Chapter Thirty-Four: Parenting Your Gifted Child
March 24, 2011
Colin accompanied the Wards back to the PRT base, and then holed up in his lab to review the footage from the mock battles and the following debriefs. As he did so, he tried to convince himself that he was being paranoid, seeing things, worrying for nothing. Instead, everything he saw reinforced what he'd noticed throughout the day.
Security notified him when the last of the Wards, except for Fi herself, left the building. When Colin checked her location, he found that she was already on her way up, without him needing to summon her. He blacked out his screens but left the videos queued up to where he'd been watching, just in case he needed them. Then he took the papers he'd printed earlier in the day, put them in a file folder, and set them on the end table next to the chair that Fi had used the last time she visited him.
Finally, he stood and walked over to his lab door, arriving just in time to let her in and save her the trouble of knocking. She smiled timidly when she saw him, and murmured a perfunctory hello. She was wearing another white shirt over casual jeans, and Colin reminded himself again to check on the status of her wardrobe as suggested by Intrepid's mother.
She was also wearing the visor he'd made for her. He'd been working on it even before she went deaf, but he'd prioritized it after Saturday. In addition to having a built-in computer to run an improved version of the he-said-she-said beta program, he had given her basic communication links, online access, heads-up warnings, and several emergency response options. While it fit over her mask, Glenn wanted him to encourage her to use the technology to replace the leather.
"Can we talk?" she asked, rubbing her own arms, and Colin realized he'd zoned out on her, as he sometimes did when he was trying to come out of a tinker funk.
"Of course." He gestured toward the door to his quarters, and she meekly walked in that direction. Colin took the time to study her posture. He hadn't seen her be sincerely meek often enough to have a good statistical sample, but she didn't seem to be faking. He shook his head, focused again on the actual events happening around him, and followed Fi into the living room.
As always, she sat in the armchair and faced the rest of the room. She also curled her feet up under her, which meant she wasn't preparing to flee. Colin had a number of things he wanted to address with her, but since she had taken the initiative to come to him, he decided to let her start.
"Was there anything in particular you wanted to talk about?" he asked as he took a seat on the couch across from her. It wasn't the first time he'd talked to her in completely civilian dress, without part or all of his power armor on. But somehow, without being sure why, this time he was reminded of the fact that Contract was never unarmed.
She shifted uncomfortably, looking thirteen instead of sixteen, and he couldn't pinpoint where the thought had come from. Fi didn't look particularly dangerous, at the moment.
"Just seems like there's a lot of stuff we should discuss." She paused, took a deep breath, and then tacked on, "What with the legal guardianship and all."
Colin nodded, even though she wasn't looking at him. "Do you have any questions?"
She shrugged, looking toward him, presumably meeting his eyes, although it was impossible to be sure behind the visor. "Are you going to keep it?" Colin was surprised, and she must have seen it in his face because she hurried on. "You don't have to. I know it's just a formality that Legend twisted out of the courts for his convenience. If you wanted to pass it on to Piggot or Miss Militia or whoever, no one would blame you."
"Fi," he cut in, "do not you want me to be your legal guardian?"
She shrugged, again, but didn't look away. She seemed almost defiant. "It's not like you asked for this."
"I'm ashamed to say I didn't think about it at all," he admitted, and this time it was her turn to look shocked. "You were so self-possessed that when the file summaries didn't mention your guardian, it didn't occur to me to ask who it was. And for that, I'm sorry."
She cleared her throat uncomfortably. "Not your responsibility."
"Actually, it is." At his correction, she seemed to see the irony and her face twisted into a self-mocking expression.
"Right. Well, um, I forgive you." She still seemed a little off balance, but not insincere.
Colin had put a lot of thought into how he was going to handle his new responsibilities. He had considered signing over the guardianship to Miss Militia, Director Piggot, or even a Protectorate couple like Battery and Assault. But every time he tried to picture her reaction, he instead was reminded of what she'd reluctantly shared with him on Friday night, before disaster struck. She'd been passed from adult to adult before, and though it hadn't broken her, it obviously had affected her.
He wasn't the best person to be a father-figure, or whatever it was he was supposed to do now. He didn't know how to discipline, or when, or even if that was what Fi needed. He was not the person anyone would have chosen to handle the care and keeping of an emotionally fragile teenager.
