"No." Paz's expression was flat, blank. Deliberately so, if the faint tremor in her voice was anything to go by. Jacob, for his part, just looked uncertain, gaze flitting between my bodies.
"No?" Tabitha parroted back. Her head tilted questioningly. Anxiety I couldn't openly show manifested through the crawling and scrabbling of insectile legs under her skin. I herded them to her back so no one could notice the subtle squirming.
"No, I don't believe you. You're making it up."
"She's not lying," Acacia interjected. "There really was a story named Worm back home, which has an incredible number of similarities to events and such in this world."
Tabitha nodded. "And yes, before you say it, we have been spending a lot of time on the internet while we've been here, learning stuff and getting our bearings. I'd understand you deciding that any details we give could just be stuff we saw there, or details fabricated such that none of us here would be able to verify them." She grimaced. "Honestly, even trying to think of something either of us could say that could convince you feels like an exercise in frustration. Which doesn't mean I'm going to just give up, but I don't know the way forward."
Paz's eyes studied my faces, and whatever she saw there caused a crack to form in her own expression. "Fuck…" she breathed, a slight hitch in her voice. "I heard that capes were all at least a little crazy, but…"
That actually hurt a little. I liked Paz, and not just because she and Jacob had let me stay here instead of leaving me to fend for myselves. I didn't let my feelings go any further, though, and not just because of the stress of having been so rudely uprooted and dumped here on Bet. I didn't want to give her any reason to feel she might be taking advantage of either of me. And yes, I cared what she thought of me. Hence, y'know, feeling hurt.
I let what I was feeling flow out into Acacia, and she gave Paz a sad smile. "I mean, you're not wrong."
Paz's head jerked up, mortified surprise in the lines of her face. "I, I said that out loud?" Acacia nodded, and the other woman winced. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean-"
"I'm not angry," Acacia interrupted, and Tabitha inclined her head in agreement. "I'd be among the first to admit that neither Tabitha nor I have what could be considered a 'normal' or 'baseline' mentality, but, well, we're far from the strangest parahumans out there."
"Except you also believe we're in a story," Paz said carefully, with an uncertain look to her.
"See, that's the thing!" Tabitha exclaimed as my own excitement bled through. "As far as we're concerned, we aren't! This place may bear a rather extreme resemblance to the story, but I don't see a setting, I see a world, populated by actual, living, thinking people, not characters on a page. I don't know how or why Worm and this world are so similar, but it really doesn't matter, since I rather doubt we'll ever find out why. And you want to know the best part?"
"What?" Paz asked softly, her voice uncertain and nervous as she leaned away a tad, perhaps without realizing.
"Neither you, nor Jacob, ever appear in the story. Neither of us knew anything about y'all before we met you, which, to me at least, means our interactions are so much more genuine. To me, at least." Acacia arched an eyebrow at Tabitha, who rolled her eyes and smiled. "And to her as well, I guess." Acacia gave a satisfied nod. My own darling pair of puppets, my right and left hands.
The reaching fingers of my outer power, caressing all that was solid and without life that lay within its intimate grasp, affirmed to me how very real this world was. For all that I'd had this sense, and that of my own biology with my inner power, for less than a week, it truly felt like a part of me, rather than something forced upon me, like the body I'd lived in before I'd come here. I don't know how common my perspective on the matter might be among other transgender people, but I'd always felt something of a disconnect between body and self. It was less me and more something within which I'd resided. And somehow, even with my constant awareness of my bodies' makeup, they felt less like a part of me than did the senses my powers imparted. Truly insidious, these powers were.
Jacob cleared his throat, drawing my attention. "So, just to be certain," he started, slowly, "you two are not going to suddenly start ranting about how, say, the similarities of our world to your story mean every person here is a character instead of a person, or that no one here has souls, and thus nothing you do to anyone would be wrong?"
Tabitha blinked, but it was Acacia who responded. "What? No, of course not!" she exclaimed indignantly.
Tabitha cut in, "Honestly, I'm not certain that souls exist in the first place for anyone, really. But getting into all the reasons for that, and for why we're not about to, say, go out and commit whatever atrocities come to mind would take forever, and would probably require a detour into some philosophical shit that I'm sure neither of y'all want to hear right now."
"Please, please don't make her start lecturing us," Acacia begged, her eyes pleading.
