A Side FF

Sherrel pulled back the stick and spun the wheel. The car twisted, tail whipping out as she pulled hard to the right onto the dirt road. The truck followed her, the onboard system slaved to her baby and mimicking its every move. The old country road winded down into the valley, leaving the mountain-hugging highway behind.

Sherrel kept one hand on the stick and the other on the wheel. The engine roared through her, the vibrations like music. The best thing about detoxing was finally being sober enough to actually feel the road. The rock and roll of the suspension. The firmness of the body. The violence of an enhanced tinker tech engine.

She needed to feel it, to remember. The feeling was tangible and that made it easier to focus. To ignore the constant itch.

Behind her, the truck's passenger coughed. "Don't suppose you could slow down?"

Sherrel shifted to a higher gear. "Nope."

She gunned it as the road leveled off into a straightaway, racing past the 'access restricted' sign on the perimeter fence. The Air National Guard didn't bother checking in on the old airfield, which probably never hosted anything more than a few snow planes and helicopters anyway.

Decent enough place to tinker the day away.

Guiding her baby onto the runway, Sherrel accelerated. With the push of a button, the rusted old doors on one hanger pulled away and she slammed the brakes. The car's suspension was like riding a cushion of air, and Sherrel's hair barely moved as she came to a near instant stop. The truck stopped behind her, to the sound of Leet's groaning.

Sherrel shook her head and opened the door.

"Baby," she called.

"You drove better when you were high."

"I drove safe when I was high. It's called responsibility."

She reached the back of the truck and pulled the release. The doors opened, revealing Leet's not-Gundam. Sherrel refused to call it Zaku. That name just didn't make sense. It was his third suit, not his 'zeroth,' and it wasn't a plane built in the 30s or anything. She figured Leet liked it because it sounded cool and was Japanese.

Once a nerd, always a nerd.

Sherrel climbed into the back, noting the damage to the chest. Looked like something hand-sized and hand-shaped melted into the armor. Not enough to injure anyone inside, but enough that she felt a small pang of worry.

Such a novel concept, worry. You never worry when high.

"You okay?" she asked.

"Fine. Just get this thing open. The damage goes far enough I can't pop the cork."

Sherrel leaned in and reached for the emergency release, a clamp on either side of the chest plate. She pulled; stepping back as the mechanism finally whirled and the chest pushed forward and then up. Leet didn't get out immediately. He waited, letting Sherrel crouch down and pull the clamps off his forearms.

"You should do away with these," she said as the needles pulled free of his arm. Sherrel frowned at the blood staining the ports where the needles inserted into his control suit. "They–"

"Worked fine," he interrupted. He rubbed at his forearms with both hands, arms crossed over his chest. "It was like moving with my own arms and legs."

"Yeah. That's worth stabbing yourself sixty-seven times. Could at least do two more. Make a joke out of it."

"Don't need that many nerve connections."

Free of the braces around his arms, Leet bent down and pulled his legs free. She tried telling him it was stupid to build a design that needed help to escape. He didn't listen. Obviously.

Leet pulled himself out of his suit. He turned to exit the truck, only to find Sherrel blocking his path. He looked at her with those surprisingly baby-doe eyes of his. Sweat greased his skin, obscuring freckles on his cheeks. His sandy hair was a tangled and greasy mess in need of a shower. It told her that the heat problem was still an issue, contrary to his claims of correction.

"Gonna tell me how it went yet?" she asked.

When he didn't immediately answer, she crossed her arms over her chest and waited. He kept silent after signaling for an emergency teleport. She gathered from the radio that the plan didn't go according to plan. Plus he didn't have his guns, the Pokéball thing, or his axe anymore.

"She had Citrine's power," he said. "Used it to bust out of the orb."

"The Pokéball," Sherrel corrected.

He flinched and his face turned red. "It's not a Pokéball!"

Sherrel pushed her lower lip out. "It was a Pokéball and you, me, and everyone else knows it."