But he also wasn't blind enough to think that shuffling her off onto someone else wouldn't have its own consequences. So, through happenstance and circumstance, he was what she had, and they would both have to make the best of it.
"I have an apartment," he said, not sure how else to breach the subject. "I don't tend to spend much time there, between patrol and tinkering and these quarters, but," he cleared his throat, "I thought I'd show it to you, tonight."
The thunderstruck expression was back. "Why?" she asked blankly.
"Fi," he said as gently as possible, "you didn't really think I was going to have you live on Intrepid's couch, or here in the PRT base, did you?"
She shrugged, and shifted so that her knees were more in front of her, than under her. Colin didn't need a software program to tell him she was putting up barriers. "You do. Live here, I mean."
Colin nodded, allowing the point. "But I choose to do so. I'm satisfied with that lifestyle, and I maintain another option for when this gets too stressful. That's why I have an apartment."
Fi looked thoughtful, so Colin gave her time to process everything. His ongoing projects weren't critical, and he'd already blocked off the rest of the evening to spend with Fi. In a way, she was actually his most sensitive project at the moment.
"You're really serious about this. About… guardianship," she finally mused aloud, tripping over the last word.
"I am," he confirmed, and she nodded, then broke eye contact. He decided to change tracks, and come back to the idea of where they would or wouldn't sleep. "In light of that, there are a couple things that Legend should have discussed with you, but it appears he chose to wait until you were more settled."
She looked back to him, more patient than curious, but her lips did twitch a little in some morbid sort of humor. Colin didn't try to guess what she'd found amusing.
"The rewards for killing Behemoth come to a total of 320 million dollars. Legend chose to deposit this sum into your Ward's trust account." Fi nodded, totally unphased.
At his questioning glance, she shrugged. "I spent my time in New York deaf, but not stupid. Jouster had a paper copy of my file and he wasn't careful where he left it. He didn't have access to the record of my Ward trust, of course, but I could read between the lines."
Colin nodded his understanding, and decided to indulge in a point of personal curiosity. "His summary said that you rarely addressed him in anything except Portuguese?"
"It was Latin, and a little Italian. He just rubbed me the wrong way. Reminded me of someone." She didn't elaborate, and he didn't push her. God only knew there were people he'd love to shout at occasionally, if he thought it would do any good.
"How many languages do you speak?" he asked with a wry smile.
She returned it as she answered, "More than you."
He tilted his head to acknowledge the point, then pulled them back on track again. "What would you like to do with the reward for the other two Endbringers?"
Her startled look returned, but her grip on her knees had lessened until she was sitting almost cross-legged, so he counted it as progress. "What?"
"It's close to another half billion dollars, all told. That's a lot of responsibility right now. If you don't want to think about it for another two years, then the trust isn't a bad way to go about it. Or you could put it in a long-term investment option, or you could manage it more closely. What do you want to do?"
Her expression changed throughout his questions until she was looking at him like he was some sort of interesting problem. "You're not going to tell me what to do?"
"I'll offer my advice if you want it." She nodded slowly, which Colin took as permission to continue. "I think you should put it in a long-term investment option for the foreseeable future. It will be accessible if you really need it, but it won't be hanging over your head. And they say you're not supposed to make major life decisions after a personal loss. I think 500 million dollars counts as a major life decision."
He'd gone over and over in his head how he wanted to approach the topic of Ash's death. Finally, after research and talking to Dragon, he'd decided on this approach: factual, open if she wanted to talk about it, but not pushing.
She nodded. "Okay. I'll think about it. Can we deal with it another time?" He nodded, but didn't speak. After waiting another moment or two, she took the opening, just as he had hoped she would. "Just how much have you found about Ash?"
"A bit," Colin admitted. She hunched over a bit, shrinking in, but she didn't bring her knees back up so he continued softly. "He was born under the name David Striker, and he was set to graduate from MIT at a young age. He dropped out of normal society after his roommate killed himself while Ash was asleep in the same room, and that's when he changed his name."
She nodded, not surprised by the narrative, but not pleased that he knew it either. "As far as I can tell," Colin continued carefully, "he joined some sort of underground society. He associated with people and places that have limited or no legal footprint. He spent his time making money on the stock market, breaking into secure networks, and skimming electronic funds from villains, gangs, and other criminal organizations."
