Leaf
Chapter Nineteen
Victoria stood outside her sister's bedroom door, feeling helpless. When the hospital had exploded, she had dug through the rubble desperate to find her sister, only for Amy to show up on television reading a hostage note. An hour later, Amy managed to send her a text saying that bombs had been planted in their home (they weren't, so Bakuda must have been bluffing), and Victoria had spent the whole night flying around the city trying to do something, anything to get her sister back.
Then she came back on her own. Miss Militia had rescued her, arresting Bakuda and killing Oni Lee in the process. She didn't know any of the details, because the only person who knew anything had locked herself in her room and wouldn't say more than two words to anyone, but ... but she had heard that the Undersiders had been involved.
"Leave me alone."
Oh. Three words. Progress.
"Talk to me, Amy," she said through the door. "You can always talk to me."
Nothing.
Not for the first time, Victoria wished she had more versatile powers, something that could help people after the fight instead of just pounding people into the dirt during it. Amy's wasn't as flashy as hers, but she did more good than anyone else in the city.
She considered calling Dean again. She had gotten most of her information about Amy's misadventure from him, who had gotten it from Vista, who had also been involved for vague reasons. But if she had to call her boyfriend for help with her sister, then ...
The door creaked open, and Amy stepped out in her Panacea costume. She eyed Victoria and edged around her, hugging the wall as though afraid to touch her.
She was wearing gloves. Why? Some Striker powers worked through clothes, but not Amy's. After everything she had been through, why limit herself now?
And she had certainly been through a lot. At the bank, that villain Tattletale had threatened to reveal some devastating secret, which Victoria would have challenged as a bluff if it weren't for the look of fear in Amy's eyes. Victoria hadn't pried into that afterwards, letting her broach the subject on her own time, but Amy had become a nervous wreck after Tattletale's escape from custody. The ABB kidnapping her and holding her hostage was just the most recent in a long train of disasters.
"Heading out?" she asked, faking a casual tone. No, that was bullcrap. "Are you sure you're ready for this?"
"No choice," she muttered, heading down the hall. "I already promised."
Typical. It was like she was trying to burn herself out sometimes. "Where?"
She hesitated. "Arcadia."
Victoria frowned. Class was canceled, but the school was currently housing the former ABB captives. They weren't in any real danger with Bakuda locked up, but they were taking advantage of the school's Faraday cage until they could get their bombs removed. Finding a safe way to remove them was Armsmaster's top priority, but keeping an eye on Bakuda was his top priority, as well as restoring order to the city, and half a dozen other disasters that needed to be dealt with.
"But that's brain surgery," she protested, following her. "You don't do brains."
Amy stopped at the front door, the back of her hood giving no indication of what was going on inside her head. "I do now."
Victoria froze. A week ago she would have been thrilled. A week ago, Amy wouldn't have touched someone's brain with a ten foot pole, claiming it to be too delicate or dangerous or ... something. Now? Now this all seemed wrong.
"And stop using your aura on me!" she shouted over her shoulder. "I hate that!" She slammed the door, leaving Victoria alone in the house.
"But," Victoria said to the closed door, "I wasn't."
WWW
"So here's the good news," Lisa said, sitting on the couch and putting her feet up on the coffee table. "You've been unmasked, but you haven't been outed. The PRT likes to play soft with us. If we start killing people, they'll ship us off to the Birdcage, but until then, they'll play ball."
Brian sat across from her, his arms resting against his knees. "So what does that mean for me?"
"Like I said, you're not outed. There's no warrant out for the arrest of Brian Laborn, the local paper isn't going to publish your secret identity, they're not even going to tell your family."
"Alright." After the bank, Aegis had spoken to him. The man could hit like a truck and had survived being used as a chew toy, but he had played the part of the good cop, asking him if he had wanted anyone informed of his situation. "So what's the bad news?"
Lisa took a deep breath. "Everything else. If they see you walking down the street minding your own business, they'll leave you alone, but if you step foot on their territory, they'll take action. That means the PRT building, police stations—"
"I'm not that stupid."
"And courtrooms."
His expression hardened, and he felt some of the life go out of him. Aisha. He had become a villain with an exit plan. He'd make some cash, more than he ever could with an honest job, apply for custody of his younger sister, then get out. Their mother had the maturity of a teenager, jumping from one boyfriend to another, from one high to another, and if Aisha grew up with her she'd end up the same way. When the boss had recruited them and formed the Undersiders, villain retirement seemed like it was only a few months away.