"Okay…" Paz said carefully. Her eyes flicked between my bodies. "So, I'll accept that you believe this story of yours has relevant information, for now. How does this make you want to do as this supervillain wants and leave the city?"
"Alright, so." Tabitha cleared her throat. "As far as the story went, on May fifteenth, Brockton Bay was attacked by Leviathan."
A twitch went through my hosts at the name, joined by a hiss of surprise through clenched teeth.
"Yeah. Now, I have no idea if it'll happen the same here. Things are different. It could attack on a different day, or it could hit a different city. Or it could attack Brockton Bay on May fifteenth like in the story, only for the fight to go differently. Like, where story-Leviathan ended up getting driven off by Scion before the city could be sunk or whatever his objective was, here… well, you know how Scion ripped open a portal to who-knows-where the other day and flew through? Yeah, I don't think he'll be showing up this time."
"Fuck," Paz breathed. Then she blinked. "But, wait. Aren't capes supposed to come together to fight the Endbringers when they attack?"
Tabitha grimaced. "From what I remember, on a good day against Leviathan, one in four capes don't…" She took a breath. "They die. One in four die. And that's on a good day."
Acacia let her gaze fall. "I've… We've only been here, only had our powers for less than a week. And we haven't had anywhere near the time we'd need to become attached to this city." She curled in on herself, a curtain of curly red hair hiding her face. "I… I'm fine with being a coward if it means we get to live." Tabitha put an arm around Acacia's shoulders and pulled her close, letting her rest her head on her shoulder. Despite my circumstances, I still managed to take comfort in the gesture I was giving myself.
Paz's expression slowly morphed into stricken, mortified shock, a hand coming up to cover her mouth. She seemed to be groping for the words to apologize for the unintentional implications, so I stopped her by having Tabitha give her a wan smile and shake her head. "It's fine, we know you didn't mean anything by it." After a few moments, Paz nodded and lowered her hand, revealing a trembling, obviously forced smile of her own.
An uncomfortable silence fell around us. I'd like to claim that I was letting them think over what Tabitha had just said, but really, I just didn't know what to say to break it. And even with a separate fragment of my mind devoting itself to thinking of how to convince these two to not be in Brockton Bay when Leviathan came, but nothing I came up with seemed like it'd work. Possibly my perfectionist streak was working against me, as it always did, but I couldn't give up. Even without guilt to push me, I had to do it.
As if he'd read my mind, Jacob broke the silence and asked, "Why are you telling us all this? Surely you know how it all sounds."
Tabitha gave him a small, lopsided smile. "I do. We do. I… well, what I want out of this is to convince y'all to leave town, go inland somewhere on, like, May twelfth or thirteenth, and stay there for, say, a week. That way, if Leviathan does attack sometime around then, you won't be at risk like you would be if you stayed. And if he doesn't attack, you're free to just think we're just crazy, because you'll be alive."
He blinked and opened his mouth as if to speak, but Tabitha barreled on. "This isn't a debt thing, not really, and it's certainly not a guilt thing. But the two of you took us in when we had nothing but the clothes on our backs and no one but each other. You helped us and asked for nothing in return. If the worst happens… We're not heroes, but if we can save you two, we will."
Acacia straightened up as Tabitha spoke and met Paz' eyes with as much sincerity as Tabitha's own gaze held, even as embarrassment left a dusting of pink on her cheeks. "It doesn't matter that we've only known you for less than a week," she said softly. Her blush deepened without me having to prompt it, and she looked away. "Y'all matter to us."
I couldn't prevent a slight blush from coloring Tabitha's cheeks as well at the admission, and I let her duck her head and take another bite from what remained of her meal to cover it so Acacia wouldn't have to look away. Paz and Jacob remained silent, glancing to each other, then back to Acacia. Their body language betrayed a certain amount of discomfort and uncertainty that even my less-than-stellar social skills managed to notice, though despite that, Paz looked a little touched. Finally, after at least a minute of private conversation between them, they turned back to me, and Jacob asked, "Do you mind if we think it over before we decide?"
Relief at how they weren't just dismissing me out of hand bloomed within my chests, and both of me smiled. "That's all we ask," Acacia said softly.
.o.o.o.
