Riley Alone (COMPLETE)
- Thread starter R3N41SS4NC3
- Start date
A child, finally facing how screwed their life is, after years of gaslighting and Manipulation. Christ that's deeply disturbing, and so sad.
Well done.
Well done.
chapter 17: Is that... Me?
R3N41SS4NC3
Professional Carol Understander
- Pronouns
- It/Its
"All things considered, the next morning was probably the best morning of my life. Up to that point, at least. It's the least complicated, looking back."
Dawnlight, birdsong, and a throbbing between my temples pulls me out of sleep. My eyes flutter open and – OW! – slam shut as the throbbing intensifies. I try again, opening them just a squint this time. My head still hurts, but it's bearable.
I'm still in the abandoned house, and it doesn't look like I had any visitors while I was asleep, excepting the chirping bird on the empty windowsill. I'm all sticky, I realize as I start to move. The jar of eggy brine emptied over me when I slept, leaving my clothes wet, salty, and less comfortable than ever. Add that to the dirt, sweat, and muck from my escape, and the shirt is ruined.
This is Aron's shirt. Was. Aron's gone, from the lives of the Carpenters and myself. I said goodbye to him. I shuck it, and the dewy air is bracing against my bare chest. It's better, but it still feels like there's something trying to dig its way out of my brain with an ice pick.
I shamble into the kitchen to look for something to drink. The sink dispenses no water. I check the cupboards, but this place isn't well stocked despite the abundance of cabinet space, and the only liquids I find are the pickle-brines and cans of soda. I think. The label is white, chalky, and rubs off in my hand, all signifying marking rubbed away by age, and it's bulging at both top and bottom, more ovoid than cylindrical. I shouldn't drink this. Good girls drink juice, not soda pop.
My lip peels back. I try to open it, but the tab pulls off before it breaks the seal: a sign I should stop. Fudge to that — I search the drawers, and then take a knife and stab it into the side, and the can sprays my hand with more sticky liquid before I can put it to my lips and suckle at the odd drink.
I suck the can until it crinkles, and then let out a belch big enough to make me dizzy. The drink sits heavy and odd in my stomach, refreshing but unpleasant. Even when I've emptied the can, I couldn't guess at what flavor it was. It didn't taste like anything natural, more like carbonated paint thinner than fruit or cola. It's disgusting, and might actually be paint thinner.
I grab another, this time stabbing its top for easier sipping as I survey the rest of the house. I didn't get a good look at it when I came in yesterday evening. It's not a big place. Other than the kitchen and living room, there's only a bedroom and a bathroom: both of them small, with just enough room for a smattering of furniture and paths. A queen sized bed, a dresser, and a nightstand with an oil lamp in the bedroom: a tub, toilet, and sink with a mirror in the bathroom.
There's an attic, with stairs that pull down from the living room ceiling, but it looks like it was only for storage, with cedar chests full of clothes, festive decorations, and camping supplies. There's a cellar as well, locked but easily broken into, and it's stocked well with preserved food: barrels, jars, and cans of various foodstuff. If I stay here for long, I'll need to watch my salt intake.
I pause, can of meat in my hand. How long will I stay here? I don't have anything to go back to. I can't go back to the Carpenters. Ketlan is… And the Nine is dead and gone – Mannequin and Shatterbird are still around, last I heard, but we're all that's left. I could maybe bring us back together or try to remake the group from scratch, but what would be the point? I kill, unmake, and remake some people, find some others that want to do the same, and just do that forever until I'm killed? Living each day to its selfish fullest and like it's our last because it may well be? Hurting normal people like Ketlan just because we can? That wouldn't be good.
I go back upstairs with the canned meat, into the kitchen for a can opener and a spoon, then outside to eat. Tangled by knee-high grasses and shrubbery is a metal patio set, with four chairs and a table, all painted green and unrusted. Leaves, twigs, and dirt covers them like snow. I brush the almost-mulch off one chair and sit. I open the can and eat my breakfast straight from it. It's chili: tasty, but boring on its own.
There's so much life in the clearing around the cabin. Bunnies, squirrels, chipmunks, and other small mammals dart through the grasses and wildflowers; a pair of bunnies play together, one running at the other and the second jumping over to dodge, again and again. Small birds flit every which way, chirping and trilling, pecking at the ground for seeds and bugs. Countless bugs crawl across the grass, burrow beneath the ground, and buzz from flower to flower.
There was a bug controlling cape in Brockton Bay, wasn't there? She was on the same team as Siberian and Cherish's nominees, if I remember correctly. What was her name? Scuttle? Scurry? Skitter? Skitter, yeah. She'd probably be able to count these bugs. She had such fine control, from what I could tell.
I wonder what Amy's up to. Is she still just healing, or did she finally free herself? I can't imagine she unshackled herself completely; I would have heard about that, even as little as I kept up with news as Aron. I hope she's still alive. Even now, I'd like to meet her. Is she good? She helps a lot of people, sort of. I think that most people would probably say she's good, because she doesn't do bad, but is that what good is? The absence of bad? Is a rock, incapable of wrongdoing, good? But maybe that's not fair to her. She does heal people, helps them return to normal life. But she doesn't help them get better than normal, so is that actually enough to be good? Where's the cut off? Who gets to judge if that's good or even good enough?
I finish my chili and set it and the spoon to the side and continue to watch the natural world. A group of deer come out from the treeline. At least one is male, with a budding pair of velvety nubs on its head. The other three are either female or too young to have developed the secondary sexual characteristics. They look around intermittently as they graze, watching for danger. A bird lands on a doe's back to peck at parasites.
The deer move on as the sun rises. The morning shadows resolve into dappled light, and then disappear as the sun crests the canopy. It's warm and feels nice, and I let myself soak the light in.
Still, as nice as it feels, it doesn't relieve the aches and soreness I feel. I still have splinters galore and bruised ribs from Ketlan hitting me – it looked like he got a decently strong and adaptable power, some sort of Changer that absorbs biological matter to enhance himself; does that heal his base form too? Can he eject the materials or are they destroyed? What are the limits to what he can absorb? It looked like different materials gave him different attributes; what would happen if he absorbed another parahuman? Would he gain any access to their power? – not to mention my blistered feet and the sharp pain in my left forearm of what I'm pretty sure is my subdermal mesh rubbing against muscle.
And I'm still sticky from the brine. That's not going away without a wash. The sink didn't work, so I'm betting the tub won't either. Not as is, at least. Maybe there's a well pump? That would need a generator, I think, and that would be in the cellar? I can't remember if I saw one down there, so I'll have to check. That's so much work when I could just lay here in the sun until I expire. But I just ate, and that pushes back my expiration date, so I might as well.
A trip to the cellar's generator and water pump later, and I'm in the tub, scrubbing the last week off of me with increasingly dirty water. I empty and refill it twice, and when it finally stays mostly clear, I let myself soak. The water is cold, but it's nice. I'd stay in it forever, if I could, but I don't have what I need to make myself aquatic here; that would involve gills, a new bladder, and flippers at the very least.
Maybe that's what I could do. Find a lake to live in and just be a lake monster. One of those good ones, like the emerald eyed siren near Toronto. Or Nessy. I never really considered 'mermaid' as a life path before, but it might be nice to hide in murky depths and only allow myself to be seen in glimpses. If I do it right, I could maybe even be beloved as a local cryptid.
Maybe that's what good is: being well liked. But no, that can't be right; Jack broke plenty of well liked heroes. He had a habit of making them do terrible things and ruining the people's trust in them. He would twist them against the image they'd brought up and broadcast that: put a well-known defender of children into a position where he has to kill a child, make a fundamentalist hero perform an abortion, convince a queer advocate to turn on their own community. Sometimes he'd look them up on the news after we'd left town to check on if they'd recovered from what they'd done, and they almost never did: shunned, demoted, forgotten, or loathed because of a forced mistake. Can good be that fragile?
I finish my bath, exit, and look for a towel to dry off. I find one under the sink, and as I stand, I glimpse my face in the mirror above the sink. Aron's face.
I've worn it for months now. I became this face more than I thought possible, playing a role so perfectly and feeling it so deeply it became a part of me. Aron was as real as Bonesaw, and just as maliciously comfortable to slip into. Is that how other parahumans feel about their masked identities? I reach up and Aron in the mirror does the same, poking himself in the cheek. Aron pinches it and pulls at the pudge. The baby fat smoothness of childhood clings well to his face, unlike some of his classmate, who have started to change and become ever so slightly leaner and pimpled. He wonders when that will start to take him. Mom said it would be soon. Some of the boys in the year above him, their voices have started to crack and warp. Kial's already started, and he's grown an inch since the start of the year. Aron wonders when he'll start to grow like that, and how tall he'll get. Will he get bigger than his dad? That would be…
I shake myself to dislodge the familiar self. The motion reopens the aching wound of my loss. I'm not Aron. I acted like it, I took on his name, his face, his family, his life in almost totality, but I'm not him. I'll never be him. I never was him, not really. I acted like it, but it was an act until the end. The real Aron wouldn't have hurt Ketlan like I did, and Ketlan wouldn't have attacked his real brother. I was a fake: something shaped like a person, but not a person – a convincing counterfeit of a human being.
Maybe that's all I've ever been.
Maybe that's all I'll ever be.
My passenger connected so young, and I leaned into the connection as much as any parahuman could. Para… human. I don't remember ever being fully human. All of my life I've been with Jack, playing his games, acting a good girl for him just to survive, all the while not knowing what any of it meant.
Passengers reward us for using our powers. That's obvious. It's something that could be presumed even without knowing about the passenger itself; it feels good to use powers. In spite of the traumas powers inspire and mimic, every parahuman is compelled to use their power. I've never known a life without my passenger nudging me into being a good parahuman. My whole life, I've been chasing a high from something I can't see, something that defies all of my attempts at knowing it.
Is that what good is? Being useful? I was useful to my passenger; I used my power constantly, in new and exciting ways. I was useful to Jack and the Slaughterhouse Nine; I helped keep our family alive, brought new members in, and kept Jack happy with my art. I was useful to Aron's soccer team, even.
None of that feels like good though. It was all too conditional, too subjective. There are other families, other teams, maybe even other, competing passengers – How can serving one thing be good when there are other things that oppose it? How could any of it have been good when so much of it makes me feel so squirmy-bad inside? I hurt people, and I don't think that was good.
The reflection of the dead boy moves as I shift my weight. It's funny, in a not-funny sort of way. I took Aron's face, but it's changed since then. How couldn't it after months of being worn? I grew up inside Aron, a little. He was a poopypants-meanie who didn't appreciate his life, but he gave me everything. I took everything he had, and then I lost it.
Aron looks so somber and melancholy, like whatever he's feeling is too big to make him cry, though he wants to.
I don't deserve his face.
Breathing hard, I pull myself from his reflection to raid the kitchen for tools and supplies. Knives and under-the-sink chemicals: not enough. The cellar: a tool box, power tools, and hardware. I haul it all back into the bathroom, to the only mirror I've found here, and get to work.
With knives and saws, I cut and peel back the skin to rip out the cosmetic implants, the ones that changed my facial structure, that gave me Aron's higher nose, wider forehead, and sharper chin. I don't have anything to replace the other pieces that I shaved away all those months ago in the woods, but that's fine; I'm not going back to Bonesaw, I'm getting rid of Aron, for good. It's fine if my face is oddly shaped and too small at the end of this.
Skin stuck back in place, I start on that, mixing a topical brew to kill both the homemade and transplanted melanin. I smear it all over my body and scrub it deep into the dermis with a brillo pad. If my skin color comes out streaky and patchy, that's fine. Anything to get rid of the freckles and look less like the normal boy I failed to be.
His eyes stare back at me, terrified and still so sad, and I can't stand the accusation. I mix another dye, this one to be inserted. When it's done, I realize I have no needle to deliver it. Bonesaw without a needle: it's almost enough to make me laugh. I need a needle. Needle needle needle… Nettle!
Outside, to a pine tree, I gather nettles and bring them back in – The wind outside stings like the arctic. I make another mix, dip a nettle, and pull it out. The solution hardens in the air: a thin shell around the pineleaf core. Fire to burn away the core, and then a knife to cut the end at an angle. It's poor, but I have a needle sans plunger. There's no time for a plunger; I dip the angled end of the needle in the dye and cap the open, uncut end with my fingertip. Pressure keeps the solution inside, like water in a straw. I tilt my head up, push the cut end into my left iris, release my fingertip's hold, and let out a ragged, pained hiss of a breath. The dye burns as it spreads.
I repeat it with my right iris.
Half blind and with the other half incoming, I grip the sink in both hands and lean on it heavily, breathing hard to keep myself together. I'm not done. I can't see Aron in the mirror anymore, but I'm not done. I've destroyed his skin, ripped away his bones and fat, and purged his eyes, but I still have his hair. Stupid, that was so stupid, I should have done the eyes last but I couldn't take the accusation in them a moment longer.
I can't see to mix anything new so I just take the melanin-destroying solution and rub it in like shampoo. Even though I'd only meant it for use on skin, it'll do something to the melanin in the hairs' cortexes, and might even damage the structure enough for a change in texture. I'll figure out how to change the length – shave, cut, grow – when I can see again. If I can see again.
It's fine.
I stumble out of the bathroom. The world rapidly grows dimmer and dimmer as the dye spreads and makes my irises expand, letting less and less light through the pupils. In less than a minute, I'll be totally blind. I make for the living room while I can still see shapes enough to guide me to the couch. I trip over something and catch myself painfully on my hands before I faceplant. I force down a sob. Why don't I have my pain switch? Crawling, I make it to the couch and pull myself up onto it.
I scream when I touch it. The couch claws and rakes against my skin, its fibers like so much sandpaper rubbing me raw. I escape the blackberry bramble of a couch, every move hurting more than the last, and collapse onto the floor. Blind, pained, and shivering, I curl into myself and wait for it all to pass. I don't like this. I'm scared. I know it's my own fault that I'm alone, but there's no comfort in the blame. There is no comfort at all.
I crack open and slam closed my eyes many times in the next hours as I wait for my sense to be bearable. The air stings against my corneas and the light is either nonexistent or far too bright as my irises expand and contract in turn. I have to shield my face with my aching arms to keep the sunlight off of my eyelids; even that much is unbearable.
This was far from my best work. It might actually be some of my poorest: slow, painful, and debilitating – and not even on purpose – all because of subpar tools, poorly conceived ideas and even more poorly mixed solutions, and haste. As time passes and the agony grows, fades, progresses, and retreats, I have nothing to think about other than how terrible my work was. At this point, I can only hope it does what I made it to do and doesn't instead leave me in blinded agony for the rest of my life. Or until I find new eyes – There're animals around.
Late in the night, I crack open my eyes and wait for the pain that doesn't come. I open them fully, and the pain is minor, akin to eyestrain. I wait for it to return – thinking maybe I caught the perfect time between dilations – but it doesn't worsen. It doesn't lessen either, but it's easily bearable.
I hiss as I sit up. My skin is unnaturally dry, and it cracks and tears instead of stretching as I move. I blink and look around. The only light is what's streaming in through the windows; night though it may be, it's clear and the full moon and the stars are bright this far into the country. The cabin is just as it was before my incapacitation. Mostly.