Then everything fell apart. He had lost one fight that he couldn't run away from, and everything he had worked for went down the drain. He couldn't argue a parking ticket, let alone file for custody. "So that's it."
Lisa took a deep breath. "Not quite."
He looked up at her. "There's more?"
"Shadow Stalker."
"I thought you handled that. You told Miss Militia about what she did." About some of it, at least.
She shot him a quick smile. "I'm a notoriously manipulative supervillain, remember? What do you think my word is worth?"
"But they'll investigate?"
She shrugged. "If they have to. Miss Militia has enough weight to throw around, so they'll try to keep her happy while moving as slowly as possible. There's no public scandal, so my guess is ... a quiet transfer in a month?"
Brian clenched his hands into fists. One month with someone who had tried to kill him before knowing ... "How much does she know?"
She shrugged. "Unless someone thought to restrict your file from her, and I wouldn't bet on that, I'd think everything. Who you are. Where you live. Your family."
A chill ran down his spine.
"I'm not saying she'll kill them. You dying mysteriously is a happy accident, but the PRT won't look the other way if civilians start disappearing, and that would put people's families on the table which is a whole other can of worms that no one wants to get into. But self control isn't her strong suit. She might stalk them. Talk to them. Maybe do more than talk to them."
Brian let out a breath. He felt ... suffocated. Powerless. He had to do something.
So he did. He put on his gloves, walked over to the punching bag, and began pounding it, again, and again, and again until he figured out what to do.
WWW
Amy spent the day in a haze. She received a patient, dissolved part of the skull, duplicated part of the brain, removed the bomb alongside the surrounding tissue, passed the bomb to a disposal expert, and received the next patient. And the next. And the next. She lost track of how many people came and went, forgot their faces, words of routine thanks. It was a dream, and she went through the day half asleep.
She returned home to an empty house. Most crimes occurred between six and midnight and the city was still recovering, so New Wave would be just starting the evening patrol. With the rest of the night to herself, the house to herself, she could do anything she wanted to. So she collapsed on her bed in her costume and tried to fall asleep.
It didn't work. Her brain felt agitated like it was full of static, and she knew that she would spend half the night too anxious to sleep but too tired to do anything else.
I'm falling apart.
Yes, but what else was new?
I should talk to Victoria.
A bad idea, but one that wouldn't go away.
She'll make me feel better.
She always did. And if something happened ...
Something clinked at the side of her bed, startling her. A plate. With a stack of pancakes on it. She stared at it dumbfounded until her brain started to catch up, and she noticed a little girl in her room, admiring one of the posters on her wall.
"You shouldn't be here," she said at last.
"I do lots o' things I shouldn't," Leaf said. She turned and gave her a weak smile. She wasn't wearing a mask, but Amy had seen her face before. "'Sides, I made you a promise."
"Did you?" Amy sat up and poked the pancakes with the fork. The stack had a mountain of whipped cream on top and was slathered with strawberry syrup. She remembered Leaf talking about pancakes, but she spent most of the time rambling about food in general, and she couldn't recall any specific promise.
Leaf shrugged. "Probably. Best be on the safe side with this sort of thing."
"This sort of thing being ... food?"
"Yup."
"You're a weird kid, you know that?" The whole situation was weird. She was talking to a literal super villain in her bedroom, who had brought her breakfast in bed in the evening to ... what? Make her feel better?
"And you're hungry."
"I'm not hungry, I just ... don't feel good."
"Yeah. 'Cause you're hungry."
Amy rolled her eyes, cut off a forkful, and stuffed it in her mouth. "Dere," she said around the mush. "Happy?"
Leaf grinned at her, either because she was eating or because she was talking with her mouth full. She seemed like the sort who would appreciate that grade of humor. It was pretty good, actually. Still warm. She took another bite.
"Though you really should go. If my family catches you here ..." Then what? She had taken down Bakuda in front of hundreds of witnesses, and her criminal record was mostly petty burglaries. She could probably walk by the PRT building, wave at the director, and keep going. But Carol was strict enough to put Inspector Javert to shame, and might have Leaf arrested for pancake theft, and Amy herself as an accessory.
Okay, that was an exaggeration, but not much of one.
Leaf sat down by the bed, her shoulder next to Amy's knee. "You doing okay?"
Amy stopped and set her fork down. "I try not to think about it."
She nodded. "You lost somethin' when you healed me."
"Yeah."
"You broke your rules. You broke yourself."
What did she know about rules? But ... "Yeah."