He took a deep breath, but Fi wasn't reacting so he decided to keep going. "He was killed by a man named Lucius, as you already know. Lucius was, I think, a member of the same secret society, or else a very similar one. He also entered it after being very close to, but not directly involved in, violence. The same seems to be true for many of these secret citizens."
Now, Colin did stop. Fi was staring down at her hands, twisting her fingers together over and over again. Twice, she took a deep breath but didn't actually speak. Finally, she talked, but she still didn't look up. "I guess I knew this day was coming." She sounded weary, defeated, in a way he hadn't heard before. "Who have you told?"
She looked up reluctantly as she asked the question, perhaps unable to stop herself from trying to judge his sincerity. "No one," Colin told her, simply and confidently. Her eyebrows rose in skepticism.
"Director Piggot knows that Ash was shot, as do Dragon and the Triumvirate. From the surveillance of that night, they know that his name was Ashland. That, and whatever else they can personally glean from the video call recording, is all they know. I asked Dragon to leave the issue in my jurisdiction, and she has. I have involved no one else in my investigation."
Skepticism was slowly giving way to hope on her features. "Are you saying that you're not going to tell them?"
Colin shrugged his shoulders, but in a deliberate way, not out of casualness. There were a number of issues to address here, and the reasons he would give her were not his deepest reasons, but they were true enough and easier for her to accept. "And tell them what? That I saw a bar burn down in the middle of a bunch of cotton fields in Texas? While I was illegally accessing satellite footage? There are no records of the bar, no evidence that the fields are anything other than a legitimate farm being run by a dead man."
Her expression of hope remained guarded and wary. She was waiting for the other shoe to drop, so he didn't make her wait for long. "They might believe me, they might not. If I'm satisfied with the results of my investigation, there would be no reason for either of us to find out."
"What do you want to know?" She was still studying him, deciding whether to trust him or not. In light of that, he decided to be blunt. It was working pretty well so far.
"Are they a danger to society?"
"No. Absolutely not. They're protecting it."
"By breaking into FBI records?" he pressed.
She hesitated, and he could see an idea occurring to her, slotting into place. "Imagine that Scion hadn't appeared," she said slowly. "Imagine that capes were… a little less conspicuous. Not less powerful, but… less obvious. Imagine that most people didn't even know for sure that capes existed. There were rumors, tall tales, but nothing concrete."
She took a deep breath, still choosing her words carefully. "Imagine a world like that. And then imagine that just like today, there are good capes and bad capes. Ones that kill, and ones that save. When a cape killed someone, it wouldn't be safe for the police to investigate. They wouldn't believe what they found, they couldn't do anything about it, and they might piss the cape off and get themselves killed. In fact, even today, it's not really safe. That's why the PRT handles it. But in this imaginary world, there's no PRT. So who could handle it? Who could save the officers who would try to investigate? Who could stop a villain before they killed again?"
He could see where her analogy was going. "A hero."
"A vigilante," she answered. "Not a government hero. No one sanctioned. But just because you didn't have a badge… well, you couldn't just let people die, because the government didn't believe. And you couldn't tell people, even good people, even officers or agents. If you told them, they'd lock you up, or get themselves hurt by getting in over their heads."
Colin turned that information over in his mind. It was a plausible scenario, a nice fairy tale even, and it sort of fit the available facts, but not perfectly. "We do have the PRT, though. And the Protectorate."
"We weren't hunting capes," she replied easily. "We weren't even hunting humans." He started to protest, but she didn't stop to listen. "Capes have opened doorways between worlds. For the most part, those places have been empty, or they've been similar to us. But what if a door got opened, and the other side tried to eat us?"
She said it flippantly, and the way she was carefully coaching her scenario in hypothetical questions made him pretty sure that she was misleading him, but trying not to out-and-out lie. It rankled, but he could practically picture his social software flashing on the visor he wasn't wearing, telling him to take a moment and think through the situation.
This was obviously difficult for Fi to talk about. She didn't seem like she was trying to mess with him, just reluctant to give him the full story. Everything he had found about her past life indicated that they clung to their secrecy. That secrecy had been drilled into her for most of her life.
He needed to look at this thin explanation as an olive branch, and try to fit it into the larger picture available to him. But that could wait. First he had to react to Fi's sideways explanation.