There is a book on the floor: the same one I tripped over on my way to the couch. I pick it up. The cover reads: How to Deal with being You: Sadly, You're Stuck with Yourself for the Rest of Your Life. I stare at it for a long, uncertain minute, then set it aside.
There's another light that I hadn't noticed, coming from the bathroom, low, orange, and dim but present. I didn't leave a light on, did I? Wait, that's impossible; there are no lights to leave on. The only electricity here is to the water pump.
I push myself to my feet and leave a slightly bloody handprint on the floor. My skin is… not good at being skin right now. Skin is supposed to keep the outside world out of the saltwater bog that is a body's insides, and keep the juices inside from spilling out. Mine is doing none of that, and it's doing it painfully. I need to fix it: another reason to go to the bathroom, where I left all my supplies.
Each step hurts, but I've hurt before. I don't like pain, but I know it well, and it's not difficult to take it for what it is – the body telling me there's an issue somewhere; in this case, everywhere – and push it to the back of my mind where it doesn't bother me as much. Once upon a time, what feels like a two lifetimes ago, I could turn it off with a switch, but that's long since broken.
The light in the bathroom is coming from the bowl of eye-dye in the sink basin. It's on fire. It looks to have spontaneously combusted as it dried. Only the top layer is aflame, so it's… probably fine. It hasn't spread yet, at least. The bowl is a little drippy around the rim – That's odd, considering porcelain's melting point is thousands of degrees, and it is not nearly that hot in here.
There are more important things to focus on than my tinkertech fire. I turn to the mirror to see if I succeeded in freeing Aron from my body and my eyes widen. I stare, transfixed by the thing that stares back. It barely looks human. It has the form and the features of a human, but that's where the similarities end. The face is deformed where bones, cartilage, and fat has been pulled out and left unreplaced, leaving an impression of an unfinished work.
Its warm, pale grey skin is streaky and splotchy, like a mix between a burn victim's healed scars and someone with vitiligo. The coloration is uneven, almost calico for how patternless it is. Cracks from the dryness split the skin like a drought cracks dirt, and raw, sunburnt red runs down its face and body in rivers and tributaries where the skin has broken instead of creasing.
Its eyes are neither the brown that I fled from nor the baby-blue that I originally maintained, but an unnatural, dull orange that reminds me of a fallen oak leaf. As I lean in, I notice it's not a solid color, but flecked with browns and golds. I blink and a tear escapes: still painfully sensitive.
The hair is almost silly: grey and sticking straight up and out like it's electrified. It's thinner than I've ever had it too, the chemicals having damaged my scalp. I gingerly run my fingers through it and stray hairs pull away painlessly. It's the sort of hair expected from a mad scientist in their eighties, not a thirteen year old. It's zany, and doesn't fit.
None of these pieces fit together in a coherent way. If I found someone looking like this, I'd check for an omega brand. If I purposefully made something like this, Jack would frown and ask me what I was thinking, disappointed but at least pretending to try to understand, and making me feel worse for every word said. I look nothing like Aron, and I look even less like Bonesaw. I look like a freak.
"...I kind of love it," I quietly admit to myself.
Dawnlight, birdsong, and a throbbing between my temples pulls me out of sleep. My eyes flutter open and – OW! – slam shut as the throbbing intensifies. I try again, opening them just a squint this time. My head still hurts, but it's bearable.
I'm still in the abandoned house, and it doesn't look like I had any visitors while I was asleep, excepting the chirping bird on the empty windowsill. I'm all sticky, I realize as I start to move. The jar of eggy brine emptied over me when I slept, leaving my clothes wet, salty, and less comfortable than ever. Add that to the dirt, sweat, and muck from my escape, and the shirt is ruined.
This is Aron's shirt. Was. Aron's gone, from the lives of the Carpenters and myself. I said goodbye to him. I shuck it, and the dewy air is bracing against my bare chest. It's better, but it still feels like there's something trying to dig its way out of my brain with an ice pick.
I shamble into the kitchen to look for something to drink. The sink dispenses no water. I check the cupboards, but this place isn't well stocked despite the abundance of cabinet space, and the only liquids I find are the pickle-brines and cans of soda. I think. The label is white, chalky, and rubs off in my hand, all signifying marking rubbed away by age, and it's bulging at both top and bottom, more ovoid than cylindrical. I shouldn't drink this. Good girls drink juice, not soda pop.
My lip peels back. I try to open it, but the tab pulls off before it breaks the seal: a sign I should stop. Fudge to that — I search the drawers, and then take a knife and stab it into the side, and the can sprays my hand with more sticky liquid before I can put it to my lips and suckle at the odd drink.
I suck the can until it crinkles, and then let out a belch big enough to make me dizzy. The drink sits heavy and odd in my stomach, refreshing but unpleasant. Even when I've emptied the can, I couldn't guess at what flavor it was. It didn't taste like anything natural, more like carbonated paint thinner than fruit or cola. It's disgusting, and might actually be paint thinner.
I grab another, this time stabbing its top for easier sipping as I survey the rest of the house. I didn't get a good look at it when I came in yesterday evening. It's not a big place. Other than the kitchen and living room, there's only a bedroom and a bathroom: both of them small, with just enough room for a smattering of furniture and paths. A queen sized bed, a dresser, and a nightstand with an oil lamp in the bedroom: a tub, toilet, and sink with a mirror in the bathroom.
There's an attic, with stairs that pull down from the living room ceiling, but it looks like it was only for storage, with cedar chests full of clothes, festive decorations, and camping supplies. There's a cellar as well, locked but easily broken into, and it's stocked well with preserved food: barrels, jars, and cans of various foodstuff. If I stay here for long, I'll need to watch my salt intake.
I pause, can of meat in my hand. How long will I stay here? I don't have anything to go back to. I can't go back to the Carpenters. Ketlan is… And the Nine is dead and gone – Mannequin and Shatterbird are still around, last I heard, but we're all that's left. I could maybe bring us back together or try to remake the group from scratch, but what would be the point? I kill, unmake, and remake some people, find some others that want to do the same, and just do that forever until I'm killed? Living each day to its selfish fullest and like it's our last because it may well be? Hurting normal people like Ketlan just because we can? That wouldn't be good.
I go back upstairs with the canned meat, into the kitchen for a can opener and a spoon, then outside to eat. Tangled by knee-high grasses and shrubbery is a metal patio set, with four chairs and a table, all painted green and unrusted. Leaves, twigs, and dirt covers them like snow. I brush the almost-mulch off one chair and sit. I open the can and eat my breakfast straight from it. It's chili: tasty, but boring on its own.
There's so much life in the clearing around the cabin. Bunnies, squirrels, chipmunks, and other small mammals dart through the grasses and wildflowers; a pair of bunnies play together, one running at the other and the second jumping over to dodge, again and again. Small birds flit every which way, chirping and trilling, pecking at the ground for seeds and bugs. Countless bugs crawl across the grass, burrow beneath the ground, and buzz from flower to flower.
There was a bug controlling cape in Brockton Bay, wasn't there? She was on the same team as Siberian and Cherish's nominees, if I remember correctly. What was her name? Scuttle? Scurry? Skitter? Skitter, yeah. She'd probably be able to count these bugs. She had such fine control, from what I could tell.
I wonder what Amy's up to. Is she still just healing, or did she finally free herself? I can't imagine she unshackled herself completely; I would have heard about that, even as little as I kept up with news as Aron. I hope she's still alive. Even now, I'd like to meet her. Is she good? She helps a lot of people, sort of. I think that most people would probably say she's good, because she doesn't do bad, but is that what good is? The absence of bad? Is a rock, incapable of wrongdoing, good? But maybe that's not fair to her. She does heal people, helps them return to normal life. But she doesn't help them get better than normal, so is that actually enough to be good? Where's the cut off? Who gets to judge if that's good or even good enough?
I finish my chili and set it and the spoon to the side and continue to watch the natural world. A group of deer come out from the treeline. At least one is male, with a budding pair of velvety nubs on its head. The other three are either female or too young to have developed the secondary sexual characteristics. They look around intermittently as they graze, watching for danger. A bird lands on a doe's back to peck at parasites.
The deer move on as the sun rises. The morning shadows resolve into dappled light, and then disappear as the sun crests the canopy. It's warm and feels nice, and I let myself soak the light in.
Still, as nice as it feels, it doesn't relieve the aches and soreness I feel. I still have splinters galore and bruised ribs from Ketlan hitting me – it looked like he got a decently strong and adaptable power, some sort of Changer that absorbs biological matter to enhance himself; does that heal his base form too? Can he eject the materials or are they destroyed? What are the limits to what he can absorb? It looked like different materials gave him different attributes; what would happen if he absorbed another parahuman? Would he gain any access to their power? – not to mention my blistered feet and the sharp pain in my left forearm of what I'm pretty sure is my subdermal mesh rubbing against muscle.
And I'm still sticky from the brine. That's not going away without a wash. The sink didn't work, so I'm betting the tub won't either. Not as is, at least. Maybe there's a well pump? That would need a generator, I think, and that would be in the cellar? I can't remember if I saw one down there, so I'll have to check. That's so much work when I could just lay here in the sun until I expire. But I just ate, and that pushes back my expiration date, so I might as well.
A trip to the cellar's generator and water pump later, and I'm in the tub, scrubbing the last week off of me with increasingly dirty water. I empty and refill it twice, and when it finally stays mostly clear, I let myself soak. The water is cold, but it's nice. I'd stay in it forever, if I could, but I don't have what I need to make myself aquatic here; that would involve gills, a new bladder, and flippers at the very least.
Maybe that's what I could do. Find a lake to live in and just be a lake monster. One of those good ones, like the emerald eyed siren near Toronto. Or Nessy. I never really considered 'mermaid' as a life path before, but it might be nice to hide in murky depths and only allow myself to be seen in glimpses. If I do it right, I could maybe even be beloved as a local cryptid.
Maybe that's what good is: being well liked. But no, that can't be right; Jack broke plenty of well liked heroes. He had a habit of making them do terrible things and ruining the people's trust in them. He would twist them against the image they'd brought up and broadcast that: put a well-known defender of children into a position where he has to kill a child, make a fundamentalist hero perform an abortion, convince a queer advocate to turn on their own community. Sometimes he'd look them up on the news after we'd left town to check on if they'd recovered from what they'd done, and they almost never did: shunned, demoted, forgotten, or loathed because of a forced mistake. Can good be that fragile?
I finish my bath, exit, and look for a towel to dry off. I find one under the sink, and as I stand, I glimpse my face in the mirror above the sink. Aron's face.
I've worn it for months now. I became this face more than I thought possible, playing a role so perfectly and feeling it so deeply it became a part of me. Aron was as real as Bonesaw, and just as maliciously comfortable to slip into. Is that how other parahumans feel about their masked identities? I reach up and Aron in the mirror does the same, poking himself in the cheek. Aron pinches it and pulls at the pudge. The baby fat smoothness of childhood clings well to his face, unlike some of his classmate, who have started to change and become ever so slightly leaner and pimpled. He wonders when that will start to take him. Mom said it would be soon. Some of the boys in the year above him, their voices have started to crack and warp. Kial's already started, and he's grown an inch since the start of the year. Aron wonders when he'll start to grow like that, and how tall he'll get. Will he get bigger than his dad? That would be…
I shake myself to dislodge the familiar self. The motion reopens the aching wound of my loss. I'm not Aron. I acted like it, I took on his name, his face, his family, his life in almost totality, but I'm not him. I'll never be him. I never was him, not really. I acted like it, but it was an act until the end. The real Aron wouldn't have hurt Ketlan like I did, and Ketlan wouldn't have attacked his real brother. I was a fake: something shaped like a person, but not a person – a convincing counterfeit of a human being.
Maybe that's all I've ever been.
Maybe that's all I'll ever be.
My passenger connected so young, and I leaned into the connection as much as any parahuman could. Para… human. I don't remember ever being fully human. All of my life I've been with Jack, playing his games, acting a good girl for him just to survive, all the while not knowing what any of it meant.
Passengers reward us for using our powers. That's obvious. It's something that could be presumed even without knowing about the passenger itself; it feels good to use powers. In spite of the traumas powers inspire and mimic, every parahuman is compelled to use their power. I've never known a life without my passenger nudging me into being a good parahuman. My whole life, I've been chasing a high from something I can't see, something that defies all of my attempts at knowing it.
Is that what good is? Being useful? I was useful to my passenger; I used my power constantly, in new and exciting ways. I was useful to Jack and the Slaughterhouse Nine; I helped keep our family alive, brought new members in, and kept Jack happy with my art. I was useful to Aron's soccer team, even.
None of that feels like good though. It was all too conditional, too subjective. There are other families, other teams, maybe even other, competing passengers – How can serving one thing be good when there are other things that oppose it? How could any of it have been good when so much of it makes me feel so squirmy-bad inside? I hurt people, and I don't think that was good.
The reflection of the dead boy moves as I shift my weight. It's funny, in a not-funny sort of way. I took Aron's face, but it's changed since then. How couldn't it after months of being worn? I grew up inside Aron, a little. He was a poopypants-meanie who didn't appreciate his life, but he gave me everything. I took everything he had, and then I lost it.
Aron looks so somber and melancholy, like whatever he's feeling is too big to make him cry, though he wants to.
I don't deserve his face.
Breathing hard, I pull myself from his reflection to raid the kitchen for tools and supplies. Knives and under-the-sink chemicals: not enough. The cellar: a tool box, power tools, and hardware. I haul it all back into the bathroom, to the only mirror I've found here, and get to work.
With knives and saws, I cut and peel back the skin to rip out the cosmetic implants, the ones that changed my facial structure, that gave me Aron's higher nose, wider forehead, and sharper chin. I don't have anything to replace the other pieces that I shaved away all those months ago in the woods, but that's fine; I'm not going back to Bonesaw, I'm getting rid of Aron, for good. It's fine if my face is oddly shaped and too small at the end of this.
Skin stuck back in place, I start on that, mixing a topical brew to kill both the homemade and transplanted melanin. I smear it all over my body and scrub it deep into the dermis with a brillo pad. If my skin color comes out streaky and patchy, that's fine. Anything to get rid of the freckles and look less like the normal boy I failed to be.
His eyes stare back at me, terrified and still so sad, and I can't stand the accusation. I mix another dye, this one to be inserted. When it's done, I realize I have no needle to deliver it. Bonesaw without a needle: it's almost enough to make me laugh. I need a needle. Needle needle needle… Nettle!
Outside, to a pine tree, I gather nettles and bring them back in – The wind outside stings like the arctic. I make another mix, dip a nettle, and pull it out. The solution hardens in the air: a thin shell around the pineleaf core. Fire to burn away the core, and then a knife to cut the end at an angle. It's poor, but I have a needle sans plunger. There's no time for a plunger; I dip the angled end of the needle in the dye and cap the open, uncut end with my fingertip. Pressure keeps the solution inside, like water in a straw. I tilt my head up, push the cut end into my left iris, release my fingertip's hold, and let out a ragged, pained hiss of a breath. The dye burns as it spreads.
