A/N: Chapter 20 Review Responses are in my forums as normal. A few notes on this-the story of Brian Laborne's trigger, and Aisha's after, are as far as I remember pretty close to canon. I detailed them far more, but as far as I can remember these events come from the story. Like my other interludes, and the canon Interlude's in Wildbow's story, this one is intended to set up the next arc and provide additional perspectives.
Interlude: Loss
Brian Laborn closed his trig book with a tired sigh. He hated math. Things like literature and history came naturally, but he always struggled with math and the sciences. He still tried to maintain at least a B in biology and trig, but he had to work harder on them than any other subject.
Homework finished, he decided he deserved a break. He knew his dad expected him in the gym for at least three hours the next day, so the idea of doing any type of exercise repulsed him. Instead, he left his room and shambled into the kitchen of the old apartment he shared with his dad.
The kitchen had a half-eaten pizza from two days ago, a left over steak from last night and a tub of pulled pork from Smokey Don's by the gym. He pulled out the pork and some bread to make a sandwich. He grabbed a beer from the bottom drawer of the fridge (dad never cared as long as he had enough for himself) and settled down on their old, sagging couch to watch some television until his dad got home from the garage.
The news was all about the latest Endbringer attack. He switched it to sports.
Halfway through his sandwich and the first quarter of the Brockton Bay Bandit's first quarter, his phone giggled at him like devilish little girl. He sighed impatiently. "What is it now, ya little imp," he muttered.
On his phone he saw a text from his sister Aisha. HELP ME.
Part of him wanted to laugh it off. Aisha sent him goofy texts all the time. But for some reason he didn't. He put down his beer, muted the TV, and called her back. The phone went straight to voice mail, like it was busy or off. Frowning, Brian called his mom's landline number.
He got a busy signal.
He tried texting her back, but she wouldn't respond.
Or couldn't.
For a moment it became hard to breathe and his whole body began to shake. With a sudden burst of energy Brian leaped out of the couch, pausing only long enough to grab his wallet before rushing out the door. He didn't even lock it, which would probably get his ass beaten, but he didn't care.
He burst out of the building and sprinted up Lord Street to downtown as if hell followed. He didn't just flag a cab, he jumped in one about to pull out and climbed in before the driver knew what happened. "Get me to 1821 Downey now!"
The driver didn't question. Grue might only have been fifteen, but he was already the larger of the two men in the cab, with more muscle than most adults. "Sure, sure!" the driver said.
They reached his mom's building, which was even more rundown than his dad's. He ran from the cab. "Hey, you fuck! What about my fare!" the driver shouted after him.
Brian didn't care. Every second that passed convinced him something terrible was happening, but he couldn't let his mind dwell on what. He rushed through the lobby and up the stairs—the elevators didn't always work and when they did they were too slow. He took the stairs two at a time, flying up like a cape until he reached his mom's floor.
He had a key of course, and in seconds was inside. He saw his sister in the far corner of the room, curled up like a ball with her forehead to her knees in the small space between the couch and the wall.
She looked up when he arrived, her cheeks wet with tears. Brian's breath caught again and he had this strange feeling in his stomach, almost like when his dad really landed a body blow in the ring. She reached for him from the floor, like she used to do when she was little. He rushed right to her and picked her up as if she still was.
She didn't scream or cry, she just held on to him tighter than he could ever remember her doing so before.
"What's wrong, Aisha? What happened?"
The silence broke and she started crying again into his shoulder, hugging him so tight he could barely move. He wasn't going to ask again; he'd never seen his bratty sister hurt like this. He started toward the door when a figure moved between them.
Brian never saw the guy before, and didn't like what he saw then. The man was young, his hair braided into rows with beads carrying them down to his shirt line. His didn't wear his shirt, but he had a Merchant tat on his left pec and a worn out pair of denim shorts hanging so low on his hips Brian could see pubic hair.
In his arms, Aisha made an almost rodent-like squeal and tried to move away from the man.
That feeling of being punched changed in Brian's stomach. The near-pain suddenly turned icy cold. The shaking in his arms stopped as he let Aisha slide into a bundle on the floor. The Merchant flunky knew violence when he saw it.
Neither of them said a word. The man went for a weapon in his back pocket—knife or gun Brian didn't know. Brian went straight for the man's face. His fist connected in a solid upper cup not even his dad could take issue with. The man screamed as he bit a piece of his own tongue off. He stumbled back, flinging a sling blade wildly onto the kitchen floor as he fell backward.
