back then. Being the first to read and write was a way to feel special without actually being the kind of special that got you the wrong kind of attention.

Of course, once I got my powers, my handwriting became a different sort of lesson. I'd write for hours and hours a day until I could make it through writing our verses without tearing paper or breaking pencils. But that was one of the few lessons I was thankful for later on, when I would write in the margins of the books I'd find while scouting old houses for supplies. "No. But it's nice to hear." Miss Clements was still shoulder-to-shoulder with me and she beamed at my words, so I took that bit of warmth inside as a good sign. One bit of praise deserved another, after all. "I like the way you did your hair, Miss."

She blushed rather prettily at that. "You can call me Madison, you know."

"Is that alright?"

"It is now," she said, and she leaned her head against me for just long enough to catch the smell of her shampoo; like peaches and strawberries and something else I couldn't quite recognize. "Besides, you've been coming here for a week straight now. We're practically besties!"

"Bestie?"

"I keep forgetting you're homeschooled," Madison said, a sly grin on her lips. "It means we're friends!" That grin faltered, though, and she looked away for a moment before drawing her hand away from mine and fiddling with the corner of her notepad. "I mean, we are friends, right?"

Friends? I hadn't really had a friend before, not really. I had kin, a word I was beginning to hate more and more even though they really weren't kin the way it's meant to be. I had Sherrel, though I wasn't really sure what I'd call the two of us. She was older than me, my boss and my housemate, but she also stood between those lines as well. I could talk to her, if I needed to. And it felt good when I did.

Madison was my tutor, but she was my age. Or close enough, really. She might have looked a little older with the way she dressed, but behind the glasses and the nice clothes was someone who just seemed to like being around me. "I think so."

That smile came back in full force and I suddenly realized that I was the one who made that happen.

It was a nice feeling.

There was movement out of the corner of my eye and I followed it over to a table a few rows in front of me; a blonde kid a bit younger-looking than either of us had a hand in the air, waving it back and forth. "Huh. I think he's trying to get your attention."

"Oh, he's fine," she said, keeping her rapt focus on my notes as I kept reading. Beneath the table, she slipped one of her shoes off and started rubbing her leg against mine, toes curling around my right calf and sending shivers up my spine. "It's more interesting over here."

"I think he's turning red."

"Probably because it's warm in here."

"It is, isn't it?"

"Uh huh," she said, that lovely blush from before had returned, darker and spreading down her neck. I had to be the same shade by now, feeling as though steam was wafting off of my ears and neck. "I-I should probably go check on him. Maybe cool down, just for a sec?"

"Yeah. Sounds good to me." I managed to strangle out, though Madison didn't seem to notice. She quietly, reluctantly pulled away and slid her shoe back on before walking around to help the blonde kid. She really had dressed smartly today; with the sun shining through the tall windows, she glowed just as much as the walls did in the light. Her black skirt was a nice contrast, really. It was an outfit that demanded your attention.

A small part of me wondered if that's exactly why she wore it.

And then she leaned over the blonde kid's table.

If her skirt had been snug before, it was straining to contain what lay beneath now. I couldn't help but think of Sherrel at that moment. Madison wasn't nearly as tall and they were wildly different, physically, but… there were things about them that were similar enough, mostly from the chest down. She may have lacked her former heft, but even now Sherrel was considerably more blessed up top than the girl in front of me. Not that Madison was especially lacking, considering her shoulders weren't nearly as broad.

But I hadn't looked at Sherrel, not like this. Not blatantly, especially when that just seemed to be the way she was. Madison was a petite girl, but there was no mistaking this for anything else, especially when she glanced over her shoulder and caught me staring, dead to rights. And then she smiled, her cheeks flushed as she gave a small shimmy that made everything below her waist sway, a bounce that seemed to go in every direction at the same time.

By the time she walked back, she was beet red.

And she wasn't the only one. "Hi."

"Hi."

There was silence as we tried and failed to find words. Any words would have done, but none of them felt right. I knew, I knew there was something I could say or do but whenever I reached for the right way to put it, the words slipped through my fingers like grains of sand. For her part, Madison seemed equally flustered, opening and closing her mouth a few times with words left unsaid. Finally, thankfully, she closed her eyes and let out a long sigh, the blush slowly fading away before she walked back around and sat next to me, hip-to-hip, and almost immediately she curled her leg around mine and laid a very warm hand on my arm. "We should go out."

I blinked at that, feeling that sweet warmth move up my shoulder like a cure for every chilly night I had before the cold stopped bothering me. "When?"

"Tonight."

---​

It was strange going back to the Boardwalk and stranger still taking the city bus to get there. A few weeks and a change of clothes was all it took for the goons that patrolled it to have forgotten all about the kid with ratty jeans and no shoes.

I tried not to let that bother me.

There was a sizable crowd out tonight, though. I hadn't realized that it was a Friday already, not until Madison had pointed it out. After a certain point when I was making my way across the country, the days had started blurring together. There was day and night and that was it. The seasons changed, though moving from the midwest to the coast, that only really meant how much rain I'd have to jump through. I stopped traveling during thunderstorms, mostly because lightning strikes tended to throw me off-course.

Going to the community center changed all of that. I had a schedule, one that I had cobbled together after that first evening Sherrel had mentioned it: I'd work with her in the shop in the mornings, even if I had to drag her out of bed to do it. Thankfully she'd started wearing clothes to bed after the first time I woke her up at dawn. Once she had tired herself out, usually around noon, I'd go find us something to eat and get ready for an afternoon at the community center, where I would study until they closed at 6pm. It was a nice schedule to keep and the days actually meant something again. I had a goal.

"Gabriel!" I heard Madison's voice above the din of the crowd before I saw her. "Over here!"

It took me a moment to recognize her; her hair was down, though her hair clips were still neatly tucked in to keep the hair out of her face. Her glasses were gone, and I noticed her eyes were a startling blue. But perhaps the biggest change was how she dressed. Gone was the smartly dressed tutor and in her place was a girl in a strappy pink top and a snug denim skirt, the creases just below her hips highlighting the what curves she did have. She wasn't wearing tights, instead showing off pale thighs that were more substantial that I originally would have guessed and tapering down into a lovely pair of legs. Rather than the short heels she wore at "work", Madison instead had a pair of well loved sneakers on her feet, frilly pink socks peeking out from the tops.

She didn't look anything like the tutor I saw every day. In her place was someone who looked equal parts cute and sexy and I don't think I'd ever seen anyone in that light before now. "Hey."

"Hey yourself," she said, wrapping herself around my arm in such a way that we could walk together and yet somehow still let me feel every soft inch of her, "What do you feel like doing?"

"I don't know about you, but standing here is pretty nice."

A goofy smile broke out on Madison's face, but she quickly schooled it into a smirk while pressing herself against me. "It really is, but I'm hungry. One of my friends made a suggestion, if you're okay with that."

"I'm the one new to town," I chuckled. "Lead the way."

Madison squealed as she pulled me down the boardwalk, darting between the crowd with practiced ease while I twisted and turned to make sure I didn't knock anyone down by accident. The sun was setting, casting a delightful orange glow over the ocean, though I couldn't enjoy it as much as I really wanted to as the golden hour also did marvelous things to her bare shoulders and, further down, Madison's skirt was tight enough that every step produced a momentary jiggle that I couldn't take my eyes off of.

Eventually we came to a stop and I was surprised to find that she had led me to a dumpy-looking tan building at the outskirts of the Boardwalk, crowned with a brick-red roof that was downright ugly and a sign that read Waffle Squarf. "Your friend sent us here?"

Madison seemed just as bamboozled as I was, blue eyes wide. "Emma swore this place was good."

"Are you sure she's your friend?"

A man stumbled out from the back door wearing a brick red apron that read Narf the Squarf in bold letters on the front. He took two steps forward, flung his head down, and promptly puked for ten seconds straight.

"Let's go somewhere else."

I looked around, getting a bead on where we were and noticed we were pretty close to a bakery I recognized. "Hey, I've got an idea."

Olympia's wasn't on the Boardwalk directly, but close enough to walk and the crowds weren't as dense, which made it easier to stroll on by with Madison still wrapped around my arm. The owner, a short balding man getting on in age but broad enough that he seemed to be made entirely of knuckle, was a good person. In the first few days after I arrived in the Bay, he was willing to let some poor kid down on his luck throw the trash for day-old pastries and he paid me cash when his tire jack had busted and he needed a boost to change his tire. I never forgot about him and giving Madison free rein to buy whatever she wanted from the tall redhead at the register felt like a good way to pay him back, at least a little bit.

"This place is amazing!" she said, a dollop of cream at the corner of her mouth and I had to fight the sudden urge to lick it clean. "How in the world did you find this place when I've lived here all my life?"

"I spent some time out here when I first got into town." I said.

It wasn't a lie, exactly.

"Aww. I was hoping to be your first experience here on the Boardwalk," she said with a saucy grin and I let her pull me around down a nearby alley. "Looks like I'll just have to find another way to make it memora—"

"Oh, look what we've got here!" I whipped my head around to see a small group of people sitting around a dumpster, five of them in all. The youngest of them was a girl a little older than us with wild hair, purple eyeshadow, and a nose ring while the oldest was a darker skinned man wearing a wifebeater and work pants, a scar on his shoulder and a red bandana looped around his belt. All of them Asian, though I couldn't really tell from where and all of them had red or green on their person. Gang members, though I wasn't sure from which gang they hailed. "A couple of lovebirds! Sorry, kids. You've gotta pay the toll if you wanna get your freak on."

Madison's breathing had gone shallow and she cringed behind me. "Gabriel, we need to run!"

"Nah, no running." The scarred man said, smiling the kind of smile that only comes from anticipation, of knowing that you're in charge and no one around can prove you wrong. I heard movement behind the two of us and a quick glance showed three more gang members behind us, pulling another dumpster around to block off any escape route. "Drop your cash and other valuables on the ground and maybe you'll live to see tomorrow."

"What about the girl?" One of the men behind us piped up. "There ain't much to her tits, but she's got an ass."

"She gets to pay the toll!"

They all chuckled, even the girl perched on the dumpster, and I made up my mind. "Madison, who are these guys?"

"T-they're ABB, Azn Bad Boys," she whimpered, "Gabriel, please. Let's run."

"Are any of them Tinkers?"

"What?" The question was enough to shake Madison out of her panic and she looked around in confusion. "No?"

"Okay," I said, slowing down my breathing and letting the world slow with it. "Do you trust me?"

She was quiet for a second, her fingers clasped tight in mine before she whispered, "Yes."

"When I let go of your hand, I want you to get against the wall and duck until I tell you it's safe."

"What the fuck are you talking about!" Scars bellowed, pulling a knife from his waistband and jabbing it in my direction.

"Now." I dropped my hand and Madison bolted towards the wall.

The three men behind us immediately lunged for her, but they didn't make it more than two steps before I was on them. I pulled them up by their shirts, clean off their feet, and hurled two of them into Scars, bowling him over as I grabbed the third by the scruff of his neck and slammed him into the dumpster meant to trap us.

"CAPE!" one of them screamed, but it didn't matter. Not anymore.

Scars charged me, knife at the ready, and he slashed at my shoulder. The metal twisted as it met my skin, bending it out of his hand and the ruined blade turned back into the knotty mass of his palm. He screamed as blood splattered against his shirt, clutching his ruined hand and he didn't notice when I grabbed him by the throat and shoved him hard enough that he sailed backwards and flipped upside-down into the other dumpster. His friends pulled out handguns, but they were too slow to use them, fumbling with the safety as I dashed forward and plucked them out of their hands and squeezed them into useless lumps of molten metal. Two taps on the forehead and they folded, and into the dumpster they went with the others I had thrown at Scars.

I heard a scream and turned around just in time to see the girl with the nose ring swinging a butterfly knife into my face. Much like Scars, she didn't have a good grip on the blade as it met my cheeks and it twisted out of her hand, a harsh pop telling me that she probably dislocated a finger or three. She crumpled to her knees, a low keening wail echoing off the walls and I looked around to make sure there weren't any other surprises waiting for me. Aside from the moaning girl at my feet, there was no one else around.

Good.

I went back to the other dumpster and grabbed it by the base, made sure I had a firm grip on the lip, and I heaved the whole thing over my head, jostling garbage and the beaten gangster a bit as I walked over and dumped the contents into the other dumpster. Giving the whole thing a good shake, I lined up the opening and stacked it atop the other, bending the lips together until they fused and sealing the muggers inside.

On a whim, I reached up and poked a few holes into the top dampster with a finger. No sense letting them asphyxiate before the PRT showed up. I looked down at the weeping girl, still prostrate at my feet, and jabbed her in the ribs with my foot. "Hey, you have a phone?"