I repeat it with my right iris.
Half blind and with the other half incoming, I grip the sink in both hands and lean on it heavily, breathing hard to keep myself together. I'm not done. I can't see Aron in the mirror anymore, but I'm not done. I've destroyed his skin, ripped away his bones and fat, and purged his eyes, but I still have his hair. Stupid, that was so stupid, I should have done the eyes last but I couldn't take the accusation in them a moment longer.
I can't see to mix anything new so I just take the melanin-destroying solution and rub it in like shampoo. Even though I'd only meant it for use on skin, it'll do something to the melanin in the hairs' cortexes, and might even damage the structure enough for a change in texture. I'll figure out how to change the length – shave, cut, grow – when I can see again. If I can see again.
It's fine.
I stumble out of the bathroom. The world rapidly grows dimmer and dimmer as the dye spreads and makes my irises expand, letting less and less light through the pupils. In less than a minute, I'll be totally blind. I make for the living room while I can still see shapes enough to guide me to the couch. I trip over something and catch myself painfully on my hands before I faceplant. I force down a sob. Why don't I have my pain switch? Crawling, I make it to the couch and pull myself up onto it.
I scream when I touch it. The couch claws and rakes against my skin, its fibers like so much sandpaper rubbing me raw. I escape the blackberry bramble of a couch, every move hurting more than the last, and collapse onto the floor. Blind, pained, and shivering, I curl into myself and wait for it all to pass. I don't like this. I'm scared. I know it's my own fault that I'm alone, but there's no comfort in the blame. There is no comfort at all.
…?
I crack open and slam closed my eyes many times in the next hours as I wait for my sense to be bearable. The air stings against my corneas and the light is either nonexistent or far too bright as my irises expand and contract in turn. I have to shield my face with my aching arms to keep the sunlight off of my eyelids; even that much is unbearable.
This was far from my best work. It might actually be some of my poorest: slow, painful, and debilitating – and not even on purpose – all because of subpar tools, poorly conceived ideas and even more poorly mixed solutions, and haste. As time passes and the agony grows, fades, progresses, and retreats, I have nothing to think about other than how terrible my work was. At this point, I can only hope it does what I made it to do and doesn't instead leave me in blinded agony for the rest of my life. Or until I find new eyes – There're animals around.
Late in the night, I crack open my eyes and wait for the pain that doesn't come. I open them fully, and the pain is minor, akin to eyestrain. I wait for it to return – thinking maybe I caught the perfect time between dilations – but it doesn't worsen. It doesn't lessen either, but it's easily bearable.
I hiss as I sit up. My skin is unnaturally dry, and it cracks and tears instead of stretching as I move. I blink and look around. The only light is what's streaming in through the windows; night though it may be, it's clear and the full moon and the stars are bright this far into the country. The cabin is just as it was before my incapacitation. Mostly.
There is a book on the floor: the same one I tripped over on my way to the couch. I pick it up. The cover reads: How to Deal with being You: Sadly, You're Stuck with Yourself for the Rest of Your Life. I stare at it for a long, uncertain minute, then set it aside.
There's another light that I hadn't noticed, coming from the bathroom, low, orange, and dim but present. I didn't leave a light on, did I? Wait, that's impossible; there are no lights to leave on. The only electricity here is to the water pump.
I push myself to my feet and leave a slightly bloody handprint on the floor. My skin is… not good at being skin right now. Skin is supposed to keep the outside world out of the saltwater bog that is a body's insides, and keep the juices inside from spilling out. Mine is doing none of that, and it's doing it painfully. I need to fix it: another reason to go to the bathroom, where I left all my supplies.
Each step hurts, but I've hurt before. I don't like pain, but I know it well, and it's not difficult to take it for what it is – the body telling me there's an issue somewhere; in this case, everywhere – and push it to the back of my mind where it doesn't bother me as much. Once upon a time, what feels like a two lifetimes ago, I could turn it off with a switch, but that's long since broken.
The light in the bathroom is coming from the bowl of eye-dye in the sink basin. It's on fire. It looks to have spontaneously combusted as it dried. Only the top layer is aflame, so it's… probably fine. It hasn't spread yet, at least. The bowl is a little drippy around the rim – That's odd, considering porcelain's melting point is thousands of degrees, and it is not nearly that hot in here.
There are more important things to focus on than my tinkertech fire. I turn to the mirror to see if I succeeded in freeing Aron from my body and my eyes widen. I stare, transfixed by the thing that stares back. It barely looks human. It has the form and the features of a human, but that's where the similarities end. The face is deformed where bones, cartilage, and fat has been pulled out and left unreplaced, leaving an impression of an unfinished work.
Its warm, pale grey skin is streaky and splotchy, like a mix between a burn victim's healed scars and someone with vitiligo. The coloration is uneven, almost calico for how patternless it is. Cracks from the dryness split the skin like a drought cracks dirt, and raw, sunburnt red runs down its face and body in rivers and tributaries where the skin has broken instead of creasing.
Its eyes are neither the brown that I fled from nor the baby-blue that I originally maintained, but an unnatural, dull orange that reminds me of a fallen oak leaf. As I lean in, I notice it's not a solid color, but flecked with browns and golds. I blink and a tear escapes: still painfully sensitive.
The hair is almost silly: grey and sticking straight up and out like it's electrified. It's thinner than I've ever had it too, the chemicals having damaged my scalp. I gingerly run my fingers through it and stray hairs pull away painlessly. It's the sort of hair expected from a mad scientist in their eighties, not a thirteen year old. It's zany, and doesn't fit.
None of these pieces fit together in a coherent way. If I found someone looking like this, I'd check for an omega brand. If I purposefully made something like this, Jack would frown and ask me what I was thinking, disappointed but at least pretending to try to understand, and making me feel worse for every word said. I look nothing like Aron, and I look even less like Bonesaw. I look like a freak.
"...I kind of love it," I quietly admit to myself.
And now begins the upswing 
After 45k or so getting Riley lower and lower, breaking her down again and again, I'm finally letting up and throwing her a bone in the form of a budding identity and self-image she uncomplicatedly vibes with. It's not a straight shot into happiness from this point, but that is the direction she's heading. So tell your friends who held off on reading this because it's too sad and angsty and miserable: the happiness has begun... Sorta. It's still a story about Bonesaw teehee
As always, I have a ko-fi if you want to tip.
After 45k or so getting Riley lower and lower, breaking her down again and again, I'm finally letting up and throwing her a bone in the form of a budding identity and self-image she uncomplicatedly vibes with. It's not a straight shot into happiness from this point, but that is the direction she's heading. So tell your friends who held off on reading this because it's too sad and angsty and miserable: the happiness has begun... Sorta. It's still a story about Bonesaw teeheeAs always, I have a ko-fi if you want to tip.
That last line really drives the point home. She isn't Bonesaw anymore. She isn't Aron anymore. She isn't even Riley anymore. She's just... uncompleted. There's nothing defining her anymore.
Thanks for the chapter. Looking forward to the next one.
Thanks for the chapter. Looking forward to the next one.
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I believe her cape name is Best Girl.
And Riley has, in true artist fashion, tried to reduce herself to a blank canvas, but instead created art. I am very sus of the placement of that book about living with yourself. That feels very "breadth and depth" to me, though perhaps unnecessary, considering she'd already altered herself. Or maybe it just helped out her in the right mindset. Who knows with Thinkers...
R3N41SS4NC3
Professional Carol Understander
- Pronouns
- It/Its
eyyy you caught on to the contessa plot quicker than anyone else, congrats. but yeah, contessa's involvement in this fic was to throw a specific book through a specific window, and now that thats done shes done and riley is set on the Cauldron Plot Path (tm), similarish to hers in canon
id written this with old mountain dew in mind, based on a horrible-fun night i had with my high school bestie, where we drank dangerously expired dew all night and had a great time aside from the nausea. the cans were bulging, white with age, and needed knives to open.
beer is p funny tho.
She lost Riley when she lost her family and became Bonesaw, lost Bonesaw when Jack died and she became adrift to settle as Aron, and lost Aron as her past caught up to and destroyed her new life. Her identity, since she was 6 years old, has been defined by loss, and now she's lost everything. Who will she become without a clear role to play? What can she make herself into, when she only knows the designs for what she is not?
I like this part of the story and the search for a bearable identity (secret pun intended).
- Location
- Edinburgh
Yelp, just binged this. This is great, easily best worm fic I've read in months. Highly looking forward to the rest of this!
chapter 18: What do I do now?
R3N41SS4NC3
Professional Carol Understander
- Pronouns
- It/Its
"As cool as I looked, I couldn't spend forever just staring at myself in the mirror. For one, every movement tore more dried skin open, and that hurt. I also got hungry and had other stuff to do. Some of my subdermal mesh had torn and was rubbing against muscle, causing some internal bleeding that I needed to head off, and my muscles and tendons weren't far from failing and tearing right along with my skin, and basically it was only a matter of time until my whole body fell apart. I needed to fix myself. So I did. And then I didn't know what else to do. For weeks or months, I kind of didn't do anything. I just existed listlessly. I made myself take care of my meat because that's what you have to do with your meat. It was a mundane time, even more so than my time as Aron. Eventually, things got less bad."
Vienna sausages and… it's been a few days since I've had corn, I'll go with that. I open a couple cans of each and dump them in the skillet over the wood stove, toss some fresh herbs in, and stir as it all sizzles. A few minutes later, when the mix is warm, I take it outside, grabbing a book on my way. I let out a shiver as I sit at the table and pull the blanket around my shoulders a bit tighter.
The world is just now waking. The birds are singing and flitting between branches, the sun is making its way over the canopy, and it's another picturesque morning. I smile and let out a sigh that leaves me lighter. I spoon a bite into my mouth as I watch the world start its day.
A porcupine approaches, sniffing around at my feet. He looks up at me.
"Hey Oliver," I greet. I drop a spoonful of corn for him and he gobbles it up. He looks up at me again and I shake my head. "No, just one for you today."
He doesn't look happy, continuing to beg for another bite. I chew my lip and look around. He's the first to come today, and none of my other forest friends are around yet so…
"Don't tell anyone else. I can't have you all thinking I'm playing favorites," I tell him as I drop another spoonful for him. He snorfs it up greedily. I smile.
Other animals come out of the woods and grasses and approach, and I feed them all only a spoonful each. The calming pheromones I set up while I was putting out bug-repellent keeps everyone from hurting each other over their morsels, though I do have to pull Lonnie the groundhog off of Strip the raccoon.
My skillet empties and I open my book as the animals either amble away, knowing there's no more easy food, or settle in to hang out. There are many books here, but a large portion were damaged or outright ruined by the elements that it's a bit of a gamble finding one that's mostly legible most of the way through. There are science fiction stories that have ruined passages that probably explain the mechanics of the world, fantasy stories whose final chapters are clumped into a saturated lump of paper and ink, biographies whose early life is streaky and easily torn, and so on.
There's one book that's barely damaged at all though; it's the one I've read the most, and not entirely for that one reason. It's the same book I tripped over when I was blind, How to Deal with being You. It's a book on self-help and self-actualization. It's oddly insightful – or maybe that's not odd at all, given its genre – and full of advice and affirmations that feel almost tailor-made for me. It's actually more than a little creepy, when I think about it. The cabin holds no other books of its genre or condition, and it makes me think someone put it here deliberately: for me? Still, good advice is good advice, no matter the source… assuming this is good advice. It doesn't feel like the book holds bad advice.
Like how it talks about letting go of the past – It doesn't say to forget the past, no matter how unpleasant, but to look at what's happened, accept that it has happened, and find lessons in what's happened: lessons that can be applied to building you future self. There are a lot of lessons in my past, as members of both the Slaughterhouse Nine and the Carpenters. The Nine taught me how to not be, and the Carpenters gave me something normalish to compare against. I hope they've given me enough to build from.
Sadly, it says there's never going to be a day where I wake up changed and fixed, suddenly better and okay – and that I should be wary of days that feel like that because they can often be mania or delusion in a sugary coating – but that every day is an opportunity to work towards a better version of myself, built out of the lessons of my past. Eventually, one day, I might wake up and be okay being myself, and that's an intoxicating idea, as cheesy as the book is at times.
In the two or so months I've been here, I've read it six times and I'm working through my seventh now.
When the sun is well above the canopy and the meadow is bright, I set the book down, dog-earring the page. Midday is the best time to tinker because of the light, so I pull my foot out from under a restful deer, gather my skillet and book, and go back inside. I put the book on the living room's table. I rub clean the cast iron and hang it up by the stove.
Now: what to tinker? There's a few projects I could work on. I could make some more pheromones and see about trying to lead the animals around; it would certainly be gentler than other control methods I've used in days past. But I don't know if I even need or want that. The animals are already mostly comfortable around me, and they'll follow on occasion if they want, and there's not much use to being followed by docile, wild animals.
I could try to grow crops again? I wince. Better not, actually. Plants are a ways outside my specialty, and one infestation of super corn was bad enough. I knew it would grow quickly, but still. I spent an entire week fighting it back. I was lucky to repair the wall before the next storm.
I could work on one of my internal projects. My muscles are repaired and better than ever, but I've been neglecting my organs. I only have the normal amount of them, and only the human ones too. I don't even have venom sacs. Or maybe I should recreate my pain switch? That wasn't a terrible thing I had when I was young. Or maybe I should work on giving myself some options in a fight? This time in the cabin is a nice reprieve – a breath of fresh air, as it were – but it won't last forever. Parahumans must use their powers, and a tinker must test their tech. I will leave here someday, and when I do, I think I'd like to not immediately die.
It's hard to decide what to tinker because I don't know what sort of tinker I want to be. I don't know what sort of parahuman I want to be. Good, of course, but the definition continually eludes me. Working on myself, making adjustments and modifications is… It's not good, but it doesn't feel bad either. It's neutral, I think. I wasn't hurting or helping by making it so I can change my blood color at will; I was just messing around, having fun and doing no harm.
I want to be good. Not– Not a good girl, but actually good. I want to help. I want to stop kids like Ketlan from feeling like he did because of what I did. I want to stop all the Jack Slashes in the world and keep them from hurting and ruining things just because they think it's funny. Even if the idea of coming anywhere near another man like Jack Slash makes my hands tremble.
Maybe I could fix up something and go kill Nilbog. I remember him being talked about as a kindred spirit to the Slaughterhouse Nine, so he's definitely not good. I might be good to get rid of him and his horde. But from what I remember, he's only depopulated one town, and most of the danger and fear that surrounds him is borne from the creations he repopulated that town with.
His creations are supposedly independently thinking creatures of all shapes and sizes. I can't imagine most of them have hurt anyone, and I can even less imagine that they'd take well to their creator being killed. They probably love Nilbog like family, and family hates to see family die. They would lash out after Nilbog's death, like Ketlan lashed out at me for Aron's, and then I would either kill them all or unbridle a cavalcade of grieving, traumatized people. Both of those options feel bad to me.
