Title: Blueprints
Author: kenzimone
Disclaimer: Don't own.
Rating: PG
Summary: When Magenta shapeshifts, she closes her eyes.
Note: I'm taking some artistic license when it comes to Magenta's ability to shapeshift, but let's just call it fanon and move on, shall we? For the LJ community fanfic100's 89th prompt: 'Work'.
When Magenta shapeshifts, she closes her eyes.
It's like falling from ten thousand feet; fast, terrifying, blood pounding in your ears. She shrinks, plummets, and she can hear her bones crack and feel her ligaments realign under her skin. There's nothing pretty about it. Crouching makes the drop feel less heart stopping, but nothing can prevent the feeling of being crushed from the inside.
She closes her eyes, and doesn't look – she's young and inexperienced, the transformation not as fast as it eventually will be – and no one else looks, either. For a moment in time, where she's small enough to be held in someone's cupped hands, but still the same, still Magenta, she feels naked. But then she remembers that it's ugly and that no one sees, and when she opens her eyes she's colorblind and the world is encased in shadows.
Her mother is a shapeshifter too, but her dad isn't. He's nothing, as powerless as the dummy they rescue in Save the Citizen, but she loves him still. He wears nice suits and drives a nice car and acts like she's the most powerful Super Hero alive as he kisses her goodnight.
Her mother shows her how to shift, how to shrink and stretch and become something completely different; she doesn't close her eyes when she changes, but that doesn't mean her daughter doesn't look away.
Magenta tried watching once, when she was younger. Watched wings sprout from her mother's back; watched how her nose distorted and expanded and merged with her mouth; watched as her eyes grew to cover half her head, splitting into thousands of small facets that gleamed in the fluorescent kitchen lights.
She finally had to turn away when the arms – legs? – bursts out of her mother's side with a sickening wet crunch. Until that her mother's buzzing whisper in her ear told her that it is okay to look now, honey, her eyes remained tightly shut.
...
Does it hurt? Layla asks, and expects her to answer with a simple yes or no.
Magenta knows that is she hesitates, if she thinks it over for too long, her friend will smother her in concern; and Magenta needs room to breathe.
So she shakes her head and returns the red head's smile, because it doesn't hurt, not if you know what you're doing; if you're skilled enough it's quick and smooth and painless, and all you'll ever feel as your heart shrinks to the size of a hazelnut is a tiny spasm, one skipped heartbeat out of many.
But at sixteen no one expects you to be skilled in much of anything, do they?
Layla smiles the smile of those who choose to believe what they're told, but beside her Warren stands, and when he leans down to grab his bag from the bench he exhales a breathy accusation, a hot and humid word that slithers across her skin and tickles the hairs on the side of her neck;
'Liar.'
He leaves, and she can't be sure he doesn't look back because she wills herself not to turn around and check.
...
What happened at homecoming was a fluke. A sad irony. Sometimes she dreams about her friends' faces watching her from the other end of a metal tube, while she runs towards a ticking bomb. And sometimes when she finds it (because she always does) she doesn't chew through the wire in time; the feeling of burning fire on her skin is what makes her wake.
As much as Magenta hates Royal Pain – even before, when she was only Gwen Grayson and drew admiring looks walking down the hallways of the school – she has to admit the girl is brilliant. There is no way she hadn't gone through the school records before, hadn't checked out each and every student's power. Sifting through the files to look for the most likely threats, and then taking actions so that even they wouldn't be able to stop her.
And still, when she hid the bomb, she didn't hide it well. How easy had it not been to get Penny to tell them the location of it? How easy had it not been for a guinea pig to squeeze through, to use its teeth to disable the ominously ticking device?
Even though Royal Pain knew her, knew what she was capable of, she never considered Magenta a threat. And that stings worse than anything else.
...
Magenta is not stupid, nor does she hold any illusions of life after Sky High. She knows that she'll never be a Super Hero; a lone guinea pig is never going to save the world. Sidekick duty, too, is unexpected. The likes of Will Stronghold would never team up with a rodent.
Lack of illusions never means lack of hope, though. She already knows her place, knows where she'll be when high school becomes a thing of the past and she's thrust out into Maxville and expected to use her abilities for good, to save and bless and shelter those not as fortunate as herself.
Her mother's a shapeshifter, and a good one. Not a Super Hero, not a Sidekick, but one of the forgottens; one of a handful of extraordinary beings whose powers are not as much suited for battle as they are for other, but not less important, tasks. Hush-hush stuff, things you never read about in the news paper because their work is done behind the curtain as the Super Heroes put on shows before flashing lights. The invisible stagehands of the play that is Good vs. Evil, if you will. There never has been a pretty word for intelligence gathering.
She hasn't been promised a position, not yet. But she's hopeful. Will talks about knocking out villains and Layla about saving ecosystems. Zach and Ethan indulge at times too, speaking of bad people blocking out the sun or building forts out of small tubing. Warren doesn't say anything, even though sometimes she can imagine visions of burning bodies flickering through his mind, something that would have once scared her but doesn't any more. And while the others talk she leans back, dreaming about tight passages and meetings held sub-rosa, of eavesdropping and snitching and helping to save the world, one secret at a time.