I chose to retire to the guest room not long after the meal concluded. Nothing against my hosts, of course. I just wanted a bit of space to relax on my own terms, away from people, especially after the day I'd had.
A thought intruded upon me as Acacia closed the door, musing on how I would be gone long before I stopped calling it the guest room in my mind, and a sudden surge of melancholy followed. Not that I'd been expecting them to let me stay indefinitely, of course. My pride wouldn't allow it, now that I no longer had my depression holding me back and sabotaging me at every turn. I was, in theory, able to fend for myself, so I must, however irrational the feeling might be.
The attempt to get my hosts out of the way of potential harm was, for the moment, out of my hands. Unfortunately, I still worried, and my anxiety latched onto that the first chance it got. I still can't believe I forgot to deal with my anxiety when I was giving my depression the boot, but now that my mental state wasn't nearly as dire, I couldn't bring myself to do any more amateur brain surgery on myself just to shoo it away. I'd have to deal with it the traditional way, by distracting myself somehow so I couldn't dwell on it.
Acacia went to flop face-first onto the bed, while Tabitha leaned against the chair in front of the vanity and stared at herself in the mirror. I was rather pleased with the face I'd given my new identities; a more feminine version of my old face, and with a little less softness to the cheeks. I'd made certain to commit to memory every last detail of these forms, so that I'd always be able to return to them, no matter how much I might shift my shape. In a sense, they were my base forms, now, as I'd all but discarded my old appearance. Good riddance, really. But seeing Tabitha's reflection in that moment brought one thought to the forefront of my mind.
Specifically, how little I'd explored my powers.
True, like I'd told Paz and Jacob, I'd only had them for less than a week, and I'd had other things to do. Excuses, perhaps, but valid ones, not to mention how there was a limit on what I could attempt in this room. But it was something of a pity that I had yet to even try on a non-humanoid body. That was something I could explore here and now.
Tabitha started stripping, because unlike in her Fionnuala guise, her clothes weren't just sculpted and colored skin. When everything was neatly folded on the vanity, she turned away and sank to her knees. Acacia sat up in time to watch Tabitha's body start to ripple and warp, the exquisite pain drawing forth a breathy gasp from a throat that soon distorted.
When her bones and ligaments and flesh had ceased their crunching and twanging and squirming, when the tentacles called forth to mop up and absorb what droplets of blood and other fluids had escaped in the process were withdrawn, when breath hissed through an inhuman throat to fill altered lungs, I let myself relax so I could observe, and inhabit, what I had wrought from Tabitha.
To Acacia's eyes, Tabitha had become some manner of quadruped, though one unlike any animal I could think of. Her four legs were vaguely like those of a cat, though her forelegs' shoulders were more akin to those of a human, at least in outside appearance. Just behind those shoulders were another pair, from which extended very humanlike arms, save for their disproportionate length and extra elbow. Each ended in human hands with retractable claws in place of nails. All six limbs, and the rest of her body, were lean and sexless, but muscular, and they, like the rest of her body, were covered in pale, freckled, unmistakably human skin. Sharp, violet quills grew in a patch that stretched from between her shoulders to just before where her flexible spine became a long, stinger-tipped tail that waved lazily through the air. And with all of her biomass in use and none of it tied up in that weird, spatially-compressed storage state, she was larger than her human form had been, easily over five feet tall at the shoulder.
Her head, however, had a long, wide muzzle, almost dog-like in shape. The nose and ears fed into that assumption, but when her lips parted, a multitude of long, curved, needle-like teeth were revealed. A languid yawn revealed that beyond that jaw lay a second set of mandibles, these ones filled with chisel-like incisors, sharp canines, and crushing molars, and able to move independently of the first set. And where the eyes would've been emerged masses of root-like bone, each studded with an embarrassment of eyes.
Nonhuman in form, yet bearing many recognizably human traits, Tabitha had become a, presumably, disturbing whole. Not bad, for a first try. Could be better, but thankfully I felt none of the dysphoria I might've felt in a male human form.
Walking on four legs turned out to be shockingly intuitive, to the point that I was pretty sure my power was helping with it. Tabitha padded over to Acacia and sat down, laying her head on Acacia's lap, who promptly started scratching her behind the ears. A deep, purring sound rumbled from Tabitha's chest.
Ah, bliss. My worries could wait, for now.