Is there even a good option? Kill them all, set off a rampage, or do nothing. Can nothing be good? With nothing but bad options, can doing nothing be good? I'm doing nothing now, vacationing in the countryside, and it's probably the most good thing I've done in my life. Or… no, it's just the least bad. It's neutral. But the choice between bad and neutral is easy.
Nilbog isn't going anywhere. If I find out that killing him and all his children is actually good, I can do it later. I just don't know enough to make a plan. I barely know anything, really. Burgess Middle School taught me that much – There is so much I don't know. I need to know more. I need experience. I need to experience the world as me, not as Bonesaw or Aron, but as Riley.
…I probably shouldn't go by 'Riley' though, at least not as my cape name. Ignoring how it's not at all a cape name, it would be too risky. It is known that Riley Grace Davis is– was Bonesaw, and even though I can't change my past, even though it does no good to disregard who I've been, Bonesaw is dead to the public and it's better she stay that way.
Muriel's terrified face comes to mind, when she realized who she was in the car with. I sigh. I don't want to be looked at like that again either. Bonesaw is dead and gone, and she's never coming back, and that's good. I know at least that for sure. I'll carry the weight of what I did as her forever, but there's no need for everyone else to fear a return that will never happen. I'll be the opposite of Bonesaw.
I pause my venom sac production as I realize I've kind of already decided what I'll do. It's not big. It's no grand gesture of goodness that might horribly backfire. It's experience as an anti-Bonesaw.
I'll be a hero. A smile overtakes my face as I recontinue my tinkering with the sac. I won't be able to join the Protectorate or the Wards; they'll dig into my history, and I can't risk that. Even if I tried to pass myself off as a amnesiac monster cape, I doubt it would hold up. I'd call the organizations paranoid for how much security they regularly have, but it's not paranoia when you have so many enemies. A single mistake and I'd be outed, and then killed or locked away.
So that means I'll have to be independent. They're much more isolated and vulnerable – most of my parahuman materials for my work as Bonesaw came from villains or independent heroes – but they're also much freer. I'll be the independent hero…! I was hoping I'd come up with a name there. Oh well.
I don't install the venom sac yet, instead setting up a digestive track to distill food into the venom. I'll fill it, and then decide on the delivery method: spines, fangs, claws, or a spray. I grab another can of sausages from the kitchen pantry, drop a few in the faux stomach, and munch on the rest as I clean up my kludged together workshop in the bathroom. There are a few more hours of good daylight I could work in, but I want to stretch my legs instead. I dress warmly, then head outdoors and into the woods.
Dappled sunlight shines through the freshly leafed trees. The world is loud with the sounds of nature: most of those sounds are animals trying to have sex with each other, but it's no less beautiful for it. After so many days here, I'm familiar with the area and know how to find myself around, so I'm comfortable taking a slightly new route toward a nearby stream.
What would a good cape name be? I can't present my powers as they are in full; that would out me as Bonesaw in an instant. Unless I do something like Mannequin did; when he stopped being Alan, his power expression changed – or rather, his focus with his tinkering changed enough for his newer work and earlier work to be incredibly distinct. But I reached so wide and so deeply into my power, built so many different things, always sought new ways to tinker, I wouldn't know where to start on changing my work's focus to distinguish my new self.
I climb over a fallen tree. There's so much mycelium in and under the downed tree, drawn to the dampness and the nutrients. A fallen tree is a hot spot for little life; fungi, bugs, mosses, and all the things that eat those are drawn near. It's a great place to find samples. Nature is full of so many useful things to tinker with, but on occasion I do miss the easy access to pure chemicals and clean supplies that civilization can provide.
Maybe I shouldn't be a tinker as a hero. I'm uniquely-ish suited to pass myself off as another type of parahuman. Most tinkers have obvious tells and expressions of their tinker power: impossible weapons, power armor, gadgets, and other doodads. But I can build and store my stuff inside of me. I've done it before. I could make it look like I'm not even using tinkertech. If done right, that would give me a good mental distance from Bonesaw. That, combined with how I look and how Bonesaw is regarded as dead, would give anyone pause before accusing me of being her.
I make it to the stream. It's small, just a few feet across at its widest, most likely fed by melting mountain snow or a spring, and very nice to be near. The water is clear and incredibly cold, and I can see tiny fish in it, no bigger than a finger. I never spent long looking at aquatic life. I guess that's the condition of a terrestrial being. It's odd though; my power is about meaty life and augmenting it, and water is the source of all life, according to Mrs. Butler's life science class, but I rarely did aquatic things with my power.
Not for a lack of ability, of course. Even now, a dozen and a half ideas for creating gills, rebreathers, buoyancy bladders, collapsable fins, and more are coming to mind. I look away and put them out of mind. There's no reason to give myself gills. I can't swim in a stream so small, and it's not like there's much for a human – para- or otherwise – to do underwater. Actually, it could make for a decent escape option, now that I think about it. Limited, but potentially useful.
I start walking downstream to take in the sights and sounds. The pitch and gurgle of the running water changes as the riverbed changes; twists, falls, and pits all make different sounds and change the surface's appearance and how it carries the pollen and detritus that's fallen in.
I wouldn't want to base my entire cape identity around water and fish though. That would be lame. An animal motif could be cool though, and it would fit with the slightly more subtle stuff I could tinker into myself, like claws, toxins, and durability. I could base myself around a wolf, or a fox, or a snake, or maybe a tige– Nope, not a tiger. If there is one thing I'm going to definitely not be, it's a flipping tiger.
…I miss Sibby. I shouldn't, but I do. It's like a hole in my world, a chunk taken out of my turtle shell of a self that's left me feeling raw and alone. I've lost plenty of 'family' when I was with the Nine, but Sibby was special. She was like Jack; she was invincible, until suddenly she was gone. Everyone in the Slaughterhouse was family, and I loved them – at least I think I did; I tried to – but Sibby was one of the few that I actually liked. She played with me, and she was always excited to see what I'd made, and she wasn't warm or soft but she was there and with me and she was my friend and my sister and my aunt and my pet and–
I suck down a shaky breath and let it back out.
So. Being a hero. Animal motif. An animal motif for my super hero persona. Maybe I shouldn't be a predator. Dressing predatorily feels like a step back. Maybe a deer would fit better? Or some sort of scavenger, like a vulture, or a–
A bear. I stop. There's a bear by the water's edge. It doesn't seem to have noticed me. In fact, it doesn't seem to be noticing anything, or doing anything. It's still. I wait a few minutes, and it doesn't move. Is it asleep, dead, or just hanging out? I approach, and it's dead. There's a bloody hole on its side: a bullet wound. I look around, and there's no one here. The forest is loud: nothing scary around. I haven't heard a gunshot since I arrived, which means this bear must have been shot a ways away and then come here to expire. It looks like it died just a few hours ago: definitely less than a full day.
It's in good condition. Other than the bullet into its chest which shredded some of its vital organs, it looks to be fully intact, with plenty of good meat and an intact brown pelt. According to the mostly ruined zoology book back at the cabin, bears are opportunistic omnivores; they'll eat anything: berries, larvae, fish, roots, meat – but they'll rarely hunt like other predators, like wolves and cats.
I grin and then grab the bear's paw, heft it over my shoulder, and start to carry-drag back to my cabin. Even with my super-muscles, it's a strain. I'll have to work on those some more. A bear would be cool, and already ideas for using the pelt as a durable cloak, venom sacs to coat the claws, hooking the jaws onto my own, and more fill my head. It's all coming together, and it'll do nicely.
Vienna sausages and… it's been a few days since I've had corn, I'll go with that. I open a couple cans of each and dump them in the skillet over the wood stove, toss some fresh herbs in, and stir as it all sizzles. A few minutes later, when the mix is warm, I take it outside, grabbing a book on my way. I let out a shiver as I sit at the table and pull the blanket around my shoulders a bit tighter.
The world is just now waking. The birds are singing and flitting between branches, the sun is making its way over the canopy, and it's another picturesque morning. I smile and let out a sigh that leaves me lighter. I spoon a bite into my mouth as I watch the world start its day.
A porcupine approaches, sniffing around at my feet. He looks up at me.
"Hey Oliver," I greet. I drop a spoonful of corn for him and he gobbles it up. He looks up at me again and I shake my head. "No, just one for you today."
He doesn't look happy, continuing to beg for another bite. I chew my lip and look around. He's the first to come today, and none of my other forest friends are around yet so…
"Don't tell anyone else. I can't have you all thinking I'm playing favorites," I tell him as I drop another spoonful for him. He snorfs it up greedily. I smile.
Other animals come out of the woods and grasses and approach, and I feed them all only a spoonful each. The calming pheromones I set up while I was putting out bug-repellent keeps everyone from hurting each other over their morsels, though I do have to pull Lonnie the groundhog off of Strip the raccoon.
My skillet empties and I open my book as the animals either amble away, knowing there's no more easy food, or settle in to hang out. There are many books here, but a large portion were damaged or outright ruined by the elements that it's a bit of a gamble finding one that's mostly legible most of the way through. There are science fiction stories that have ruined passages that probably explain the mechanics of the world, fantasy stories whose final chapters are clumped into a saturated lump of paper and ink, biographies whose early life is streaky and easily torn, and so on.
There's one book that's barely damaged at all though; it's the one I've read the most, and not entirely for that one reason. It's the same book I tripped over when I was blind, How to Deal with being You. It's a book on self-help and self-actualization. It's oddly insightful – or maybe that's not odd at all, given its genre – and full of advice and affirmations that feel almost tailor-made for me. It's actually more than a little creepy, when I think about it. The cabin holds no other books of its genre or condition, and it makes me think someone put it here deliberately: for me? Still, good advice is good advice, no matter the source… assuming this is good advice. It doesn't feel like the book holds bad advice.
Like how it talks about letting go of the past – It doesn't say to forget the past, no matter how unpleasant, but to look at what's happened, accept that it has happened, and find lessons in what's happened: lessons that can be applied to building you future self. There are a lot of lessons in my past, as members of both the Slaughterhouse Nine and the Carpenters. The Nine taught me how to not be, and the Carpenters gave me something normalish to compare against. I hope they've given me enough to build from.
Sadly, it says there's never going to be a day where I wake up changed and fixed, suddenly better and okay – and that I should be wary of days that feel like that because they can often be mania or delusion in a sugary coating – but that every day is an opportunity to work towards a better version of myself, built out of the lessons of my past. Eventually, one day, I might wake up and be okay being myself, and that's an intoxicating idea, as cheesy as the book is at times.
In the two or so months I've been here, I've read it six times and I'm working through my seventh now.
When the sun is well above the canopy and the meadow is bright, I set the book down, dog-earring the page. Midday is the best time to tinker because of the light, so I pull my foot out from under a restful deer, gather my skillet and book, and go back inside. I put the book on the living room's table. I rub clean the cast iron and hang it up by the stove.
Now: what to tinker? There's a few projects I could work on. I could make some more pheromones and see about trying to lead the animals around; it would certainly be gentler than other control methods I've used in days past. But I don't know if I even need or want that. The animals are already mostly comfortable around me, and they'll follow on occasion if they want, and there's not much use to being followed by docile, wild animals.
I could try to grow crops again? I wince. Better not, actually. Plants are a ways outside my specialty, and one infestation of super corn was bad enough. I knew it would grow quickly, but still. I spent an entire week fighting it back. I was lucky to repair the wall before the next storm.
I could work on one of my internal projects. My muscles are repaired and better than ever, but I've been neglecting my organs. I only have the normal amount of them, and only the human ones too. I don't even have venom sacs. Or maybe I should recreate my pain switch? That wasn't a terrible thing I had when I was young. Or maybe I should work on giving myself some options in a fight? This time in the cabin is a nice reprieve – a breath of fresh air, as it were – but it won't last forever. Parahumans must use their powers, and a tinker must test their tech. I will leave here someday, and when I do, I think I'd like to not immediately die.
It's hard to decide what to tinker because I don't know what sort of tinker I want to be. I don't know what sort of parahuman I want to be. Good, of course, but the definition continually eludes me. Working on myself, making adjustments and modifications is… It's not good, but it doesn't feel bad either. It's neutral, I think. I wasn't hurting or helping by making it so I can change my blood color at will; I was just messing around, having fun and doing no harm.
I want to be good. Not– Not a good girl, but actually good. I want to help. I want to stop kids like Ketlan from feeling like he did because of what I did. I want to stop all the Jack Slashes in the world and keep them from hurting and ruining things just because they think it's funny. Even if the idea of coming anywhere near another man like Jack Slash makes my hands tremble.
Maybe I could fix up something and go kill Nilbog. I remember him being talked about as a kindred spirit to the Slaughterhouse Nine, so he's definitely not good. I might be good to get rid of him and his horde. But from what I remember, he's only depopulated one town, and most of the danger and fear that surrounds him is borne from the creations he repopulated that town with.
His creations are supposedly independently thinking creatures of all shapes and sizes. I can't imagine most of them have hurt anyone, and I can even less imagine that they'd take well to their creator being killed. They probably love Nilbog like family, and family hates to see family die. They would lash out after Nilbog's death, like Ketlan lashed out at me for Aron's, and then I would either kill them all or unbridle a cavalcade of grieving, traumatized people. Both of those options feel bad to me.
Is there even a good option? Kill them all, set off a rampage, or do nothing. Can nothing be good? With nothing but bad options, can doing nothing be good? I'm doing nothing now, vacationing in the countryside, and it's probably the most good thing I've done in my life. Or… no, it's just the least bad. It's neutral. But the choice between bad and neutral is easy.
Nilbog isn't going anywhere. If I find out that killing him and all his children is actually good, I can do it later. I just don't know enough to make a plan. I barely know anything, really. Burgess Middle School taught me that much – There is so much I don't know. I need to know more. I need experience. I need to experience the world as me, not as Bonesaw or Aron, but as Riley.
…I probably shouldn't go by 'Riley' though, at least not as my cape name. Ignoring how it's not at all a cape name, it would be too risky. It is known that Riley Grace Davis is– was Bonesaw, and even though I can't change my past, even though it does no good to disregard who I've been, Bonesaw is dead to the public and it's better she stay that way.
Muriel's terrified face comes to mind, when she realized who she was in the car with. I sigh. I don't want to be looked at like that again either. Bonesaw is dead and gone, and she's never coming back, and that's good. I know at least that for sure. I'll carry the weight of what I did as her forever, but there's no need for everyone else to fear a return that will never happen. I'll be the opposite of Bonesaw.
I pause my venom sac production as I realize I've kind of already decided what I'll do. It's not big. It's no grand gesture of goodness that might horribly backfire. It's experience as an anti-Bonesaw.
I'll be a hero. A smile overtakes my face as I recontinue my tinkering with the sac. I won't be able to join the Protectorate or the Wards; they'll dig into my history, and I can't risk that. Even if I tried to pass myself off as a amnesiac monster cape, I doubt it would hold up. I'd call the organizations paranoid for how much security they regularly have, but it's not paranoia when you have so many enemies. A single mistake and I'd be outed, and then killed or locked away.
So that means I'll have to be independent. They're much more isolated and vulnerable – most of my parahuman materials for my work as Bonesaw came from villains or independent heroes – but they're also much freer. I'll be the independent hero…! I was hoping I'd come up with a name there. Oh well.