Some things never changed. Unlike someone, Sherrel considered that a good thing. Flying cars were overrated.

Leet groaned and Sherrel asked again, "What happened?"

"I just told you what happened."

"You said the Pokéball didn't work. What happened after that?"

He sighed and relented, filling her in on the back and forth fight that ended when Bakuda showed up and scored an easy five hundred million dollars.

Biggest Guild bounty on the books, and the bomb thinker won it. Sherrel wondered if she'd make a money bomb with all the green just to laugh about it later. Bitch seemed kind of loopy from how Leet described her.

"Who's Citrine?" Sherrel wondered, only after he finished the story and she stepped aside to let him pass.

"One of Accord's capes. Shaker." She scowled as he jumped down. "One cape missed and everything Zero predicted came up wrong."

Sherrel followed him as they crossed an array of workbenches, lifts, vices, and assorted spare parts bins.

Zero sat on a table atop a raised platform, a storm of cables and wires connecting the head sized box to a dozen routers. The unassuming cube chittered away, doing a whole bunch of tinker babble Sherrel felt sure even Leet didn't understand. Arrays of monitors surrounded the table, millions of images and strings running over the screens as the little tinker box did whatever it did on the internet to predict the future.

"You'll fix it," Sherrel offered.

"It's not broken," Leet said. He pulled a set of tools from a stand. "Zero predicted Citrine might be in the mix. I ignored it because it didn't make sense. She died halfway across the city. It was human error. I should have let Zero work off its own predictions instead of trying to curate them. I almost screwed us."

Sherrel sat on the folding chair by the stairs. "We're fine."

"Newtype almost died."

Sherrel already knew the answer, but she asked anyway. "Who cares?"

"Everyone else cares!" Leet hunched over the table. "If she died because of something we did, everyone would blame us! Especially since I already tried once!"

"Yeah." Sherrel raised a hand and checked her nails. "Probably should have made that one stick."

"That's not the point!" He turned and looked at her. "StarGazer alone could fuck us completely and the only thing StarGazer cares about is Newtype. She dies and anything could happen."

"Zero tell you that?"

"Yes!"

Sherrel glanced at the box and tried not to show how much she hated it. "Sure it's not broken?"

He ran a hand over his face. He turned back to his tools and started working. She didn't know what for, exactly. Zero was all hard-coded. Any change meant opening the cube up—though it didn't literally open—and messing around with the inside.

Sherrel crossed her legs and watched. Part of her wanted to go fix the small bit of damage Psycho Nazi did to her baby. Or maybe get started on another. She wasn't a one car kind of girl and there were plenty of junk and scrap yards to pick from when you can get just about anywhere on the East coast in a day. Maybe something in an El Camino?

Another part of her was worried. It was a pleasant surprise finding out Leet could kick some ass and wasn't a total joke, but she got the sense he wasn't the same person everyone used to make fun of. The 'worst tinker in the world' was a joke. Leet needed to learn how to relax.

Sherrel would have thought a total nerd would actually notice how great she looked in a halter-top, but the little freak was too obsessed for his own good. Work, work, work. She knew he knew how to have fun. Fun was probably the only thing he used to be good at.

He just didn't seem interested now.

"Butcher's gone," she mused.

"Maybe. It wasn't us. That means the PRT will still want us in cells or the loony bin. Or dead."

"We can go to Mexico. The highways are surprisingly scenic."

"The PRT will follow us."

Sherrel rolled her eyes and groaned. "Zero's wrong. That—"

"Zero is never wrong. I designed it to never be wrong."

"It was wrong about Butcher."

"I was wrong about Butcher. Zero was right, just like it was right about Bakuda turning on Lung. And Newtype triggering because of a Ward. And that the eggs didn't smell spoiled but they were! Zero isn't wrong."

Except when it is and he decided it wasn't.