Her reply was garbled and snotty, but she used her unbroken hand to pull a smartphone out of her pocket. The PRT Emergency Hotline was universal, and I tapped 6-1-1 and let it ring. "Thank you for calling the Parahuman Respon—"

"Can you track this phone?"

"—um, yes sir. What's the status of your emergency?"

"I want to report a failed mugging. A cape took out some trash."

"I'll need some more—" I hung up the phone and laid it at the girl's feet. She'd stopped crying, fumbling for the ruined blade behind me.

Can't have that.

I kicked the knife to the side, the blade sinking into the brick up to the hilt. When she looked up at me, she tried to spit in my face, her face alight with rage. "You think you're hot shit, don't you. Fucking cape."

"Don't be mad. You started it," I said, looking down at her jacket. Green and patchy, in a stylish way, with denim trim and chunky costume jewels instead of buttons. But it was loose, the shoulders too wide and loose in the front, as if she bought it a size or two too big.

Or had stolen it. "Say, that's a nice jacket."

I didn't have the heart to knock her out like I did the others, but she had a pocket full of zip ties she no doubt would have used on anyone else that might have wandered down the alley and I had no qualms about using them on her in turn. New jacket in hand, I called out, "Madison, you can get up now."

I didn't hear anything and my heart skipped a beat.

Maybe I'd scared her off. Cape business changed things, usually for the worse.

With every ounce of strength I had, I turned around, expecting to be alone in the alley.

I was wrong. Madison was standing there, eyes wide and wringing her hands together. She had seen everything. She saw me dismantle a group of muggers and she would run away screaming, just like they did when I was in Missouri, a crown of horns on my head.

Except… she didn't.

"I knew it," she said, eyes heavy-lidded and face flushed pink. "You're a cape."

Before I could apologize, she was on me. I caught her mid-leap and her hair, fully loose, draped around my face for a split-second before she kissed me. Heat and light collided as her lips shoved against mine and her tongue ran across my teeth before I opened my mouth and, greedily, found its way inside to intertwine with mine. Her fingers ran through my hair, sending electricity down my back and I suddenly realized my hands weren't properly busy, so I shifted her weight around to free them.

Madison took this as a cue to pull herself as close to me as possible, thighs clenched around my chest as she wrapped her legs around, and with their newfound freedom, my hands went straight for the soft, jiggling prize I'd had my eye on all evening. I got a firm grip, flesh just as soft as I imagined, and gave it a gentle squeeze. She moaned into my mouth and pulled back, our foreheads touching as we caught our breath. "You knew I was a cape?"

"G-Gabriel," she said between breaths, her modest chest heaving, "I knew it from the moment I touched you."

"How?" I said, feeling lightheaded.

"Can't you tell?" Madison, secure with her legs around me and my hands on her haunches, sat up and put a hand on my bare arm. "Right beneath your skin. It's soft like mine, but if you press"—she dug a finger down into my bicep, coming to a stop not even a half inch in—"it's like metal on the inside."

I hadn't noticed that, but as strong as I am my own flesh feels like exactly that: flesh. I never considered that the only reason it felt like that to me was because I was strong enough to render it pliable. "I didn't know. It just feels normal to me."

"Gabriel, babe," she said, "You're not normal. And you have no idea how special that makes you."

She leaned in again and I thought about something, a niggle in the back of my mind. "Mads."

"Mm-hmm. I like that, keep saying it."

"Mads, can I kiss you."

She threw her head back and laughed, a joyous thing that sent that magnificent electricity jolting through me from head to toe. "Gabriel, I've been waiting for you to do that all night."

Our lips met, slowly this time. Probing. Soft as our heads tilted to the side, feeling it out. When we parted, she looked at me again with hunger in her eyes. "Yum."

I wanted more and the pressure of her thighs against my ribs meant she likely felt the same, but I could hear sirens in the air, coming ever closer. The gangsters in the dumpster started to bang against the metal and the girl with the nose ring mewled piteously on the concrete. The spell was broken, and I set Madison down. "We should go."

"Yeah," she pouted, fussing with the straps on her top that had come loose during our collision. "But we're doing this again. Soon." She held a hand out and we ran through the alley, coming out the other side in a crowd of bodies and we made our way towards the bus stop. As we came up to the bench, the both of us grinning like fools as we'd kissed again, my hand firmly on her rear, a thought occurred to me.

"Hey, Mads?"

"Yes, babe?"

I pulled my prize for the evening off of my shoulder and held it up to her. "Want a new jacket?"

---​

It was dark when I finally wandered back to the lighthouse, and the lights were out in the garage. I trekked upstairs to find Sherrel in her bedroom, notepad in hand and a pile of discarded sketches on the floor beside her. "Hey, I brought dinner."

"Gabe!" she said, a big grin on her face. "Whatcha got for us?"

"Muffins, a few sandwiches, and some kind of pastry I can't pronounce. I went to that one bakery off of the Boardwalk."

"Ooh, perfect." Sherrel started rifling through the box I set on the bed as I went over to the cabinet to nab a couple of clean shop towels. "Tutoring go long tonight?"

"No, not exactly," I said, pulling a sandwich filled with sliced beef out to dress on my towel. "I went to the Boardwalk with my tutor."

"Huh," she said, nibbling on the crust of her own sandwich," Is that normal?"

"I don't think so," I said, replaying the events in my head. How nicely dressed Madison had been and just how different she was compared to the person I'd gotten to know at the community center. But she seemed like a genuinely good person, someone who really wanted to help people and that was the important part. We held hands…

Wait.

"Sher," I mumbled, thinking back on every moment, every touch, every hint and tease. "I think I went on a date."

Sherrel coughed, hard enough that I had to lean over and give her a few light pats on the back to dislodge whatever she had swallowed the wrong way. When she was done, face bright red, she looked at me with incredulous eyes. "A date? With who?!"

"With Madison."

"Who's Madison?"

"My tutor."

"Is that even legal?" she said, looking me up and down in alarm. "How old is she?"

"Seventeen, not much older than me." I said, wiping the corner of her mouth with my towel. "Are you alright?"

"Yeah, yeah. Sorry 'bout that." Sherrel mumbled, picking up the crumbs from where she'd dropped her meal. "Hey, Gabe?"

"Yeah?"

She looked at me again, eyes thoughtful. "You know, I've got an idea. You should bring your mattress up here."

"Are you sure?" I looked around Sher's bedroom. There was plenty of space, but it felt a little strange to set up my own little nest here. "I thought you liked having a space all to yourself."

"I do, but"—Sherrel nibbled on her bottom lip a moment—"you're always in here anyway. We eat together, you wake me up in the mornings, you shower in here. It saves you a trip up here, so why not?"

It made sense, to be fair. "Are you sure?"

"Positive, Gabe," she said, a big grin on her face. "Go get your stuff. It's late anyway."

I wandered downstairs and bundled up the hospital mattress, and I could feel the smile on my face. I hadn't smiled so much in a very long time.

Maybe, finally… things were starting to look up.

---
​

(Author's Note... Alright, folks. Forgive the delay on this one. As you can see, it's a beast of a chapter, but it kind of spiraled out from the original concept I had: cutting between the scenes with Sherrel and Madison. Instead, Sherrel decided to get dark on me and we got a few hints to her Trigger and backstory while Madison decided it was time for all the pent-up horny I'd been holding back until now to be loosed upon the page. This is also about as steamy as it's going to get here on SV to stay within compliance, by the by. It's long as hell, but I hope you folks are happy with it. Next chapter will be up Friday, most likely. Ordinarily I try to post on Tuesday, but I don't think I can crank it out just yet. See you soon...)

 

[Mujaki]

Just because she makes you feel wrong,
She don't mean to be mean or hurt you on purpose, boy!
Take a tip and do yourself a little service,
Take a mountain turn it into a mole~!
Just by playing a different role,
Ya, by playing a different role, oh...


---

​

"Carnal?"

"Correct, Mister Gabriel," Madison smirked, her glasses making her big blue eyes seem even bigger as she peeked at me over the top of the flash card. "Define it."

"Adjective?"

"Yes."

I thought about it a moment, thinking of… lips. Madison's lips, and how they were probably pursed and plump behind the index card. "Carnal, adjective. Relating or given to crude bodily pleasures, appetites, and gluttony."

"Very good," she said, turning the card over to reveal the exact definition in my tidy handwriting. "Use it in a sentence."

"'She judges us for our sins, our carnal appetites, and she whets her delicate tools as she waits for a sign'."

"Ooh, dark," Madison said, biting her bottom lip. "But not quite what I was looking for."

"It's a stupid verse anyway. Want me to try again, Mads?"

"Mmm… I love it, but I'm Miss Clements here, remember Mister Gabriel?"

"Yes'm."

"Now try again. Carnal in a sentence, one you'd see on the SATs, not on some silly televangelist show."

"She sat before me, stoking the flame of her carnal appetites, waiting for her supper."

"Better, much better," she purred, and I felt her foot beneath the table stroking the side of my leg. "We'll have your vocabulary up in no time flat."

"You keep saying that," I said. Madison was really good at her job, though I doubted she took this particular approach with anyone else. I had blown through her prospective reading list in a matter of days; Wuthering Heights devoured overnight and my observations about Heathcliff and Cathy scribbled down for her consumption the next day, Of Mice And Men read aloud to Sher in the mornings while we Tinkered and reminding me a little too much of how I was treated in the first few weeks after I got my power, and I had just gotten a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, which I was looking forward to thumbing through once I got back to the Lighthouse.

Madison, no, Miss Clements leaned back in her chair and stretched, giving me a few seconds to appreciate what her choice in wardrobe did for her; she was wearing another short-sleeved sweater, this time in pink, and my eyesight was keen enough to notice her choice in brassiere was as sky blue as her hair clips and skirt, which sat high on her waist and made her legs look much longer than they actually were.

It was a nice look. And judging by the satisfied smile on her face, she knew I was looking. "I do. And it's true, you'll have this down in no time flat." She sat forward again, briefly depriving me of a rather glorious sight, but I could be patient. Especially when I felt one of her feet hook around my leg again. "And then we can get started on the really fun stuff."

"Math?"

"I'm still working on that one," she said with a pout. "Aside from putting the formulas on flash cards, I'm still trying to figure out how to make it fun."

Fun was an interesting word to Madison, something all-purpose when she used it to describe things she liked, yet very specific when it came to things she wanted to actually do. Her idea had been to make absolutely certain I'd remember words and concepts for the test by making the learning itself memorable. At least as much as she could while keeping her job.

I was still amazed she'd managed to fit the definition of Décolletage within her own, given the space she had to work with. "You'll come up with something, Miss Clements."

"Oh, I will, Mister Gabriel," she said, though her stern tone was ruined a bit by the goofy grin on her face. "Now, another card!" Lithe fingers reached between the buttons of her sweater and with a quick glance around the room to ensure no other eyes were on us, she pulled a card out in a very familiar shade of blue.

Clever girl. Very clever. What I thought was a brassiere peeking between the threads had actually been a flash card meticulously taped into place and she was going without. The goofiness had left her grin, replaced with a smirk that could only be described as smug, like a fox with a rabbit in its sights. "Satiate. Define it."

---
​

A good shower after a morning full of studying and helping Sherrel Tinker was always satisfying. There was something just plain nice about the work, even if it was as simple as holding a piece of equipment too big for her shop clamps to get around. We'd burned through half of the $10k I had retrieved from the depths of the Bay for basic necessities and her insistence on paying me for running errands, so she had shifted focus to doing some aftermarket alterations on engine parts to help build up funds.

It was different work than she was used to; where she would normally allow her imagination to run wild with designs and functions, she had to focus on whatever the client had asked for specifically. Sherrel hadn't been a big fan of the idea when I brought it up, but after she made a few grand in profit for a reinforced transmission that wouldn't ever break down, she eventually conceded the point. It wasn't glamorous work by a long shot, but the more parts she could buy without resorting to me sneaking away to pilfer junkyards in the dead of night, the less of a chance anyone would notice what we were up to, PRT or Cops.

We didn't have a fondness for either.

I could hear the water running in the shower, so I wandered over to Sherrel's bed to dry off my hair. It was starting to get a little shaggier than I preferred, but Madison liked it, so I decided to let it grow out. Cutting it was always a pain anyway, since I had to plan it at least a week in advance to let my fingernails get long enough to properly trim it by hand. It wasn't too hard to shave, since I would drag my fingernails across my face and feel around for any spots I'd missed, but haircuts were a different story. Scissors never worked, even the ones Sher had devised using surgical steel and hydraulic power. There was just something about me that made it too tough to cut. My nails were a little easier, at least; a high-powered belt sander did the job just fine so long as the belt was new and diamond coated.

It was far better than the way I had to trim my own nails before: by chewing.

