It doesn't take long for someone to challenge the new capes in town.
"It's the Teeth!" a man yells as he runs down the street with all the ungainly speed he can manage. "The Teeth are attacking!" Isidis promptly stands up from our exceptionally shitty lunch date and starts sprinting in the opposite direction, towards the danger, and after a brief moment of confusion I follow.
I'm not losing her.
Isidis is fast, Olympian fast, and when that gets stacked on top of a literally inhuman circulatory system she could reasonably be assigned a Mover rating. At the end of the day though, she's still ground bound, limited to purely conventional movement. Halfway down the block I've caught up with her, bone reaching out in half a hundred limbs to snag on cars, on railings, on any firm-looking graspable object, pulling me forward faster than most motorcycles.
"I'll take care of the civilians," Isidis says as she slows to a stop just in front of the corner. She doesn't seem to be even remotely out of breath. "Stay alive." I nod once as I pass her and tear around the corner, tendrils creaking under the pressure of supporting one hundred and thirty pounds and a whole fuckton of bone as I take in the scene.
Bodies litter the street , some armed and armored, some not. A man covered in spiked armor, melee weapons, and explosives walks among them, spinning a baseball bat studded with nails in one hand and whistling merrily. As I fall to the ground and roll to standing he pauses in the middle of the street, cocking his head as he examines me.
"Heard there was some game around here," he says, smiling behind a mask of blades as he levels his weapon at me. "The remnants of Hookwolf's crew are supposed to be in town, and I figured I'd have a go at them. Seems like I'm going to have to settle for his protege." He shakes his head in mock regret even as clones start spilling out of him like an endless deck of cards falling to the floor, the arrangement of their armor and weapons subtly different. "Should be easy to get a trophy, though!" The clones dash forward, a mob of nearly-identical minions trampling over one another in their eagerness to fight me.
The first gets a spike of bone through the eye. The second, a blade across the throat. Three and four are stabbed in the stomach by a pair of prongs large enough to halt their progress. Five, six, and seven eat flak shards sharp enough to shave with and fall back screaming. I'm not sure how many die to the phalanx of spikes I throw out next, and after that a veritable tidal wave of meat is pushing me back, forcing me to brace myself against the literal press of bodies.
"I saw that killing power there. A fighter then!" a voice calls. I stop bothering with needles and blades, switching to rapidly-growing claws and mouths, serrated teeth and tangled fangs that aim for damage over precision. It's not enough. There are too many bodies. "The Teeth are always looking for people who want to play hardball. Wanna switch teams?" I don't dignify that with a response and push myself up on a platform of bone, ignoring the blows on my armor in favor of just shoving the offenders away with crude pillars of fuck off. Once I no longer feel impacts on my primary layer of armor I cautiously look around, now perched safely above the chaos.
Somewhere behind the back lines one Spree casually plucks a grenade off another, who then proceeds to run forward and try fruitlessly to climb my pillar of bone. "Aww, can't have that shit, can we?" he asks rhetorically, bouncing the metal sphere in his palm. "Here, let me help you get down from there!" He tosses the grenade up high, then smashes it with the bat, an audible clang ringing through the air. I trace the arc, trying to figure out it's trajectory, until I see it roll to a stop by-
NO!
A boom too loud to hear properly echoes across the street as Isidis gets thrown away from where she was crouched by a now-dead civilian and slams into the side of a building, falling to the ground and remaining far too still.
"Now come on down and see if you want a go!" he shouts, arms spread wide, still spewing clones. "Come on, you know you want to!"
I jump off the pillar, growing a pair of platforms beneath my feet as I fall down into the writhing mass of bodies. Some of them crunch beneath me, crushed beneath the thick sheets of bone. It doesn't stop others from trying to climb up to me, stomping on one another in their haste. I don't bother with them and force myself forward, closing the distance between the original and I. I see his eyes go wide, then harden, and the spray of clones cuts off, leaving only a mess of bodies lunging forward, the original lost in the melee. I start lashing out at random, all furious tearing and rending of flesh, looking for the man who hurt Amy!
A grenade goes off, shattering plates of bone and doing fuck all else. Corpses fly to the side, scattered by the shockwave, and I see new clones popping up to take their place.
And I see their source.
You don't get away that easy.
This time I stilt over the horde, pushing off ever-lengthening poles of bone to gain altitude until the dozens of clones all looking up at me have to squint against the glare of the sun. Only one of them looks concerned about this though, his grimace visible behind his mask of blades.
Found you.