"I should have listened." Sherrel tried to interject but he just kept grumbling. "If we got Butcher the PRT would have gotten off our backs and we could focus on the things that really matter."

"You need to lighten up. The world isn't ending in ten years just 'cause a tinker box says it is!"

"And if Zero's right about that too?"

Sherrel groaned.

Stupid box. The PRT had no reason to dog them that hard. Months since he tried killing Newbitch and the PRT had come after them all of one time. Going after the Butcher and saving Newtype from her own dumbassery should prove they weren't interested in hurting her again. There were a million better things to do than chase the two of them south of the border. There was no reason to stick around.

Sherrel watched him work, thinking back to those weeks right after he busted her out.

She managed to get her hands on dope all of one time before he locked her in a room. She preferred not to think of everything that happened during that time, which felt far more distant than it should. Lots of vomiting, screaming, shaking, and self-loathing. She still felt the twitch in the back of her head, the yearning for one more high. Way people talked about it, she'd always feel it.

Sherrel didn't get all teary-eyed about it. It sucked and it happened, and Leet did something for her she wasn't in a position to do for herself.

"Sorry," he whispered. "I'm not angry at you. I'd just like something to go right for once."

Sherrel huffed and pointed out, "It went fine. So, Bakuda got the big bank. Big deal. Maybe now the PRT will worry about the multi-millionaire bomb tinker more than you."

Leet glanced over his shoulder. "What happened to the 'we're in this together' speech?"

"Are you a multi-millionaire? No? Well, sorry but that makes this whole deal charity for me so…" Sherrel shrugged, and quietly enjoyed that he actually smiled at that. "Leet—"

"That's not my name."

Fuck. "I'm not calling you Frontal."

"I thought that up on the spot!" He groaned. "I needed something and I was thinking about 'confronting' the things that matter and Frontal is what came out!"

"Yeah, it kind of sucks."

"Then call me—"

"What's so wrong with being Leet? You made some dumb videos and people thought you were a joke. Fuck'um. Leet was real. I liked him!"

Leet got that long-faced look because Sherrel's mouth still moved faster than her brain. She expected some snap back about how the videos were basically made for stoner college students but nope.

Double fuck.

"There is no Leet without Uber. Uber's dead. So is Leet." His voice turned hard, and he added, "I don't make stupid videos anymore."

"I didn't mean it like that," Sherrel offered. A shame she spent most of the last few years high as a kite tied to another kite tied to an airplane. She'd been good at talking to people once. "Doesn't it get boring being all broody and shit?"

"I'm not broody."

"You're totally broody. Lighten up and have some fun."

"I have fun." Sherrel laughed. Leet groaned. "I do! Sorry I'm not a party boy and I actually want to focus on things that matter rather than run around making lame-ass internet videos."

"Yeah, yeah. We've been super productive and important the past two months."

"We could be if we could get the PRT off our backs. There's more important things, like the Butcher and the Endbringers."

"The PRT hasn't come looking for us in weeks and I don't give a shit if Zero says otherwise. It's a tinker tech box! It's not alive!"

Leet shook his head and said something under his breath. And people said women got into moods. Clearly they didn't spend enough time with nerds.

"Let the goodie-goodies fight the Endbringers," Sherrel said. "They're the ones who like the glory and shit."

"If they could they'd have won by now."

Triple fuck. She sucked at this, more than she thought she would.

Sherrel recognized the hunger when she saw it. It's a familiar thing, like an old friend. An old and toxic friend who always borrows money and says they'll pay you back but never does but you go along with them because they're 'fun.' Unfortunately, Leet's addiction wasn't something so obviously bad for him as blow. Convincing someone they were hurting themselves was easier when they were literally hurting themselves. Literally? Physically? Whatever.

She needed to tinker before that twitch in her head started making sweet promises it couldn't keep. She'd rather tinker. But part of her rejected the idea. Never had to have a heart when she was high, and now that she wasn't, giving a damn seemed like part of the package deal. If only Leet's addiction could be solved by locking him in a room for a week or two.