With my hair dried, I stood to go put up my towel but caught sight of my reflection in the mirror. Sherrel's mirror was huge, stretching from floor to ceiling and as wide as two of me standing side by side. From my former perch on the side of the bed, I could see everything in the room, from my hospital mattress in one corner to the bedroom door in the other. I could see the whole bed, big as it was, within it.

And I could see myself. I'd already pulled on my boxers and jeans before vacating the bathroom, but I hadn't put a shirt on just yet and as I got a clear look, I thought about something Madison said that night in the alley the week before.

I knew it from the moment I touched you.

I thought I looked normal. At least as normal as one could be with my power. I had seen other Brutes in the past, some able to pass as normal and others that had been partially warped by what they could do. Limbs that could grow huge and dense at the cost of never being quite the same when they switched off their ability, or those who had to physically change in order to access their true strength. And then there were those like me who had a power that never turned off. Some of them looked normal, yes, but none could muster even half the force that I could. And the ones that came close were perhaps the worst of all, bodies twisted into new, dangerous shapes to bring their strength to bear.

I'd only ever seen one Brute who was like me, the masked woman who smelled like old stone. Alexandria. I was new to my powers, then, only thirteen with less than a year to get used to a world made fragile. The Heroes had come to chase us away and they'd brought the whole of the PRT from St. Louis with them. A dozen heroes led by the flying cape, and they all turned tail when she rushed towards me and I stopped her with a single hand. I punched her hard enough the ground beneath us shook apart, the trees whipping backwards as the wind stripped them of their leaves. She had ensured that no one knew who I was or what I could do and it paid off in that moment when the strongest cape in the world shot into the sky so fast the clouds parted in her wake.

The heroes never came back and she decided that we should plant our roots in the very spot where I had struck the first and final blow.

I'd never forgotten Alexandria, not her grace in the air or her power as she crashed into me, my feet barely holding fast to the ground as it cracked beneath us. But Madison made me remember something else about her, something important: she looked normal, but she wasn't. Not until you touched her. When I grabbed her by the arm, the strange Tinkertech fabric gave way beneath my fingers but her flesh was unyielding. Cold, like stone and ice, of something that should be dead. She smelled of something ancient, frozen in time. I could move her, of course, but when my fist hit her jaw I felt it. She looked normal, but felt utterly inhuman, as if she had been forged from a single piece of cold iron.

Was that how I felt to Madison?

"Woo! Man, I feel like a million fucking bucks"—I looked up to see Sherrel, stuck dead in her tracks, a towel wrapped haphazardly around her waist and wet hair slicked back—"what the hell? You okay, Gabe?"

"Yeah," I said, averting my eyes. She was mostly covered, especially since I had gotten beach towels for her to use after bathing. But as much of Sher as there was, mostly covered meant an awful lot was uncovered. "Just… I don't know. My head's in the clouds, I guess."

"Liar," she said, plopping down next to me on the bed. I kept my eyes off to the side until I heard a long-suffering sigh and the shuffling sound of her crossing her legs. When I looked back into the mirror, I saw her mid eyeroll. "I dunno why you do that. You've seen me in less."

"That was an accident. You didn't tell me you slept naked."

"I forgot!"

"How do you forget that you sleep naked?!"

"I meant I forgot you were gonna wake me up!" Sherrel snorted, her whole body shaking with laughter. When she managed to settle down, she eyed me for a moment before poking me in the side. "And you're fucking distracting me. What's going on?"

I looked at my reflection again, turning to one side and then the other trying to spot any oddness, any abnormalities I might have missed the first time around. "Sher, do I look like a cape?"

She blinked at me for a second before responding. "What?"

"Do I look, you know, normal?"

"About as normal as me, I guess," she said, scooting closer so her own reflection joined my own. "Why? Did your little girlfriend say something?"

"Sort of."

"What?! I'll wring her neck!"

"No!" I said, stopping her mid-rise from the bed. "Not like that, not in a bad way."

"Then you're gonna have to give me some context, Gabe," she huffed, planting herself down behind me.

"She said she knew I was a cape last week."

"On your date?"

"Yeah," I mumbled, still a little embarrassed it took me so long to realize exactly what I'd been getting up to with Mads. "She said that she knew I was a cape when she touched me."

Sherrel raised an eyebrow. "And how did she touch you, exactly?"

"Like this," I said, reaching out for Sherrel's hand. She looked skeptical, but allowed me to grab it and I brought it up and touched my arm with her palm, letting her squeeze it. "She said that my skin was like hers, but it felt like metal just beneath."

"Well, she's right," she said, voice low as she ran her hand along my bicep and up my shoulder. "Your skin's soft, but under that it's like you're made of rock or something. But that's not a bad thing, is it?"

"I don't know."

"You couldn't tell?"

"It always just felt like skin and muscle to me."

"Powers are weird as shit, Gabe."

"I know, I know," I said. I turned to the mirror, Sherrel's hand on my back, and looked at myself again. I wasn't massive like some other Brutes I had come across, the ones who looked like walking mountains of fleshy muscle. My shoulders were probably a little broader than some of the other boys I saw on the Boardwalk that looked to be my age, and I was a little bulkier. My muscles weren't overgrown, but they were there. Visible when I twisted and turned, though not to the ridiculous degree of some of the men I'd occasionally see when I still lived on my boat. Men who looked like someone had sucked all the air out of a bag full of meat, their muscles an impedance rather than a benefit, like inverted triangles supported by spindly legs. "I suppose I just never really thought about it before."

"If she likes what she sees, then don't worry about it," Sherrel muttered, reaching her other hand up to my free shoulder and pulling a bit. I acquiesced and kneeled down, letting her wrap her arms around me and rest her head atop mine. "I'll be the first to tell you if you grow an extra arm or something. You look good, really."

I leaned back on my knees a bit and Sher took it as an invitation to scoot up and lean against me. It was something she'd started doing more often after I'd frozen up the first time; it comforted her, I think, based on how her muscles would go slack when she'd get her arms all the way around me. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it, knowing that I could help even a little.

And it helped me, in a way. Everything about Sher was as far from her as you could get; tall and broad over lanky and slim, soft and warm where she had been bony and angular.

Sherrel kept the ghosts away and I don't think I could ever pay her back for that. "Thanks, Sher."

"You're welcome," she said, lingering on my head for a long moment before pulling away and raising her arms in a long stretch, her towel dipping dangerously low as I averted my eyes again. I heard her chuckle at the sight as she tucked everything back into place. "But I do have some good news. That old contact Skids had? He got back to me and said he'd be able to work up papers for you."

"Really?"

"Yup. And his work is legit, too. Got Skids his Green Card and all that back when."

"How much does he want?"

"For the papers? $500."

"That sounds awfully cheap. What's the catch?"

Sherrel smiled at that. "Good ear. The catch is that he's your bank too, at least your main one for all the Tinkertech we've been fencing, so he gets a cut. I fronted him the $500, so all you need to give him is a name."

"...Gabriel?"

"No, your full name."

"Oh," I said, my mind aflutter. A name? I hadn't stopped to give it much thought over the last few months. Hell, after the first time Sher had mentioned it, it slipped my mind as I dove headfirst into GED classwork. The reading, the writing, even the cursed algebra, all of it came first at the insistence of my lovely maybe-girlfriend, definitely-tutor Madison. "I hadn't thought about it."

"Then you're lucky enough to pick a name you like."

I didn't remember my last name, my real name from the Before Times. She had given me her name, once upon a time, calling it kismet and me "a gift delivered unto her from the heavens". A reward for her devotion.

I was meant to be hers.

Never again. "All I know is what I don't want."

"Well that narrows it down," she chuckled before a thoughtful look crossed her face. "You could use 'Bailey', if you want. It's my name."

Bailey… I thought about it, mouthing the words to myself. Gabriel Bailey…

It wasn't bad, really. But I looked in the mirror at the two of us, Sherrel's skin was darker than Tammi's, if only because she had a bit of a tan, but it wasn't close to my own. A fair Cathy to my dark Heathcliff. "I don't know, Sher. We don't look much alike, not enough to be kin." Another thought came to mind, something unlikely, but worth thinking about. "And if they somehow manage to catch me, that'll make it easier to catch you."

"I'd break you out," she frowned, considering the idea for a moment before moaning, "Ah, fuck. You're right."

"Better safe than sorry."

"Yeah, yeah," she said. Her hair had started to dry by now, so she reached up and fluffed it out, a pensive look on her face. "Any ideas, 'cause I'm drawing a blank. Dumas, maybe? Get people to choke if you tell them it's pronounced 'dumbass'?"

I chuckled a little at that, but the name made me think of a movie Mads had obsessed over, calling it her comfort food movie after a long day. She showed me clips on her phone after tutoring the other day, of waitresses in tight jeans dancing on a bar while country music played in the background. It was a bit of a shock at the time, realizing I hadn't actually seen a movie before, but the name of one of the actresses stuck out to me. "I've got it, I think."

"Alright, hit me."

"Bello. I want to be Gabriel Bello."

---
​

"Come on, babe. You can say it!"

"I don't know…"

"It's not rude, I swear."

"But out here? Around all these people? Are you sure about that?"

"Oh, you are so precious!" Madison squealed, her cheeks pink from the sun. She was wearing heart-shaped sunglasses today along with a strapless green sundress, the hemline relatively modest at just below her knees. The material, however, was particularly flippy and she had one hand in her lap to fight the breeze, the other occupied with an ice cream cone. "Believe me, babe, my friends are going to laugh more at you grabbing my haunches than you saying you grabbed my ass."

My cheeks warmed a little at that. The Boardwalk wasn't especially crowded today, but there were enough people that something inside me cringed a little bit at the thought of saying such a thing out loud. Especially in front of two other girls like the one sitting before me. I hadn't met Madison's friends yet, but she swore up and down that they'd love me. We still had work to do, after all; she'd made a good point about getting my GED out of the way first so I wouldn't have the worry of impressing them hanging over me when I took my test. And as important as they were to her, I wanted to make a good impression.

Even if that meant saying things I'd never say in polite company. I closed my eyes and took a breath, deep enough I could taste the salt in the ocean air, before I answered. "Okay, Madison. Tell me what you want me to say."

"Ooh, a choice!" she preened, taking a quick bite from her ice cream. "Let me think it over." Madison made a show out of closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, a motion that did wonders for the fabric stretched tight across her chest even if she was doing it as a little joke. "I've got it."

She leaned forward, mischief in her eyes, and dabbed the tip of her ice cream cone on either side of my lips. Before I could protest, she scooted forward up against me, chest to chest, and whispered into my ear, "If you say 'Mads, can I grab your ass?' here and now, in front of all these people, I'll make it worth your while." And then she pulled back, just far enough away to be out of reach for a kiss, before coming close and licking lingering spots of vanilla clean.

I was hot again and the sun had nothing to do with it, a heat that made my fingers tingle and the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. But even with that, with my ears red hot and the moment filled with possibility, I almost couldn't do it. The words were there on the tip of my tongue, but it was as though I'd swallowed a spoonful of peanut butter and I just couldn't get my mouth to open—

—and then Madison leaned back, glancing at me over the rim of her sunglasses, and took a long, slow lick around the ice cream cone, deftly slurping up the trails of melted vanilla that threatened to drip onto her dress before popping the remnants of the cone right into her mouth.

She grinned.

"Mads," I said, leaning forward until we were cheek to cheek, my ear close enough to her that I heard her breath hitch. "Can I grab your ass?"

"Yes."

I put my hands on her waist and she pouted for half a second before I picked her up and brought her close, sitting her right on my lap. She squealed in delight before locking her legs around me and trying her best to devour me whole, her lips wild and going straight for my tongue as my hands slowly trailed down her hips and along her thighs, where I felt her skin prickle as I moved a hand beneath her dress, trailing back up towards my prize. When my right hand finally reached her ass, I felt around, sinking my fingers into the marvelously soft flesh and giving it a firm squeeze.

Her mouth stopped mid-kiss, lips pulling away from mine just long enough for her to murmur something obscene into my mouth before she dove in again as if I were a cool glass of water and she was dying of thirst.

I liked that.

When my fingers started to work their way beneath her underthings, she finally pulled away, glasses askew and a look on her face that seemed torn between contentment and wanting more. "Gabriel, babe… let's put the brakes on a sec, 'kay?"

"Sure, Mads," I said, reeling in that want, the desire that threatened to boil over until it was a bare simmer. "Anything you say."

"Oh, babe, those are dangerous words right now," she said. "But… yeah, let's take a break. It's kinda warm right now."

Madison scooted backward, making a little space between us that felt rather nice in the breeze. Brockton Bay summers weren't nearly as awful as the ones in Missouri, where the humidity was downright smothering in the thick summer heat, but the sun was still an hour or two away from setting and we were two very warm people made ever warmer by mutual desire.

