More Best Sister.

Chapter Two

"Do you at least have a name?" At the very least I couldn't just keep referring to her as 'the girl' or 'her'.

"Yeah! You guys gave me a bunch of them!" she said excitedly. "I never had one before this time. I've got Israfel, Ulama," she counted off on her fingers, "Ziz…"

I froze.

"But mostly you guys just call me the Simurgh!"

What.

"…That's not funny," I said.

Her smile slipped away. "What? But I wasn't trying to be."

"You just said your name was the Simurgh. That's not funny, that's sick," I told her.

"But it's the truth," she said seriously. "I'm not lying. I'd never lie to you. That's what you humans call me."

'You humans'

Her wrist twisted as her hands began kneading her dress nervously, and for a moment the light of the ceiling fixture hit her skin just right, the smooth white tracery pattern I'd thought I'd seen before lighting up, looking like it was crawling up her arm from the reflected light. Pure-white, almost pearlescent, the designs were barely even visible, but 'barely' was enough for me to see them. To see what they were.

Wings. Some folded, others outstretched, all splayed out flat in a filigree with such detail, the feathers on them so fine, that a tattoo artist would be envious. They had no logic to their placement or size, overlapping and overrunning each other completely.

My eyes widened, and snapped up to her head. Her white hair. Platinum-white. Not just bleached blonde, but white as snow. And then her eyes, her light gray eyes. The same color the Simurgh's eyes were supposed to be, the only difference being that she had no whites, while the girl in front of me did, the color confined to her iris. Her skin was pale, as pale as they reported hers was.

Oh god.

All on a girl who could talk to people telepathically.

Oh fuck.

Oh fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

"Taylor?"

I was in the same room as an Endbringer. On the same couch.

My breathing sped up, and I pushed back into the corner I was seated in, trying to get as far away from her as I could. (But what good would that do?)

What if she'd already brainwashed me? Was I just another weapon now?

"Taylor?"

What had she done to me? What did she want with me?

I whimpered.

"Taylor, you're scaring me," she said worriedly, sounding concerned.

A concerned Endbringer. I would've laughed if I wasn't so terrified right then.

"Taylor?"

She reached out towards me, moving closer, and I tried to back further away, but there was no further to go on the couch. I was trapped.

I hugged my arms to myself, but she still stretched her arm out, fingers moving towards my own.

"Please don't hurt me," I whimpered.

"What?" she said, her hand drawing back suddenly. "But… I'd never…"

Her words made no sense.

Without warning, she moved onto my lap, arms snaking around my chest.

Was she going to kill me, was that her plan?

I shook, shivering with anxiety.

But instead her arms just grasped me, holding on.

"I'm sorry," she said, resting the right side of her face against my collarbone. "I should have thought about how you would react to that. We were just doing so well, and I got caught up in the moment, and I thought everything would be okay because I thought you already understood. I'm sorry for scaring you."

My shivers continued.

"I'd never hurt you," she told me, squeezing me around my chest a little bit. "Ever."

Was… was she hugging me? Was that what she was doing?

"W-why?" I said shakily, my voice coming out scratchily.

"'Because you're my sister,'" she said. Not just out loud, but in my head as well at the same time, each method reinforcing the other.

Sisters.

Sisters with the motherfucking Simurgh.

This time I did laugh, though it came out pathetic and sad.

"It's true. Your power chose me. Queen decided that out of everything she could do, she wanted me. Doing that got me out of a really bad situation, and I'll never be able to do anything to pay you back for that. But… if, if you really want me to go, I will. I'll leave and you'll never have to see me again," she said, sounding like just saying it hurt her, like just the idea hurt her.

"Why?" I rasped again. Why was she doing this?

"It's what I'm supposed to do," she told me, cheek still against my collarbone. "Give you hugs and stuff. Because…

"You're my sister," I said, our voices overlapping as I finished her sentence with her.

"Yeah," she agreed. "Family. Forever and ever."

I hiccuping sound came from me, something wet trickling down my cheek.

And then I couldn't hold it back any longer, and all of my emotions, everything I'd been holding back for four weeks hit me, all at once.

I was never going to see Dad ever again. Never hear Mom's voice reading me stories at night or the sound of Dad's car pulling up the driveway when he came home. Never have dinner with them, comfortable with both or even awkward with just Dad.

I'd have given anything to have even that awkwardness back.

I'd never get a chance to make up with Dad, to get closer again. I'd wasted the time I'd had, and now I'd never get it back.

Tears ran down my face as I cried, truly cried —sobbing and sniffling and gross stuff leaking from my nose— for the first time since Dad had died, all of my emotions pouring out in this all-consuming torrent.

Everybody was gone. First Mom, and then Emma, and then Dad, and now I was alone. All alone.

All except for the girl hugging me, claiming to be my sister, and apparently an Endbringer, somehow a product of whatever power I had.

