Acacia's knife sliced through its flesh, and it retaliated as best it could. Sadly, its best could inflict little more than make her eyes sting nicely, as there was little else a mere onion could do.
The stinging was a bit of a surprise, all told. Sure, I knew intellectually that chopping up onions released chemicals that made one's eyes water, but I'd always been spared the experience. I suspected the glasses I'd been wearing for… gosh, had it been a decade and a half already? Anyway, I guess they'd shielded me from the sting. Somehow.
I'll admit, I'm not much of a cook. Sure, I'm not anime-level bad at it; whenever I've tried my hand at it (or, more often, been subtly coerced into doing so), the results tended to be good. Rather, it was the fact that my depression had eviscerated my motivation to do much of anything. Including learning to prepare meals. But on the bright side, I had a decent amount of experience using knives, for cooking and more besides, so a mere onion couldn't hope to best me.
… Wait, why was I making this so dramatic? I had Acacia shake her head, the corners of her lips quirking up at my silliness. She started humming a song whose name I couldn't quite remember as she worked. "Hmm-hmm, hmm-hmm… There's still cobwebs in the corners, and the backyard's full of bones… Won't you stay with me my darling? When this house don't feel like home... Hmm-hmm-hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm hmm…"
"You have a nice voice," Paz said, and Acacia jumped a little in surprise despite being able to feel her presence with my power through her socks. The knife jerked in her hand, but thankfully only the flat of it hit her fingers, saving her from injury. I'd tried making my bodies' skin tougher when I'd been deciding earlier how I wanted my bodies to look, but it turned out that the first thing my power sacrificed for durability on that front was appearance. I had no interest in falling into the uncanny valley, so I'd left their skin unchanged, for the most part.
"Oh, I'm sorry!" Paz exclaimed as she hurried to Acacia's side. "I didn't mean to startle you. You didn't hurt yourself, did you?" She took my body's hand in her own, inspecting it for any wounds, then letting out a sigh of relief when she found none. "I'm glad you aren't hurt," she said with a smile.
"Oh, uh, thank you," Acacia said softly as I had a slight blush bloom in her cheeks that highlighted the freckles I'd let her keep. "But, but it would've been fine even if I was!" she hastened to assure Paz.
The woman's head tilted a little. "What do you mean?"
"Well, ah, I've got a bit of my sister's power, and she's got some of mine. I could've healed myself," she said truthfully, before lying, "but that's all it's really good for for me. That and changing colors, like in my eyes."
"Is that why your eyes are different from your sister's?" Paz asked, suddenly full of curiosity.
"Oh, no, that's natural," Acacia fibbed as I channeled my entirely real enthusiasm for weird biology stuff. "See, Tabitha and I are what's known as 'mirrored twins', so there's the eyes that are opposite, and I'm left handed while she's right handed, and other stuff like that!" And speaking of hands…
Acacia looked down at her right hand, which Paz was still holding, and blushed even harder. Paz followed her eyes, then quickly withdrew her own hands with a blush of her own. The two shared a nervous laugh, even as I let out a mental sigh.
Why was I lying to these two nice people so much? Well, the obvious answer was that while lying wasn't exactly difficult for me, maybe even came a bit naturally, I hadn't gotten as much practice with it as I could over the course of my life. My now-enhanced speed of thought helped, but getting my story straight before trying to sell it to the folks at the PRT couldn't hurt. Hopefully.
It was probably a good thing I'd dialed down my ability to feel guilt to the most minimal level possible.
I was quite happy with my power-granted ability to split my attention several ways. It made it relatively easy to have Acacia cut vegetables left-handed while Tabitha helped Jacob prepare the guest bedroom bed in the right-handed way I'd used all my previous life. It also made crafting and maintaining and improving the metaphorical masks my bodies wore much less tiresome than it could have been. I knew I could split it at least four ways, and probably more, though I got the impression that the cap on it wasn't that far off. But maybe trying another split would let me do something like…
Both Paz and Acacia let out nervous laughter, even as their blushes continued. Acacia' laughing trailed off first, leaving her with a soft smile on her lips. "Thank you again for letting us stay, Paz."
The taller woman blinked. "Oh, no, it's fine! I couldn't just-"
"But you could just, Paz, and you decided to help us, instead. You let two perfect strangers sleep in your house despite how, well, unbelievable our story is. I, I just don't know how we, how I, can ever really repay you and your brother."
"You don't need to. Honest." An earnest note enters her voice, along with a subtler one that I don't quite manage to interpret.
"But I do!" Acacia replied, for once on this strangest of days speaking purely from my heart. Her lips twisted into a slightly wry grin. "I may not be as, well, outgoing as Tabitha, but I do have my pride, like she does. 'S why I'm helping out here, even though neither my sister nor I are very good at cooking or other housework. We can follow directions, at least. Make our stay less of a bother, you know?" She turned back to the cutting board even as the little speech she'd made caused her cheeks to heat up without my input and made the last few cuts. "Onion's ready, by the way."