I don't install the venom sac yet, instead setting up a digestive track to distill food into the venom. I'll fill it, and then decide on the delivery method: spines, fangs, claws, or a spray. I grab another can of sausages from the kitchen pantry, drop a few in the faux stomach, and munch on the rest as I clean up my kludged together workshop in the bathroom. There are a few more hours of good daylight I could work in, but I want to stretch my legs instead. I dress warmly, then head outdoors and into the woods.
Dappled sunlight shines through the freshly leafed trees. The world is loud with the sounds of nature: most of those sounds are animals trying to have sex with each other, but it's no less beautiful for it. After so many days here, I'm familiar with the area and know how to find myself around, so I'm comfortable taking a slightly new route toward a nearby stream.
What would a good cape name be? I can't present my powers as they are in full; that would out me as Bonesaw in an instant. Unless I do something like Mannequin did; when he stopped being Alan, his power expression changed – or rather, his focus with his tinkering changed enough for his newer work and earlier work to be incredibly distinct. But I reached so wide and so deeply into my power, built so many different things, always sought new ways to tinker, I wouldn't know where to start on changing my work's focus to distinguish my new self.
I climb over a fallen tree. There's so much mycelium in and under the downed tree, drawn to the dampness and the nutrients. A fallen tree is a hot spot for little life; fungi, bugs, mosses, and all the things that eat those are drawn near. It's a great place to find samples. Nature is full of so many useful things to tinker with, but on occasion I do miss the easy access to pure chemicals and clean supplies that civilization can provide.
Maybe I shouldn't be a tinker as a hero. I'm uniquely-ish suited to pass myself off as another type of parahuman. Most tinkers have obvious tells and expressions of their tinker power: impossible weapons, power armor, gadgets, and other doodads. But I can build and store my stuff inside of me. I've done it before. I could make it look like I'm not even using tinkertech. If done right, that would give me a good mental distance from Bonesaw. That, combined with how I look and how Bonesaw is regarded as dead, would give anyone pause before accusing me of being her.
I make it to the stream. It's small, just a few feet across at its widest, most likely fed by melting mountain snow or a spring, and very nice to be near. The water is clear and incredibly cold, and I can see tiny fish in it, no bigger than a finger. I never spent long looking at aquatic life. I guess that's the condition of a terrestrial being. It's odd though; my power is about meaty life and augmenting it, and water is the source of all life, according to Mrs. Butler's life science class, but I rarely did aquatic things with my power.
Not for a lack of ability, of course. Even now, a dozen and a half ideas for creating gills, rebreathers, buoyancy bladders, collapsable fins, and more are coming to mind. I look away and put them out of mind. There's no reason to give myself gills. I can't swim in a stream so small, and it's not like there's much for a human – para- or otherwise – to do underwater. Actually, it could make for a decent escape option, now that I think about it. Limited, but potentially useful.
I start walking downstream to take in the sights and sounds. The pitch and gurgle of the running water changes as the riverbed changes; twists, falls, and pits all make different sounds and change the surface's appearance and how it carries the pollen and detritus that's fallen in.
I wouldn't want to base my entire cape identity around water and fish though. That would be lame. An animal motif could be cool though, and it would fit with the slightly more subtle stuff I could tinker into myself, like claws, toxins, and durability. I could base myself around a wolf, or a fox, or a snake, or maybe a tige– Nope, not a tiger. If there is one thing I'm going to definitely not be, it's a flipping tiger.
…I miss Sibby. I shouldn't, but I do. It's like a hole in my world, a chunk taken out of my turtle shell of a self that's left me feeling raw and alone. I've lost plenty of 'family' when I was with the Nine, but Sibby was special. She was like Jack; she was invincible, until suddenly she was gone. Everyone in the Slaughterhouse was family, and I loved them – at least I think I did; I tried to – but Sibby was one of the few that I actually liked. She played with me, and she was always excited to see what I'd made, and she wasn't warm or soft but she was there and with me and she was my friend and my sister and my aunt and my pet and–
I suck down a shaky breath and let it back out.
So. Being a hero. Animal motif. An animal motif for my super hero persona. Maybe I shouldn't be a predator. Dressing predatorily feels like a step back. Maybe a deer would fit better? Or some sort of scavenger, like a vulture, or a–
A bear. I stop. There's a bear by the water's edge. It doesn't seem to have noticed me. In fact, it doesn't seem to be noticing anything, or doing anything. It's still. I wait a few minutes, and it doesn't move. Is it asleep, dead, or just hanging out? I approach, and it's dead. There's a bloody hole on its side: a bullet wound. I look around, and there's no one here. The forest is loud: nothing scary around. I haven't heard a gunshot since I arrived, which means this bear must have been shot a ways away and then come here to expire. It looks like it died just a few hours ago: definitely less than a full day.
It's in good condition. Other than the bullet into its chest which shredded some of its vital organs, it looks to be fully intact, with plenty of good meat and an intact brown pelt. According to the mostly ruined zoology book back at the cabin, bears are opportunistic omnivores; they'll eat anything: berries, larvae, fish, roots, meat – but they'll rarely hunt like other predators, like wolves and cats.
I grin and then grab the bear's paw, heft it over my shoulder, and start to carry-drag back to my cabin. Even with my super-muscles, it's a strain. I'll have to work on those some more. A bear would be cool, and already ideas for using the pelt as a durable cloak, venom sacs to coat the claws, hooking the jaws onto my own, and more fill my head. It's all coming together, and it'll do nicely.
I can see Contessa's fingers all over this. The self-help book and the bear are definitely her. I am getting some Dominion vibes right now.
Was the car crash her too?
Was the car crash her too?
R3N41SS4NC3
Professional Carol Understander
- Pronouns
- It/Its
Contessas only action in this story is throwing a book through a window. I feel safe saying that now that the cauldron plot is entirely done (from cauldrons pov)
Cloak&Dagger
Definitely Insane
Tbh I was so sure that was going to be the ending of Puss in Boots and was disappointed when it didn't happen.
R3N41SS4NC3
Professional Carol Understander
- Pronouns
- It/Its
I had to look that up. Its damn adorable, thank you.
Riley delving into biomimicry? Maybe?
chapter 19: Can you Help me?
R3N41SS4NC3
Professional Carol Understander
- Pronouns
- It/Its
"As nice as it was, it couldn't last forever. Sometimes I wish I was the type of person who would be content living alone like that, but I'm not. I came here, to Laval."
It's time to say goodbye. I could come up with a dozen and a half reasons to leave, like that I ran out of Vienna sausages last week and the remaining spam is icky, or that the water pump generator is running low on fuel after an exciting day of tinkering, or that I'm sad because Oliver stopped coming by and is probably dead, but really it all comes down to just three reasons.
The first is that I'm bored. It's boring here. It was a nice break from people and a welcome chance to think without distraction, but after months of calm, low activity, I've run out of stuff to do. I've rarely stayed in one place for long, and when I did – while I was with the Carpenter family – there was at least variety to the days. This place is the same thing, day in and day out, and it's boring.
And the second reason is that this isn't real life. Being out here, alone in the woods, spending my days with animals and casual tinkering: it's not real. It's happening, sure, but there's no impact to it. Nothing I do here matters. Nothing I make here is seen or appreciated. Staying here forever would make me unreal in a way that I don't want to experience: untethered from the world's greater meaning, without influence or pollution. Purely myself. I shudder at the thought of that being forever.
Most of all, however, is that being way out here does no one any good. Good can't just be the absence of bad – there has to be more to it – so if I stay here, I'll just be sitting on the bad I've done. I can't have the last thing I've done be leaving the Carpenter family like I did. That can't be my final mark on the world. That's not good, and I need to be good, somehow. I don't know how yet, but I won't figure it out by hiding away here.
Maybe I'll come back some time. I'll figure out what good is, do that, and come back here if it ever gets to be too much. I smile. That would be nice.
I gather the things I'll take with me, set them by the front door, and have a final walk around to make sure things are okay to leave. The windows are all either closed or boarded up, the wood stove is unlit and empty, my tinker stuff in the bathroom is shelf-stable, destroyed, or with my to-go bag: everything is fine to leave. But as I stand at the threshold to the rest of the world, bag in hand, something feels incomplete. There's something missing.
"Thank you," I whisper to the house and whoever once cared for it. I close the door, open my map, and then I leave for the nearest big-enough city, incomplete.
It feels weird being in a city again, like this. It's not calm, I wouldn't call it that, and it's not quiet. But there's something alien about so many people doing so much so loudly without a drop of blood in sight. I rarely got the opportunity to just observe people as they go about their day when I was Bonesaw – I was always busy working on something or doing… stuff – and when I was posing as Aron, I never left Burgess. It's novel to see cars congest peacefully in the road, halting and moving in turn, to see pedestrians walking with the crowd on their way somewhere or another, to watch shops and stands operate and try to draw people in.
I'd probably get less biased observational data if I weren't drawing a crowd myself, but it seems like being an obvious parahuman walking down the street draws attention, even when I'm not doing anything. Mostly people avoid me, moving out of my way and hurrying past me or crossing the street to be further away. Some people, however, stop and stare or even take pictures with their camera phones. None approach, likely seeing an unknown parahuman with grey skin marred by lines of blue blood, shiny orange eyes, and a bear pelt for a cloak as potentially dangerous – A kid almost half my age tries, but her mom picks her up and rushes away, deaf to the child's protests.
And then one does successfully approach: another parahuman, this one garnering smiles instead of suspicion and sending them right back with gusto. He wears a green bodysuit with moon imagery on it and a metal wolf mask that leaves his mouth and chin uncovered. He smiles at me, and she smiles back. That's what she's supposed to do– what I'm supposed to do. I'm not masking or pretending anymore. I'm me.
"Hey there," he says in a smooth, deep voice. "You're new in town, aren't you?"
I nod.
"I thought so. I've been around here for years, and I didn't recognize you. My name is Wolfgang. And I'm sorry in advance if this is a weird question, but do you know who you are?"
I look down. That's the question of my life, isn't it? I don't know who I am. I know who I don't want to be, and I know who I can't be, but that leaves both too much and too little to make into a full person. I shake my head.
"Can you talk?" Wolfgang asks. He looks concerned now.
"Yes," I answer and realize this is the first word I've said to another human being in months. My chest unclenches oddly, tension I wasn't aware of leaving me. "Yes, I can talk."
He smiles. "Good. That's good. I know it probably doesn't feel like it, but you're kind of lucky. Some capes in positions like yours can't speak, or don't speak the local language. The Protectorate – that's the organization I work for – has a lot of experience helping folk like you adjust to things."
I blink as I realize he thinks I'm a monster cape. That was kind of the cover story I was going to roll with, but I figured it would take slightly more work than none.
"It can't have been easy finding yourself in such a strange place," Wolfgang continues, "but you should know there are people who can help you. If you want, we can head to my headquarters and get you started on integrating."
I hesitate at his offer, trying to think of how to turn him down without seeming rude, and he seems to pick up on that.
"…Or we can just hang out for a while, no pressure either way." His eyes are piercing and analytical, though his smile is kind and gentle.
"That would be nice," I answer.
We start to walk together. He asks, "So, do we have any destination in mind, or are we just wandering?"
I consider. "I don't know much about this city. I was looking for something good to do."
"Well, it's a bit early in the day for any parties if that's what you're looking for, but we could–"
"No, sorry," I interrupt, mildly confused, "I meant something I can do that is good."
He smiles again, and this time it reaches his eyes. "Yeah? Well, you could join me on a patrol – That's where we go around the area and look for ways to help out. I can't promise we'll find something, but just being around is a good way to deter anyone from acting out, and seeing you with me would let everyone know you're a good guy."
Just being around a hero is enough to make someone good? That can't be true. He's working me. He wants me to join his organization, so he's appealing to what he thinks I want. And association is a powerful tool. Jack used it a few times, dragging a less willing potential or new recruit around, making everyone see them as a part of the Nine until they gave in and accepted their place with us; they had no choice but to be with us, as anyone else would kill them.
I want to balk at the offer on that basis alone, but in this case maybe it's not so bad? Everyone was avoiding me earlier – it would be hard to help if no one will let themself be near me long enough to ask for it – so maybe some time spent with Wolfgang would be okay? And it'd give me the chance to actually ask a professional what being a hero is and judge whether it's good.
So I accept. "Okay. Let's patrol."
His smile stretches into a grin and we continue our walk down the street. It's mind-boggling how people are already reacting differently just because I'm with Wolfgang. Instead of giving me suspicious glares and hurrying past me, pedestrians are smiling and approaching, and asking the pair of us questions. Wolfgang handles most of them, laughing and chatting easily. Some people ask if I'm a new member of the Protectorate team, and after I give the first one a blunt "no," he fields those a lot more vaguely, hinting that I might or will be soon. He wants me to join, and I'm pretty sure he's using the crowd to convince me. The teachers at Aron's school did similar things to get me to quiet down, telling me I was making the other students' class time harder or that I would disappoint my parents by acting out.
Wolfgang excuses us from the crowd, and it disperses to let us through so we can continue our patrol. I keep my eyes, ears, and nose peeled for anything bad that might be happening: looking for someone scared, listening for screams, and sniffing for blood. It's hard to see anyone stand out among the hundreds of people around, hard to hear over the chatter and cars, and almost impossible to smell anything other than exhaust and sweat – I calibrated my senses for the forest, and this is not the forest. I'll need to find a moment alone to adjust later. But before then, I'd be dumb to not make full use of this hero.
…Partial use. Not full. Making full use of a person is bad. I'll only ask him questions.
So I ask, "How long have you been a hero?"
"Let's see, I've been with the Protectorate for about… four years now? Yeah, it'll be four in another couple months. I was an independent hero for a couple months before I joined up, and let me tell you, those were the scariest months of my life. I had no support, no backup, no equipment or training. The Protectorate gave me all of that and then some."
More fluffing an organization I can't join. Great. "What sort of stuff do you do as a hero?"
"Oh, all sorts of stuff. We mostly aim to keep the community safe. To do that, we patrol to show everyone we're here and they can depend on us. We also respond to calls about villain attacks and sightings. Villains hurt people, and we stop them and arrest them."
"Why don't you kill them?" That's a question that's been bothering me since Charlie said heroes don't kill.
Wolfgang's eyes go cold behind his mask but smile remains warm. "Well, that's not our place. In Canada – that's the country we're in right now – everyone is presumed innocent before proven guilty. We have to arrest a villain and give them a trial with a judge and jury before we can legally charge them with what we accuse them of. Sometimes it gets proven that they didn't do what we think they did, and if we killed them without giving them a chance to prove that, that would be murder." As an afterthought he adds, "Murder is wrong."
I raise an eyebrow. Trials? Juries? Arrests? That sounds like a load of poo. I'm unable to keep the disbelief out of my voice when I ask, "Heroes don't ever kill anyone?"
"Well. Accidents do happen, but they're rare and subject to a lot of scrutiny. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but if that's shown to not be the case, a hero can get into a lot of trouble and even go to jail, regardless of the good they've done in the past."