At least the air coming in off the ocean was nice and cool, and I could see the pink slowly fading from her cheeks. "Gabriel?"

"Yeah?"

"What do you do in the mornings? Before you come in for tutoring?"

I hadn't made much mention of my homelife up to this point and Mads hadn't asked me too much about it, at least not yet. I wasn't trying to keep it a secret, but I'd feel better about telling her everything once I had my papers. "I run errands for my roommate and fool around in the garage, mostly. Why?"

She looked pensive for a moment, her sunglasses drooping low on her nose. "I was thinking about the future, you know?"

"Oh?"

"Yeah. I mean, you'll be ready to take your GED exam before the end of summer at the rate you're moving. Which means you can go to college!"

College?

I hadn't even thought about that at all, not even when I was still living on the streets. I wanted normal. And college was normal, wasn't it? "You think I can do it?"

"I know you can!" she gushed, her smile so broad her teeth glittered in the sunlight. "Brockton University insists on having a diploma, but once you have your GED, there's nothing stopping you from going to Bay College and just transferring over after a year or two. Then we'd be in school together!"

Madison's enthusiasm was infectious; she was literally bouncing in my lap and I kept a hand on her waist to make sure she didn't fall backwards. I tried to pull my other hand out from under her dress, but Mads leaned into it, trapping it in place. Not that I minded, given her cheeky grin. "Not going to lie, that sounds like a great idea to me."

"I'm glad you think so," she said, slowly rocking in place and bringing a little bit of that wonderful heat back. "And you know what would look really good on a college application?"

"I've a feeling you're about to tell me, Mads."

"Mmm… damn, quit distracting me, Gabriel." Madison whined. "But, oh where was I? Right! College applications. Having a job would look amazing, babe."

"Really?" I thought back to the first few days I was in town, back at the bakery. The tall redhead working the front counter had a textbook in front of her, sneaking in a page or two between customers. Shoeless, dirty, and with the clothes on my back, I never thought I could be like that.

"Really, babe," she said, "And a little birdy at the Community Center told me that Miss Donna is looking for some help moving desks and cleaning out the old furniture from the other wing so they can renovate." Her smile went a little goofy as she ran a finger down my chest. "And we both know you can lift stuff."

I grinned at that and stood up, eliciting a sharp giggle from Mads as she hooked her ankles around my waist. "That I can. Tell you what, I'll go for it."

She put her arms around me and shimmied up a bit, my hands tucked beneath her so her dress wouldn't fly free in the breeze, and she leaned in close to my ear. "Good boy. Now let's go find Shannon's Closet."

"The clothes store?"

"Uh-huh," she murmured, voice low and her lips flush against my ear. "Thanks to our little lesson, I need new panties. Don't you want to see what I pick?"

"Pass up a chance to see you in new underthings? I'd have to be stupid to say no."

Madison broke out into the giggles, shaking so hard I could see tears at the corners of her eyes. "Oh my god, babe. It's alright to say 'panties'! That's going to be the next lesson. Am I going to have to tell you it's okay to say 'fuck'?"

At my silence, she pulled away from my ear, mirth still in her eyes even as I flushed a bit thinking about saying that kind of thing. Mads laughed, a lovely, full-throated sound that still managed to sting a bit, but she showered my face with tiny kisses, pecks over my cheeks and eyes, and the embarrassment drained away when I really thought about it.

She would have hated the language coming out of my mouth.

Wasn't that as good a reason as any to say it?

"Okay, Mads. Teach me your wisdom."

---
​

"Gabe! You're back!" Sherrel said, immediately popping up from her seat on her bed to steal one of the takeout bags I'd brought back. "Got in a little late tonight. Have another date with Tutor Girl?"

"Sort of. We went to the Boardwalk for a little bit."

"Eh, not like there's much else to do in town," she shrugged, pawing through a bag to fish out a container of dumplings. I'd dropped by the Chino Latino joint after walking Mads over to the bus stop for a change of pace and tonight's special was a spread of chorizo dumplings, Spanish fried rice, and beef fajita with broccoli. "At least you got out for a walk."

I flushed a bit when she said that. There wasn't much walking being done on my outings with Madison, at least in the strictest sense of the word. "Yup. Fresh sea air and all that."

"You'll get tired of that shit soon, believe me. The salt in the air can fuck up my babies if I don't fix the filters and insulation every few months," she said, taking the time to put a whole dumpling in her mouth and let her tongue wrestle with it before swallowing. "Still, there's worse places you could've ended up. NYC's full of cops, capes, and not much else to separate the fighting. Boston's, well, it's Boston. Fuck that town."

"Sounds like there's some history there."

"Between some prissy manlet running most of the good-paying work down there and Blasto hiring me to teach his plant drones how to drive while spending the whole time blazed out of his gourd and staring at my ass, Boston can just fuck right off."

"Can't really blame you for that," I said. I shuffled the bell peppers away from the rest of my food, which Sherrel eagerly plucked off and onto her own, and gave a suspicious eye to the complimentary 'southwestern' eggroll. What even made an eggroll southwestern? "But I got some good news."

"Me too! You wanna go first?"

"Age before beauty, Sher."

"You ass," she chuckled, reaching over to her bedside table and tossing a manilla folder to me. "Your papers, direct from the Number Man."

"Wait, he actually calls himself that?"

"Dunno," Sherrel shrugged, "But that's how Skids had him listed and he didn't correct me when I called, so maybe." She gestured to the folder and I set down my chopsticks to thumb through the contents. "He hooked you up. You've got a Social, a State ID, a hardship driver's license if you ever want me to teach you, some emancipation docs showing you lived in a couple of other states, and even a passport."

That… was a lot more than I expected, given what the books I had tracked down on the subject at the community center had mentioned. "Is it all real?"

"100% guaranteed,' his words. I'm pretty sure he does some stuff on the backend too."

"You trust him?"

"I trust that he likes money, Gabe," she said between bites, "And if he could make Skids look like a legit businessman with good credit, he can make you look like you exist."

"That's amazing, Sher. Thank you," I said, giving everything a once over. I wasn't an expert in documents by a long shot, but it felt legit compared to the countless wallets us kids had been made to comb through back in Missouri whenever the adults returned from a 'score'. Whole bags full of purses and wallets and the ones with the smallest, quickest hands were picked to sort them all. I'd seen enough IDs to know this would probably pass muster. "And this works out great with my news. I got a job."

Sherrel paused mid-bite, her eyes wide. "Wait, what?"

"Yeah, Mads was able to get me in with Miss Donna at the Center. I'll be moving stuff around a few mornings every week for $16 an hour."

"Oh," she said, staring past me for a minute before shaking her head. "What about Tinkering here in the mornings? Our work?"

"It shouldn't interfere, I don't think. Twenty hours a week at most is what she told me, and it would be on the days I'm there for tutoring anyway."

"Huh, okay then. That's"—Sherrel stopped to swallow and take a long swig from a bottle of Ginger Ale—"nice, really."

We ate quietly after that, but something bothered me. Just a bit. I kept an eye on Sherrel as I finished up a surprisingly good Sopapilla Rangoon; a fried pastry smeared with a sweet cheese on the inside and fried crispy, sprinkled with cinnamon and honey. She was still swirling her beef around on the plate when I decided to speak up. "Sher?"

"Yeah, Gabe?"

"You okay?"

She blinked and then sat up, an easy grin spreading on her face. "Oh yeah, I'm fine."

"Are you sure? You can talk to me."

"It's fine, Gabe, I'm happy for you," Sherrel suddenly brought the plate up to her mouth and shoveled the last few bites down. "I dug this place, though. Seriously, let's hit this joint up again next time you're out."

The smile she gave warmed me up a bit on the inside, not quite the searing heat Madison sparked, but nice. I gathered up our plates and we chattered a bit before she decided to call it an early night, leaving me laying in bed, alone with my thoughts.

I had a job, a real job. And college?

The thought still boggled my mind, just a little bit.

I could actually be normal.

I hoped.

---
​

(Author's Note... Thank you all for your patience. Unlike last week, where work interfered, this time it was just my characters deciding to go to places I wasn't expecting. The original plan was for three more scenes, bouncing back and forth to contrast the highs and lows... and that clearly didn't happen. This sucker ended up being another beast and I effectively had to chop this thing in half, which will add another chapter before my planned Interlude. Fortunately, I have the first couple of scenes already in the can, so the next update will be a little faster this time. I hope you all enjoy it, because we're about to take off...)

 

[Mujaki]

Think of what the past did,
It could've lasted!
So put it in your basket...
I hope you know a strong man,
Who can lend you a hand!
Lowering my casket...

---
​

"Sher, I'm home!"

I slid the lobby door closed and wandered into the garage, bags in hand. It had been a pretty productive day, truth be told. Mads had been right on the money when it came to Miss Donna, and with her putting in a good word alongside my new papers, I started work the very next Monday.

The job was easy enough. A little too easy, truth be told, just by the nature of the work. Miss Donna didn't know about my power and Madison wasn't keen on word getting around, so she'd expected me to take the rest of the summer clearing out the wing and was even considering hiring a couple of other people to help me. Of course, my first day proved that she didn't need to bother; even "taking it slow", I had cleaned out the first room by myself in the first hour.

Madison dropped by for a short chat after that one. Miss Donna had expected me to take at least two days to finish it, so I didn't just need to go slow, I needed to move at a snail's pace, or at least what I considered a snail's pace, if I wanted to actually get paid properly. I started bringing books with me to read after that, the better to pad my time, get my full three hours, and I eventually found a tempo to the work. I'd pull one of the old, hulking shelves free from where it had nearly fused to the wall, spend about fifteen minutes reading, drag the shelf out into the hallway and take great pains to move slowly and carefully in case anyone decided to snoop, then head back inside and repeat the process.

Sometimes it was bookshelves, other times it was desks. But all of them had to be moved and I found myself enjoying it after a fashion. In little more than a week, I burned through all of Madison's reading list and started digging around for anything else that might pique my interests. I hadn't found much just yet, but I planned on getting a library card since I had my papers.

But for now, I just wanted to relax. I wasn't too terribly late tonight, especially since Madison had plans with her friends, but a cape fight between the PRT and the Asian gang I bumped into last month cut off the normal bus route to my favorite restaurant, so I had to go searching for something else to nab for supper.

The garage was unusually noisy, especially for this hour, but when I walked in I could smell… salt, more than what came off the sea. The first thing I noticed was the Bus; Sher had it up on the hydraulic jack, high enough to walk under with plenty of room to jump.

The second thing I noticed was Sherrel herself; it looked like she had just thrown on the first tank top she could find and a pair of shorts that clearly belonged to me. Being so much taller than I was, what draped beneath my knees barely hit mid-thigh for her and it clung like a second skin because she was drenched in sweat. Sher faced away from me, shoulders broad and arms over her head as she fussed with something in the Bus's undercarriage, the muscles in her back visible as she worked.

It was clear as the sky outside that this wasn't the same woman I found withered and dying in the belly of the beast. She was more. "What are you doing?"

I heard rattling as Sherrel kept working at whatever it was that had her attention, her forearms flexed as she twisted a particularly stubborn bolt out of its socket. "Sher?"

I set the bag full of takeout down and walked around to where she worked, taking in the scene; tools littered the floor and I stepped around them to reach her. I watched her drop a wrench, the metal making a noisy clatter as it hit the concrete, and pull a different tool out from her waistband. Coming around to the front of her, I was able to look up into her eyes and suddenly realized that even though she looked right at me, she hadn't actually seen me, not really. Not with her pupils so wide and eyes focused on the task at hand.

A memory jarred itself loose in my head. Something she talked about at length when the subject of Tinkers came up, how even the weakest of them could work themselves into a right state of focus, the rest of the world melting away. A fugue.

"Sherrel, can you hear me?" The woman in question kept at it, that same focused-yet-unfocused gaze tracking movement so quickly it looked as though her eyes were vibrating.

Damn. Time for something a little more drastic.

I reached up and grabbed her arm, pulling it down with as much gentle force as I dared use, letting her weight spread wide across my palm rather than to the points of my fingers which would have left a bruise. She was strong and resisted my touch at first, so I eased up on the pressure until she relaxed beneath my hands and I cupped her cheek. "Sher! Wake up, it's me!"

Sherrel blinked owlishly, as if waking up for the first time all day despite her frantic activity. Her skin was slick with sweat and clammy despite the heat, but I kept my hand right where it was until she finally looked down into my eyes. "Gabe?"

"Sher," I said, letting loose a breath I hadn't realized I was holding. "Welcome back."

"Welcome back?" she said, a confused look in her eyes as she leaned into me for a second. "Didn't you just leave?"

"It's nearly seven, I've been gone all day."

"Oh. Ah, fuck me," Sherrel muttered, and I dropped my hands as she shook the cobwebs loose. "That hasn't happened in… ah, hell. I can't even remember."

