Shockwave 6-3

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I woke up screaming and thrashing under bright lights and shrill sounds.

Hands grabbed me, pushing me down to damp soft ground, voices spoke hurriedly all around. I couldn't understand them.

My chest felt like it was on fire.

A fresh pinch of pain in my arm.

I fumbled at my power but something felt wrong and darkness took me again.

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The next time I woke up was a bit more gradual than before. For one thing it was quieter, mostly, muffled maybe. The light didn't sear my eyes when I blinked them open, though they were still bright. Most importantly though, no one was holding me down.

I blinked my eyes some more and the ceiling above my bed came into focus. I tried picking my head up.

Oooooohhh no that's not going to happen. My body, figuring I was now conscious, started reporting the damages. I was sore all over.

"Taylor?" Rasped a voice.

"Ow." I hissed through the pain of trying to sit up enough to see who was talking.

They saved me the trouble.

Lisa rushed over to my side. She had been crying, her eyes red and face blotchy. "Lay still. You have a couple cracked ribs. Caduceus came by and accelerated the healing but it's still going to take a day or so."

I stopped trying to sit up. I did reach out to her with my hand and she clutched at it like a life line.

"I thought I lost you." She bent her head over my hand and I could feel her shaking.

"'M sorry." I rasped.

She let go of my hand to retrieve one of those hard plastic cups with the extra wide straw that hospitals seemed to favor. She brought the end of the straw to my lips. "Slow sips." She commanded.

I did and my chest hurt abominably anyway.

I gave her what smile I could manage as thanks. She returned it though it was strained.

"What happened?" I asked her.

She reclaimed my hand in her own and gave it a gentle squeeze, pain clearly evident in her expression. "What do you remember?"

Images flashed through my mind.

Water.

Waves.

Screams.

Broken buildings.

Broken bodies.

Blood.

Death.

….Dad.

I sucked in a shaking breath and sobbed over the pain from my ribs. "I tried to fight Leviathan."

Lisa's grip was almost painful on my fingers.

"I tried to fight him but I messed up. And Dad." My throat tightened and speaking felt like I was tearing rents through it with every word. "Dad tried to protect me." I looked at Lisa's eyes, beautifully green and filled with anguished love.

"It killed him."

One of the monitors started beeping an alarm.

"It killed him." My voice was high and thready and I couldn't help but picture Dad's final moments. "It killed him and I couldn't do anything!"

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"I'm surprised you are up here." Lisa's voice came up from behind me.

"I wanted to see it." I moved my gaze to look at her. "I didn't believe it when I heard."

Lisa stepped up next to me, careful of the edge. "I am still having a hard time believing it and I watched it happen."

"How did we lose Lisa?" I looked away from the destruction.

"Did you want the technical answer?" She backed away from the edge, maybe seeing what became of The Bay was as hard on her as it was me.

"I want to know what happened." I followed her away from the edge. I didn't want to look at the flooded streets or damaged buildings. I didn't want to see the lake where a city used to be.

Lisa sighed and sat down against the wall of the access stairs, patting the spot next to her.

I joined her, my hand questing for hers.

"Let's recap first so we can talk about our biggest mistake, the waves." She squeezed my hand but her voice was almost clinical. "We were not prepared to handle that volume of water. Sure we tried, the shielders tried, but there wasn't enough. Some of the capes were killed when Leviathan landed, and a few underestimated how strong the waves would be and tried to conserve their strength. The third wave is what did them in. It was the largest and the first one to hit after Leviathan tore through the line. After that, well you saw a few of them first hand."

I shivered.

"Tori filled me in about how things started, Leviathans ruse to draw in the blasters." I could hear the frown in her voice with out looking. "She feels guilty by the way. Leaving you on your own after finding Crystal."

I shook my head. The way things had gone, Tori would have wound up dead like so many other capes.

"Anyway. Our side rallied a bit, Chevalier, not to be confused with that skull painted chick Cavalier, cobbled together some bullshit super cannon that the Protectorate had been working on. The thing knocked Leviathan's scaly ass a couple blocks. Was able to get off a second shot too before the cannon malfunctioned."

"I saw it." I though back to the massive beam of light. "It gave us enough enough time to rescue a bunch of people in one go. It's how we found Crystal."

Lisa nodded. "Right well. You know what happened after that. Leviathan targeted one of the Endbringer shelters."

I felt the familiar hollow chill of loss.

"The PRT was able to recover some of the body cams from the troopers assigned to the shelter." There was something hidden in her tone I couldn't place.

"I saw some of them. I helped piece them together to form a time line of the attack on the shelter." Her hand squeezed mine tight enough to hurt. "I saw a bit of your trick with the fireball. The shelter security camera caught that. It was destroyed when Leviathan entered the shelter. From there there was only one brief camera shot of Leviathan pushing through the tunnel, until they found the body cam of one Corporal Ramirez."

I sucked in a breath.