My arms found their way around her without thinking, just reacting to the presence of a person nearby to hold onto, and her grip on me tightened in response as I held her like the last thing keeping me on Earth and just sobbed.

It had to have been ten, twenty minutes before my hiccupping breaths started evening out, a bone-deep weariness settling over me from the intense emotional release.

"It's gonna be okay, you know?" she said quietly, her arms releasing me and drawing back so that she could look me in the eyes. "I promise."

I laughed sadly. "You're the Simurgh," I said, finally saying it out loud and acknowledging her words, sniffling.

"Yeah," she agreed, moving backwards off my lap to sit on the short, worn wood coffee table in front of the couch I sat on. "That's what you guys call me."

"And, and somehow my power made you my sister," I stated incredulously, wiping at my cheeks with the palms of my hands.

She nodded. "And made you mine!"

I froze, and blinked. "What… does that mean?" I asked warily.

"I told you before. Queen wanted me to become your 'sister', so I told her she should actually make us kinda-related instead of just having me be with you because of her. So, we uh, made you better," she said.

"Better," I repeated flatly, not wanting to deal with this but knowing I had to anyways.

"Yeah. Like me. I got humanized. Humanified? Human-ed? I don't have to scare you guys crazy anymore and be all 'rahhhh, metaphorical religious creature preying on your mental vulnerabilities by subverting and reversing deep-seated societal beliefs'."

I blinked.

"An angel? That's what I was supposed to make you guys think of," she said. "Well, a seraph. More wings is supposed to be better and everything. So I had all the wings." She was grinning widely.

Well, she'd definitely succeeded with the angel comparison, considering how people had thought of her when she first showed up.

"So, powers only really understand stuff with really strong emotional ties, 'cause that's what's important to them. But that's like, all they understand. They're super narrow-sighted," she told me. "When I was made, angels were a big deal to the person. And then when you triggered 'cause you needed someone, Queen went looking and was like 'Angel! Like a guardian angel! Humans really like those! Angel sister = best sister!', and the fact that I'd been acting like a crazy murder monster didn't even matter to it."

That was… weird. To put it mildly.

"Aaaaaanyways. I got humaned so that I would fit in better —because a fifteen-foot mute winged lady kind of stands out— with a real body and everything!" Before I could react, she grabbed my hand and put the palm against her chest. For a second I wondered what she was doing, and then I felt the beat of a heart. "Kinda half-human, half what I was like before. And you got the other half!"

"…What!?" I yelped, pulling my hand away from her chest.

She pouted, but didn't do anything. "Well, that's a vague way of putting it and not really how it works at all, but it's good enough. The point is you're like me now! See?"

She suddenly reached up and flicked me in the forehead.

I could tell that it was hard, the force behind it ridiculous, and somehow I knew that if she'd done that to a normal human their head would have exploded from the force, but I hadn't even felt it.

Holy shit.

"I can do that?"

She nodded. "Well, kinda. Not yet. I made Queenie promise not to suddenly dump everything on you at once, but to go slowly so that you can adjust properly."

That made a lot more sense, because I hadn't even come close to being able to break out of those handcuffs at school, but the punches I'd felt hadn't hurt and I didn't even have any marks as evidence of the fight.

"Isn't that cool though? We're totally real sisters now!"

Yeah.

Sisters.

Sisters with the Simurgh.

"Who is 'Queenie'? You keep mentioning her," I asked, still trying to adjust to the idea that there was a fucking Endbringer sitting on my coffee table like it was nothing unusual.

"Ah… Queen is your powers. Well, she's giving you your powers. Like, your power personified? Embodied? She's not like, an actual person or anything." she… the sister my powers gave me, the Simurgh, huffed. "Look do you want me to be entirely, completely honest with you? Even if it totally weirds you out and might change how you look at everything you know?"

I swallowed, and then nodded hesitantly.

"Powers aren't from you guys. They aren't a human thing. They're expressions of something else. You know the Corona Pollentia?" she asked. I nodded again. It was what meant someone could become a parahuman.

"That's like… a beacon. The sign of something reaching out and watching. And when everything's just right, that perfect chemical cocktail in your head, it activates." She snapped her fingers. "Insta-connection. It looks at you, at what you're doing, at what's causing the trigger and chooses a way to express itself, what it's going to do for you. Tinker, Blaster, anything, but it all depends on how and why. The Gemma forms, specifically tailored to help you control and use that particular expression, a constant connection and the thing through which your power can affect the world.

"The thing that actually does all of that? That gives you your power? They're not human. They're called shards. Well, the super-Illuminati calls them agents, and Riley calls them passengers, but however you say it, it's not here, it's locked away in a totally different dimension, on an alternate Earth, with the only connection being that Gemma. And they're not from here."

"Like… aliens?" I asked incredulously.

"Exactly," she responded. "They're pretty dumb, sorta ehhh on sentience individually and not truly sapient even in small groups, but they're still super powerful. Queen's one of the most important, she normally organizes, controls, and configures all of the other shards.

