2.3
-- Lisa Wilbourne Tattletale --
"We need to debrief. That meeting did not go as well as it should have." Tanya paused for a moment, then continued begrudgingly. "I recognize that my expectations for you were unrealistic. Still, you can't improve without understanding what you did wrong."
What I did wrong? Your expectations for me? Sure those weren't actually your expectations for someone else, Tanya? You know, I'm coming around to your point of view: that woman must have been a fucking saint to put up with your constant bullshit. But I couldn't actually say that, could I? Talking to Coil never felt like such a fucking minefield. Well, hardly ever.
"Can we do this later? Please? I'm completely tapped."
We'd flown to my hideout, entering through the back. I was more than ready to call it a night, but Tanya had elected to follow me into my bedroom. And she still wasn't leaving.
"Completely? You should try to maintain a reserve, just in case. That meeting wasn't an emergency."
Oh, fuck you.
"And what would you have done if you thought I was holding back?" I hissed, unable to keep the words down.
She frowned at me. Fuck! I shouldn't have said that. I let up on my power a bit, preemptively flinching. My power wouldn't save me, but I couldn't help it.
Confused. Not angry.
I had maybe a quarter second of pure relief before it hit me, the icicle in my brain sprouting fractal spikes. I tried to bite down on a piteous whimper, but it escaped anyway. Not that I couldn't use some pity right now, I just knew my audience.
"Sorry," I mumbled, eyes closed. "I--"
I flinched from a hand on my shoulder, eyes snapping open. Huh. Was that concern in her eyes after all? Getting some mixed messages here, Tanya.
"I would have noted it as something to ask about later. That's all."
That had been an expression of frustration, not an actual question. I had a better idea what was going on in her head than she did, after all, not that that was hard. Still, she was probably right, at least so long as she'd had other people to focus on. I hadn't wanted to bet my life on it.
Of course, she had no clue what I was talking about. She hadn't actually killed me on the basis of a paranoid delusion -- she'd only seriously considered it, deciding my fate while accelerated to the point I could barely read her, let alone respond -- so, really, what did I have to whine about? Oh, and she'd definitely wanted me to know it, too, in case I got any ideas in the future. No big deal, she'd already forgotten all about it.
"It's just a debrief. You don't need to use your power," she offered like she thought she was doing me a favor.
No. Nope. Hell no.
"Too late for that. It hurts even when I don't use it, and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. More... I was going to say more pain than you've ever felt, but I guess that's not actually true, is it?"
She shrugged.
And that was the thing. Why wouldn't she think that was the right way to treat people when that's how people treated her? Actually, she was being downright considerate in comparison to Dr. Schugel. And possibly the others? She'd been keeping something back, something she didn't want to talk about. Because the part of the story where she burned her hand off wasn't the bad part, apparently.
It would have been one thing if that had been her trigger event. It was... OK, it was bad even for a trigger event, especially considering her age. But it wasn't the worst one I'd ever heard of, or even top five. Maybe some form of pyrokinesis plus the ability to puppet burned flesh, her own included? Eh, that'd be cruel even by power standards. And there should be a Brute aspect given the physical injury. Whatever.
The point was it hadn't been her trigger event, and not just because mages don't trigger. It had been traumatic but not traumatic enough. She hadn't broken. She wasn't even uncomfortable talking about it, really. And what did that say about the rest of her life? It wasn't that I didn't sympathize, it was just... too much. And my oncoming migraine definitely wasn't helping.
Part of me wanted to just tell her that I quit. Coil was dead and we were due over ten million dollars from the bounty payout, so why take the risk? She seemed to think I'd stick around for more money, but I could make money anywhere, and my tastes aren't that extravagant. And, as she was well aware, all the money in the world wouldn't help a corpse.
I'd fear another Coil situation, but I'd learned my lesson. He got me because I hadn't had the resources or muscle to leverage my power, and that wouldn't happen again. I could hire my own mercs, now, and even if the team dissolved, Taylor would stick with me. Well, probably not if I left the city, which would be wise... I'd make it work.
I was even pretty confident she'd let me go if I insisted. Her sense of ethics was... dubious in some areas, and she'd made some compromises on top of that, but this was very clear cut. The ability to break off a business relationship is essential to creating a competitive market, and that's the sort of rule she gets.
She'd feel paranoid about letting me go, but she'd also feel paranoid about enslaving me. She'd have to either give in or kill me and she'd ultimately settle on the former, at least if I played it right. Not that upsetting her like that was smart, but I'd hopefully have made it well away before that became an issue.
Of course, doing that would as much as guarantee there would be an issue. There already would have been if I hadn't been around to manage her. And, while I wasn't overly fond of this city, Taylor wouldn't leave with me. The others too, probably. And, well, I did sympathize with her. That's... not too common. I learn about so much awful shit happening to so many people it's just... hard to care about it all. She managed to stand out.