"What?" Paz blinked at the incongruous statement, before her eyes widened in comprehension. "Oh, right! Here, let me." She scooped up the cutting board and its contents, took the knife Acacia proffered handle-first, and went over to the pan on the stove, into which she scraped the chopped bulb with a hiss of heat.
Acacia watched Paz's back while fidgeting for a bit, before blurting out, "You, uh, your house had some cracks in the foundations."
Paz went still at that. "What do you- wait, 'had'?"
"So, uh, you know how I said my power is terrakinesis?" Acacia twisted her hands a little. "W-well, I think that might not be entirely accurate. See, I can sense stuff with it, and I can change what I can sense. I felt that there were some minor cracks down there, and, well, even if they're not huge having them isn't the best thing, right? So I smoothed things together so there are no more cracks, since, uh, I don't know how bad they really were, but I get the feeling they could've been expensive to fix if they got worse. And, well…"
"And you still want to repay us for giving you and your sister a place to stay," Paz cut in softly, giving Acacia a kind smile over her shoulder.
"Yeah." Acacia paused, then gave Paz an exaggerated stern look. "And before you say anything, I don't feel like I've fully paid you back yet."
The other woman laughed, a happy sound in the face of which I couldn't help but let my shyer body smile. "I suppose I can't really argue against that, now, can I?" Her expression turned thoughtful. "There is something I could maybe use your help with after dinner, I suppose."
"Of course!" Acacia replied.
.o.o.o.
The favor, as I discovered after the four of us had finished our dinner of spaghetti and meat sauce, involved the sensory portion of my outer power. Paz, after confirming that the power let Acacia differentiate between materials that she could sense, asked her to "look" throughout the house for a jewelry box that had belonged to their late mother. Apparently it had been left to her in the will, but she'd never been able to find it, despite much searching for it over the years.
"At this point, I almost expect it to be tucked away in a well-disguised secret compartment or something," she admitted with a self-deprecating chuckle.
It took me nearly an hour of Acacia sitting in the living room with her eyes closed as I had at least five separate divisions of attention combing through the field that suffused the house. Sadly, no secret compartments of any kind turned up, but the jewelry did, in the end. It turned out to be at the bottom of a box of miscellaneous items nearly at the back of their cramped attic. In my boundless wisdom, I elected not to pull it through the ceiling, and instead just guided Jacob to the box in question.
After that was done, and a few hours of mostly truthful (honest!) conversation in which I finally found out what Paz's full name was (Pacífica Cardoso) and what she did for a living (she was a freelance programmer and former hacker who was occasionally hired to use her hacking skills to test the cybersecurity of various companies; more boring than it sounded, or so she claimed), I found myself growing surprisingly sleepy. My bodies soon found their way to the guest bedroom and into the bed therein.
Tabitha had to be really convincing to Jacob as they'd made the bed so that he'd acquiesce to the two "sisters" sharing the bed. He'd been ready to give up his own bed and sleep on the couch, but eventually he conceded the friendly argument. And so, after doffing their identical dresses and hanging them up to air, my bodies slipped under the covers, one hugging a pillow to her chest while the other hugged the first from behind. Their eyes closed in the dark, and I settled in to await Hypnos' embrace.
Eventually, my eyes opened once more. I was sleepy, yes, but thoughts I'd been ignoring had taken the opportunity to bubble up and flit about my mind in a most distracting manner. And, naturally, the majority of them had to do with the things I'd done today.
One thought shouldered its way to the fore: in my efforts to not waste away on a rock in a forest, I had essentially performed brain surgery on myself. Actual, mucking-around-with-the-head-cheese brain surgery. Now that the pall of desperation didn't hang over me, the whole concept seemed rather, well, appalling. But that wasn't the concern that the thought presented to me.
Rather, was I, was this Helena, the same Helena who had woken up this morning?
Was the "real" Helena dead, with the current me being what remained?
The worst part was that there was no way, would never be a way in all likelihood, that I'd ever be able to know the answer for certain. If I really was a distinct entity from the Helena of yesterday, then she was gone, and would never return.
But, wait. A new thought occurred to me. If Helena was dead, then, at the very least, I hadn't killed her. She had done it to herself, in a desperate bid to free herself from the cruel claws of depression. Moreover, if she was dead, and her passing had left me in her place… well.
I saw two possibilities laid out before me. One was that I was the original Helena, if slightly altered. The other was that I had essentially been born from the original Helena's sacrifice. That I was, in essence, her child. Her daughter.
Well.
Now that I'd mentally laid them out, the situation didn't seem so bad. I wasn't religious, really, but just in case, it wouldn't hurt to give the original Helena my thanks and honor her sacrifice. Just in case.
And once I had, I felt better, and I closed my eyes with smiles.