When I fall, it's silent. The clones scramble over one another, trying to reach my landing point even as the original tries to bury himself in meat. I have mass and speed though, and bodies burst when I land. Someone screams in the tangle of broken limbs. I push out more bone, warding off rapidly-degrading clones with a sphere at least six inches thick as I pull their progenitor face-to-face with me, alone together. Spree opens his mouth-
-and it promptly gets filled with a spike of bone, emerging from my right hand and continuing to protrude out the back of his head.
No more games.
I shatter the sphere outwards, launching shrapnel and knocking over the last of the clones as I search for Amy. I see her hunched form where it landed, still motionless. A few long steps and I'm beside her, shoving meat from the corpse formerly-known-as-Spree into her body, trying to match the parts as close as I can as the bits slip and slide between my fingers.
pleasebealivepleasebealivepleasebealive
The flesh melts, then shifts, crawling from where I haphazardly pressed it into different parts of her body, organs reforming and skin closing. She still looks too pale. I cut open Spree's throat, trying to hit every artery, then hold his parted neck over a patch of bare, smooth stomach. Blood quivers, then drains into the skin, and a more healthy pallor returns. After a moment her eyes flutter, followed by a series of hacking coughs.
"Ugh, anyone catch the license number of the-" the rest gets cut off as I pull her into a hug and release a breath I didn't know I was holding.
Alive.
I answer some mindless questions about the fight. Who started it, what happened, why I killed Spree. They tell me they're probably not going to make a big deal of it, but I should get a lawyer on call anyways. The Teeth don't have a legal team to speak of, but what I did was close enough to over the line that an advocacy group or overly-ambitious lawyer might decide to try and make an example of this event.
It all washes over me, really. A stream of words I hear, understand, process, then promptly move on from. I give them assurances that I won't use this level of force again unless absolutely necessary and they let me go, the card of the PRT's legal team tucked somewhere in my armor. I'll put it next to John's when I get back to my room.
But first, Amy.
I spot her talking to Vicky on a rooftop across the street, bodies closed inward, the two sisters discussing something in as much privacy as they can get. I lean back against the building behind me, watching. Waiting.
Vicky says something and Amy reacts violently, slashing her hand across her chest and stomping her foot. Vicky backs off at that, both hands held up in surrender, then lowers them as she begins to talk again. Eventually they come to a resolution, stepping into a short hug which then transitions into a short flight from the rooftop to the ground. A few more words get exchanged, one more hug, and Vicky gives me a quick glance I can't quite read from this distance. Then she flies away, a vision of blonde and liberty green. I track her until she becomes too small to see, then turn back to Amy. She walks over to me, a firm set to her eyes as she jerks her head down the street.
"We should get out of town for a while," she says, voice clipped. Tight. "Just until the Protectorate gets some reinforcements." I nod, following her passively as Amy pulls me away from the crime scene and flags down a cab.
It's not like I have anything better to do.
The cabbie is old, old enough that she looks like she could tell us about working in a factory for the first time during the Second World War. She's lively though, with a grin that still has most of her teeth, albeit more than a little worn. She introduces herself with good cheer and a name seven syllables long that I promptly forget. Amy mutters something to her, leaning between the two front seats as I collapse into the back. As we pull into traffic, an acoustic guitar and a soft voice start coming out of the radio, loosening some of the tension in my shoulders. I lean my head against the window, letting the sounds wash over me and the rhythm of the car lull me into a trance.
A hand shakes my shoulder and I turn to Amy. She's got her seatbelt on and taps her lap with one hand, mask up. I can only see her eyes, and in them I can see an exhaustion to rival my own.
"You're wiped out. Lay down," she says. I don't have the energy to argue, so I fall the other way, helm shifting under my skin, leaving only the blank white full mask. Soon I feel Amy's fingers in my hair, combing through it, massaging my scalp. I shift my head more fully into her palms, losing myself to the sensation.
I wake up slowly. The sun is up again and I promptly put a pair of shutters over my eyes. Too bright. I slowly thin them, letting in the shine one ray at a time as I take inventory of my situation. I'm laying down, a rather nice pillow beneath my head, and I can smell grass and the sea.
"Sleeping Beauty is awake," a voice says dryly. I fully open my shutters and look into Amy's face from below. She gives me a tight smile. "You would not believe how much of a pain it was to drag you up here," she says, looking away from me to something ahead of us. "You better appreciate it."
"What do you mean?" I ask, slowly propping myself up on my elbows, blinking the sleep clear of my eyes as I sit up.
Then I see it.