His voice carries a sharp edge of warning underneath its velvet warmth. I drop the subject – It wouldn't be good to peeve him off enough to stop answering my questions when I've barely started. I nod, pretending to accept his answer even though there's no way it was an accident when a hero killed a member of the Nine.
"So, I've answered some of your questions," he says. "Maybe you could answer some of mine?"
After a moment, I nod. I'll have to be careful about what I say, but it's better to answer than to lose my chance to ask more.
"You seem pretty well adjusted for a case fifty-three – that's what we call people in your position, whose bodies have been changed by their powers and lost their memories. Can I ask how long you've you been around?"
"A couple weeks," I tell him.
He hums in understanding. "And what've you been doing since you came to? I can't imagine you've been in the city all this time; I would have heard of you before today if you were."
"I actually woke up in the woods, east of here," I lie. I came from the north. "I spent some time there, and then followed my nose here."
"Your nose? You have a good sense of smell?"
I nod. He nods in return.
"Do you know what else you can do?"
I think for a moment about how to respond. How much do I want to say, and how much is believable for me – as a presumed amnesiac and freshly triggered parahuman – to know? I mull a moment too long, apparently.
"Sorry, that was probably a rude question, with you not having… well. Anyway, the Protectorate headquarters has some state of the art testing areas to help people figure out what their powers are, and the eggheads there are good at what they do. I thought I knew everything there was to know about my wolves – I can summon wolves, by the way – but they figured stuff out I hadn't even thought to consider."
"You summon wolves? Real or projections? Are you limited to just wolves? What kind of control do you have over them: is it precise or more generalized?" I ask.
He tilts his head at me. "You're a curious fella, huh? There's nothing wrong with that, but I can't really show my power off willy-nilly. I make wolves out of the stuff around me, and that means there's a bit of property damage involved. I could show you at that powers testing lab I mentioned. They love it when we break their stuff."
"Thanks, I guess. I'll think about it," I respond to the implicit invitation.
"Hey, like I said earlier, no pressure. If you want to come by, you can come by any time. Until then, I'm okay to do whatever you want to do – as long as it's legal," he chuckles.
"Thanks. I actually have some more questions, if that's okay."
"Absolutely, ask away," he invites.
Asking about powers is a trap, so instead I ask him about his daily life as a hero, the sorts of villains he's fought, his favorite parts of the life, the ways he's struggled as a hero, whether he has unspeakable regrets, what it was like to get powers, what people know about powers, and why he decided to be a hero in the first place.
"Well, simply put, I wanted to do good." Wolfgang sounds only mildly tired and curt after the hour of question and answer. He didn't answer all my questions, but he gave a decent attempt at most of them.
"How do you know what's good though? How do you know whether what you're doing is right or wrong?" I ask, letting a bit of desperation into my voice.
"Well, first off whether it's legal or not. That's a pretty good waypoint."
"So… everything legal is good, and everything illegal is bad?" I can't help but frown as I summarize his answer. That sounds really annoying, because if that's true I'll have to learn every law, and there are probably a lot of them. And wait, laws were made by people, right? So how did they know to make them right?
Wolfgang sees my confusion and sighs. "Well, it's more than just that. The law is… it's a good guide, but sometimes you have to listen to your conscience."
I blink and tilt my head. "But I don't have a cricket."
He stumbles a half-step and turns his head to stare at me. Incredulously, he asks, "Was that a Pinocchio reference?"
I nod. I made a few wooden boys with Mannequin after watching it the first time. Despite myself, I can't help but smile a little bit at the memory. That was a fun day. He was rarely in the mood to collaborate so deeply with me, so it was always a treat when we worked together on something.
"Huh. Well okay then," Wolfgang says. "Not everyone has a Jiminy Cricket on their shoulder, but everyone does have a conscience. It's the voice inside your head or the feeling in your gut that helps tell you whether you're doing what you should be doing or not. It helps steer you in the right direction of good."
"...What if I don't have that either?" He stops and I stop too. He doesn't immediately say anything and I blurt, "What if the voice in my head tells me to do the fun thing instead of the 'right' thing? What if I never had one? What if–"
"Hey." He sets a hand on my shoulder and cuts me off. "I… I'm going to be honest, I'm a little out of my depth with this. But, I think you're not giving yourself enough credit. When I found you, you weren't doing anything bad, and it didn't look like you were about to either. It's pretty obvious you want to do good, and that puts you on a better level than most people. So uh, just keep doing what you're trying to do."
I stare at the hand on my shoulder for a long time. Long enough that Wolfgang removes it and I'm hit with a chill despite my cloak. I swallow the lump in my throat and try to shake it off. That was the first time someone's touched me in a long time. My voice is strained as I thank him.
"No problem. We uh, do have a junior program called the Wards that has some people closer to your age that might share similar struggles."
"I'm still not sure if I want to join." I feel awful about dodging yet another invite. As bothersome as they are, he's been nice to me.
"You wouldn't have to. I'm just saying you could maybe talk to them, hang out, and maybe ask some advice. It's never a bad idea to make friends."
"I…"
"You could come meet them now, if you want. No pressure to join either way."
…I shake my head. I'm here to do good not to talk forever. And as nice as it's been, I know that his kindness would turn to bitter aggression the moment he learns who I was. I don't want to risk discovery, so I can't get too close. "Thanks."
"Of course. Here"– he pulls a card out of his pocket and hands it to me –"this is my card. It has my phone number on it. Do you know how to use a phone? Actually, do you know what a phone is first?"
I nod.
"Good, good. Call me if you ever change your mind or need something, and I'll pick up – day or night."
I stare at the card for a moment. Black lettering embossed with a silver wolf's head. I memorize the number and then return it to him. "Thank you."
"Of course."
I turn and leave, jumping up to a second story roof and roof-hopping away. I need to find somewhere private to adjust my senses to better fit the urban environment, or better yet just install better control – amateur stuff – and then I'll go out hunting for something bad to sink my teeth into. If I take a moment or two to let Wolfgang's words sink in and try to recapture the feeling of his touch, then so be it.
It's time to say goodbye. I could come up with a dozen and a half reasons to leave, like that I ran out of Vienna sausages last week and the remaining spam is icky, or that the water pump generator is running low on fuel after an exciting day of tinkering, or that I'm sad because Oliver stopped coming by and is probably dead, but really it all comes down to just three reasons.
The first is that I'm bored. It's boring here. It was a nice break from people and a welcome chance to think without distraction, but after months of calm, low activity, I've run out of stuff to do. I've rarely stayed in one place for long, and when I did – while I was with the Carpenter family – there was at least variety to the days. This place is the same thing, day in and day out, and it's boring.
And the second reason is that this isn't real life. Being out here, alone in the woods, spending my days with animals and casual tinkering: it's not real. It's happening, sure, but there's no impact to it. Nothing I do here matters. Nothing I make here is seen or appreciated. Staying here forever would make me unreal in a way that I don't want to experience: untethered from the world's greater meaning, without influence or pollution. Purely myself. I shudder at the thought of that being forever.
Most of all, however, is that being way out here does no one any good. Good can't just be the absence of bad – there has to be more to it – so if I stay here, I'll just be sitting on the bad I've done. I can't have the last thing I've done be leaving the Carpenter family like I did. That can't be my final mark on the world. That's not good, and I need to be good, somehow. I don't know how yet, but I won't figure it out by hiding away here.
Maybe I'll come back some time. I'll figure out what good is, do that, and come back here if it ever gets to be too much. I smile. That would be nice.
I gather the things I'll take with me, set them by the front door, and have a final walk around to make sure things are okay to leave. The windows are all either closed or boarded up, the wood stove is unlit and empty, my tinker stuff in the bathroom is shelf-stable, destroyed, or with my to-go bag: everything is fine to leave. But as I stand at the threshold to the rest of the world, bag in hand, something feels incomplete. There's something missing.
"Thank you," I whisper to the house and whoever once cared for it. I close the door, open my map, and then I leave for the nearest big-enough city, incomplete.
…?
It feels weird being in a city again, like this. It's not calm, I wouldn't call it that, and it's not quiet. But there's something alien about so many people doing so much so loudly without a drop of blood in sight. I rarely got the opportunity to just observe people as they go about their day when I was Bonesaw – I was always busy working on something or doing… stuff – and when I was posing as Aron, I never left Burgess. It's novel to see cars congest peacefully in the road, halting and moving in turn, to see pedestrians walking with the crowd on their way somewhere or another, to watch shops and stands operate and try to draw people in.
I'd probably get less biased observational data if I weren't drawing a crowd myself, but it seems like being an obvious parahuman walking down the street draws attention, even when I'm not doing anything. Mostly people avoid me, moving out of my way and hurrying past me or crossing the street to be further away. Some people, however, stop and stare or even take pictures with their camera phones. None approach, likely seeing an unknown parahuman with grey skin marred by lines of blue blood, shiny orange eyes, and a bear pelt for a cloak as potentially dangerous – A kid almost half my age tries, but her mom picks her up and rushes away, deaf to the child's protests.
And then one does successfully approach: another parahuman, this one garnering smiles instead of suspicion and sending them right back with gusto. He wears a green bodysuit with moon imagery on it and a metal wolf mask that leaves his mouth and chin uncovered. He smiles at me, and she smiles back. That's what she's supposed to do– what I'm supposed to do. I'm not masking or pretending anymore. I'm me.
"Hey there," he says in a smooth, deep voice. "You're new in town, aren't you?"
I nod.
"I thought so. I've been around here for years, and I didn't recognize you. My name is Wolfgang. And I'm sorry in advance if this is a weird question, but do you know who you are?"
I look down. That's the question of my life, isn't it? I don't know who I am. I know who I don't want to be, and I know who I can't be, but that leaves both too much and too little to make into a full person. I shake my head.
"Can you talk?" Wolfgang asks. He looks concerned now.
"Yes," I answer and realize this is the first word I've said to another human being in months. My chest unclenches oddly, tension I wasn't aware of leaving me. "Yes, I can talk."
He smiles. "Good. That's good. I know it probably doesn't feel like it, but you're kind of lucky. Some capes in positions like yours can't speak, or don't speak the local language. The Protectorate – that's the organization I work for – has a lot of experience helping folk like you adjust to things."
I blink as I realize he thinks I'm a monster cape. That was kind of the cover story I was going to roll with, but I figured it would take slightly more work than none.
"It can't have been easy finding yourself in such a strange place," Wolfgang continues, "but you should know there are people who can help you. If you want, we can head to my headquarters and get you started on integrating."
I hesitate at his offer, trying to think of how to turn him down without seeming rude, and he seems to pick up on that.
"…Or we can just hang out for a while, no pressure either way." His eyes are piercing and analytical, though his smile is kind and gentle.
"That would be nice," I answer.
We start to walk together. He asks, "So, do we have any destination in mind, or are we just wandering?"
I consider. "I don't know much about this city. I was looking for something good to do."
"Well, it's a bit early in the day for any parties if that's what you're looking for, but we could–"
"No, sorry," I interrupt, mildly confused, "I meant something I can do that is good."
He smiles again, and this time it reaches his eyes. "Yeah? Well, you could join me on a patrol – That's where we go around the area and look for ways to help out. I can't promise we'll find something, but just being around is a good way to deter anyone from acting out, and seeing you with me would let everyone know you're a good guy."
Just being around a hero is enough to make someone good? That can't be true. He's working me. He wants me to join his organization, so he's appealing to what he thinks I want. And association is a powerful tool. Jack used it a few times, dragging a less willing potential or new recruit around, making everyone see them as a part of the Nine until they gave in and accepted their place with us; they had no choice but to be with us, as anyone else would kill them.
I want to balk at the offer on that basis alone, but in this case maybe it's not so bad? Everyone was avoiding me earlier – it would be hard to help if no one will let themself be near me long enough to ask for it – so maybe some time spent with Wolfgang would be okay? And it'd give me the chance to actually ask a professional what being a hero is and judge whether it's good.
So I accept. "Okay. Let's patrol."
His smile stretches into a grin and we continue our walk down the street. It's mind-boggling how people are already reacting differently just because I'm with Wolfgang. Instead of giving me suspicious glares and hurrying past me, pedestrians are smiling and approaching, and asking the pair of us questions. Wolfgang handles most of them, laughing and chatting easily. Some people ask if I'm a new member of the Protectorate team, and after I give the first one a blunt "no," he fields those a lot more vaguely, hinting that I might or will be soon. He wants me to join, and I'm pretty sure he's using the crowd to convince me. The teachers at Aron's school did similar things to get me to quiet down, telling me I was making the other students' class time harder or that I would disappoint my parents by acting out.
Wolfgang excuses us from the crowd, and it disperses to let us through so we can continue our patrol. I keep my eyes, ears, and nose peeled for anything bad that might be happening: looking for someone scared, listening for screams, and sniffing for blood. It's hard to see anyone stand out among the hundreds of people around, hard to hear over the chatter and cars, and almost impossible to smell anything other than exhaust and sweat – I calibrated my senses for the forest, and this is not the forest. I'll need to find a moment alone to adjust later. But before then, I'd be dumb to not make full use of this hero.
…Partial use. Not full. Making full use of a person is bad. I'll only ask him questions.
So I ask, "How long have you been a hero?"
"Let's see, I've been with the Protectorate for about… four years now? Yeah, it'll be four in another couple months. I was an independent hero for a couple months before I joined up, and let me tell you, those were the scariest months of my life. I had no support, no backup, no equipment or training. The Protectorate gave me all of that and then some."
More fluffing an organization I can't join. Great. "What sort of stuff do you do as a hero?"
"Oh, all sorts of stuff. We mostly aim to keep the community safe. To do that, we patrol to show everyone we're here and they can depend on us. We also respond to calls about villain attacks and sightings. Villains hurt people, and we stop them and arrest them."
"Why don't you kill them?" That's a question that's been bothering me since Charlie said heroes don't kill.
Wolfgang's eyes go cold behind his mask but smile remains warm. "Well, that's not our place. In Canada – that's the country we're in right now – everyone is presumed innocent before proven guilty. We have to arrest a villain and give them a trial with a judge and jury before we can legally charge them with what we accuse them of. Sometimes it gets proven that they didn't do what we think they did, and if we killed them without giving them a chance to prove that, that would be murder." As an afterthought he adds, "Murder is wrong."
I raise an eyebrow. Trials? Juries? Arrests? That sounds like a load of poo. I'm unable to keep the disbelief out of my voice when I ask, "Heroes don't ever kill anyone?"
"Well. Accidents do happen, but they're rare and subject to a lot of scrutiny. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but if that's shown to not be the case, a hero can get into a lot of trouble and even go to jail, regardless of the good they've done in the past."
His voice carries a sharp edge of warning underneath its velvet warmth. I drop the subject – It wouldn't be good to peeve him off enough to stop answering my questions when I've barely started. I nod, pretending to accept his answer even though there's no way it was an accident when a hero killed a member of the Nine.
"So, I've answered some of your questions," he says. "Maybe you could answer some of mine?"
After a moment, I nod. I'll have to be careful about what I say, but it's better to answer than to lose my chance to ask more.