Brian followed—he stepped forward with his left hand, twisted his whole torso and swung a strong right cross right into the man's stomach. Even while stumbling backwards, the Merchant flunky folded in the middle from the blow, which is what kept him from cracking his skull on the edge of the counter.
Still Brian followed. Right hook, left. He could hear his dad critiquing him in the back of his mind. Lift your shoulders, boy! What kind of pussy-assed punch is that? Use your body, damn it! Use your body!
Brian used his body. He used his knee, ramming it into the bloody mess that was the man's face. He moved down the body, concentrating on soft tissue and the overwhelming need to hurt this man who somehow, in a way Brian could not allow himself to consider, hurt his sister. Finally, his fists bleeding and bloody, he pushed himself to his feet to look down on the broken, bloodied figure who made his sister cry.
A brief glance down the hall showed his mother, naked and only partially wrapped in sheets, visible on the edge of the bed. As he looked, he saw her move and sighed with both relief and disappointment. Then he felt shame at that last terrible feeling. The cold monster still had its hand wrapped around his heart, though, so the shame fled quickly. Without a word, he reached down to his sister and picked her up like a baby despite her being nearly twelve. She wrapped her legs around his waist and clung to him like one as well.
"He's never touching you again," Brian whispered.
The cab driver was still there on a phone when Brian emerged. He took one look at the blood all over Brian's hands, the girl his arms, and the three twenties held out between his two fingers, and said, "He's come back with the fare. Call you later, Sal."
Brian got back into the back seat and Aisha sat on his lap. The driver didn't even ask, perhaps realizing that Brian was still on that edge of violence. He turned the cab around and drove him right back to where he got him.
Before Brian climbed out, the man said, "You made the son of a bitch pay?"
The driver knew. Maybe not the details—not the hows and whys. But he knew exactly what just happened and why.
Brian looked down at his split knuckles, but also the blood that ran up past his wrist. "Yeah."
The driver handed one of the twenties back. "Good."
Brian took the cash, nodded to the driver, and then took his sister home.
~~Simurgh's Son~~
~~Simurgh's Son~~
When she was nearly fifteen years old, Aisha heard on the news that her brother was dead.
Mom was actually working for a change, pulling shifts at a diner downtown in a sketchy effort to make herself look good for the caseworker, Mrs. Henderson. Despite being a shitty, drug-addicted bitch of a mom, she didn't want her little girl being taken away by her own son.
Aisha didn't just want to live with Brian, she wanted her mom to as well. Brian was the strong one. He was the only one who cared. Dad couldn't be bothered with a girl, and washed his hands of mother when he caught her smoking crack and fucking her dealer in the alley behind the house.
After he finished beating the dealer to a pulp, he beat his wife as well, and then left. Douglas Laborn was a hard man, and Aisha felt no more for him than she did for any of the men in her mother's fucked up life.
She sat on the couch, unopened school books around her from the homework she couldn't do even if she wanted to, and watched the television. She liked the old Tom and Jerry cartoons—the constant, mad-cap violence and simple plots appealed to her. She had a hard time following anything for too long—even movies often lost her interest because she just couldn't make herself pay attention to the plot.
During commercials she flipped channels, and it was during that channel flipping that she saw the cape name Grue in a scrolling headline at the bottom of the screen.
She stopped and turned it up. The newscaster was some pretty Latino women with hair Aisha would kill for.
"…youngest capes ever sentenced to the Birdcage. Assistance Director Thomas Calvert had this to say:"
The screen switched to a forgettable man with receding hair and a sharp chin. "It's a tragedy any time a life is lost, either to violence or to incarceration. Unfortunately Harry Bailey demonstrated a level of ruthlessness and a horrifying power than we cannot risk being free. He directly murdered three people, one of whom was only seventeen, and was directly responsible for the death of several of the members of the gang called the Undersiders, including the parahumans called Grue, Regent and Hellhound, all of whom were themselves teenagers. We had…"
The words tumbled into a low drone in Aisha's mind. "Brian, what the fuck are you getting yourself into," she muttered. She started to pull out her phone to text him when the message sudden hit her like one of their dad's right hooks.
Grue was dead. Brian was Grue. Her brother was dead. Brian was dead.
He's never touching you again.