Fi had shown that she had a lot of knowledge, presumably knowledge that came from Ash or other members of this secret community. With that knowledge came power, and perhaps the key was to look at how they were using that power. Fi, at least, seemed to be using it to save lives.
She'd thrown the fox among the chickens with her accusations against the Triumvirate, but it could have been much worse. She'd exposed their secrets in the relative safety of the PRT base, under an Endbringer truce, and only after being prompted by Alexandria. It had also been necessary for the destruction of the Endbringers.
If she'd been trying to destroy the Triumvriate, as she seemingly had good reason to do, she could have made her accusations in New York immediately after killing Behemoth. With most of the Protectorate listening and a large number of hero and villain Thinkers on the line to confirm the truth of what she said, she could have destroyed the Protectorate in a heartbeat. She hadn't.
He wasn't sure that he completely trusted her or her judgment, she was still just a teenager, but he didn't trust his superiors either anymore. Between the two, he'd choose Fi, which was the real reason he hadn't told anyone else about his discoveries until he'd had a chance to debrief with her.
Fi was trying to tell him that her family, her past, were not evil people. They weren't kidnapping and torturing minors. They weren't creating Endbringers. They weren't squeaky-clean either, but he'd already known that. Fi seemed to know their secrets, and she was willing to defend them. For now, her vague reassurances were enough. He'd keep digging, but he'd keep the results to himself. It was time to move onto the next potential issues with her past.
"Are you in danger from any of them?"
"No," she answered simply.
Colin scowled, and selected a sound byte to play from his phone. It was one of several phrases he wanted to have on-hand, word-perfect, if it was needed.
"Christopher swore a blood oath."
"Any idea where he is?"
"Last report said Oregon. But it's not as bad as it could be. He stood up in Council and volunteered his own wording. The exact phrase is 'if given reasonable opportunity.' Most of the younger generation followed suit, if they swore anything at all."
She didn't respond immediately, so he asked, "If given reasonable opportunity to do what?"
"To kill me," she said in the same straightforward, factual tone. As though it didn't matter or worry her in the least. Then she sighed, already knowing that this wouldn't fly. "This is… a cultural thing. Not easy to explain. Try to let me get through the whole thing?"
Grudgingly, he nodded. This conversation with Fi was nothing like their previous interactions where she had been straightforward, and either honest or silent. This round-about, drawn-out sort of communication was harder for him to trust, but he had to make allowances for the trauma she had experienced in the previous week.
"A blood oath is sacred. In more than 5,000 years of legacy, one generation to the next, none of us has ever broken a blood oath of our own volition. It is the one thing that binds us together, that allows us to survive. Not everyone is even allowed to make a blood oath. You have to prove yourself honorable enough to be worthy of making one."
She swallowed heavily. "So understand that this isn't lip service. It's not a bluff and it's not a ploy. Christopher swore that if given reasonable opportunity, he would kill me. And if he is given reasonable opportunity, that is what he will do. It's as close to a fact of nature as a human intention can be."
Colin couldn't see her eyes behind the visor, but her face became a little tenser, and her shoulders tightened up. "If given reasonable opportunity, however, is the very lightest of oaths. I'm surprised it was even accepted. Given my well known capacity to defend myself, I'd have to be practically comatose for the oath to even apply."
She stopped talking then, even though the explanation didn't feel finished. Despite her insistence that he not interrupt, he felt like she needed a prodding to continue.
"If it's not a concern, why would Ash warn you in a time-sensitive environment?"
She swallowed, but didn't seem upset at his input. "He was concerned I might throw all caution into the wind and call Chris for a snap to Australia. Chris is a teleporter, you see. He can send people to any place he knows, and he can retrieve people he knows well, if his passenger takes certain steps to give him the opportunity. Putting my life in Chris' hands, with the blood oath in play, would practically require Chris to drop me in the most dangerous place available."
Her fingers were picking at something on the knee of her jeans that Colin couldn't see clearly, but she kept talking even without looking towards him. "It was also Ash's way of letting me know that Lucius and Gordon had been curtailed. They've been out for my blood for years, and no doubt they wanted a much more stringent oath. This was his way of letting me know they'd lost the debate and been outmaneuvered."