The obelisk is a massive hunk of black stone, twice as tall as I am and wide enough that I wouldn't be able to wrap my arms around it. The top is jagged, with a green flame that doesn't seem to be burning anything flickering at the tip, but the rest is smooth, glossy, and I can make out the engravings on the sides from ten feet away. In front of it are a quartet of white marble pillars as tall as I am arrayed in the middle of a pool of water, with pure white pebbles covering the floor of the pool. A modest garden surrounds it, mostly bushes and gently blooming trees, cultivated in that way that only freshly planted greenery can be.
It might've be serene if not for the devastation beyond it.
From where we are we should be able to see the streets of Brockton Bay, as tangled and nonsensical as they were. We should be able to see the gradual fade from the deserted warehouse district to the sketchy apartment complexes to the commercial area to Downtown to the higher-end residential areas to Capitol Hill, with the few parks the city still had occasionally breaking up the brutal urban landscape. The Boardwalk should be hemming it all in, running along the coast line, open from dawn to past dusk, ready to serve tourists a steady supply of souvenirs and drinks. Up north there should be a mass of rusted hulks, the graveyard that reminded everyone of Brockton Bay's glory days.
Instead there's ruin.
The skyscrapers have been brought low, the Boardwalk washed away, one district swept into another, the streets covered with a single massive incoherent mess of destruction. Enormous pools dot the city, with a sinkhole large enough to fit an ocean liner smack in the middle of it. It's not even the middle of the city anymore. The waterline has moved inland, changing the shape of the coast into something too sharp and too alien to have occurred naturally.
During the rescue effort, I had seen that it was bad. Houses were leveled, streets flooded so deep that I'd needed to travel by rooftop, lakes where there used to be shopping malls.
I just didn't put all the pieces together until now.
"Yeah, that was about my reaction," Amy says quietly, shuffling up next to me. "Like, Brockton sucked. A lot. We had a Nazi problem, a drug problem, a corruption problem, an education problem..." she laughs without humor. "If you bothered to index it, we probably had more problems than upsides. It was home, though."
I continue to stare at what remains of my home.
"So yeah. That's gone. They condemned the city basically as soon as the capes departed. They decided to set up the memorial on the outskirts overlooking the city because building it inside the city would make it effectively inaccessible. Roads in there are kind of a mess." She stands up, brushing grass off of her butt and jerking a thumb at the obelisk. "Names of the dead capes are on the black one. Let's check it out." She starts walking towards it, following a long cobblestone path that winds carefully through a series of bushes. After a moment I follow her.
I recognize a few names on it. A lot of names.
Shrike. Alex Swallow. Springboard. Jeremey Zacksman. Titania. Jennifer Ylwes. Whiteline. Unnamed. The next side. Alabaster. Chad Jackson. Armsmaster. Colin Wallis. Assault. Ethan Rebelski. Hookwolf. Brad Meadows. The next side. Lady Photon. Sarah Pelham. Laserdream. Crystal Pelham. Purity. Kayden Anders.
I do some quick math.
More than a hundred capes died. A lot more.
"This was a bad one," Amy says quietly, running her fingers over the name of her cousin. "Really, really bad. The worst in a while. And in Canberra we had to quarantine the entire city." She curls her hand into a fist and presses it against the stone, leaning her head forward. "It was bad, but it could've been worse."
"How?" I ask, something hot and mercurial breaking inside of me, flowing through my guts like poison. "How the fuck could this be worse? How could losing so many fuckingheroes be worse? And for what? We. Lost. We lost your cousin, your aunt, your home, my home, my business, my-" I cut myself off, bone shuddering between the twin tensions of wanting to snap and wanting to keep my promise to Amy in front of her, even if I've been breaking it left and right in a desperate attempt to pretend like things are okay. "Everything is dead," I whisper.
"No!" Amy shouts back, spinning around, tears in her eyes. "Carol's not dead, Vicky's not dead, Eric's not dead, Neil's not dead, Mark's not dead, I'm not dead, and you're not dead!" She stomps over to me, glaring up into my mask, and I have to take a step back as she gets up in my face, a presence far larger than her five-four frame pushing me back. "Whenever Crys put on her costume, she knew there was going to be a chance she'd end up dead. At first it was a joke, and then I had to put her back together from the boobs down. She. Knew," Amy says, poking me in the chest, right over my hammering heart. "She knew there was a chance that she wouldn't come back. Aunt Sarah knew that. Armsmaster would've known that, Tecton would've know that, everyone who showed up was willing to die." Her hand curls into a fist, pushing me back. "And some of them did. Not us, though."
For a moment, we just stand there.