"He had tried to hold the door and was crushed when the wall was smashed in. By some miracle, or maybe curse, the camera fell pointing at the shelter. It caught everything. The rescue party's last stand, what happens to the civilians, and you." She took a shaky breath. "I watched you face down an Endbringer and I saw what happened to Danny…"

Her hand left mine so she could wrap an arm around my middle and shuffle closer.

"In the end I didn't do anything." I felt sick.

"You don't know?" She sounded surprised. "Taylor, you are the reason there are any survivors at all from that shelter."

I shook my head. "The last thing I remember was…Dad."

Lisa was silent for a moment. "You did something, the camera whited out from the light when you did, so no one knows exactly what but everyone above ground saw Leviathan get blow clear up through the ground and away from the shelter."

I shook my head. I wasn't strong enough to do something like that.

"That was the same time your armband reported you dead."

Her words were like a cold punch to the gut.

"What?" I could feel her trembling against me.

"Your armband stopped working the same time you did…..whatever." Her voice was strained and she was blinking back tears. "So you were reported as dead."

"Lisa I-"

"No, please let me finish." She cut me off. "I only want to think about it once. Let me get through everything. Please."

The sick feeling in my gut turned to lead and weighed heavily with my guilt as I realized I hadn't kept my promise to come back to her. I had used my power not to live, but to fight what could have, by all rights should have, been my last fight.

Lisa pressed on. "After you blasted Leviathan out of the shelter we tried to engage again but, by this point half of the fighters were dead or wounded. Our only saving grace was Leviathan had also been heavily damaged and, now thanks to you, was missing its tail. There were more losses but we were holding, just barely. Someone got Alexandria back into the fight and a call went out that Eidolon was almost here, he had gone to try and convince Scion to come to the fight. I guess Scion was nearby? Hell, if Eidolon was the messenger, I guess Scion could have been on the other side of the planet."

She shook her head. "Leviathan attacked another shelter. Pulled in the capes that were left. Then, like all at once, the capes just kind of switched off and Leviathan abandoned the shelter. It was the weirdest thing. It could have just annihilated everyone there, but it just fucked off back to the beach. We thought it was leaving. We thought it was over."

I couldn't help but picture the flooded streets and sunken city.

Lisa took a deep breath and sighed. "Instead, Leviathan pulled in a wave, bigger than anyone thought possible. It flooded the city, one or two of the shelters, we even had to evacuate the aid station and basically anything you wanted to live had to be on at least on the second floor past north thirty first street.

She was silent for a moment. "Then there was a sound. Something that you heard but really more felt. Apparently there was a large aquifer under Brockton. Leviathan collapsed it and, well, you have seen the result."

Her brevity of the last bit of explanation spoke to how bad it must have been. We sat for a while, not saying anything. Just…..us, yet I felt some separation between us, emotional, not physical. We were both hurting, but whereas I was working through fresh but now past events, Lisa had yet to confront the issue that I had hurt her by not running. And here she was supporting me. Again.

I leaned my head down to rest on hers.

She sighed. "You know, If the civilians hadn't stepped up there would have been a lot more dead."

This almost seemed to come out of left field. "What do you mean?"

"You were rescued by civilians." Though she said it I felt like she had intended to say something else and I could probably guess what.

"A load of other capes too." She continued.

"Who?"

"The capes that collapsed?" She looked up at me, searching my face for something. "It was because someone triggered in the shelter. If the civilians there didn't rescue the capes? Most of them probably would have drowned when the last wave came in."

There was some bite to her tone and I winced.

She noticed. "Yeah, and you won't believe me until you see for yourself but you know the girl who triggered."

No. Please god no.

"Or I guess you know her parents. Michael and Charity's kid was the trigger."

I was simultaneously relieved and horrified. Relieved that it wasn't Madison or Emma and horrified that Charity's daughter was the one to trigger.

I thought hard on conversations I had with Charity. Her daughter was what? My age? Maybe a little older?

"Charity came to me," she made tisking sound before continuing. "Or, rather she came looking for you. She wanted to ask if you would talk with her daughter, Molly I think, and help her. Buuuutttt with you still sedated, I stepped in."

It almost felt like another dig.

"Thank you." I whispered, then ripped the bandage off. "And I'm sorry."

She stiffened.

"I'm sorry Lisa." I tried to hug her to me, even through the soreness from my ribs. "I'm sorry."

"No, you can't be sorry." She sniffed and her voice was tight. "Because then you would have done something wrong. And you didn't. You saved those people. Without you they all probably would have died. So you can't be sorry. Don't be sorry because I'm selfish. They lost more, you lost more."

Dad.

She pulled out of my arms and turned to face me, tears flowing free and face splotchy.

"I'm sorry." I held my arms out to her. "I'm sorry I didn't keep my promise."

"I thought you were gone." She choked on a sob and fell onto my legs, crying into my lap, the dam finally broken. She cried the long, heavy, cathartic kind that set me off again. We sat there on the damp rooftop of the PRT and we cried.

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Author's Note: No real note this time. Too sleepy and I still need to get this posted over on AO3. Thank you all for your fav, follow, and reviews! love you all!