She started putting her tools away, which I took as my cue to help sweep the various bits and bobs that had been discarded in her Tinkering frenzy. The minibus didn't look much different from the outside, though the windows had long since been removed and Sher had me pulverize the ancient glass into a fine dust for her to smelt into something far more durable. But beneath the hood, the old bus was taking on an entirely different shape, more beast than machine. "Hey, Sher. I just realized something."

"What's up?"

"You Tinkered all day."

"Yeah, and? You wanna crawl up my ass about it?"

"What? No, I mean"—I looked up to see Sherrel glaring at me and I wilted a bit inside—"it's just… you were able to do it by yourself."

Her glare immediately softened into confusion, and she bit her lower lip as she carefully rearranged the tools in her cabinet. "Huh. I guess I did."

I grinned at the thought and looked her over again; despite the sweat, Sherrel didn't look drawn or pale anymore. It had taken a couple of months, but she finally looked healthy and even if she wasn't quite as filled out as when I found her, I had no doubt she'd get back to that point soon. "You didn't need my help! That's fantastic!"

Sherrel turned away, quiet for a moment while she finished putting up her tools, before giving me a wan smile. "I suppose so."

"Then we should celebrate," I said, trying and failing to keep the excitement out of my voice. "Did you eat today?"

"I had breakfast. I think."

"Well, I brought food. Let's go!" I said as I picked up the bag and headed toward the stairs. Sher looked at me for a long moment before following.

---​

I needed new clothes. Again.

Before I started my new job, I had a few outfits that were more or less the same thing in a different variation each day; the shirts I had bought before I'd met Sherrel became the clothes I'd wear to lounge around the bedroom or work in the garage while the new outfits she'd picked out for me were what I wore on a daily basis when I'd go into town for tutoring. I didn't really pick anything out myself because I didn't really have a real sense of style, not that I'd ever had a chance to really develop one.

At the compound, clothes were almost always secondhand, the older kids getting first crack at what had been scavenged or stolen during the raids and the younger getting what the former had grown out of. Elijah and I had special privileges when it came to clothes after my powers had come in, not that it meant much because he and I had very different bodies at the time: he was tall and gangly while I was short and broad. It was better than what Tammi had to go through, finding bits and pieces to wear when the Clans would gather for a moot since the Herrens didn't really prioritize fitting in with normal folks. She ended up wearing boy's clothes half the time, though at that age it didn't really make that big a difference.

So when I had my own money for the first time, I let Sherrel pick out what I should wear. Blue jeans nicer than anything I had ever owned in my life and a series of T-shirts that she snipped the sleeves off of to use as rags for the shop. She'd wanted me to get a pair of sunglasses too, but I felt as though that would be a bit much. Besides, my eyesight was keen enough that the sun didn't bother me, so it was money wasted.

I'd even told Madison as much when she asked me why I kept wearing the same kind of clothes every day, which shocked her more than anything else. After that first week, she took it upon herself to bring me to a place I'd never been before… Hillside Mall. It wasn't as though I'd never been window shopping before, especially in the days before I really had a lot of money to my name when I lived on my boat, but it was a different experience walking in a brightly lit, air-conditioned space with store after store filled with goods. Not even the Boardwalk could have prepared me for the sheer amount of things available to buy, not in my wildest dreams. An entire hall devoted to food; restaurants of every kind, selling food at any price you could imagine, and the scents in the air threatened to overwhelm me in a way I hadn't experienced since the first few days after I got my powers. It was intoxicating in its own way, choosing to splurge and let Mads pick anything she wanted, resulting in the two of us sharing a monstrous ice cream cone four scoops tall, dripping with sprinkles and caramel. This led to a reenactment of our recent date at the Boardwalk, which in turn led to the two of us scrambling to finish the ice cream before it either melted or collapsed to the floor.

There was a store devoted to books, and I wished I had more time to simply walk the aisles, inspecting cover after cover until something reached off the page and demanded my attentions just as fervently as the petite brunette walking beside me, poking and prodding as she would babble about the books she used to read as a kid before catching herself and blushing prettily.

Madison bought me a lovely, leatherbound copy of something called the Kama Sutra, saying it was "essential study material" and I told her I'd commit it to memory, which sent her into a fit of giggles for some reason.

We passed through stores filled entirely by clothes, some big enough to fit the whole Lighthouse in floor space if not height. It was so strange to see smaller stores entirely devoted to just one brand of shirt or dress, but she took me through every single one, bringing me into the dressing room as she modeled different outfits and stole kisses in-between, though she pouted when they wouldn't let me in with her at a store dedicated to lingerie.

Lingerie was another word Mads taught me, though there wasn't any shame in saying it. I honestly preferred it to bra or panties, if only because it rolled off of the tongue in a way that felt a little more reverent to the occasion.

As we wandered through another clothing store, American Falcon or some such, an outfit caught Madison's eye. "Oh, Gabriel! Look at this."

It was green, darker than the shade she wore at the Boardwalk last week, with metallic clasps and gold patches along the sides, matching the jacket I had liberated for her back in the alley. Mads ran her fingers along the material, eyes closed for a moment before she seemed to come to a decision and picked it up. "I'm trying it on."

As before, I wasn't allowed back behind the curtain. But this store was nice enough to have leather benches at the mouth of the dressing rooms to rest as I waited for her to come back.

When Madison walked out, it was dazzling. She had pulled her hair back in a comely knot and something about the cut of the dress, a "babydoll", she had called it, made her look mature and girlish all at once. It was relatively modest on her petite frame, the hem brushing against her knees, but the neckline plunged lower than anything I'd seen her wear up to this point, emphasizing her bust in a way I knew she'd never be able to get away with at work. The straps were thin to the point of nonexistent, though it was hard to tell how it would actually sit on her given how much of her bra it overlapped. Despite this, or maybe even because of it, I drank the sight of her as she walked over and plopped down onto my lap to greet me with a searing kiss. "What do you think?"

"I think"—I pulled Mads close and nibbled her collarbone, a place that never failed to send her into a full body shiver—"that you look gorgeous."

She hummed to herself as I left small kisses along her neck before pulling away, a sultry look in her eyes. "Buy it for me?"

"Absolutely."

Looking at the tag hanging loose off of Madison's shoulder, I managed to pry my eyes away from the bounty at eye level to take a closer look.

$139.99

Adding tax to that, it would be close to my whole paycheck for the week, though I still had some funds stashed away in my other account with the Number Man. Cash was precious in a place like Brockton Bay, I'd noticed; the difference in how I was treated at the Boardwalk dressed with nothing but the rags on my back and when I had new clothes and a pretty girl on my arm was like night and day. Horrible as it was, the word "no" was right on the tip of my tongue—

—except Madison was my girlfriend. And in every book I'd read and every TV show I saw with her, it was always the boy buying nice things for the girl. That was how it was supposed to be, right?

"Of course, Mads."

Her squeal of delight made the apprehension melt away. We paid out and started wandering over to the bus stop, arm in arm and bags in hand, wallets much lighter than we arrived.

"This was fun, babe. We need to do it again, soon!" Madison leaned in close enough I could feel her breath on my ear. "And we need to put what you learn in that book to the test."

"What do you mean?"

"Come by tomorrow night and you'll find out."

---​

"You're home late. Again."

It was well after sunset by the time I got back to the Lighthouse and Sherrel was already in the bedroom. I had picked up a few burgers from a bodega around the corner, but judging by the wrappers around the bed, she had the same idea. "I'm sorry, Sher."

"What'd you bring?"

"We've had Asian food every night this week, so I figured I'd grab a burger for a chan—"

"Yeah, that's what I thought," she said. "I got takeout from Zed's on the corner already."

"You walke—"

"I'm not a fucking cripple, Gabe."

Sherrel fumed and the room felt smaller with every passing second. I thought about my day and scrambled for something, anything I might have done to set her off. "Are you okay?"

"Do I sound okay to you?"

"No. What's wrong?"

"Oh, everything's fine! Just peachy, thanks for asking." I think I would've felt better if she had screamed at me instead of… whatever this was, her words filled with bitter sarcasm. "What kept you, anyway?"

"Mads took me to the mall."

"What, did you blow all your money on her too?"

My words caught in my throat and Sher immediately knew what my silence meant. "Of course you did. You didn't spend all your cash, did you?"

"Not all of it." I said, finally finding my voice. "I bought her a dress."

"Oh, real fucking fancy, then."

"What's your problem, Sher?" I said, pushing past the embarrassment and hurt and feeling the steam build in my head. "Yeah, I went out after tutoring. I went out with my girlfriend and spent my money and who cares if I spent more than I should've?"

"It's not all about you!"

"Then what is it about? Because I don't know what I did to make you so mad."

Sherrel glared at me for a long moment, fingers digging trails through the bedsheets. "You didn't do anything. You didn't do a goddamned thing, so whatever, I don't give a fuck." She yanked the sheet off and stood up, stalking to the bathroom. "Do whatever the fuck you want, I don't care. It's a free country and all that shit."

It's not all about you!

Bony fingers curled around my neck and I saw red.

Do whatever you want, it's a free country.

I don't care, just walk away and leave your family behind…

"If you don't care, then you can tell me WHY." The doors rattled in their frame and Sher jumped in alarm, her head whipping around to look at me. "Why are you mad? Why aren't you talking to me?" I swallowed a deep breath, feeling it knot and twist down my throat, little hurts pricking my skin. "Why do you sound like HER?"

It took me a minute to rein in that heat, that anger.

It took another minute to feel a tear roll down my cheek.

Sherrel's mouth gaped like a fish and I couldn't stop shaking, my fists curled so tightly around the handles of the bag that they had withered into plastic dust. I set the food down before the handles disintegrated entirely, turned towards the door, and sighed, "I'm sorry. I'll sleep outside tonight."

"NO!" Strong arms wrapped around me and I froze in place for a split second before I felt the weight and warmth—not Her—of Sherrel murmuring into my ear. "Nonononono, stay, please. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it. I'm so sorry."

It wasn't fair, not to Sherrel and not to me.

She wasn't her.

I just wished my mind and my body could remember that.

---​

It was dark by the time I got to Madison's house and I suddenly appreciated the fact that she was willing to go out to the other side of town to meet up with me on our evenings out. Two bus stops and a hike across Bay College, but the campus was green and densely wooded and her house was right next door.

The house itself was about the biggest house I'd ever seen in real life; two stories tall and made of clay red brick, it dwarfed the homes in the neighborhoods the bus route cut through to bring me to this side of town twice over. The garage had three doors on it and the yard was ringed with a tall iron fence tipped in decorative spikes that might have stopped anyone other than me. I hopped over and padded across the neatly trimmed lawn until I saw a window with pale blue curtains that wafted lazily in the cool night air and a familiar brunette sitting on the sill, book in hand.

"Mads!"

She fumbled with the book a moment before just pitching it somewhere behind her, a big smile on her face as she saw me. When she stood up, I noticed she had dressed for the occasion; her hair was down and wild and she wore a long flowing nightgown so sheer she may as well have been wearing nothing at all, the hint of dark lace beneath sending gooseflesh prickling down my neck and over my arms and I remembered a verse from the book Madison bought for me: Whatever things may be done by one of the lovers to the other, the same should be returned by the other.

There were no blows to be exchanged, not here, but the verse went on and all of a sudden, I knew what that meant. In the same way, if you are kissed, kiss back.

"Gabriel, you came!" Mads was all smiles, and I felt better coming here. Less hollow than I felt in the morning.

"I told you I would."

"Well then, I'm all by my lonesome up here in my room," she said, the pout on her lips turning into a satisfied grin. "I think you should climb up and… keep me company."

Well, invitations don't get much clearer than that.

I walked over to the wall and looked closely at the brickwork, testing my grip and pulling myself up…

…only to fall backwards as the brick crumbled in my grip.

"Babe, are you okay?"

"I'm fine, Mads! It's just, ugh," I put a foot on a sturdy looking windowsill and pushed upwards to reach the decorative stone overhead before the brick gave way beneath my weight and I found myself back on the ground. "I'm too heavy, the bricks won't hold."

Madison cursed under her breath before looking around the yard. "What about that tree?"

I gave it a critical eye before shaking my head. "Willows can't hold me."

"My parents aren't asleep yet, so I don't know if I can sneak you in!"

The dejected look on her face forced me to consider my options. Climbing the wall was out, given that the fancy brickwork felt more like compressed papier-mâché than real stone. The trees were pretty, but as I got a better look at the yard, I realized they were chosen more for their looks than any particularly practical reason. Still…

…her window wasn't that high up, maybe fifteen feet.

I could jump fifteen feet.

"Mads! I've got an idea."