Words failed her and her brain shut down. She pulled her knees up onto the couch and let her forehead rest on them, and tried to remember what it felt like when he held her. She gave him such a hard time, all the time, but she knew for a fact that he was the only one who really, really cared. Her mum didn't care—she was trying because she just didn't want to lose. Her dad didn't care because she was a girl. Only Brian cared. Brian became a villain to get the money to give her a better home. Everything he did was for her, even if she fucked with him every chance she got.
Her brother was dead. The only person in the world who gave a shit about her—who really saw her—was dead.
She felt numb, inside and out—as if something inside her suddenly broke. She didn't say anything when her mother came into the kitchen.
"Aisha!" Mom screamed. She sounded angry, like she did if she went too long without hitting up. "Aisha, the fuck are you, girl? Where's dinner?"
Aisha looked up from where she sat on a couch ten feet in front of her mother. The older woman was looking right into the living room, before cursing and walking to Aisha's room. "Aisha! You better get your ass in that kitchen, girl! Aisha!"
"Mom, what the fuck? I'm right here!" Aisha said.
Her mom walked right by her, heading into her own room. Aisha jumped up, truly concerned now, and followed her into her bedroom. "Mom I'm standing right in front of you," she shouted. She reached out and touched her mom's shoulder.
Celia Laborn screamed and jumped up from where she sat on her bed. "What the…who's there?"
"MOM!" Aisha screamed.
Her mom blinked but wouldn't look at her. "Fuck it," the older woman muttered. She turned her back on Aisha, pulled her can from the bottom drawer of her nightstand, and removed a needle. Heroin, now, looked like. She switched it up sometimes, depending on what she could afford.
"Shit, mom," Aisha muttered. So much for going straight.
Anger and frustration boiled up until she reached down and ripped the needle from her mother's fingers before she could inject. Celia looked up, blinking without focusing, before staring down at her arm.
"Did I already shoot up?" she muttered. She put the can away, then stood and looked out into the apartment. "Aisha, where the fuck are you?" Now she sounded less angry, and a little worried.
That was when Aisha realized she had a power, now, and that the forums were right. Powers didn't make anything better at all.
~~Simurgh's Son~~
~~Simurgh's Son~~
Coil knew the moment he received the notice of Tattletale and the other's escape that his civilian identity was compromised. The unwritten rules only applied if honored by both sides—and he'd not even bothered to acknowledge them, much less honor them.
It took only a few split universes to know that every member of the Protectorate in Brockton Bay would be out for his blood within hours. Fortunately, with the help of his Pet he had contingencies in place to give the Protectorate other things to occupy their time.
Walking out the door of his home, he called Dimitri. "I need immediate pick up. Enact Contingency 34."
No hesitation. "Yes, Boss."
Coil disconnected. While frustrated at the set-back, he knew this would not be his end. No, this was just a momentary distraction.
~~Simurgh's Son~~
~~Simurgh's Son~~
Dennis's parents were yelling.
Missy Biron could hear them from the lounge where she sat in front of a television watching the news report listing all the names of the capes revealed in the email. Missy knew all the responsible news agencies were refraining from repeating the information on the Ward members, but there were a lot of less than reputable media sources that took an almost devilish delight in ruining the lives of the youngest heroes of Brockton Bay. Somehow it didn't surprise her that her cape name, Vista, was among the very first compromised.
At least Shadow Stalker was gone. Word had it she was transferred, but Missy overhead Dennis speaking to Dean about how she'd violated her probation and was back in juvie pending a possible sentence maybe even to the Birdcage.
"Hey Missy, how are you holding up?" Dean greeted her with a wave and sat down on the couch a few feet away. She knew he didn't need to ask—he could sense emotions. The fact he was there at all proved to her he'd sensed her black mood.
"Are they going to take Dennis home?" It was a trick she'd learned from the Youth Guard counselor—answer questions with more questions.
Dean shrugged. He was simply too nice to push—his cape name of Gallant was appropriate for him. "Probably. Wouldn't be surprised if we get stuck with a Youth Guard agent. The PRT will have to offer Family Protection to any of our families that feel at risk. They'll set up alternative identities for us too. Probably disguises or something like that. Are you worried?"
"No," Missy said. Why worry? She had no family left to be concerned with.
The door to the conference opened. "You haven't heard the last of this, Piggot, not by a long shot!"
Dennis' dad was looking a lot better, Missy noted absently. His hair had fallen out the previous year with the chemo, but after Dennis begged Panacea for help it had grown back. It was silver now, instead of Dennis's carrot-top, but it was growing in nice and full.
He stormed out of the dorms with Dennis's mother a step behind. She saw Missy and smiled sadly before jogging to join her husband.