Being a good friend sucked.

"Put the future box down," Sherrel offered. "My baby is banged up because you made me go rescue Newtype. You—"

"Back already?"

Sherrel felt a worm climb into her throat. She turned in her seat, growling. "You still here?"

"Why would I leave?" The man stepped up onto the platform with a bag of popcorn in one hand. "I've been abroad for a few years. Might as well make this trip a vacation. Tour the old stomping grounds."

He was an ugly little man, emphasis on ugly in Sherrel's eyes. Big nose. Big ears. Thinning hair atop his head. Plus his eyebrows were creepy thick. He looked like someone had too much fun with a potato doll.

The man recognized her glares, and dismissed them. He reeked like Skids—Skidmark. The eyes gave him away. A nice suit and a polite mouth didn't change the predatory 'how can I use this' gaze.

"You used us." Leet turned, glaring at the man. One hand clutched a tool between pale fingers, and the other gripped the edge of the table. "You knew the trap wouldn't work, and you knew Othala would go after Newtype."

The man simply shrugged, his face a facade of innocence. "We're using each other Mr. Marshall, and I'll point out that I offered further assistance. You preferred to do it on your own."

Leet scoffed. "Forgive me for not trusting the random passerby off the street."

"Everyone is always so suspicious," the man said. In a small voice he added, "It would be so much easier if people could understand each other a little better."

"Says the shady fuck who shows up in secret hideouts no one knows about," Sherrel grumbled.

"My offer was and still is genuine," the man repeated, as he usually did at least once a conversation. "And while I understand you're upset with how things turned out, I'm not."

Sherrel's jaw slackened slightly. Leet seemed equally surprised.

He shrugged again. "I'm not some mustache twirling ne'er-do-well. We both wanted the Butcher dealt with and the Butcher is now dealt with. I'm sure I can convince some of my PRT associates that your actions in Boston were a one-time mistake you regret, not something that requires you be hunted down."

Sherrel glanced to Leet. He looked surprised, but she felt more relieved to see him suspicious. That shit didn't make sense. Not how he knew about Butcher. Not how he decided to tell two villains but not the PRT. Not any of it.

The guy's poker face sucked. He obviously had some kind of angle.

"Why?" Leet asked. "What do you get out of it?"

Sherrel would prefer to ask how he fucking knew it was Othala in the first place. He never once answered that question. He just alluded vaguely to thinkers and informants.

The man's eyes narrowed. "Because people are slow to understand. They delude themselves easily, and the Protectorate with its flashy heroes, extravagant public relations campaigns, and carefully curated narratives are making it worse. False hope is a powerful opiate."

"The fuck are you on about?" Sherrel rose from her seat and turned. "You show up out of ginger-fuck-nowhere, say you want to make a trade, and now you're prattling about some Karl Marx shit?"

The man's eyes widened, as if shocked she could make that reference. Sherrel glared harder at him, and his otherwise relaxed posture. He didn't seem remotely worried to be in the workshop of two tinkers. Even Newtype got trashed for a bit when she made that mistake.

"Sorry," he said. "Most of the people I talk to don't have such colorful vocabularies. It's refreshing."

The fuck did that mean?

The man looked past Sherrel. "Allow me to answer one question with another. What is wrong with the world?"

And the fuck did that—

"Power."

Sherrel turned to face Leet.

He looked the man in the eye. "Power is what's wrong with the world."

"My answer as well." When Sherrel looked back at the man, he wore a small smile. "More specifically, the disparity of power. The rich and the poor. The weak and the strong. Those without powers and those with power."

"Oh please," Sherrel grimaced.

The man ignored Sherrel.

"It's a wonderful opiate we've made for ourselves," he said. "We've taken the world and packed it into a box of expectations. Heroes are heroes. Villains are villains. Victims are victims. It's like a waltz. An endless dance with the same three beats of ambition, resentment, and hate. We've become so comfortable with it, we allow ourselves to all be victims together."

