[OC][Non-BB] Sinews

[YseultNott]

It takes Sweet Dreams several steps before she realizes Alison isn't following her anymore, and when she turns around, a look at her face is all it takes for her own smile to slip off.

"Oh," she says. "Sorry. I thought you'd realized when you saw the corpse, or that you'd been told, or… I thought you knew."

Alison runs.

Her heart is beating in her ears when she reaches her room in the Wards quarters, fingers twitching, and she ignores Makayla in favor of slamming the door closed.

Her pants have barely started to subside into something like sobs when there is a knock on the wood, and Sweet Dreams' voice calling her name.

"Go away," Alison says.

There isn't an answer, or the sound of footsteps walking away. Just breathing on either side, ragged on hers and quiet on the other.

Sweet Dreams is still there. Waiting. Judging. Sweet, sweet, sweet Sweet Dreams, pretty, beloved, silly Sweet Dreams who makes everyone's heads spin.

There is a glass on Alison's desk.

"Go away!" she screams, and she hurls it at the door.

The glass shatters.

Makayla is crying.

There is broken glass on the floor, and blood from it on Alison's hands, tacky, and something is slowly sinking in her stomach with each of Makayla's wails, something like guilt or anger or dread, something cloying sticking in her throat, and Alison leans forward and lets it pour out, acid and dark and full of chunks.

On the news that night, they talk of a dead man in town, found devoured.

It isn't the one Alison found.

 

[YseultNott]

"And so, you called the PRT," Officer Wentworth says, his face unreadable.

Alison doesn't like how distant he seems, or the too-bright lights, or the too-close walls, or the way she has to keep her fingers trapped between her knees to stop them from shaking.

She nods.

"Why?" he asks. "You said you didn't "particularly think" it was a cape, so why?"

There is something in his voice as he leans forward, acid or anger or vitriol, and Alison doesn't know what to say.

"I think we're done here," Mom says.

"Yes," Officer Wentworth says, anger slipping into a kind of disdain or disgust, "I think we are."

The ride home is quiet, in the awkward, stilted silence of people who don't know what to say.

Mom is the one who breaks it.

"He shouldn't have talked to you like that," she says. "You did the right thing, trying to help, and calling when you… When you realized. You did everything right."

The words ring empty and there is no answer coming past Alison's lips, no words in her throat or at the tip of her tongue, and the silence stretches again like gray spiderwebs.

"I love you, Alison," mom says. "You know that, right?"

"Yeah," Alison says.

She's not sure if it's true.

 

[YseultNott]

Alison is sitting on her bed in her room in the Wards quarters, staring at the wall, when there is a knock on the door and the sound of a woman's voice, familiar.

"Hey, Alison," the woman says. "It's been a while."

"Officer Mills?" Alison asks, because it has been a while since they last talked, and she's not sure why she's there.

"That's me!" Officer Mills says. "I had a bit of free time, so I thought I'd check how my favorite superhero is doing."

"Oh," Alison says, and there's a new glass on her desk to replace the one she broke, a plastic one, and she doesn't feel super, or any kind of hero.

Officer Mills sits on the bed beside her, grin turning into something a little softer and a little kinder, like when she took off her helmet on the day they first met, like when she took Alison's hands and told her it would be okay.

"I heard about what happened," Officer Mills says, "with Sweet Dreams and with the police. Want to talk about it?"

She's not wearing her helmet. Her black body armor, yes, and her PRT name tag, but no helmet, and Alison wants to believe her, and Mom so bad.

She wants everything to be okay.

"I don't know," Alison says.

Officer Mills waits, quiet, encouraging.

"It's just," Alison says, "it's just I don't really feel like I belong on the team? I'm… I'm not cute and pretty and colorful with a nice spinny dress like them, you know, and I don't fly like Daisy Bell or make people see lights like Sweet Dreams and Ma… and Sunbreeze can do both, and even her, when she got her powers, she decided to be a hero, you know? I thought I was gonna go to the Birdcage."

Her cheeks are wet.

"And," she says, she continues anyway, "and even when I did try to, to be a hero, and I tried to help, and he's, he's still dead!"

"Oh, Alison," Officer Mills says, and there is a shift of the mattress as she gets closer, and her hand comes to rest against Alison's back, rubbing circles against her spine. "It's not your fault, sweetie, okay? He was already dead before you even got there, none of it is on you. And even if he'd still been alive… Nobody can save everyone, Alison. Not me, not Sweet Dreams, not Daisy Bell, not even Alexandria. It doesn't make you bad, honey. Just human."

He's dead.

He's dead. He's not going to be okay.

No one can make things be okay. Not Alexandria. Not Officer Mills. Not mom. Not Alison.

All she can do is sit on a bed and cry.

"What," Alison says, hitched out between her sobs, "what about the, the woman? What happened to her?"

For a long second, there is no answer.

"What woman?" Officer Mills asks.

 

[YseultNott]

Following a request for more details regarding Alison's power on ao3:

Alison is a Striker/Changer, with the power of extending her fingers and digging into surfaces, burrowing in and writhing, tearing them apart. The change and burrowing is hard to control, especially when she's stressed or scared, and might happen on reflex while inattentive or overwhelmed.