A moment later Piggot stepped outside with her bitch-face on, heading for the door.
Missy stood, cleared her throat, and said, "He didn't do it, you know."
Piggot stopped and visibly arrested whatever she was going to say. Instead, the obese woman with the obnoxious bowl cut turned to stare at her with a blank expression. "What was that, Vista?"
"Mage. He didn't do it. It was AD Calvert. Mage might have known the others from Arcadia, but I'm not in high school yet. He couldn't know my real name, only Calvert could. He's just trying to blame Mage to make everyone hate him."
"At this point I'm not sure it will matter," Piggot said. "He's already been tried in the court of public opinion. Even if he didn't directly release the information, if he helped compile it he still committed a major felony that we can't ignore, no matter how much of an injustice he might have been subjected to previously."
With that, Piggot turned and walked out of the room.
Missy sat back down on the couch, arms crossed, and waited for the next set of parents to come and yell about their child's identity being released.
"Missy, do you like Mage?"
She jumped, having completely forgotten Dean was still there. "No," she said a little too fast. "It's just…if he really wanted us hurt, he could have hurt us. He didn't. He healed me."
With that, she left the lounge for her dorm room. For most of the others, the dorm rooms were where they stayed while on active duty, but when off duty they went back to their families. For Missy, it was the only home she'd known since she was ten years old.
Sitting on her bed was the stuffed unicorn. She was too old for stuffed animals, and given her actual seniority as a Ward she was very sensitive to the suggestion of being a little girl. Yet…she kept the stuffed unicorn that Mage made for her. She climbed onto her bed, hugged the stuffed toy to her chest, and stared into space with dry eyes while wishing it were her parents in that conference room, screaming at Piggot.
~~Simurgh's Son~~
~~Simurgh's Son~~
"Kayden?" Louise's voice sounded odd to Kayden Anders.
She looked up from the CAD layout for the Michaelson's home to where her assistant was looking over her shoulder wide-eyed with alarm. Kayden left her own desk and walked into the reception area of her small Interior Design firm. "What is…what's wrong?"
They kept a television in the reception area of Kayden's Interiors, mounted on the wall facing Louise's desk. It could sometimes be slow and it didn't hurt to give Louise something to do when there was no work. She followed her secretary's gaze to the television and froze. She felt as if Alexandria had just punched her in the gut.
On the television was a picture of her from her last Driver's License renewal next to a picture of her as Purity. The newscasters were talking about her life. Not Purity, but her, Kayden Anders', life. "This can't be," she whispered.
"Kayden, they know everyone," Louise said. The poor woman's hands were shaking. Her husband was a former captain of the Empire who, like Purity herself, began to question the ideology espoused by Kaiser. "It's all online, too. Even Ward names were released. It was supposedly put together by that new cape, Mage."
"But this…ASTER!"
The screen had switched to her loft, where Miss Militia, Assault and Battery were escorting PRT agents and woman in a pantsuit from the door with Kayden's daughter in their arms. She felt her power blooming around her even as agony ripped at her heart. They were taking her angel away from her? They dare?
"Go," Louisa said. "Go, I'll lock up."
With a grateful look at her friend she let the power come even in her work clothes, rushed out of the door of their small rented office and took to the air while ignoring the screams of all those around her. Doing so, she saw PRT vans closing on her office, but she didn't care about that. She soared over the city toward her home, but when she arrived it was too late. People scrambled away in terror, but again she didn't care. All she saw was police tape—the capes and police were already long gone, with her daughter in their arms.
With a scream of unadulterated rage, she lifted into the air and blasted the home across from hers into dust before launching herself into the sky once again.
~~Simurgh's Son~~
~~Simurgh's Son~~
Jess looked up when the door opened and Trickster walked in in full costume, complete with his goofy mask. She hadn't thought of him as Francis in months. "So, are you with us?" he asked.
There was a threat not so subtly implied in his tone and the set of his shoulders. Perhaps because of her own physical limitations, or perhaps because of her power, Jess had become very good at reading body language. What she saw in his body language was the threat of death. While her power itself was powerful, she was terribly vulnerable to anyone who knew her secret. Though the whole base espoused the official line that Mage mastered and then murdered Jess's best and only real friend, she and Tickster both know who pulled the trigger.
"Doesn't sound like I have much choice," she said with forced calm.
He nodded, his expression hidden by his mask but his suspicion of her motivations obvious in the shuffling of his feet. He accepted her word anyway. "Come on, then."