She obviously didn't like discussing the subject, but as both her supervisor and her guardian he needed an explicit answer. "To be clear, people in your past are now actively trying to kill you, and you are not in the least bit concerned about this?"
She looked up with a smirk. "That's correct."
Colin just stared at her, trying to understand her perspective, or indeed any perspective that could account for her confidence. He didn't like the answer he found, and demanded, "Do you have a death wish?"
Fi snorted and crossed her arms in front of her chest. "Excuse me?" Her tone was cavalier, but her body language was far less casual.
"You nearly killed yourself more than once this afternoon. All told, you suffered twelve broken bones, more than thirty cracks or fractures, significant bruising, twists or strains of your ankles, elbows, and knees, and even some head trauma. All of this in a simulation situation. You ran headlong into Miss Militia's fire. You risked yourself, used your own position as bait, always took the most dangerous tactical position, threw yourself into the line of fire to intercept hits, and generally discarded your own physical safety."
As he listed out his worries, her face grew more somber, and he felt his anger giving way to the fear that had been lurking in his gut ever since she'd landed with a resounding crack and failed to move.
When he was done, she was silent for a while, turning over what he'd said, and he gave her time. They both needed to recoup from his little rant. Finally, she reached up and took off her visor and mask, so that they could look each other squarely in the eye.
"I'm not afraid of Death. I have been risking my life for close to a decade now, by my own choices and for causes that I believe in. I have seen teammates die. I have seen innocent people killed because I was too slow, or too late, or busy elsewhere. I have killed. Death and I are old companions.
"And yes, there was an occasion where I was suicidal."
His breath caught in his throat, and Colin opened his mouth to say something, anything, but she dropped her gaze and he shut his mouth, because she wouldn't hear him.
"I am not that girl anymore. When Death comes for me, I will face him with courage, but I do not seek him. I wasn't trying to hurt myself today. Every maneuver I made, I expected to succeed in. If I had been in that simulation last December, I would have survived all ten rounds without anything worse than bruising and scratches. I would have had to win differently. I might have lost a few more rounds.
"But I would not have suffered the injuries I did. I pushed myself today to figure out where my limits are. Turns out they're a lot closer than they used to be. I can't afford to discover that in the field. I can't trust my own body right now. And until I figure out my new limits, or figure out how to push myself back to my old limits, I'm a liability. If today had been actual combat, there's a good chance I would have died. That's not how I want to meet my death."
She looked back up, and then put her visor back on. "I'm sorry, for worrying you. I didn't mean for today to be quite that traumatic for myself or for anyone else."
Colin studied her, and was sure that she was speaking the truth. He'd still go over the recording later with his lie detector to be sure, but she sounded sincere. "It wasn't just your physical injuries. You showed an alarming tendency to put yourself in the line of fire, even when it wasn't strictly necessary. You rarely let anyone else take a risk if you had anything to say about it."
She shrugged. "Oops? That's a holdover from my previous fighting style. Depending on who I was with, there's a good chance that I would be the only cape on the field. It made sense for me to take the most dangerous position because as a parahuman I was the most adaptable, and I'm equally capable if not more so on the mundane side of things. I don't let teammates take risks if I think I've got a better chance of walking away. And I'm used to having the best chance of walking away."
Colin ran a hand over his head, able to see where she was coming from but not liking it. "That was before. You yourself just said that you're not up to that standard anymore."
"I still wipe the floor with any Ward, hand to hand, except possibly Clockblocker."
"Capes don't do a lot of hand to hand combat." Fi tilted her head, acknowledging the point, but she didn't offer anything else to the conversation, so Colin cast about for a solution. "What can we do so that you trust your teammates? Do you need more simulation time? More field time?"
Fi sighed, thinking, then shrugged. "Yes? Both? We do need more training, but mostly I think we just need time. I mean, think about it. When I first got here, we weren't really a team. It was Jason and I versus the Brockton Bay Wards, and yeah, that was mostly my fault but that's how it was. We're a new team now, with a new leader and new members. We need time to synergize. Brockton Bay is pretty quiet at the moment, and there won't be any more Endbringer fights, so we just need to take a breather and learn to be a team."
Colin nodded. That had been his assessment in general, as he watched the Wards throughout the afternoon. When they'd pitted the Wards against "everyone else" the team had held their own, and within five or six minutes of fighting had started to work together more and more effectively, ending the round at the nine minute mark with a decisive victory. He could only hope that time would help Fi, as well as their combat readiness.