"You seem pretty well adjusted for a case fifty-three – that's what we call people in your position, whose bodies have been changed by their powers and lost their memories. Can I ask how long you've you been around?"
"A couple weeks," I tell him.
He hums in understanding. "And what've you been doing since you came to? I can't imagine you've been in the city all this time; I would have heard of you before today if you were."
"I actually woke up in the woods, east of here," I lie. I came from the north. "I spent some time there, and then followed my nose here."
"Your nose? You have a good sense of smell?"
I nod. He nods in return.
"Do you know what else you can do?"
I think for a moment about how to respond. How much do I want to say, and how much is believable for me – as a presumed amnesiac and freshly triggered parahuman – to know? I mull a moment too long, apparently.
"Sorry, that was probably a rude question, with you not having… well. Anyway, the Protectorate headquarters has some state of the art testing areas to help people figure out what their powers are, and the eggheads there are good at what they do. I thought I knew everything there was to know about my wolves – I can summon wolves, by the way – but they figured stuff out I hadn't even thought to consider."
"You summon wolves? Real or projections? Are you limited to just wolves? What kind of control do you have over them: is it precise or more generalized?" I ask.
He tilts his head at me. "You're a curious fella, huh? There's nothing wrong with that, but I can't really show my power off willy-nilly. I make wolves out of the stuff around me, and that means there's a bit of property damage involved. I could show you at that powers testing lab I mentioned. They love it when we break their stuff."
"Thanks, I guess. I'll think about it," I respond to the implicit invitation.
"Hey, like I said earlier, no pressure. If you want to come by, you can come by any time. Until then, I'm okay to do whatever you want to do – as long as it's legal," he chuckles.
"Thanks. I actually have some more questions, if that's okay."
"Absolutely, ask away," he invites.
Asking about powers is a trap, so instead I ask him about his daily life as a hero, the sorts of villains he's fought, his favorite parts of the life, the ways he's struggled as a hero, whether he has unspeakable regrets, what it was like to get powers, what people know about powers, and why he decided to be a hero in the first place.
"Well, simply put, I wanted to do good." Wolfgang sounds only mildly tired and curt after the hour of question and answer. He didn't answer all my questions, but he gave a decent attempt at most of them.
"How do you know what's good though? How do you know whether what you're doing is right or wrong?" I ask, letting a bit of desperation into my voice.
"Well, first off whether it's legal or not. That's a pretty good waypoint."
"So… everything legal is good, and everything illegal is bad?" I can't help but frown as I summarize his answer. That sounds really annoying, because if that's true I'll have to learn every law, and there are probably a lot of them. And wait, laws were made by people, right? So how did they know to make them right?
Wolfgang sees my confusion and sighs. "Well, it's more than just that. The law is… it's a good guide, but sometimes you have to listen to your conscience."
I blink and tilt my head. "But I don't have a cricket."
He stumbles a half-step and turns his head to stare at me. Incredulously, he asks, "Was that a Pinocchio reference?"
I nod. I made a few wooden boys with Mannequin after watching it the first time. Despite myself, I can't help but smile a little bit at the memory. That was a fun day. He was rarely in the mood to collaborate so deeply with me, so it was always a treat when we worked together on something.
"Huh. Well okay then," Wolfgang says. "Not everyone has a Jiminy Cricket on their shoulder, but everyone does have a conscience. It's the voice inside your head or the feeling in your gut that helps tell you whether you're doing what you should be doing or not. It helps steer you in the right direction of good."
"...What if I don't have that either?" He stops and I stop too. He doesn't immediately say anything and I blurt, "What if the voice in my head tells me to do the fun thing instead of the 'right' thing? What if I never had one? What if–"
"Hey." He sets a hand on my shoulder and cuts me off. "I… I'm going to be honest, I'm a little out of my depth with this. But, I think you're not giving yourself enough credit. When I found you, you weren't doing anything bad, and it didn't look like you were about to either. It's pretty obvious you want to do good, and that puts you on a better level than most people. So uh, just keep doing what you're trying to do."
I stare at the hand on my shoulder for a long time. Long enough that Wolfgang removes it and I'm hit with a chill despite my cloak. I swallow the lump in my throat and try to shake it off. That was the first time someone's touched me in a long time. My voice is strained as I thank him.
"No problem. We uh, do have a junior program called the Wards that has some people closer to your age that might share similar struggles."
"I'm still not sure if I want to join." I feel awful about dodging yet another invite. As bothersome as they are, he's been nice to me.
"You wouldn't have to. I'm just saying you could maybe talk to them, hang out, and maybe ask some advice. It's never a bad idea to make friends."
"I…"
"You could come meet them now, if you want. No pressure to join either way."
…I shake my head. I'm here to do good not to talk forever. And as nice as it's been, I know that his kindness would turn to bitter aggression the moment he learns who I was. I don't want to risk discovery, so I can't get too close. "Thanks."
"Of course. Here"– he pulls a card out of his pocket and hands it to me –"this is my card. It has my phone number on it. Do you know how to use a phone? Actually, do you know what a phone is first?"
I nod.
"Good, good. Call me if you ever change your mind or need something, and I'll pick up – day or night."
I stare at the card for a moment. Black lettering embossed with a silver wolf's head. I memorize the number and then return it to him. "Thank you."
"Of course."
I turn and leave, jumping up to a second story roof and roof-hopping away. I need to find somewhere private to adjust my senses to better fit the urban environment, or better yet just install better control – amateur stuff – and then I'll go out hunting for something bad to sink my teeth into. If I take a moment or two to let Wolfgang's words sink in and try to recapture the feeling of his touch, then so be it.
"But I don't have a cricket."
That is exactly the problem. What a great reference and metaphor combined.
That is exactly the problem. What a great reference and metaphor combined.
- Location
- Minnesota
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Love this line. Really captures her whole deal.
I bet you Riley could ponder an orb like no other
chapter 20: Am I doing this right?v
R3N41SS4NC3
Professional Carol Understander
- Pronouns
- It/Its
"My first night as a hero was… Well, Wolfgang called it a disaster, but I think I did alright. Even now, I'm pretty sure I mostly did the right thing. I wouldn't do everything the same, but still."
I stare at the man through his bedroom window and sigh. It's just someone cutting themself. That makes nine incredibly minor injuries, seven menstruating people, two hospitals, and one brawl that ended with the two men hugging and singing together as I tried to work out whether to intervene. In short, sniffing for blood hasn't been a good way to find something good to do.
I smell some new A-negative in the air just as I'm considering changing tactics and sniffing for something else, and I figure I may as well check this out first. It's probably another minor cut, but I don't have any other leads. I run towards the blood at a leisurely pace over the roofs, my muscles enhanced with strength and flexibility enough to keep pace with a car for days.
Maybe adrenaline would be good to try and track instead? Or something non-biological? Would that keep down false positives? There's plenty of hints of adrenaline in the air, but much less gunpowder. If that is gunpowder I'm smelling; I'm only mostly sure of that. I'll need a sample before I can be certain. Gunpowder would be good to track, since violence is intrinsic to guns.
The smell of blood takes me to an apartment building in the brighter, less trash-strewn part of town. The building is five stories tall and the blood is coming from the… fifth floor. I hop from the adjacent building and sink my claws into the brick, my bare feet sticking onto the rough, sheer face easily.
The bear pelt I wear as a cloak both is and isn't part of me. I can remove it without any trouble, but my hands attach to the insides of its forepaws in a way that's more bone inside flesh than hand inside glove. While I kept most of my augmentations and tinkertech inside myself, there are a few pieces I had to put into the cloak: extra muscle, protective mesh, thermal insulation, and a few more doodads. The claws can easily extend and retract and can secrete a bevy of different chemicals that are stored in bladders in the paws. The bear's maw was fashioned into a collar, with the teeth pointing up along my neck. There's another connection point at the back of my neck that's used to link my nerves to the artificial ones that line the cloak, letting me feel through it.
With the claws and my gecko-inspired soles, it's easy to wall-crawl over to a window to get a better look, though much harder to actually get that better look thanks to the curtains. I can hear a man's voice within, but can't make out quite what he's saying. I slide a claw around the windows frame, pull it out, dro– almost fall off the wall trying to catch it, check to make sure no one is below me, and then drop it for real. It hits the ground with a distant shatter.
The man's shouting is easily audible without the glass in the way.
"–stupid bitch. I wouldn't have to do that if you would just, for once in your pathetic, miserable fucking life get one thing right. It's just one thing. That's all it is! Dinner! That's all I ask for but apparently it's too much for your stupid brain to wrap itself around. I'm off all day at the precinct, working my ass off to give you a roof over your head, to keep you safe from all the scum out there, and you can't even make my dinner right?!"
…That man is using very naughty language. I poke my head past the curtains and see the loud, foul-mouthed man. He's a large man with short hair, wearing a white shirt and underpants. He's red in the face, and his hands are clenched into fists or tensely hooked fingers as he gestures to accompany his incredibly inappropriate speech.
There's a woman on the ground below him. One of her arms is held between herself and the man, and her other is pressed against her face, where I see a gash and a new bruise. Her face is also red, but with tears and fear instead of anger. I can barely hear it over the man's shouting, but she's apologizing.
This doesn't seem similar to the brawl I saw earlier. I'm not sure how or if these two could reconcile into hugging and singing, so I think that means I should intervene? I should make sure I know what's happening first.
I pull myself through the wall's newest hole and call out, "Hey! Stop it."
And the two people look at me. They both flinch and the man takes a step back. The woman whimpers and sheilds herself from me. Fearfully, the man demands, "Who are you? What are you doing in my house?"
"I'm a hero," I answer, taking a pose from Protectorate Pals, with my hands on my hips and my chest puffed out. "I don't have a name yet, but um. I'm here to stop this."
"A hero?" The scared confusion on the man's face gets pushed out by cautious anger. "Listen kid, I don't know what you think is going on or what you're playing at, but this is my private property, and you're trespassing, so– Wait did you fucking break my window to get in?! That's B and E and destruction of property."
I don't know what he's talking about, but rather than tell him that, I look past him to the woman. She flinches. "Are you okay? Did he hit you?"
"Hey! It's none of your business what happens in my house," the man says.
"Do you need help?" I ask her, ignoring him.
"She doesn't need help," the man snaps at me. He lifts her by the arm and pulls her to her feet, ignoring the cry she lets out and the way she stumbles.
"Stop hurting her!" I tell him.
"Hu– I didn't hurt her," he denies, looking at me like I'm crazy.
"Her face is bloody."
"She fell. Isn't that right, Maryl?" He shakes her.
"Yes. I fell, that's all," she says in a shaky voice. "You don't need to worry. I'm fine. We're fine. So you can leave, okay? Please?"
"See? It's fine. So get out before I decide to charge you."
I squint at her. She's lying. Why? She's cringing away from the man. His knuckles are white where he holds her. She's in pain, yet her face pleads with me to leave. She's scared of him.
"I… I think I need to call someone about this," I state. "Where's your phone?"
"I'm not letting you use my phone," he says, sounding as if the concept is an insult to his very being. "And you're sure as hell not going to call anyone about what you think you saw here unless you want to get in major trouble."
"Just go, please," Maryl begs.
"Shut up," he hisses at her. "You're not helping."
"Sorry, I'm sorry."
Suddenly I'm not looking at Maryl and an angry man, I'm looking at Bonesaw and Jack, and she's holding onto him as much as he is to her. He's invincible to her, and she knows nothing else. He needs to go. He reaches for something and I stop him. At the last moment, I change from a venom to a coagulant and a paralytic. Murder is wrong.
He falls to the floor with four slashes across his chest, deep enough to scrape bone. Blood stains his shirt, but only along the tears. It doesn't spread, as very little blood actually leaves his body. Maryl screams and falls away from me.
"It's okay," I tell her. "He can't hurt you anymore."
She just continues to scream and scramble away. I frown. I look around the place and spot a phone on the wall. I grab it and dial the number Wolfgang gave me. Maryl, still screaming, runs out of the apartment, and through the open door, I watch her bang on the other apartments' doors.
The phone line connects. "Hello? This is Wolfgang. Who is this?"
"Hey, Wolfgang. We met earlier today? You let me patrol with you and ask you some questions?"
"Oh, right, the cape with no name. You really should pick one out soon unless you want me to do that for you," he says jovially.
"Oh. Okay. I wouldn't actually mind the help. I don't think I'm very good at naming things."
"How about uh… Sniffer? No, that's bad. Bear. Bear… claw? Bearclaw?"
I test the name on my lips. "Bearclaw." It feels like it fits right, more than it maybe should. "Yeah, Bearclaw. Thank you."
"You're very welcome, Bearclaw. Is there anything else I can help you with?"
I look at the handful of people peeking through their doors at Maryl or into this apartment. The man is slowly, shakily lifting his arm to paw at his chest.
"Maybe," I say. "I think I might have done something good, but I'm not entirely sure."
"Uhuh. Why don't you walk me through what happened?"
Wolfgang sighs after I repeat the story to him, this time in person. We're on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building, and there are two PRT vans parked near us, with a trio of troopers milling about; their eyes always return to me. The man I opened, an officer James McDaniel, has been loaded into an ambulance and sent to the hospital, and the PRT have cordoned off the apartment. Maryl, his wife, went with him and a PRT officer.
"Kid, I'm going to level with you; this doesn't look good," Wolfgang says. "You sent a police officer to the hospital."
"But he was hurting his wife," I remind him.
"She tells a different story."
I blink.
"I talked to her before she left. She says they were having dinner and you broke in, hit her, and attacked him when he tried to defend her."
"What? But that's not true," I protest. "That's a lie. She's lying."
"That's her story, and right now it's your word against hers."
My mouth opens but nothing comes out. Why would she say that? I showed her he's not invincible; she could be free, now.
"Kid, as bad as this looks, it's not the end of the world, okay? I'm sure you didn't mean to hurt anybody, but you're lucky McDaniel isn't dead with how deep you cut him, and–"
"It wasn't luck," I interrupt. "I made sure he wouldn't bleed from the cuts. Murder is wrong; you told me that."
He re-appraises me. "Yeah?"
"Yeah. I paralyzed him and stopped him from bleeding out. I was helping," I insist.
"Huh. Be that as it may, what you did is still seriously bad. I have to ask you to come back to HQ with me to finish sorting this out."
I tense, and I can tell he sees that.
"Listen, this doesn't have to be the end of anything," he says in a soothing voice. "You don't have to be under arrest or anything like that. Mistakes happen, and I get that, and if you come with us, we'll sort it out and help you not make mistakes like this again, okay?"
"...And if I don't go with you?"
Wolfgang makes a sad, disappointed face. "I'm asking you this time, but if you don't come, we won't be asking again. You want to be a hero, right? So come with me and learn to be one."
I take a step back.
"Kid, don't. Please. You want to do good, right? You want to be a hero? If you run, you lose pretty much all chance of that. If you run from this, you won't stop running. You won't be able to do good like that. So come with me back to HQ, okay? We'll get this sorted out and get you straight," he pleads.
"...I can't. I'm sorry."