The fingers extend by growing phalanxes and knuckles, able to bend into any directions, and don't detach.

 

[YseultNott]

There was no woman in the house, dead or alive. No pictures of her on the walls, no blonde neighbor, no family to the deceased. No reason for a woman to have been there at all.

"Oh," Alison says.

There's a hollow feeling at the bottom of her stomach, like a stone sinking in dark water.

"Should I have told Daisy Bell about the hair?" she asks. "Or, or Officer Wentworth? I thought they knew. Since… Since they had the crime scene and everything, I thought they'd found it and I…"

She hadn't wanted to know.

Like a coward.

"You didn't do anything wrong," Officer Mills says. "I'll ask about it. They should know. And if they don't, well."

Her hand leaves the hollow of Alison's back, sliding up to rest on her shoulder.

"They should have," she says.

 

[YseultNott]

They don't.

"The hair should have been in the evidence if it was there," Daisy Bell says. "Cadenza, are you sure you're remembering correctly? You were shocked, maybe you were mistaken."

Maybe you made it up, she doesn't say, but Alison hears it anyway. She wants to speak, but words refuse to come.

"I dunno," Sweet Dreams interject. "Maybe it was just lost. There was some chaos at the start, what with no one knowing who was supposed to have the case. Might have slipped through the cracks."

Alison's hands shake minutely, and she grasps at her fingers, squeezing painfully to keep them from moving.

(It's her fault. She's the one who called the wrong people.)

"That would be unfortunate," Daisy Bell says. "If there hadn't been that… mishap, things would be simpler."

Sweet Dreams shrugs.

"We might have ended up in a similar situation anyway," she says. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about."

Daisy Bell turns towards her.

"Officer Wentworth called," Sweet Dreams continues. "A witness came forward regarding the second murder."

She pauses, briefly.

"He says the killer is a cape," she says.

 

[YseultNott]

Alison has never been in a cape fight. She's not even been in a normal one, a real one, just pushes and shoves in the schoolyard when she was younger.

(There was that time, of course, with him, and it was scary and violent and bloody, all tacky on her fingers, but it wasn't a fight, and even if it had been one, she would have been the bad guy there.)

(She hurt him. He was going to hurt her, but he didn't because she hurt him, because she was scared and stupid and pathetic and she panicked, and none of it would have happened if she'd just managed to keep calm)

(For all of Officer Mills's reassurances, when the dust settled, she was the one with bloody hands.)

They don't know the murderer's name. The cape. The villain. The witness didn't see them, not really. Didn't see anything at all. He just found the body, still warm, and panicked and ran home.

"I was hungry," he says. "When I passed by this house, I was hungry. I… I'd bought a steak for dinner, and gotten some offal from the butcher for my dog, and I was so hungry I ate all of them raw in the middle of the street. Made myself sick, but if I hadn't, when I found the body, I think I might've…"

His hands are shaking.

They call the villain Morsel.

 

[YseultNott]

"Did you clean the kitchen?" Mom asks.

Alison takes the time to finish tying the garbage bag before answering.

"Yes," she says. "I mopped. And, err, I dusted the top of the closet and cleaned the drain."

"That's very nice of you, Alison," Mom says. "What brought this up?"

A man died. Two. A woman, maybe. Devoured, and maybe the second one would still be alive had Alison been better, been smarter, had she been more thorough in her deposition.

(Maybe not. They don't know. They can't know, and that, in itself, is on her.)

She wanted to be good. To be useful, even if it was just passing a broom along the kitchen floor.

Stupid.

Alison shrugs.

"I just felt like it," she says.

"Well," Mom says, "Thank you. I appreciate it."

She smiles.

Alison makes herself smile back.

 

[YseultNott]

"We found it," Sweet Dreams says.

Alison turns toward her.

"The hair," Sweet Dreams elaborates. "I was right. It was in the evidence and it got misplaced. Thought you'd want to know."

Of course she was right. She's good at the whole "being a hero" thing. She knows what she's doing.

She doesn't have to clean the kitchen to be helpful.

"I hope it helps," Alison says.

Sweet Dreams shrugs.

"Daisy Bell is going to run tests," she says. "Gonna take a while to rebuild everything afterwards, so she's kind of pissed, but we might get a witness that way, or even Morsel. Worst case scenario, we give closure to the family."

Morsel.

It hadn't even crossed Alison's mind, that the hair might not belong to another victim.

Stupid.

She just keeps on trailing behind.

 

[YseultNott]

The worst part of it all is the wait.

Daisy Bell's works, when they work right, when she spends time enough on them, tend to be pretty, to be thin and delicate, like spun glass and spiderwebs and dragonfly wings, and they are just as fragile as they look.

The more complex, the more well-made, the easier they break, and rarely does anything more extraordinary than a mundane flashlight survive more than a couple of uses.

"It will take a few days," she says. "I can salvage the machine enough for it to work, but it will take time, then more time to make the tests and get the results. And I'm not sure I'll be able to repair it afterward, I might have to rebuild it from scratch."

Alison wishes she could do it. A few days worth of work and a mystery solved, maybe even the entire case, lives saved and villain punished.

Still.

A few days turn out not to be fast enough.