"What about therapy?" Colin asked, braced for the expected answer.
As she always did, Fi scoffed. "Very funny." She immediately turned away, displeased, but Colin just waited. After a moment, she looked back at him. "You're serious?"
"Yes."
"You know why that's a terrible idea," she stated slowly, as though waiting for him to crack a grin and admit he was joking. Colin carefully didn't move a single muscle in his face. "I know secrets. World ending secrets. I can't be honest with a therapist. What would a PRT employee have done if I'd told them that I was stressed out to be debriefed by Legend, who was most likely involved with my kidnapping and torture? They'd either decide I was delusional, lashing out, or they'd report it and who knows what would have happened then? That's not the biggest secret I've got. I can't talk to someone, because I can't trust anyone."
Colin nodded reasonably, acknowledging her argument. When he didn't back down, however, Fi leaned back in her chair and studied him. After a moment of silence, Colin finally spoke. "You're right. You have to be able to trust your therapist. That's why I've cleared it with the Triumvirate, and with Director Costa-Brown herself, that if you agree to therapy, whoever you talk to will sign a binder worth of paper.
"They will be bound to absolute secrecy, even if you admit to crimes past or future. They won't have the normal caveats about breaking confidentiality to protect yourself or others. They won't be able to be subpoenaed in a court of law. They won't be under any obligation to talk to the PRT, and if they attempt to do so they will be sued for malpractice."
He couldn't see her eyes behind the visor, but the rest of her face showed her surprise and interest.
"That's not legal," she finally ventured in answer to his assurances.
"This isn't a normal situation. Technically speaking, your therapist won't be your doctor. They will just be someone bound to absolute secrecy who happens to have the necessary training to help you deal with all the things you're dealing with."
She chewed on her lip, thinking over the offer. In Colin's opinion, it was the one most important part of the evening. He knew he was going to screw up as a father, or guardian, or whatever he was now. He wasn't the right person to help her.
But if he could get her to someone who could help, then that would be good enough. He could be one of a team of people who were helping her.
"Alright, I'll do it," she said eventually. "With caveats. We'll message each other, and Dragon will encrypt and protect the signal without listening in. I want her legal assurances too, that neither she nor anyone else will read what we're writing.
"But I'm not going to talk to someone and have to read what they're saying. I want us to be on equal footing. So we find a therapist who's fluent in sign language, and I mean fluent, or I just chat with the therapist in a closed chat room or whatever to make it secure."
"That's reasonable," Colin assured her. After an awkward moment when he failed to find a better way to ask the question, he tacked on, "You're fluent in ASL?"
Fi nodded, and then her hands flew as she answered him back, too fast for him to pick out motions or associate motions with words. "I learned just after I triggered. The first time I was deaf the cost lasted for nearly four months, and I met some Deaf people right off. They were horrified that I didn't already sign. There was no good excuse not to accept their offers, so I stayed with them for those first few months. I learned ASL, and I learned about Deaf culture. It's an amazing world. Amazing people. It's my world now, my people, for the rest of my life. I am Deaf."
She said the last statement with something like pride. Colin immediately resolved to find a way to build a program that could read and translate ASL, and then realized that he was thinking like a tinker.
"Should I learn ASL?" he asked hesitantly.
Fi shrugged, her expression fading from proud to guarded. "It isn't necessary. I have the visor. I read lips. And in two years, I'll be a legal adult."
Cautiously, afraid of offending her, he told her, "That's not what I asked. Should I learn ASL?"
"I'd appreciate it," Fi admitted timidly, looking thirteen again.
Colin nodded, resolute. "Alright then."
She smiled, then stood up and crossed the space between them quickly, impulsively. At the last minute, just as Colin realized that she was about to hug him, she stopped, pulling back awkwardly as though she too recognized what she'd been about to do.
Carefully, Colin stood up and took a hesitant step forward. The hug was clumsy, and lasted barely a second, but as they both let go and stepped back Fi was laughing silently. When Colin started laughing too, acknowledging the weirdness of the moment, she broke out into honest, slightly too-loud, giggles.
It wasn't perfection, but it was pretty good progress for their first night as… well… whatever they were.