He turned and left, allowing the door to close behind him.
She shook her head angrily and rolled her wheelchair over to hit the automated door switch. By the time she reached the elevator leading up to the garage, she found ten of Coil's men gathered around Ballistic in his full costume and Trickster. Coil himself walked out of the door from the underground lair where they moved after Marissa…
Jess stopped her thought. Coil, like Trickster and Ballistic, was in full costume, the body suit so tight she could see his ribs and bulge, though she suspected and hoped he wore a cup. She caught just the hint of his eyes behind the fabric of his eyes.
"My dear, I'm pleased that you've decided to join us," he said.
"They're my team," she stated simply. The less said, the less chance of him detecting a lie. She wasn't a hundred percent sure of his power, but knew it was very hard to fool him.
"Indeed. Ladies, gentlemen, shall we?"
They loaded her into her old van with Trickster and Ballistic driving. Coil and his men piled into their own van, and soon the two vehicles were passing through traffic heading south toward Boston, and their appointed meeting with Accord.
Jess had personally never met the man, even in her Genesis form, but she knew it was because of Accord that their friend Cody was gone, either killed or sold away into slavery.
"I haven't slept in a couple of nights," she said casually as they approached the outskirts of the town. "Mind if I catch a few winks?"
"It's an hour drive," Trickster noted.
She set her customized wheelchair into a locked, reclining position and closed her eyes.
Almost immediately she began a lucid, full-color dream of her own body in the back of the van, with Trickster and Ballistic in the seats in front of her. Noel, Marissa, Oliver and Cody should have been there too, and would have been if Trickster hadn't been such a goddamned shitty leader.
Within this lucid dream, she built a billowing form of soft, almost foam-like tissue, whipcord muscles and cartilage, but almost no bones to speak off. She formed eyestalks so she could see, and ears so she could hear, then laid her dream body down along the side of the van's interior with one eye-stalk raised high enough to see the road.
She could tell almost as much by the sound of the regular bumps and the higher pitched thrum of the tires on grated cement as her vision that they'd reached Brockton Creek, which was more a lake than a creek that fed into the bay south of the city, opposite the Piscataqua in the north. Like everything else in Brockton Bay, the bridge was simply a road on piles set high enough over the water not to be swept away at high tide. The guard rails were low and in ill-repair, like the bridge itself. Like everything about Brockton Bay.
Their van had an elevated roof to accommodate Jess in her wheelchair. Luke had, on more than one occasion, commented on how top-heavy the van was on tight turns.
Within her lucid dream, Jess said, "I'm sorry, Luke."
Ballistic turned to look at who spoke, but she was already moving. A tentacle snapped forward and grabbed the wheel from Tickster, pulling hard to the right. She shot another tentacle backward, blowing the back doors off entirely. Just as the van struck the rail at sixty miles an hour, her dream body slapped its' tentacles onto her real body and suddenly billowed in the wind like a parachute.
She flew out from the van, her dream body and her sleeping self, as the van containing the last surviving friends she had in this world flipped over the rail and into the vast, algae-infested, polluted waters of Brockton Creek.
The hard landing jolted her awake with pain in her back, and her dream form faded. Far ahead, she saw Coil's van screech to a halt and armed men climb out. Despite her pain, Jess closed her eyes and forced herself back into her lucid dream. It took longer this time, but the monstrous form she choose reached down and lifted her limp body in its muscular arms before running across the four-lane bridge. Traffic had already stopped because of the wreck, but now the terrified drivers stopped because of the great dragon that ran across the road.
Cradling her own form in the arms of her lucid dream, Jess flexed her dream-wings and felt muscles bunch powerfully across her back. She dreamed of running clear off the edge of the bridge and letting the fetid wind catch the stretched skin of her wings. A powerful flap and she gained altitude; another and she went higher and higher until she banked to her left and started flying north again back to the city.
A part of her, even within her dream, knew she was losing every possession she had, but it was worth it to escape. Luke might have believed Trickster's increasingly silly lies, but Jess knew from his body language alone Trickster killed Marissa. He tried to convince them all that he did everything because of his love of Noelle. Jess knew now, though, that he used Noelle as an excuse to hold the group together. Without her, he had nothing but fear and threats.
That was never enough to work on Jess, and it never would be. She wasn't afraid of dying; she just wanted to die on her own terms. More importantly, she wanted to make sure that Marissa received the justice she deserved.