Well, that was all moot, since everyone knew I worked for Tanya now. Well, technically just the PRT, but I was less than confident they'd manage to keep that tidbit quiet. I'd become the 203rd's obvious weak point. I could fend off people shopping for a pet Thinker, but the sort of groups who'd look for an edge on Tanya? That implied they thought they might beat her, and that implied they were way out of my league. By putting me under her protection, she'd guaranteed I'd need that protection.
If she'd meant to do that, to back me into a corner and leave me no way out, I'd be pissed as hell. But she just... hadn't. The thought still hasn't even occurred to her. She was nearly as upset about the PRT discovering our association as I was, actually. Loyalty was one of her big blind spots, I suspected, despite (or possibly because of?) her capacity to inspire it.
When she considered my possible betrayal earlier, that was the first time she'd really doubted a subordinate's loyalty in years, I think. A lot of her paranoia was about new types of threats she didn't have a good handle on yet, so when she moved on, she just went back to assuming I'd do whatever she wanted without worrying about how to ensure that.
Tanya had been inspecting me while I thought and now she sighed.
"How long will you need?"
Right. My migraine. Well, it was nice not thinking about that while it lasted.
"Through tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. The morning after, at the outside."
She grimaced.
"OK."
"Well, however much you might hate this delay, I promise you I'll hate it more."
"Why would I want you to suffer?" She shot me a brief wry smirk. "We haven't started your training yet."
Oh. Well, that's terrifying. I think on balance I preferred when she frowned at me. Definitely a problem for tomorrow, though.
"Goodnight, Tanya."
"Goodnight." She started to make her way out, then paused, turning back. "Is there anything you need? Anything I can do?"
What? How... thoughtful? Whatever, I'd had my fill and more of trying to untangle Tanya today.
"Quiet and darkness, mostly. Water. Someone to clean if I throw up. A warm bath, when I've recovered enough for it. But I pay people to handle all that. For what you can do? Just please don't bother me until I'm over it. And don't make any big moves until we've talked it over. Or kill anyone. Please." Uh, actually, was it a good idea to leave her unsupervised? "Maybe you should sleep at Taylor's tonight? She can help you with any Bet stuff you need while I'm indisposed."
"Taylor?"
Oh, uh... Shit. Well, she'd probably unmask soon enough, anyway.
"Sorry, Taylor's... one of Skitter's henchmen. Henchwomen, I mean."
She rolled her eyes.
"Fine, though I'll expect you to be more circumspect with secrets that actually matter."
She finally left, and I grabbed my new satellite phone. We'd had Coil's goons fetch some after Tanya got Shatterbird, naturally. I let the team know I'd be out of commission and that the meeting went well -- no one had died, which was the important thing -- and told Taylor she was on babysitting duty. I turned it off before anyone could complain or ask questions. By the time I finished my hands were already shaking, and I'd had to turn the brightness down to minimum halfway through.
This was going to suck.
It actually hadn't been that bad. It should have been -- I know my power, and I knew the consequences when I ran it dry and pushed a little more. There's variance, but not this much. As ever, though, my power refused to explain its mechanics to me. I suppose I couldn't really complain; it was hard to overstate just how much misery this anomaly had saved me. If it ever went the other way, though...
The migraine proper was over in less than two hours, and I'd even managed to get to sleep at a reasonable time. Well, somewhat reasonable. And now I was awake, albeit still lazing in bed, at ten o'clock, which counted as early for a supervillain. Taylor doesn't count, since she's still pretending she's just pretending to be a villain, which... Uh, Coil and Dinah are dead, and they were reasons one and two for maintaining her 'infiltration.' She'd come up with some new excuse, of course, but not all the options were good. Maybe it was time to have a frank conversation about that.
Actually, she'd implied yesterday she'd chosen Tanya as her new project, hadn't she? I'd encouraged her at the time, but now I was feeling... less sanguine about tying our fortunes to hers in the long term. Or, frankly, sharing a city with her. Not that I had a choice anymore, but I was less enthusiastic about it.
Well, maybe the long term wasn't the issue. She'd clearly been much more stable in the past if she'd endured multiple attempted murders without retaliation in kind for the sake of... her career, I guess? Actually, that didn't really make her sound more sane, did it? But definitely less murderous, which was the pressing issue.
So, in theory, she should eventually be able to pull herself together and we'd get all the upsides of Tanya with none of the downsides. Well, fewer of the downsides. We just had to make it past this... little hurdle... of the violent death of her best friend/surrogate sister/social crutch/favorite barista... over whom she'd already killed thousands and wasn't nearly satisfied...