Part of her wanted to scream at the girl, to rant about how much healing her had cost her, that even though what Tattletale had made her do had saved hundreds of people, it wouldn't be worth it if ... if it led her to do something irreversible. But, hell, it seemed like the kid already knew. So they sat there for a minute in silence, Leaf leaning against her knee, Amy finishing off her pancakes, sating a hunger she didn't know she had.
"I saw you today," Leaf said, "with all the leftover people."
"Have you been stalking me?" she asked dryly.
"Nah, been casin' you." Like there was a difference. "You could have taken a day off."
She sighed. That was the sort of thing Victoria was always worried about while unable to understand, and Amy couldn't explain it to her. But Tattletale had ripped out all her secrets, and Leaf had been there listening the whole time. Besides, she was a healer, too. At this point, what did she have to lose? "I've never been able to heal brains before. I've never let myself heal brains before. I wanted to make the most of it before ..."
"Before you fall apart?"
She nodded. "Yeah." It wasn't a matter of if anymore, but when. She would do something to Victoria she wouldn't be able to forgive her for, something Amy wouldn't be able to forgive herself for. Something she dreaded, something she dreamed for. And then it would all be over, her place in the family, on the team, as a hero. Her life. It would have been better if Bakuda had blown her head off. Or if Tattletale had.
Leaf remained silent to let her speak more, but she didn't have anything else to say. "'Kay," she said at last. "I'll help."
"You'll help?"
"Yeah, like before. You cut, I regrow. Tell them guards not to arrest me, and we'll be done by lunchtime."
That ... that was a pretty good estimate. Turning brain tissue into a living bomb capsule was child's play for her, but recreating it meant drawing biomass from the fat and muscle cells throughout the body, and was at least ninety percent of the operation. For Leaf, it was as easy as breathing.
"Thanks, but—"
"Not done. Then you gotta go on vacation."
She blinked. "What?"
"Va-ca-tion. That's what boring old people call not working for a bit, right? Take a break, have fun. Travel. Go some place you've never been before."
"What? I can't go." Idiot, she thought. Dying is preferable to what you're going to do, but taking a break is too much? "People need me here. Even after all the people Bakuda kidnapped, there's still ..."
"Expectations?"
She shrugged. "Yeah." More like responsibilities, but responsibilities people expected her to fulfill.
Leaf nodded. "You stay in one place too long, people start expectin'. You try on a new hat 'cause you think it looks nice, and people recognize you by the hat and expect you to wear it forever even if you only wanted to put it on once. And if you take it off, they act like you're doing it to mess with 'em, to act like someone you're not, and they hate it 'cause now they gotta look at you instead of the hat, 'cause they know what a hat is, but people are weird and messy and don't make sense."
Amy blinked. "I ... think I get it." Which was a cause for concern in itself. But reputations were major issues as a cape, and a hero who committed a single crime could carry that black mark with them for the rest of their career. Names and costumes, too, even catchphrases. Then there was public perception. Victoria was the most focused, driven, intelligent person Amy knew, but commenters on her PHO threads always thought of her as a ditz because she was a beautiful, blonde teenager. Meanwhile, Amy was far less attractive and liked people less, so they thought she was the smarter of the two, when she couldn't think her way out of a paper bag.
And they expected her to heal them. Somewhere along the way, it had gone from, "I have these powers, so I should use them for good," to, "If I don't, I'll be letting them down." How was that fair? Why should thousands of strangers get a say in her life? She was a person, not a goddamn democracy. But they voted, she listened, and she had been stuck with their expectations ever since.
"I'll sweeten the deal," Leaf said. "You go off somewhere and have fun 'cause you've never done it before, and I'll stay here and be boring 'cause I've never done that neither. I'll go to hospitals and heal people, and you go where you've always wanted to go but never could."
The idea of Leaf making hospital rounds was ridiculous and potentially disastrous, but the idea of Amy leaving Brockton Bay and going ... "I don't know where I would even go."
Leaf shrugged. "Figure it out. The world's got loads of interesting stuff, delicious food you've never tried before. Flangria, lazbo curry, simberry jam, buildings made to look like giant cinnamon rolls, cities so high up in the mountains the Highstorms make the sky look like a big, fluffy carpet, blue people with shadows that point the wrong way, giant crabs bigger than your house, folks with eyebrows that go out to their ears, sea monsters, all waiting for you to find 'em and look at 'em."
"I'm pretty sure most of those are made up."
She shrugged. "Or maybe you should get out more."
She considered that for a moment, really considered that. The cynical part of her mind thought that if Leaf was going to hospitals and healing people in her place, then she'd have less time to commit crimes. The even more cynical part of her mind thought that this might be an elaborate plan. Maybe Leaf couldn't have come up with anything sinister, but Tattletale certainly could. To get access to the hospitals? To get Panacea out of the city?