Sherrel turned to Leet. She felt a pit in her stomach. This wasn't good. She didn't know why exactly, but it wasn't. Nothing good ever came from people who start talking like the demented baby of Rand and Nietzsche. It was the tone really, more than anything. Skidmark always thought he had all the answers too.

He didn't and Sherrel didn't plan to ever trust anyone who thought they did ever again.

"Go cry a river," she said snidely. "Put it on YouTube when you're done. Maybe stick your cape name to it so we can actually look up whoever the fuck you are."

The man's eyes narrowed. "I'm not playing the cape game at the moment." Leet raised his brow and Sherrel scoffed. The man seemed to think for a moment, and then shrugged. "Call me David. It's a good name. I like using it again."

Sherrel couldn't stop herself from gaping. Did he just give his real name?

"Awfully confident," Leet said. "We could rat you out."

"Honestly, someone ratting me out at this point probably doesn't matter. It would, if anything, speed things up. I'd do it myself if it weren't so bloody a path." He seemed almost amused when he said, "How'd you figure it out? If I may ask."

"A shadowy cape running around managing other capes with a hard-on for making the PRT look bad? Yeah. That's a real mystery."

"Who is he?" Sherrel asked.

"Teacher," Leet answered.

"I've never once called myself that," David said. "I resent whoever started it. Teacher was an overgrown child with an ego. I'll admit I'm not short on ego myself, but I'm not tearing the world down just to gloat about it."

Sounds fitting to me, Sherrel thought. And then she cursed herself for not saying it aloud. Were her hands shaking? Teacher was the one who outed all those capes a few months back. Everything in Brockton Bay went souther than south after that. The guy in front of her, talking about boxes and shit like some freshman philosophy major, did that. Sherrel counted that as at least three distinct red flags.

Actually, thinking back to her own freshmen year, that comparison seemed disturbingly accurate.

"Then why are you doing it?" Leet asked.

"Because things can't go on as they are." He set the empty popcorn bag down. "The world was locked on an unsustainable course before parahumans and the Endbringers sent it spiraling. The complacency needs to end. The people have to break free of the dance, fight for their future. We've waited long enough."

"Easy to say from a position of safety and power," Leet snarled. "You talk a good game, but I don't see how you're any different from the rest."

David's expression flickered, losing all sense of calm. Sherrel reflexively started moving toward one of the benches behind her. Tinker tools might be for building, but they could wreck someone's day too.

"I don't do what I do for me," David said.

"No," Leet replied. "You're doing it for a cause. Every psycho thinks they're the hero."

Sherrel tensed, as David's face grew angrier.

"Leet," she warned.

"I'm not playing this game," he said firmly. "Coil wanted to use us too. Get to the point and say what you want."

Sherrel tried to look for something to grab without looking like it. She didn't know how 'Teacher's' power worked, but if he could master people on a whim he'd probably have done it already. Masters didn't have brute ratings though.

"I want the waltz to end." When Sherrel looked back at him, David seemed calm again. "I think you do too."

Leet's silence made Sherrel more uncomfortable the longer it drew out. Not-Teacher pushed his hands into his pockets, waiting.

There are many kinds of addictions.

If Sherrel had to put a name on it, Skidmark wasn't ever really about the drugs. He was about power. Power over others. Power over streets. Power over himself.

He was a pathetic little—ugly—man.

Leet thought in silence, watching the creepy fucker talking like he had all the answers. She already knew what his answer would be. He'd mumbled about it enough times. The needles that pierced his skin told her all she needed to know about how far he would go.

Some people are addicted to a high.

Some are addicted to power.

Some are addicted to a notion.

The thing they all have in common is they don't know when to stop. They don't want to stop. They won't. Not on their own.

Being a good friend fucking sucked that way.