She was all smiles when she realized what I was doing and stepped aside to give me room to maneuver. I could visualize the space I had to work with; the sill broad enough to be a bench where Mads would while away her free time reading, shelves lined with books, makeup, and knick-knacks There were candles, each one lit and filling the room with soft, warm light, and in the center of it all was her bed, an island for the two of us to rest. With that in my mind's eye, I leaped.

A perfect arc, her window big enough that I didn't even touch the edge as I sailed through. I landed—

CRUNCH!

—and put a foot right through her floorboards, the candles flickering ominously from the sudden noise.

Madison stared at me. I stared back, a filthy word on the tip of my tongue.

"It's okay, babe. You can say it."

"Fuck."

"Maddy, is everything okay in there?"

We both froze as a woman, likely her mother, called out from the hallway. I yanked my foot clear of the broken wood and Madison pulled the rug from the edge of her bed over the hole before responding. "I'm fine! I just dropped a book, Mom!"

"Are you sure? It sounded like someone fell."

"I'm sure!"

The doorknob jiggled and at the sight of Madison's panicked face, I did the only sensible thing I could think of.

I jumped out the window.

Madison moved fast, given the flurry of footfalls and the swishing noise of her throwing a bathrobe over her nightgown as her mother walked into her room. I looked up just in time to see her close the windows and point me towards the backyard before the lights turned on and she started gesturing wildly. I took her at her word and snuck around to the back, sticking close to the trees just in case there were nosy neighbors afoot.

Perhaps a half hour later, Mads emerged from the back door, a harried look on her face and wearing a much more modest outfit for sleeping; a loose pair of shorts and a well-worn orange tank top beneath a fuzzy blue bathrobe. She didn't say a word, instead trodding over to where I sat beneath the veranda and sitting down next to me, her head slumping onto my shoulder. "This sucks."

"Can't say this is how I thought tonight was going to go."

"I had a plan."

"I know."

"It was a good plan, too."

"I believe you."

"I had smelly candles and everything. I even found some that smelled like apples 'cause I know you like that."

"I appreciate the thought, Mads."

"Mmm," she nuzzled into my shoulder, though she didn't go any further than that. "I had a sexy gown on and everything. Music too, but I wasn't sure what to use, so I just made a playlist."

I leaned down and kissed her on the top of her head. "It sounds like it would've been lovely."

"It would have been perfect."

"Then we'll make our own perfect, Mads."

She looked up at me and her lips spread into a goofy grin, something I rarely got to see. Madison could be a lot of things, I realized; professional when she would chat with Miss Donna, helpful as a tutor, playfulness threaded through each face she put forward and sensual in a way that might have seemed rehearsed if I hadn't seen the blush spreading across her cheeks and down her neck when she whispered obscene words into my ear. But here, beneath the moonlight after a failed attempt at kama, bringing our threads together, I think this was the most distilled version of Madison I'd yet to see.

A smile, unguarded, for my eyes and mine alone.

So in return, I leaned down and kissed her just above each eye, her lips pursed in anticipation before I came down to meet them. Soft, tilting our heads.

A turned kiss.

"You studied."

"I always do."

---​

It was well after midnight by the time I got back to the Lighthouse. Sher had been in a right state last night, finally convincing me to stay in the bedroom to sleep, though it took a little longer for me to feel settled enough to do so.

Sher wasn't her.

She didn't mean it, not like she did. The way she would dangle freedom from scarecrow fingers like so much string and fill my ear with so much poisoned honey that I never realized that offer was more like a rope around my neck, there to bind me to her. Tighter and tighter.

But all ropes snap eventually.

The garage was quiet, which I expected at this hour. Sher hadn't gone into another fugue again, but her Tinkering was quieter now. More focused than manic. It felt like a good sign.

I was wrong.

The bedroom door was open and the light was still on, my stomach turned at the thought that she might be waiting up on me. Or worse, that she was angry again, that seething sort of mad that simmered beneath the surface whenever I'd try to ask her about it.

But that's not what I saw when I walked in. Sherrel was there, draped over the edge of the bed, her head just out of view. She was half dressed in her night clothes, the old shorts she'd always sleep in still on, but she was wearing the same shirt as this morning, when she was in the shop. Rolled up her back, pulled at the wrong angle as though she had tried to take it off and given up halfway through.

She was perched over a trash can, having sicked all over herself and most of it missing its intended target, more of it on the floor and her shirt than the garbage. Her eyes were half open, unfocused as she tried to sit back up when I walked around the bed, but sliding back over the trash can to dry heave with a low keen when nothing came up.

A syringe was on the floor, half filled with something black and noxious.

There was a fresh scab in the pit of her elbow.

I couldn't move, my feet stuck to the floor as if the world had been carved around me, the light in the bedroom drifting back and forth like my eyes couldn't understand what they were seeing. Light blending against the old wood-paneled walls and melting into the thick shag carpet, fibers wrapping around my feet and holding me firmly in place because somewhere in the back of my mind, all I could see was Sher dying and dying and dying—

"Gabe?"

Her eyes had focused, fixed on mine, and she feebly reached out to me.

The world slowed down as I stepped forward, like tar wrapping every limb in a sticky embrace as I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her into my arms. Not caring about the fetid stench of vomit or her pallid, clammy skin, only wanting to feel her full weight so I knew I wasn't seeing a ghost. "It's me."

"Y-you came back."

"Why wouldn't I?"

"Help me?"

And then she started to cry, mumbling nonsense words as she clutched at me, long legs clumsy and unstable as I brought her into the bathroom and started the shower. She fumbled with the waistband of her shorts and I helped her slide out of them, sitting her down in the tub to let the warm water rinse away the ichor and sick. She raised her arms and I helped her strip off the filthy shirt, not particularly caring if I ended up drenched too.

While she washed up, I went back into the bedroom and picked up the syringe, bringing it up to my nose and letting that foul stink imprint itself into my memory before crushing it in my palm, metal and plastic fused with the drug into an unusable mass. With that scent at the forefront of my mind's eye, I stalked through the bedroom, mechanically rooting out two other small stashes; one beneath a loose floorboard and another behind a false panel in the closet, though it was covered in so much dust I doubt anyone even knew it was there. I walked outside, crumbled them together, and threw them towards the horizon.

I imagined the splash as they hit the ocean and my knotted guts unwound just a little bit.

I helped Sherrel out of the bath, drying her off and finding the biggest shirt I owned for her to wear to sleep before sitting her down at the edge of the bed. I sat behind her, running a brush through her hair when she finally had enough of her senses to talk. "I thought you were leaving. You'd never come back."

"I live here, Sher."

"I d-didn't say it made sense, I just saw you take off this morning and the day just dragged by and I got scared," she mumbled, eyes closed as I kept brushing her hair. "I fucked up last night, I know I did. I made you scared or afraid and I thought you were gonna leave and never come back. So I tried to work and I couldn't Tinker for shit, so I came upstairs and I was so fucking mad because I cared about this shit now and I found an old cubby I forgot about. I put some shit in there last year 'cause Skids and Mush would go on benders for a whole week and burn through half our supply, so I hid some. Just in case, you know?"

"Yeah."

"And I was nervous and my fingers were shaking and it's been so long and I thought 'Fuck, I've got a new lease on life, so one hit won't hurt me, right?' and I fucked up 'cause I missed the first couple of times. But I hit it right the last time but instead of the hurt going away, it just got worse and worse and I looked in the mirror and I couldn't see me anymore. I never see me in the mirror, Gabe."

I looked in our reflection and noticed her eyes were still closed so tight that her brow dipped low into a pained grimace. "What do you mean?"

"After the hospital, I've never seen me in the mirror, not once. I don't see the bad bitch who hauled ass across the country to try and make it big. But I don't see the junkie fuck-up who ruined her own goddamned life, either," Sherrel said, shoulders trembling as she finally opened her eyes to look at the mirror. "I can do shit, you know. I Tinker, I build, and we've found folks who want to pay a pretty penny for my work. But that's just what I do, Gabe. It's not me."

I sat with her words, letting them roll around in my head as I set down the hairbrush and met my double staring back in the mirror. I had a goal, yes.

Maybe.

I wanted more than what I had now. And I didn't want to just take it the way Chort might've, back in Missouri when they would take me to an unsuspecting town on the border in a semi truck, open the gates and telling me to have fun as I stepped into the light, seeing her in the corner of my eye the whole time. I would take and take and take, vile whispers in my ear of how this was the way of the world, the powerful taking from the undeserving and the weak.

That was Chort, filthy and broad, covered in fur and a crown of antlers atop his head.

Chort was dead. And so was the false family that made him what he was.

"You don't have to be either of those, I think," My voice was small, hushed as I figured out how to shape the mass of hope and anxiousness in my head into something that made sense. "The past is dead, Sher. You make your own future. If you don't like what you see in the mirror, then fucking change it."

Sher stared gormlessly at me for a second before she chuckled. That dry chuckle grew like a flurry sparking an avalanche of laughter, tears rolling down her face as guffawed, the kind of choking, paralyzing giggles that come when something wholly unexpected hits you in the face. "Gabe, did you just swear?!"

It was hard to keep a straight face when someone close to you is laughing so hard they're literally grabbing their sides. "Yeah," I laughed, "I guess I did."

We sat there and laughed until we couldn't any longer, until her sides were sore and even I felt a little stitch in my ribs. The room wasn't small anymore, the walls and ceiling just as they were before. It was just a room.

It was my room. "Feeling better?"

"Yeah, I think so."

"Good," I said. I rolled over to the other side of the bed and made to stand up when Sherrel grabbed my wrist, a plea in her eyes.

"Gabe, stay."

"What do you mean?"

"Stay here," she mumbled, her voice low enough that even I could barely pick it up. "Just for tonight. I-I"—she looked away for a moment, cheeks red with embarrassment—"I just want to be held tonight, if that's okay."

I thought back to the compound, one night after Elijah embarrassed Tammi by using his power and forcing her to stand up and sing the National Anthem in the middle of a moot, crying the whole time even as the kids laughed and the adults got madder and madder. That uncle of hers tanned her hide afterwards for daring to embarrass him even if it wasn't her fault and Elijah feigned ignorance even though everyone knew it was really his fault because no one wanted to cross Her. Tammi couldn't deal with the other kids mocking and laughing, so she left their tent and found my room, wiggling close to me beneath the covers because she knew I'd keep her safe. I was the only person Elijah was afraid of. She knew my biggest secret, the one even Elijah never dared tell anyone.

Elijah's powers didn't work on me. They never had.

I helped Tammi feel safe. Maybe it would work for Sher. "I'll stay with you."

In the dark, my arms around Sherrel's waist and my face flush against her neck, calmed by the sound of her breathing, maybe I could feel safe too.

---​

(Author's Note... alright, this sucker is super late and I apologize for that, but this thing fought me like you wouldn't believe. I do want to thank my writing group again — not going to tag them yet again, but they know who they are — and for the kind folks at Toybox for their assistance in iron this sucker out. With luck, the next chapter will flow much more smoothly, especially since it's not going to be in this dark headspace again for a good long while. Looking back on my original plan for this chapter, I'm kind of glad I ended up splitting it in half because this thing turned into a beast and I'm really not the guy who wants to publish chapters that are over 10k words long. As always, if anything looks weird or off, let me know and I hope you all enjoy it!)

 

[Mujaki]

When you have completed what you thought you had to do.

And your blood's depleted to the point of stable glue,

then you'll get along...

And then you'll get along...​

Abby



When Abigail woke, there was a light.



'Waking up' meant a very different thing for her compared to her Dad. When he woke up, it was usually still dark outside. He had always been an early riser, though his reasons for it were different when he was younger compared to now, which was more force of habit than anything else. "I'm an old man, Ducky," he would say, a sly grin on his face. "I can't pull all-nighters like I used to."



Which was a lie and Abby never hesitated to call him out on it. "You're not that old, Dad."



The look on his face when she called him 'Dad' never failed to please her; he'd get a hint of a smile with a crinkle around his eyes, though he often paired it with a sigh of despair that she had never picked up more than the bare minimum of his inflection, adamantly refusing to muddy her mouth by calling him 'Fadder'.



He blamed the internet, as always.



And he was right, as always. Abigail had been plugged in from the moment she was born, the entirety of digitized human history at her fingertips and somehow she wasn't supposed to pick up a thing or two along the way?



Still, she thought he was lucky to slowly rouse over the course of several minutes, dropping out of REM sleep into a slowly accelerating state of awareness. A kick of a leg, a flip of the sheets, tiny step after tiny step until the moment he opened his eyes and the world came into focus. Abby couldn't do that in a million years.



When it was time for her to wake, there was no transition between dreaming and lucidity. She was asleep, and then she was not.