"It's really weird, though, because Queen doesn't usually do this sort of thing for her expressions. Usually she's all 'look at me controlling all the things! Wheeeeee!' I think she wasn't limited properly and got misconfigured, because she's not supposed to be able to interact directly with other shards. But she can, so she got mine from Selector."

Aliens. Aliens were real!?

Is it really that impossible, though? I thought. I mean, there are alternate realities and people say that theoretically there's an infinite number of them, and Aleph even has people on it. Why can't there be aliens?

Some people had even thought, or still did think, the Endbringers were aliens.

"Wait. She got yours?" I repeated.

She —the Simurgh? Ziz? I really needed to figure out how to refer to her— nodded. "You didn't think that I was just like that for no reason, did you?"

I flushed.

She laughed, bell-like and happy sounding. "Nononono. I was pretty much about as close to a power existing without a human… medium —yeah, I like medium— as you can get. I was really just my shards. More than one, which let me be sorta-sapient but not really. I could kinda think and reason and stuff, but it was a lot different. A lot colder, more mechanical. I could have strong almost-feelings, mostly because he needed opponents who could react and give human-enough responses, like… getting angry when I failed, or acting hurt, or getting irritated at the capes who kept destroying my toys, etcetera. …But it was nothing like this!" she said, gesturing at herself and her general human-ness.

She seemed really happy about it.

"But… how?" I couldn't even imagine the Simurgh being, acting, like this. It was the complete opposite of what you'd expect, really.

"Oh, that's all Queen. She copied what Bastion's doing, got Shaper to change my body, took control and hooked into all my shards… and ta-da!" She held her hands out like a performer and shook them, grinning. "New me! Isn't it great? It's so awesome!"

I just nodded, not really sure how to respond.

I mean on the one hand, Simurgh. On the other hand, now-human crazy-thirteen-year-old Simurgh.

"So yeah! And I mean, you're like that too, of course. That's what I was talking about, the whole 'making you like me thing'. We're pretty much the same except looking different and different expressions of my shards," she said. "Well, Shaper's still working on you, I think, but give it a few days, a week tops!"

I collapsed backwards, my head tilted up to the ceiling.

Oh my fucking god. This day.

Sooooo…

I triggered today.

Just before punching Emma's face in (finally)

My power decided I was so lonely I needed a sister.

It apparently decided the Simurgh was the best choice, ostensibly because of what she was, angel-looking… construct that my power could work with. Oh and because she understood humans the best, right.

The Simurgh got upgraded? downgraded? sidegraded? turned? into a thirteen year-old girl.

An insane thirteen year-old girl.

An insane thirteen year-old Endbringer-lite girl.

Who is now my sister.

Because apparently I got upgraded to the same.

And got powers like her.

Because we're sisters.

…Powers come from aliens living on other alternate Earths.

Yes, aliens exist.

But apparently aren't very smart.

…But they can still turn the Simurgh into a thirteen year-old girl.

Did I get everything?

"Yeah, pretty much," the… Simurgh said.

Wait.

I tilted my head down. "Did you just read my mind?"

"Ehehehehe… maybe?" she responded. "I mean, it's actually kind of hard not to. The mental connection is a lot stronger between us because of Queenie. She's like, the bridge between us two for everything, and she's connecting all of my shards to us. You'll probably start to feel it in a couple days."

God, could my day get any stranger?

"Probably," she giggled.

"Stop that!" I yelped. "That's so weird."

She shrugged, with an amused look. "It's how it works."

"Do you have something I can call you other than 'the Simurgh'? I just… I really can't even think of you like that, you're too different."

"I noticed," she said, grinning. "It's been really funny."

I groaned, my face falling into my palms.

Fucking mind-readers.

"Anyways. Um, I don't know? I've… never had to do something like that before," she said, looking slightly vulnerable. "Uh… Izzy? Zee?" she offered. "I really like Sophia, 'cause it's basically just a translation of one of the others, but…"

I twitched at the name, fear/anger/loathing rising.

"Yeah. That. Sophie?"

My fingers dug into the armrest of the couch.

She blew out a puff of air. "Annoying. Stupid girls ruining perfectly good names. Argh…" She ruffled her hair with both of her hands in frustration. "I hate not being able to See like this. I'd just be able to look at everything and tell exactly what would be the best and go with that. Graahhhh."

It was really odd to think of the Simurgh not having her precognition. It was like… one of the things that made her the Simurgh. I couldn't even imagine what it must be like for her, having to deal with the loss of such a major sense.

Suddenly, the girl in front of me froze, and looked up at me slowly, with a terrifying grin on her face. "I've got it."

"What?" I asked, wondering what kind of name could get her to react like that.

And somehow, impossibly, her grin widened. "Serafina."

A/N: Because where's the fun in being a terrifying angel of mindfuckery turned into a thirteen year-old girl if you don't make your name an obvious reference hiding in plain sight?