Oh, and a bunch of other things, too, like her paranoia, her violent over-protectiveness, her need to put on a show for her men, her utterly dysfunctional theory of mind, and the simple weight of habit. And I suspected she'd straight up murder the next person who introduced themselves to her as a communist, so we should probably work on that, too, before it came up.
Well, OK, her coping strategies weren't great. We just needed to find her a good therapist. One who specializes in famous paranoid grieving child prodigy orphans with PTSD and bizarre body image issues who are also refugees and child soldiers who fought on the front lines of one of the worst conflicts in human history and are probably autistic or something. Oh, and they'd need to be familiar with the cultural context of another nation from another century on another world. And ideally capes, too.
Fuck.
Maybe it was a good thing Bonesaw got away since we'd obviously need her skill in creating chimeras to pull this off. That list didn't even cover all her baggage. A lot of it is hard to put labels to. And then we'd have to convince Tanya to open up to this 'person' and not kill them for being around when she was thinking about her loss, which actually sounded way harder than finding/creating them in the first place.
Well, not every plan is a winner. I'd have to talk it over with Taylor, anyway, and she's good at plans. Well, sometimes she's awful at plans, but I thought this wouldn't impinge on her issues too much, at least if we've ruled out institutional solutions.
Though, she wasn't exactly in a good state herself. Her principal obsession just died in a manner arguably reminiscent of her mother's death, and then she helped Koenig murder Bonesaw's innocent victim... I almost rolled over and went back to sleep. How the hell did I end up responsible for this cluster fuck? Weren't there supposed to be professionals to handle this sort of thing? Or adults, at least?
But of course I knew the answer. There were and they were useless. None of our lives would be like this if they weren't.
I sighed and started my morning routine. I'd told Tanya this afternoon at the earliest, though in the best case I'd expected it'd still be pretty bad then. I was basically fully recovered now, mild hangover territory, but I could certainly still use an hour or two of relaxation. Maybe Tanya could call yesterday a vacation, but it had been pretty hard on us mere mortals.
Things would keep. If something big came up, they'd... still not interrupt me, because they thought I was incapacitated by pain. But I'd sent Tanya to Taylor, she'd... Wait, how the hell did I think that was a good idea?
Buoyed by sudden adrenaline, I rushed over to my phone, anxiously tapping the screen as it booted up. A couple questions about the meeting from Brian, an acknowledgment from Taylor last night, and... that was it. That meant everything was going well, right? I called Taylor.
"Hello? Lisa? I thought you were down for the count."
"Wasn't as bad as I'd thought," I hastily got out. "What's up on your end?"
There was a worrying delay. I heard some shouting in the background. I scrambled for my gun just in case, phone still held to my ear.
"Oh, not much. I'm working on cleanup. Some old pickup trucks don't have chips, so you just need to clear out the glass--"
"And Tanya?" I interrupted, pausing my dubious effort to check the magazine with one hand.
"Oh, I gave her a laptop earlier. Seems to have kept her happy. The men are helping out. She wanted to talk to you when you were up, though."
I let out an explosive breath and put down the gun.
"Oh. Good."
I was... almost certain she couldn't hurt anyone but Notarin over the internet, at least.
"... What did you think we'd gotten up to?"
"... Oh, nothing in particular."
"Fine. Should I hand you off to Tanya, then?"
"Er, no. Probably better we speak first. Come to my place?"
"Sure."
"You knew? For how long?"
Taylor shied back towards her side of the couch, suddenly tense. I rolled my eyes and scooted over, wrapping an arm around her waist. I gave her a moment to calm down before continuing softly.
"Immediately. I'm probably the strongest Thinker in the state. You couldn't really have thought I didn't know?"
She had thought that, actually, but I thought it might do her some good to draw her attention to how dumb that was. Because Taylor wasn't dumb and she really needed to confront the reasons she kept doing dumb things. Of course, Taylor hadn't had great experiences with people saying that sort of thing. I'd have to be careful not to push too hard.
"Well, I didn't know how your power worked at first, and afterward you never did anything about it. You do occasionally miss things."
"Not something on this level. I sussed out which of Coil's mercenaries would turn coat right under his nose, with only a minute or two of conversation in most cases."
"... Good point. Why didn't you do anything?"
"You wanted to take out Coil. I was rooting for you the whole way."
"I wanted to take out Coil and the Undersiders."
"Sure, that was the plan at first… Would you have done that?"
She briefly looked conflicted, but she'd already made the choice.
"No, I guess not. You were that confident I'd like you guys? Rachel attacked me the first time we met. I still don't like Alec."
"I don't like Alec. Sell him out if you want, but I suspect you don't actually want to."
She rolled her eyes at me but didn't object.
"You need to be more careful. Can you imagine if you tried that on the Empire? You definitely wouldn't have liked them."