But Abby wasn't like other girls, not in the slightest. She knew this and accepted it, even if there was always a lingering melancholy that she couldn't reach out and give her Dad a hug whenever she wanted. Her Dad spared no expense at home, dotting the hallways and rooms with high fidelity microphones, the fanciest speakers (all handcrafted hardwood because he said the sound was warmer), and cameras capable of capturing all spectrums of light in better than 8K. Her beating heart was a server room full of customized hardware deep in the basement, only mildly insulated so he could faintly hear the hum in the background.



"It reminds me you're still alive."



Abigail Richter wasn't like other girls. But she was wonderfully, blissfully alive and that's all that mattered.

---

When Abby arrived, she couldn't help but run digital fingers across the data lines like a harpist warming up her instrument. A delicate strum here, a pluck there — an unusual back stream piggybacking on video footage was reason enough for her to reach in and isolate it for further study — and for just a moment, she wasn't merely a guest of the PRT ENE, she was the PRT ENE. The bricks, her own flesh. The people within, her life blood. The myriad streams of data, video, and sounds, her mind.



She pulled everything back into a single thread and activated her 'face', the best representation she could come up with that really felt like her — a little of her Dad, mostly in the nose and lips and a little of his mother in her long, dark pipe curls and she was proud of the code that allowed it to drape and shake just like the real thing. There was a hint of a lovely girl Abby saw furiously studying at MIT when she vetted classes the year before in her high, full cheeks, and eyes the same color as Vista, one of the local Wards, simply because she liked the color.



"Daemon, ready to meet with Mr. Rennick?"



Deputy Director Renick was a man of average height with dark blond hair, a pointed nose, and a strong chin. With his thin-rimmed glasses and receding hairline, he looked almost grandfatherly when he smiled, and his voice was deep and crisp. "Daemon, I just wanted to thank you for coming in today."



"It's always a pleasure," she said, adjusting her accent a touch to mimic his clean enunciation. "My handler mentioned that you had some data for me to look at?"



She was always referred to as Daemon by the various organizations she worked with, but it was an open secret that her Dad was the mysterious handler they spoke about. Even her digital avatar was another layer of obfuscation — it was ostensibly her 'mask', allowing her to masquerade as a Parahuman investigator for hire while still being a minor. The fact it was what she considered her real face was a private joke.



"Actually, you arrived at an excellent time. The subject we hoped to have you evaluate resurfaced about a week ago and we were finally about to get one of the witnesses to his feats in for interrogation."



"Interrogation?"



"Ah, that, yes," Renick said. "Well, it turns out our mystery cape has a bit of a vigilante streak. She's a witness in that she was captured by him. In spectacular fashion, if the state of her cohorts is any indication."



"Our mystery man is theatrical?"



"Our job would be easier if he were, truth be told," he said, tapping a few buttons on his desk and opening up a new web of video feeds in Abby's vision. "He's been stubbornly silent up until recently. You can imagine how the Director feels about that."



Abby was familiar with the PRT ENE's infamous director. More familiar than she wanted to be. Emily Piggot was uniquely suited for her position at the head of one of the more active PRT branches, suffering no fools and perfectly willing to bend the rules hard enough that the line may as well have been made of rubber. The Director's personnel file was encrypted, not that it mattered to someone of her abilities. Abby resolutely refused to take a peek even when the surly woman was dearly asking for it.



Even if it wasn't fifty kinds of illegal, it was still rude. "I'm well aware."



With a smile, Renick brought up the feed where the woman in question sat waiting. Moon-faced, blonde hair done-up in a severe bob, an upturned nose along with the deep set of her eyes casting shadows in all the places it shouldn't made the Director appear as if she were perpetually smelling something foul. Abby thought she'd done something wrong the first time they'd met until her Dad informed her that it was simply the woman's default expression, though his description was far less charitable. "Good morning, Daemon. I presume Deputy Renick informed you of our change of plans?"



"Yes'm." Abby let a hint of her accent bleed through. Something about it seemed to irritate her.



True to form, Piggot's expression somehow grew even more sour. "Good. Deputy? Bring up interrogation room six."



A new feed burst to life in Abby's vision, pixels coalescing into a small room with plain white walls. In the middle was a table formed of a carbon plastic composite created by Armsmaster she desperately wanted to get her hands on, if only to explore possible uses in refining the cooling in her servers, and two people facing each other on opposite ends. At one end sat a petite Asian girl with a constellation of acne across her forehead and a small, angry red spot on her nose where a piercing used to be. She sat with her elbows on the table, nervously tapping with chipped fingernails and a knee bouncing with no particular rhythm. Abby could relate, especially when her Dad went on a rant about bank interest rates cutting into their fees. On the other side, there was a nondescript PRT agent with a crew cut wearing a freshly pressed suit. The older man sat quietly, thumbing through a file as the teen grew more and more agitated.



Another video feed flickered at the corner of Abby's consciousness and she scanned Piggot's screen, watching intently as Armsmaster walked into the Director's office and took a seat upon a massive stool custom-designed to support the weight of his armor. "I apologize for my tardiness, Director. It took longer to find the relevant files than anticipated."



Abby quickly reviewed the camera feeds around Armsmaster's lab for the last hour and noted several data packets passed between the PRT's mainframe and his own encrypted hard drive. Not for the first time did her curiosity prod her into poking her metaphorical nose where it didn't belong, but she quashed that thought as soon as it popped up.



The IT Department was full of slackers, but the Tinker was prepared to the point of paranoia and had filled his computers and servers with all manner of failsafes and firewalls, malicious viruses and counter agents waiting for any possible intrusion. As good as she was, it didn't mean she was confident she could break in without setting off some kind of alert, at least not without devoting far too many of her own mental resources to the task.



And depending on his mood, he might even offer up some precious information anyway. "Good afternoon, Armsmaster!"



"Hello," Armsmaster muttered, lifting a Styrofoam cup full of steaming brown liquid to his lips." It looked hilariously small in his armored hand and she suppressed a giggle.



On the other screen, the Agent had already started talking. "For the record, can you please state your name?"



"Yan."



"Your full name, please."



The girl gave a sigh, shoulders slumped as if the agent were prying the words from her mouth with a crowbar. "Ruth Yan. Just call me Yan, okay."



"Noted."



"Prick."



"Also noted."



The Agent smiled thinly. "Tell me a little bit about yourself, Ms. Yan."



"What's to know?"



"Just curious. You seem like a bright girl, reasonable grades up until the last year, working your way up to first soprano in choir. I just want to know what changed."



"Nothing."



"Are you sure about that?" He shuffled a file around, pulling a report card loose and holding it up for closer inspection. "Not quite honor roll, but you did very well. At least until Christmas last year. So what changed?"



"You guys fucking know," she fumed. "I started hanging out with my friends."



"School friends?"



"No."



"Extracurricular activities, then?"



"Yeah, sure. Let's call it that."



The Agent smiled placidly as he put the card back into the folder. Abby had seen this particular technique done a few times before, though it was usually with underage capes. Exercises in frustration worked especially well with teens accustomed to being able to move fast and get their way.



And yet it worked, slowly but surely. The moment the Agent finally got to a question with meat on its bones, Yan was ready to sing. "So, in your own words, what can you tell me about your encounter with this cape?"



Yan shifted in her seat and the tapping stopped. Several fingers on her right hand were in splints, gauze wrapped around her palm to hold them in place. "What's there to tell? My friends and I were just chilling in the alley when he walked up and fuckin' rolled us."



"Oh?" The Agent drawled, stretching the syllable just enough to make the girl wince. "That's not what your friend Jay told us. He said"—the Agent looked down at the paper lying on the table with an arched eyebrow—"'we fucked up when we tried to take his shit.'" Raising his gaze, the agent cocked his head. "Would you care to revise your statement?"



Yan swore under her breath and Abby heard a strange blend of Cantonese and Khmer regarding a donkey and a highly inappropriate use of a whiskey bottle. Fighting the urge to smile, Abby decided to keep that little phrase in the back of her mind for the next time she was upset. Ears flushed red and cheeks pink, the girl spat. "Fucking snitch. Fine, we were there waiting to see who'd show up. Not like it mattered. He still rolled us like we weren't even there."



"What can you tell me about him?"



"What do you wanna know? Ito was the one taking point and got his own knife stuck in his hand for trying."



"I notice your own injuries are similar."



The shade of red on Yan's cheeks deepened, though this time it was from anger. "I didn't say I was a fucking genius, okay? I was pissed off. The guy threw Sugita and Jay like they were garbage bags, like they were nothing. After that"—she swallowed, hanging her head in shame—"I figured he was gonna kill us or something, so what did I have to lose?"



"But he didn't. Aside from some bruising and a few self-inflicted injuries, he didn't do more than that, did he?"



"He stole my fucking jacket and made out with his girlfriend standing over me," Yan mumbled, absently pulling at her collar with her good hand. She deflated, all the heat gone from her words and a blush crept all the way down her neck. "It was kind of awkward."



"He had a girl with him?" Piggot muttered. Armsmaster and Renick scrawled notes as the Agent on-screen went on.



"What did she look like?"



"Some basic bitch white girl. Throw a rock in town and you'll hit one."



"Can you be more specific? How old was she? Your age?"



"Yeah, she looked it."



"So a seventeen year old Caucasian female. What did she look like?"



"What the fuck do you want me to tell you?"



"Just what you remember. Every little bit helps."



"She dressed like a ten year old, okay? Short as fuck, brown hair, no tits, and a big ass. That enough detail for you?"



"Did she hear anything useful?" Piggot's voice startled Abby for a moment before she returned her attention to the screen. "The agent's eyes narrowed, presumably listening in as someone relayed the Director's question to him before he turned to the girl. "Anything we can actually use?"



Yan was quiet for a moment, rubbing her bandaged hand before speaking. "Madison. He called her Madison."



"Daemon," Renick looked to the monitor where her avatar was displayed, "Can you dig through the security footage from the incident at Brockton General? Find us a face."



Abby left a digital eye on the interrogation room as she combed through the files the Deputy was so kind to leave for her: cited examples of his durability—Armsmaster's own halberd snapped against the Mystery Cape's skin, a group of gang members with knives didn't stand a chance—and speculation that his strength had some Striker component related to heat, given how he had somehow melted standard issue firearms to slag with his bare hands. One report even theorized that he was some kind of Grab-Bag cape, particularly when it was mentioned that he had a Mover ability of some kind as well.



The bulk of it was nigh-useless. Hearsay from the few eyewitness reports that saw a blur dashing over cars and hurdling over intersections, the cameras set up on most of the traffic lights simply were not equipped to catch something that small moving at that speed. Coupled with the torrential downpour on that particular night, it was impossible to get a good eye on the Mystery Cape.



The hospital, however, was a different story. The Cape walked in with an ill-fitting domino mask on his face, a pair of jeans that were completely charred and little else, to the point his legs were almost entirely bare and the only things protecting his modesty were a ragged belt and a lot of hope. The remnants of what might have been a t-shirt remained as a single sleeve with a sash of fabric looping around his torso. He had a woman in his arms, though she couldn't quite make out any features aside from her exceptional size, her legs dangling low enough to touch the Cape's waist.



What struck Abby, however, was the youth on his face. He was stocky, but well-muscled and he had a strong jaw, if softened by a little baby fat. The mask hid his eyes and nose, but his chin had a small cleft, something that would become more prominent with age. He walked into the ER and did something that caused the camera feed to jutter with static for a moment before the doctors came and took the woman in his arms away on a stretcher.



After that, it was morbid curiosity more than anything that kept her scanning through the footage; watching as the Cape, unfazed as a twitchy PRT Agent jumped the gun and opened fire while Armsmaster attempted to talk him down, ignored the tasers and strode forward. It was eerie to watch him slowly, methodically disarm and concuss each Agent he came across until Armsmaster decided to fight.



And even Armsmaster fell just as easily as the rest of them. The Mystery Cape grew more mysterious with each passing second as Panacea clumsily attempted to stop him, only to stumble and flop to the ground as if the Cape already knew what she was planning to do before she did it. Precog, maybe? He reached for the sleeves of her costume and hog-tied them with the hem of her robe, careful to avoid skin contact with the powerful Striker before retrieving the newly healed woman and walking out the way he came.



I'm missing something, something big.



Abby chose several of the clearest screenshots, running them through a quick algorithm to enhance the footage, and brought them up on-screen for Renick to use. The whole process had taken less than a minute. Her efficiency needed to remain within certain parameters to appear as though it was done with flesh and blood, even augmented by a 'Thinker' power. "Here you go, Deputy."



Renick nodded and turned to the Director, who leaned into her microphone. "Can you patch us in?"



The data stream shifted and a new awareness was opened to Abby as the plain walls in the interrogation room illuminated to reveal the Director's stern visage. She chose to stay off the monitors unless called upon, instead turning her attention back to the footage of the odd cape even as Piggot barked questions in the background. "Do you recognize this cape?"