Then the tired part of her mind spoke up, wanting to get it over with already. A vacation would only delay the inevitable. She had spent her whole life trying to do what was right instead of what she wanted to do, even though she always knew she would screw up eventually. Wouldn't it be better to just rip the bandaid off? To just ... give up?
But there was one last part of her mind that could still dream, and she dreamed of mountains, of forests, of distant countries, and of strangers. She never wanted to be a hero. She never wanted powers. She never wanted to be anything, but never had a choice. In a world of strangers, no one would know her, and no one could pressure her to do anything, be anything she didn't want to be. And for the first time in her entire life, she would be free.
Besides, it might give her enough time to put herself back together. And if there was just one chance of saving herself, when giving up would cost her everything, shouldn't she take it?
"Alright," she said at last, offering Leaf her hand. "It's a deal. You're a weird kid, you know that?"
Leaf took her hand, grinning, and with that physical contact her entire biology filled Amy's mind. She had seen the brains of countless people and dozens of capes, but Leaf's was the first one she had ever worked on. There was no Gemma, no Corona Pollentia, nothing that should have been able to grant her parahuman abilities. No abnormality in her head at all besides the small crystalline structures growing in her eyes.
"I ain't weird," she said in defiance of objective fact. "I'm awesome."
WWW
"Hey, guys," Lift said, strolling into the loft. "Did you miss me?" Brian was punching his punching bag, Alec was playing his video games, Rachel and her dogs were nowhere to be smelled, and Lisa was sitting on the couch with her laptop fabrial.
"Hey, Lift," she said, setting the fabrial down. "How's the basket case?"
She shrugged. "I promised to help her with cleanup tomorrow, so I think she'll be okay."
Alec paused his game and took his headphones off. "Cleanup? You mean community service? By choice?"
She held up her hands. "I'll make up for it. Promise."
"Darn well better. If we don't commit any actual crimes soon, we'll lose our villain cards for sure."
"I have a crime we can commit," Brian said, taking his gloves off. He had an intense look on his face, like he wanted to keep punching things but had work to do. He came to the middle of the room and looked at each of them in turn. "Who's up for a kidnapping?"
WWW
A/n Remember kids, if crime isn't solving your problems, do more of it! And if that doesn't work, try pancakes. This was more of a breather episode, running down from the last arc and setting up the next one, but it needed to happen.
My personal headcanon of the unwritten rules is that they're more a theory Lisa came up with when noticing how capes did so many things that didn't make a whole lot of sense more than an iron law. But she told her theory to Taylor, who took it as an iron law (mostly), which led to much of the fandom adopting a stricter adherence to those rules. At that point, Lisa was trying to convince Taylor that it was okay to do crime because it's really just a game of Cops and Robbers. Here, Brian's family's lives are on the line and at the mercy of a psychopath and a soulless bureaucracy, so she's presenting her theory as a set of unwritten guidelines instead.
My second personal headcanon (or I guess first because it showed up earlier) is about how much of Amy's problems are her own, and how much of them are the fault of others. I've seen stories blame Victoria for using her aura on her all the time, and others blame Carol for being a terrible adoptive mother. There's a story to be made there, but canon is a lot more vague. In Victoria's interlude, Amy accused her of using her aura on her, but Victoria denied it. Was Victoria lying? Was Amy mistaken? Amy complained about Carol a few times, and at one point I think Carol blamed herself for not doing a better job, but lots of teenagers complain about their parents, and lots of parents blame themselves for their kids' choices, and neglect does not always mean abuse.
So it's vague, and it largely depends on what story is being written. If it's a story about Victoria trying to help her sister, then it's helpful for her to take responsibility and change herself. If it's about Amy trying to help herself, blaming others isn't all that productive.
But that's largely a side tangent, and with Amy likely to spend the next month in Paris or somewhere selling thousand dollar massages on the beach, her personal and family issues won't be so plot relevant.
This chapter has been edited by Eschwartz and HanChenYou, and it would have looked much sillier without them. As always, I'd like to thank my Patrons Exiled, Prime 2.0, Sphinxes, Kelsey Bull, Hubris Prime, Janember, Yotam Bonneh, Svistka, Lord of Edges, LordXamon, Victoria Carey, Kurkistan, Bernie McGuire, Christopher Harris, Luminant, and Jan, and finally, I would like to thank you, my readers, without whom this story would be utterly pointless. Thank you, and have a very merry NaNo WriMo.