"They don't have you."
"No one else is looking out for that sort of thing here because we have me. I'm certain Coil knew, too. He just didn't care because he was already playing both sides." Actually, he'd been OK with it because I'd promised she wouldn't go through with it, which he'd doubtless confirmed through extensive torture. But no reason to drag down the mood, right? "You'd have gotten caught and Hookwolf would have shredded you."
She sighed, finally relaxing.
"Yeah, you're probably right... So, what now?"
"Nothing. I just wanted to make sure you weren't about to do anything... rash. Tanya can never hear a single whisper about this, you understand? She'd kill you over it just as fast. And if you did give the heroes information on her, what do you think they'd do with it?"
"They'd..." She sighed. "I want to say they'd get her help, but I guess I know better. They'd use it to attack, and, worse, they'd bungle it. It'd be a bloodbath."
I nodded and gave her a little squeeze. Discovering Alexandria and Shadow Stalker's identities had done a number on her faith in the 'good guys.' If it had just been that I'd say she was over-correcting, but there was a lot of other stuff she hadn't been taking into account before. Her predictions were much more accurate now, anyway.
"Besides," I said, "it'd be better if we presented a united front. How embarrassing would it be if we ran into each other in the enemy's camp?"
She'd been looking away, but now her head snapped back towards me.
"What? You just--"
"Not the heroes. A hero."
She paused for a moment to consider.
"Miss Militia. You think she'd be willing to work with us for Tanya's sake. Who is betraying whom here, exactly?"
"Mostly her betraying the Protectorate, I think, though that's not really a productive way to think about it. Both sides will definitely be better off for it, but neither would see it that way if they found out. Call it a diplomatic backchannel."
She nodded. "OK, I'm in." She paused for a moment. "You said Tanya would kill over that sort of thing. Why..."
I gave her a slightly desperate smile. Why am I willing to do something suicidal? Because I know things you don't. Why are you willing to do it, Taylor?
"Why risk it? Because not doing it is also a risk. If they do something to set Tanya off, really set her off, she'll kill the whole department and turn the PRT HQ into rubble. You don't want to know how close we've already come to that. That sort of thing can't go unanswered. They might abandon the city if we're lucky, turn Brockton Bay into a quarantine site like Gary, Indiana or Gallup, New Mexico. They're halfway to condemning it already. Oh, and they'd probably send us a few cruise missiles as a parting gift."
"That's if we're lucky?"
"If we're unlucky they'll send in the big guns to restore order, and they know we're associated. Watchdog to track us down and the Triumvirate to bring us in. Maybe kill orders, maybe just Birdcage sentences. I'm not... completely certain we'd lose, but winning would bring its own complications."
"I said we shouldn't associate with hero killers."
"Yeah... Do you regret it?"
She frowned.
"No. She needs our help. We just need to stop that from happening." She shook her head. "You can ask me again on the Birdcage transport, though."
We sat in comfortable silence for a minute.
"Not certain we'd lose? To the Triumvirate?"
"It's... difficult to bet against Tanya. A lot of people have and all of them are dead. Would you have guessed she'd beat the Nine? Not just beat them, but make them look like a joke? Her world doesn't have anything like the Triumvirate, of course, but no one in our world has anything like her experience. That wouldn't be enough on its own, not in a straight fight, but... I think you're right she's been holding back."
I paused to give Taylor a chance to break in. She stayed quiet.
"Remember that apartment building she thought she could blow through in a single shot? Legend could do that. Maybe Purity too. Not many more names on that list. And that was just the level of power the situation called for. We don't know how much more she might still have been holding in reserve. And magic doesn't follow the same rules as powers. She might have access to some obscure effect that just bypasses power-based defenses, like how Masters can bypass hers."
"If she had that, why--"
"If she's got an effect like that, she hasn't figured it out yet. I imagine investigating that sort of question is going to be one of her priorities in the near future. As for the additional power... there's a cost. No clue what, but she's very reluctant to use it. She took Siberian very seriously as a threat or she wouldn't even have considered it. Still, she'd break it out for the Triumvirate."
"... Who we don't actually want dead, right? We're on the same page on that?"
I rolled my eyes at her.
"Yes, Taylor. Better them than us, but much better neither. They're the backbone of the Endbringer defense and Tanya has absolutely no intention of taking over that role." I continued before Taylor could object. "She sees the fights as pointless. No upside and no possibility of victory. The Simurgh especially, since why would she take a fight she'd lose when she can see the outcome beforehand? You can try to argue with her about it, but I don't think you'll get anywhere. Don't even mention it to her men, no matter what."
Taylor sighed.
"I guess I'll try that, then."
I gave her a moment.
"Well, we know what we want. How do we get it? I had this idea about..."