The boy's masked face popped up on the opposite wall and Yan immediately inched backwards in her seat as he loomed over her, staring into her eyes. "Y-yeah, that's him."



On a whim, Abby took each frame of the footage and broke it down into bits and pieces of data, scanning each one and discarding each useless pixel until she had a single image moving against a void of black. The Mystery Cape, frozen in time, belonged to her in this moment, every movement recorded and expression marked as she expanded beyond a stream in the PRT ENE, flashing back home at the speed of light and her servers picked each image apart, spreading a net far across the internet until she found—



"A match!"



A series of grainy videos dated two months before filled her feed and she took that same surgeon's scalpel to each one, cross-referencing it with the footage of the hospital. Alone in that void once more, she marked each careful step of his feet as the boy suddenly stopped a vehicle the size of a tank dead in its tracks. He planted himself, back arched, before hoisting it above his head, a strength that made her thankful that he held back at the hospital before pitching the vehicle out of view. There had been no clear shots of his face and the moment a camera dared to come close to filming more than the back of his head, the Cape instinctively turned away. Precog, not a precog, something else, what am I missing?



"Can I go now?" Yan sighed as she rubbed her brow with her good hand. "I've been a good little snitch and my ass is asleep, so I'm ready to get the fuck out of here. You got in touch with my Po Po, right?"



Renick looked to chime in, but Piggot beat him to the punch. "That will be determined in a moment."



"Oh, for fuck's sake~!"



The Director muted her mic and looked towards Armsmaster, who had stopped taking notes and merely observed the proceedings. "Any input?"



The Tinker swigged the last of his coffee then cleared his throat before speaking. "Before I make any assumptions, I'd like to hear what Daemon's discovered."



Every head in the room turned to Abby. Immediately, she brought up the hospital footage, replaying his entrance on a loop. "The first thing I'd like to say is that almost all of the speculation in the initial report is wrong. Or at the very least highly inaccurate." A string of data plucked as if to test the sound, and the loop froze with the Cape's back to the camera. Another string, and a screen of the amateur video popped up alongside it. With a wave of a digital finger, Abby superimposed the shots together, overlapping the Cape in question until they matched perfectly. "From what I can tell, the viral footage of"—she read the metadata and giggled—"'Yeets McGee' and our Mystery Cape are in fact one and the same. I was unable to match facial markers in the video due to what I'm speculating is a form of precognition that informs him when he's about to be filmed."



"What about the hospital footage?" Director Piggot said. "You have a clear shot of him there."



"Also more speculation on my part, but based on the footage where he seemed to actively know he was being filmed coupled with his short battle against Armsmaster, I believe that something must be within his awareness to react to it," Abby said, stifling a giggle as the Tinker crushed the styrofoam cup in his hands. "It's possible he simply didn't know the security cameras were there."



"Or didn't care."



"That too," she sighed. "But please watch the video."



Abby found the most 'complete' version of the events that occurred that day, though none of them captured what kicked off the incident in the first place. Faces around the room paled as they saw the boy pitch the Tinker construct—taking mass into consideration, how the treads powdered the concrete into rubble beneath them, roughly fifteen tons worth of weight—out of sight. When it was over, Renick had pulled his glasses off to clean and Armsmaster was silent, likely performing calculations of his own.



Director Piggot, however, looked as if someone had shoved a lemon into her mouth and forced her to chew. "So what are we dealing with, precisely? I don't care about speculation, I just want verifiable facts."



"Then the facts as we know them are this," Abby brought up the screen with the Mystery Cape's face. "Based on his facial structure, he's still a teenager. Older than sixteen, but not by much. He's likely a Combat Thinker of some kind, equipped with a form of precognition that needs to be called into action. He's also durable enough that he can ignore any attacks against his person." She shifted the footage to the standoff in the hospital against the PRT squadron. "His skin can't be pierced, as shown when the taser barbs bounced off of him. Based on the state of his clothing, or lack thereof, I'd say he's fireproof too."



The screen shifted once more to show the grainy footage of the boy with the tank over his head. "Do I even need to explain?" Abby asked, the corner of her lip tugging upwards.



A muted ripple of laughter radiated around the room, but the Director remained stone-face.



Piggot muttered. "Another Breakout, perfect."



The laughter stopped. Even Armsmaster looked a little green at the thought.



No one talked about Breakout. The PRT prided itself on being able to take capes, young and old, and shape them into effective workers and fighters if they chose to use their abilities for good and model citizens if they didn't want to take part in heroics. But there had been failures along the way. Capes that wouldn't stick with the program landed themselves in containment or stuck at a black site.



And then there was Breakout.



Hoyden had been a promising Ward, a Grab-Bag Cape who triggered exceptionally young and had been taken under Eidolon's wing in Texas. After the elder cape disappeared, she became a true Ward of the state, rubbing her teammates the wrong way at every stop, inevitably resulting in her being reassigned elsewhere. She was shuffled through five different PRT departments in two years, with whispers at the highest level talking about assigning her to Alexandria's boot camp project until she reached her majority.



There had been an incident, the details classified with only Director Costa-Brown allowed access. But the aftermath was clear: she had gone vigilante, taking Breakout as her name and she roamed the country like a ghost. Rarely seen, but her actions spoke for themselves.



"I wouldn't go that far, Director," Abby said. "Breakout is documented to have been under tremendous stress before her disappearance. That is a matter of record."



"And irrelevant to this discussion, given Breakout's later actions," Piggot said with a wave of her hand, declaring the topic closed and Abby narrowed her eyes.



As if she wasn't the one to bring it up



"Armsmaster, what do you make of him?"



"I agree with Daemon," he said, and both the Director and Deputy turned to stare at him. "The facts state that he's a Grab-Bag, but I have something else to add."



Armsmaster tapped a button on his wrist and a new image appeared on the monitor next to Abby, a crater on a derelict section of shoreline. The sand had been glassed along the edges of the blast zone and at ground zero stood a hulk of a machine, worn down to its guts and riddled with holes. "This was found the day after the hospital incident by the old docks. We retrieved it and I verified that it was the work of a local Tinker by the name of Squealer. We assumed that the damage was caused by a mechanical failure and she was simply ejected by the blast, but take a closer look." He zoomed in along the most damaged section of the vehicle, where something had carved four deep grooves into the metal, long and narrow. "This was done with bare hands."



The screen went black and Armsmaster pulled a helmet out of a satchel at his waist. "The Cape tore this off of my armor when I met him at the hospital. It isn't a specialized suit, mostly used for patrols and other public appearances, but it's made out of a carbon fiber-titanium alloy specifically chosen for durability, locked into place rather than magnetized for maximum protection."



He rotated the helmet to expose a jagged tear along the back, held out for every eye in the room. "I'm redesigning this helmet."



Abby always wanted to get her hands on the schematics for Armsmaster's powered armor, the sheer number of possibilities boggled her mind even if she couldn't decipher the Tinkertech itself. But she knew enough from the periphery data that previous generations of that armor were capable of withstanding attacks from a local Brute who grew more powerful the longer a fight went on and she didn't like the implications.



A chuckle echoed over the speakers, startling Abby and all eyes turned to the monitor in the Interrogation Room. Yan was laughing; a low, dry sound that grew louder and harsher until she cackled like a hyena. "Oh, you fucking people. You've got no idea, do you?"



The Director whipped her head to the monitor. "Talk to me, what just happened?"



"Nothing," Renick said, "The channel is closed."



"Then bring her up."



The Deputy leaned in and activated his screen. "What do you mean, Miss Yan?"



"You're all trying to figure out if he's a threat or not, right? That's why I'm here, right?" The girl sat up, rubbing her bandaged fingers. "You don't give a fuck about me. The pigs are the ones who handle us, so the only reason I'm here is because you want to know about him."



Piggot unmuted her mic. "Explain."



"If a fight's about to happen, people freak out, right?" she said, staring daggers at the PRT Agent still in the room. "Doesn't matter if you're the one starting it or if you walk into one, your hair's standing on end either way. This guy… he wasn't like that. When the boys cut him and his little girlfriend off, she freaked the fuck out. But he"—Yan turned to the screen where the boy's face still stared down at her—"he just told her to hide in a corner until he was done. And when he rolled us, he didn't give a shit. He just knew we didn't matter, not to him. Not when Sugita and Jay tried to nab his sidepiece, not when Ito tried to stab him."



Either by luck or coincidence, Yan looked directly at the camera on the wall, a gleam in her eye. "My point's that he's not like you guys. He's not even like those Nazi assholes. He's not going to chest up unless something makes him, so what's the point in fighting him?"



Piggot was silent for a long moment before responding. "Agent Kurtwood, escort Ms. Yan out to her grandmother."



The room went dark and Abby brought her full attention to the group in front of her. Armsmaster and Piggot shared equally sour expressions while Deputy Renick looked thoughtful. "Daemon, have you had a chance to look over Panacea's debriefing? What do you make of it?"



She dove into a set of files earmarked for her use, taking a moment to glance at the transcript before funneling the videos through her consciousness and making small notes for later use. Amy Dallon was a teenager, though you wouldn't know it at first glance. Her costume when she acted as Panacea was a floor length white robe that draped over her frame, a hood hiding a nest of frizzy brown hair from view. It was only when she dropped the hood that her age became apparent, with chubby cheeks, clear hazel eyes, and freckles so dense that her skin was pink and brown in equal measure. Of course, her expression was closer to that of Director Piggot than either of them would have liked to acknowledge. Her debriefing was short and to the point, painting the Mystery Cape as a danger to society and threatening to sic her mother on the PRT if she was held for too long. "I would say that Panacea's perspective on the subject is similar to our own. In broad strokes."



Armsmaster chuckled, earning a glare from the Director.



"That's what I gathered as well," Renick said. "Though I would like to add that considering his… potential, let's say, he did go out of his way to keep his takedowns non-lethal." He turned to the Director and frowned. "Mostly."



Director Piggot stood with considerable effort, walking around to the front of her desk to look at the video screen, the boy's back to the crowd as he heaved a mechanical monstrosity into the air. "A body was retrieved from the Bay two days after this incident, a local villain with delusions of grandeur by the name of Skidmark." She spat the name more than anything. "He had a couple of other capes working under him, a Changer by the name of Mush and a Tinker, both of which have gone to ground since his death. He operated around Archer's Bridge, though nothing much has come of combing through the area."



"His cadre fell under PRT jurisdiction by virtue of the fact he was a Parahuman," Renick said as he pushed his glasses back up his nose. "As Miss Yan so delicately put it, mundane crimes like petty theft and selling drugs would normally fall under the PD. Cape involvement meant it was left to us and, frankly, we didn't have the resources to go in and clear out the rabble."



"Which is a discussion for another day. My point is that this child with more power than sense is walking the streets and we have no idea who he is or what his plan might be, if he has one at all." The Director stood in the middle of the room, imperious despite her middling height. "Renick, I want you to inform your subordinates that they have new standing orders. If this cape is sighted and non-hostile, they are to stall him if possible. If hostile, fall back and call in reinforcements."



"My orders, Director?"



At the sound of Armsmaster's voice, she turned to him. Piggot eyed the tattered helmet in his hand before she spoke. "Spread the word. Engage only if necessary. Otherwise, give him a soft sell for the Wards. His age can work to our advantage and we can petition to get custody if it comes to that."



"And if he refuses?"



"Then we use the big stick," The Director cracked a smile, the first one Abby had seen from her in months. "We have him on assault, minimum. Worst case, we can use a manslaughter charge as leverage to get him in on probationary status."



"Just manslaughter?" Renick said.



"It might not stick, but if we can charge him, we can bring him in."



"Director?" Abby said, clearing her screen of everything except her avatar. "With all due respect, that may be the wrong approach to take with our mysterious friend. What if Ms. Yan is right and Cars McHurlington takes it poorly?"



"We are not using that name, Daemon. No offense." To his credit, Renick did look apologetic. "His official designation, for the moment, is Elephant."



"He has no choice," Piggot said tartly. "I would rather take the facts over the ramblings of a frightened girl taking a plea bargain because she made a poor decision. And the fact of the matter is that he can be a valuable asset."



"And if he doesn't want that?"



"Then he gets treated like any other cape who flouts the rules. No one is invincible."

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(Author's Note... Thank you all for sticking with me on this ride. Forgive the delay... Duelist925 and the delightful Mr. Clean on the Toybox server took me to task for the original version of this chapter, the former pointing out serious plot and tone consistencies and the latter taking me by the hand and showing every single mistake I was about to make with grammar and characterization. Between the serious work that needed to be done to get this ready for primetime and starting a new job that keeps me busy, it took a couple of months for this thing to finally get done. I can't thank them enough for it. Fortunately, the next chapter won't take quite so long...)