"Maybe I should've," I whisper.
It slips out, and for a second I think Amy missed it. Then she looks up at me, more tears in her eyes, and her other arm comes up.
"No," she says, pulling me into a hug. "No, I don't think you should've."
I stand there, terrified of doing the wrong thing, of shattering the fragile threads of caring between us, before I give up and hug her back, armor sloughing off of me, boots falling apart, until it's me, just me, in Amy's arms, dressed in nothing but my mask and underwear, shoulders shaking as too many days of grief kept at bay with pain and silence comes flooding out, burning my eyes and throat, staining her costume, and finally letting me think about Dad.
We stay there until the sun goes down, just talking. That's wrong. Talking implies a level of give and take, of equivalent exchange. Us talking would imply that after I finished with my problem, we'd come to some level of resolution, and then Amy would bare her soul to me and we'd work on whatever was on her mind. It implies a level of reason, of careful consideration, where each word is weighed in turn to most perfectly convey each and every idea.
That's not what happens.
I rant. I rave. I scream. I pour it all out, putting the incomprehensible mess of emotions into one unending vomit of noise that becomes less and less intelligible as time goes on, turning back on itself, contradictory and nonsensical. I let loose the thousand and three thoughts I have about Emma, about Mom, about school, and about Dad, a mix of tearful, naive nostalgia and completely unfair resentment. I pace across the green, ripping up grass with talons that grow hooked and jagged from my feet. I lash out, clubs blurred by the feverish haze of emotion but still hard enough to crack the bark of the freshly-planted trees. I cry, mask falling to pieces, my last piece of armor falling away and letting me smell the ocean breeze, the taste of sea salt and tears indistinguishable from one another. I fall to my knees, exhausted but not done, so I fuse my joints and get back up to do it all over again, slowly ruining the ground around me, scattering dirt with errant swipes of my arms, heavy with bone and fury, letting down my walls and finally fucking feeling it all!
Catharsis doesn't even begin to describe it.
Eventually, I taper off. The swings of the bone weapons get slower, weaker, until a blade bites into a tree and I can't bring myself to drag it out. My voice goes hoarse, a mere whisper of what it was, and I can't form words between my ragged, heavy breaths. I fall over, still technically able to stand but what's the point?
I feel a hand on my back, rubbing circles into it right above my lungs.
"Feel better?" Amy asks, voice oddly muted. I shake my head.
"Not better." Not empty. Not clean. Just raw. I feel her press up against my back, her hair against my cheek as she drops her head over my shoulder.
"Different?" she tries, linking her hands in front of me.
"Yes," I say, pushing back into the contact, thinning bone, pulling it in completely in some places, trying to get closer to her. "Different. That's a word for it."
For a while we just stay in that moment, her inscrutable and me lost in thought.
"I used to like my sister. In the weird way," Amy says quietly. I wait for shock. For disgust. For anything. Instead I just feel pain. The same pain as before, taking up all of my heart, leaving no room for anything else.
"I talked to a nurse about it, and she directed me to a psychologist," Amy continues, still vulnerable, still hesitant, and still going. "He was a nice guy. Got my whole family on speaking terms with one another. Carol's still not my biggest fan, but" — she takes a breath, letting out a sort of unhappy-but-accepting huff — "but she's managing. Not sure if he's still around, but I'm pretty sure I still have his number. Just in case."
I swallow a lump in my throat. "Do you think I need it?" I ask, an ugly ball of insecurity and fear, all barbs and caustic stickiness rolling around my insides.
"I don't think you need it," Amy says. I wait for her to continue. She sighs, squeezing me tighter. "I think you could keep doing what you're doing. Keep pushing it down, hiding behind pain and bone and waiting for someone to come around and finally kill you. I think you could get sick of waiting and go out to pick a fight with the Butcher or the Nine or someone else out of your weight class. I think you're heading down a very, very dark path," she says, quiet enough that I have to strain my ears to hear her.
A breeze picks up, and on it I can smell a hint of rot.
"And you think," I struggle for the right word, "therapy will keep me off that path?" I ask, a heaviness to my eyelids that makes no sense. I've slept. Recently.
"I think it couldn't hurt," Amy answers, leaning her head into mine, still just outside my range of vision. "I think that you need to talk to someone. Like this, but more regular, more grounded, with someone who actually knows what they're doing. I hope it'll make you happier," she finishes. "I really, really hope that it makes you want to be alive again, Rose."
I reach down with one hand, placing my bare hand upon hers. It feels different without the bone. More textured. Softer.
More there.
"My name is Taylor," I say quietly.