With that, I'm away, scaling a wall with claws and padded feet, onto the roof and then to the next. He doesn't follow – I don't smell or hear his pursuit – but still I don't slow down until I'm a mile gone.
Less than a day and I already messed up. I still don't understand what I did wrong, and that's the worst part. I didn't kill the man. I barely hurt him. I know the human body better than anyone else on the planet and I know I didn't hurt him badly enough that regular doctors can't fix him; the only organ I damaged was his skin. And why did the woman try to protect him?! I showed her that he wasn't invincible! I showed her that her Jack can be hurt, so–
…Oh.
I hurt her Jack when she thought he was invincible. The shock and dissonance must have been mind-boggling. I think back to what I did to that man who first landed that lucky hit on Jack – wait, that wasn't luck, was it? Darn; even then his damage was showing – and how vindictive I was as I set his power to burn him with each use, but never hot enough to damage and deaden nerves. That woman, Maryl, must have hated me in that moment. Her whole world broke when I hurt her terrible, invincible man.
But what else could I have done?
A definite answer doesn't come. I continue moving across the city, aimless. Maybe what I did was good, despite what Wolfgang says? People must disagree on what good is, right? Jack said things were good when they weren't good. He told me wrong, so maybe Wolfgang did too. Maybe I did do good! I showed that man that he shouldn't hurt his wife, or else someone may punish him for it. Even if I won't be called good publicly, I'll be doing good: hurting the bad people of the world!
…I'll be back to hurting people. Doing terrible things to terrible people still means doing terrible things. I've done so many terrible things. If I had a week to recount the terrible things I've done, I would run out of time. I don't want to do more terrible things, even to people who deserve it. Is that selfish? It might be. Maybe it's bad to try to avoid doing bad things for such a selfish reason. But maybe it's not. I don't know.
I do know that Wolfgang let me go after my first maybe-bad thing, and I don't think he'll be so inclined after a second or third. If I hurt people, even bad people, I'm not sure I'll have the chance to change my mind and do something else. I could fake my own death again – accident that it was the first time – but is that what I want? To leave a string of false identities doing terrible things before disappearing?
I'm trying to be better. That's the whole point of everything. I'm supposed to be building a better self, one that I can live with and tolerate being, and hurting people then disappearing doesn't feel like a step towards that goal. Finding a reason to hurt people and excuse it as good feels like something Bonesaw would do.
I force down the frog in my throat.
So… that's not what I'll do. I won't hurt people unless I have to; I think that's the lesson here. Maybe I should call Wolfgang and ask. Even if he thinks I can't be a hero after tonight, he might have some advice about this. Tomorrow though: he's probably still busy right now, and it's late and I should probably find a place to sleep for the night. Also something to eat.
I stare at the man through his bedroom window and sigh. It's just someone cutting themself. That makes nine incredibly minor injuries, seven menstruating people, two hospitals, and one brawl that ended with the two men hugging and singing together as I tried to work out whether to intervene. In short, sniffing for blood hasn't been a good way to find something good to do.
I smell some new A-negative in the air just as I'm considering changing tactics and sniffing for something else, and I figure I may as well check this out first. It's probably another minor cut, but I don't have any other leads. I run towards the blood at a leisurely pace over the roofs, my muscles enhanced with strength and flexibility enough to keep pace with a car for days.
Maybe adrenaline would be good to try and track instead? Or something non-biological? Would that keep down false positives? There's plenty of hints of adrenaline in the air, but much less gunpowder. If that is gunpowder I'm smelling; I'm only mostly sure of that. I'll need a sample before I can be certain. Gunpowder would be good to track, since violence is intrinsic to guns.
The smell of blood takes me to an apartment building in the brighter, less trash-strewn part of town. The building is five stories tall and the blood is coming from the… fifth floor. I hop from the adjacent building and sink my claws into the brick, my bare feet sticking onto the rough, sheer face easily.
The bear pelt I wear as a cloak both is and isn't part of me. I can remove it without any trouble, but my hands attach to the insides of its forepaws in a way that's more bone inside flesh than hand inside glove. While I kept most of my augmentations and tinkertech inside myself, there are a few pieces I had to put into the cloak: extra muscle, protective mesh, thermal insulation, and a few more doodads. The claws can easily extend and retract and can secrete a bevy of different chemicals that are stored in bladders in the paws. The bear's maw was fashioned into a collar, with the teeth pointing up along my neck. There's another connection point at the back of my neck that's used to link my nerves to the artificial ones that line the cloak, letting me feel through it.
With the claws and my gecko-inspired soles, it's easy to wall-crawl over to a window to get a better look, though much harder to actually get that better look thanks to the curtains. I can hear a man's voice within, but can't make out quite what he's saying. I slide a claw around the windows frame, pull it out, dro– almost fall off the wall trying to catch it, check to make sure no one is below me, and then drop it for real. It hits the ground with a distant shatter.
The man's shouting is easily audible without the glass in the way.
"–stupid bitch. I wouldn't have to do that if you would just, for once in your pathetic, miserable fucking life get one thing right. It's just one thing. That's all it is! Dinner! That's all I ask for but apparently it's too much for your stupid brain to wrap itself around. I'm off all day at the precinct, working my ass off to give you a roof over your head, to keep you safe from all the scum out there, and you can't even make my dinner right?!"
…That man is using very naughty language. I poke my head past the curtains and see the loud, foul-mouthed man. He's a large man with short hair, wearing a white shirt and underpants. He's red in the face, and his hands are clenched into fists or tensely hooked fingers as he gestures to accompany his incredibly inappropriate speech.
There's a woman on the ground below him. One of her arms is held between herself and the man, and her other is pressed against her face, where I see a gash and a new bruise. Her face is also red, but with tears and fear instead of anger. I can barely hear it over the man's shouting, but she's apologizing.
This doesn't seem similar to the brawl I saw earlier. I'm not sure how or if these two could reconcile into hugging and singing, so I think that means I should intervene? I should make sure I know what's happening first.
I pull myself through the wall's newest hole and call out, "Hey! Stop it."
And the two people look at me. They both flinch and the man takes a step back. The woman whimpers and sheilds herself from me. Fearfully, the man demands, "Who are you? What are you doing in my house?"
"I'm a hero," I answer, taking a pose from Protectorate Pals, with my hands on my hips and my chest puffed out. "I don't have a name yet, but um. I'm here to stop this."
"A hero?" The scared confusion on the man's face gets pushed out by cautious anger. "Listen kid, I don't know what you think is going on or what you're playing at, but this is my private property, and you're trespassing, so– Wait did you fucking break my window to get in?! That's B and E and destruction of property."
I don't know what he's talking about, but rather than tell him that, I look past him to the woman. She flinches. "Are you okay? Did he hit you?"
"Hey! It's none of your business what happens in my house," the man says.
"Do you need help?" I ask her, ignoring him.
"She doesn't need help," the man snaps at me. He lifts her by the arm and pulls her to her feet, ignoring the cry she lets out and the way she stumbles.
"Stop hurting her!" I tell him.
"Hu– I didn't hurt her," he denies, looking at me like I'm crazy.
"Her face is bloody."
"She fell. Isn't that right, Maryl?" He shakes her.
"Yes. I fell, that's all," she says in a shaky voice. "You don't need to worry. I'm fine. We're fine. So you can leave, okay? Please?"
"See? It's fine. So get out before I decide to charge you."
I squint at her. She's lying. Why? She's cringing away from the man. His knuckles are white where he holds her. She's in pain, yet her face pleads with me to leave. She's scared of him.
"I… I think I need to call someone about this," I state. "Where's your phone?"
"I'm not letting you use my phone," he says, sounding as if the concept is an insult to his very being. "And you're sure as hell not going to call anyone about what you think you saw here unless you want to get in major trouble."
"Just go, please," Maryl begs.
"Shut up," he hisses at her. "You're not helping."
"Sorry, I'm sorry."
Suddenly I'm not looking at Maryl and an angry man, I'm looking at Bonesaw and Jack, and she's holding onto him as much as he is to her. He's invincible to her, and she knows nothing else. He needs to go. He reaches for something and I stop him. At the last moment, I change from a venom to a coagulant and a paralytic. Murder is wrong.
He falls to the floor with four slashes across his chest, deep enough to scrape bone. Blood stains his shirt, but only along the tears. It doesn't spread, as very little blood actually leaves his body. Maryl screams and falls away from me.
"It's okay," I tell her. "He can't hurt you anymore."
She just continues to scream and scramble away. I frown. I look around the place and spot a phone on the wall. I grab it and dial the number Wolfgang gave me. Maryl, still screaming, runs out of the apartment, and through the open door, I watch her bang on the other apartments' doors.
The phone line connects. "Hello? This is Wolfgang. Who is this?"
"Hey, Wolfgang. We met earlier today? You let me patrol with you and ask you some questions?"
"Oh, right, the cape with no name. You really should pick one out soon unless you want me to do that for you," he says jovially.
"Oh. Okay. I wouldn't actually mind the help. I don't think I'm very good at naming things."
"How about uh… Sniffer? No, that's bad. Bear. Bear… claw? Bearclaw?"
I test the name on my lips. "Bearclaw." It feels like it fits right, more than it maybe should. "Yeah, Bearclaw. Thank you."
"You're very welcome, Bearclaw. Is there anything else I can help you with?"
I look at the handful of people peeking through their doors at Maryl or into this apartment. The man is slowly, shakily lifting his arm to paw at his chest.
"Maybe," I say. "I think I might have done something good, but I'm not entirely sure."
"Uhuh. Why don't you walk me through what happened?"
…?
Wolfgang sighs after I repeat the story to him, this time in person. We're on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building, and there are two PRT vans parked near us, with a trio of troopers milling about; their eyes always return to me. The man I opened, an officer James McDaniel, has been loaded into an ambulance and sent to the hospital, and the PRT have cordoned off the apartment. Maryl, his wife, went with him and a PRT officer.
"Kid, I'm going to level with you; this doesn't look good," Wolfgang says. "You sent a police officer to the hospital."
"But he was hurting his wife," I remind him.
"She tells a different story."
I blink.
"I talked to her before she left. She says they were having dinner and you broke in, hit her, and attacked him when he tried to defend her."
"What? But that's not true," I protest. "That's a lie. She's lying."
"That's her story, and right now it's your word against hers."
My mouth opens but nothing comes out. Why would she say that? I showed her he's not invincible; she could be free, now.
"Kid, as bad as this looks, it's not the end of the world, okay? I'm sure you didn't mean to hurt anybody, but you're lucky McDaniel isn't dead with how deep you cut him, and–"
"It wasn't luck," I interrupt. "I made sure he wouldn't bleed from the cuts. Murder is wrong; you told me that."
He re-appraises me. "Yeah?"
"Yeah. I paralyzed him and stopped him from bleeding out. I was helping," I insist.
"Huh. Be that as it may, what you did is still seriously bad. I have to ask you to come back to HQ with me to finish sorting this out."
I tense, and I can tell he sees that.
"Listen, this doesn't have to be the end of anything," he says in a soothing voice. "You don't have to be under arrest or anything like that. Mistakes happen, and I get that, and if you come with us, we'll sort it out and help you not make mistakes like this again, okay?"
"...And if I don't go with you?"
Wolfgang makes a sad, disappointed face. "I'm asking you this time, but if you don't come, we won't be asking again. You want to be a hero, right? So come with me and learn to be one."
I take a step back.
"Kid, don't. Please. You want to do good, right? You want to be a hero? If you run, you lose pretty much all chance of that. If you run from this, you won't stop running. You won't be able to do good like that. So come with me back to HQ, okay? We'll get this sorted out and get you straight," he pleads.
"...I can't. I'm sorry."
With that, I'm away, scaling a wall with claws and padded feet, onto the roof and then to the next. He doesn't follow – I don't smell or hear his pursuit – but still I don't slow down until I'm a mile gone.
Less than a day and I already messed up. I still don't understand what I did wrong, and that's the worst part. I didn't kill the man. I barely hurt him. I know the human body better than anyone else on the planet and I know I didn't hurt him badly enough that regular doctors can't fix him; the only organ I damaged was his skin. And why did the woman try to protect him?! I showed her that he wasn't invincible! I showed her that her Jack can be hurt, so–
…Oh.
I hurt her Jack when she thought he was invincible. The shock and dissonance must have been mind-boggling. I think back to what I did to that man who first landed that lucky hit on Jack – wait, that wasn't luck, was it? Darn; even then his damage was showing – and how vindictive I was as I set his power to burn him with each use, but never hot enough to damage and deaden nerves. That woman, Maryl, must have hated me in that moment. Her whole world broke when I hurt her terrible, invincible man.
But what else could I have done?
A definite answer doesn't come. I continue moving across the city, aimless. Maybe what I did was good, despite what Wolfgang says? People must disagree on what good is, right? Jack said things were good when they weren't good. He told me wrong, so maybe Wolfgang did too. Maybe I did do good! I showed that man that he shouldn't hurt his wife, or else someone may punish him for it. Even if I won't be called good publicly, I'll be doing good: hurting the bad people of the world!
…I'll be back to hurting people. Doing terrible things to terrible people still means doing terrible things. I've done so many terrible things. If I had a week to recount the terrible things I've done, I would run out of time. I don't want to do more terrible things, even to people who deserve it. Is that selfish? It might be. Maybe it's bad to try to avoid doing bad things for such a selfish reason. But maybe it's not. I don't know.
I do know that Wolfgang let me go after my first maybe-bad thing, and I don't think he'll be so inclined after a second or third. If I hurt people, even bad people, I'm not sure I'll have the chance to change my mind and do something else. I could fake my own death again – accident that it was the first time – but is that what I want? To leave a string of false identities doing terrible things before disappearing?
I'm trying to be better. That's the whole point of everything. I'm supposed to be building a better self, one that I can live with and tolerate being, and hurting people then disappearing doesn't feel like a step towards that goal. Finding a reason to hurt people and excuse it as good feels like something Bonesaw would do.
I force down the frog in my throat.
So… that's not what I'll do. I won't hurt people unless I have to; I think that's the lesson here. Maybe I should call Wolfgang and ask. Even if he thinks I can't be a hero after tonight, he might have some advice about this. Tomorrow though: he's probably still busy right now, and it's late and I should probably find a place to sleep for the night. Also something to eat.
Damn this is a good chapter but man feels tough
Oof. A no-win domestic dispute situation does feel like a much more likely incident for a vigilante cape to run into than the stereotypical "I found a Nazi saying slurs and mugging an interracial gay couple" trope you see a lot in this fandom.
I know that's just par the course of superhero media, and man, you really hammer home why here. Just too real.
I do really like the juxtaposition of Riley and Jack to this relationship, and how she does successfully put herself in the victim's shoes, for better and worse.
Unrelated, her bear costume sounds pretty cute, and it reminded me a lot of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan. That felt... sort of apropos.
I know that's just par the course of superhero media, and man, you really hammer home why here. Just too real.
I do really like the juxtaposition of Riley and Jack to this relationship, and how she does successfully put herself in the victim's shoes, for better and worse.
Unrelated, her bear costume sounds pretty cute, and it reminded me a lot of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan. That felt... sort of apropos.