Vindication

Chapter Two

It's not my fault.

Panacea held the hand of a wounded cape. Red Eagle, from ... Houston? Somewhere around there. A lot of his innards had come out, and Panacea had to replace the ones that she couldn't put back in. He had been in pretty bad shape before Skitter's escape had knocked his gurney over.

On the other side of the curtain, she heard Armsmaster speaking to Legend.

"Thank you for your offer, but I do not think that will be necessary."

"Too bad," Legend said. "I would have liked to have some good come out of this."

Some good had come of this. Kaiser had died, along with some others of his team. Not enough to make up for Eric, or Niel, or Mark, or any of the other heroes who died, but it was something.

Not a single Undersider, though. There was no justice in the world.

"Yes, well, anyone willing to break the Endbringer Truce and start a fight in a hospital is unlikely to be Wards material."

Panacea clenched her eyes shut. She could have told him that. Anyone willing to hold innocent people hostage with deadly spiders was unlikely to be Wards material. Even if she could have been persuaded to sign on the dotted line, the heroes would have been worse off for it.

Trucebreaker. The lowest of the low. Some villains were tolerated because during an Endbringer event, they needed all the help they could get. People like Skidmark's gang who waited until the fight was over lost that, and villains who took advantage of the Truce to hurt their enemies ...

Panacea caught her reflection in an IV bag stared back at her, warped and distorted, and she forced herself to look away.

It's not my fault.

She ... she was tired. Two members of her adoptive family had died, and a third was catatonic. And, and dozens of heroes were still in critical condition, waiting for her or one of the other very few healers to come save them. She couldn't waste her time coddling one villain who just had to wait for another five minutes.

All she had to do was nothing, and she couldn't even do that!

It wasn't her fault that Skitter panicked and made a break for it, or that she had attacked Armsmaster trying to escape. Panacea had her own problems to deal with.

She finished sealing Red Eagle's abdominal cavity, double checked his vitals, and moved on to her next patient.

WWW

"So you're from another world."

Vin followed Taylor through the ruins of her city, stepping over shards of glass and broken metal. She kept burning tin and bronze to warn her of danger, and Taylor ... Taylor watched in her own way.

Skitter was an alias to go with the mask she wore. She pulsed with power in a soft, gentle rhythm, and she had her own way of keeping an eye on her surroundings. Bugs moved around her, gathering around her and spreading out in a sort of harmony, often crawling into her long, black hair without disturbing her. She led Vin through a shattered storefront window where, strewn across the flooded floor, were clothes.

"You don't seem very surprised," Vin said.

"I am." Her voice was distant and strained as she peeled her costume off of her, struggling with the wet, form fitting fabric. She stuffed it in a satchel that they had stolen from a previous store and rifled through the piles of clothes. "But that's a big problem, and you have too many little problems right now to worry about it. We both do. Pretty soon, everyone is going to come pouring out of the shelters to check on the damage, and scavenging will become that much harder."

Vin nodded. She needed to look inconspicuous, to look like she wasn't a ... trespasser? Interloper? She felt like she was back at her first ball, trying not to look like a skaa street thief in a noblewoman's dress. Only then, she'd had months of training and practice to play the role, as well as Sazed to look after her. Here, all she had was Taylor.

"Has this happened before? Traveling between worlds?"

"A few times," she said, trying on a coat. "Back in eighty-eight Professor Haywire tore a hole into Earth Aleph, which diverged from us about thirty years ago. I haven't heard of Earth ... what was the name again?"

"Scadrial."

"I haven't heard of Earth Scadrial, but if it's possible to travel from there to here, it's possible to go back."

"Not Earth Scadrial. Just Scadrial." Why was she bothering to correct her? It wasn't like it mattered. She picked up a coat off the floor that looked like Taylor's. Not identical, but the same drab coloring and loose fit. It was soaking wet like everything in this half-flooded store, but Vin put it on anyway.

Taylor had a point. She needed to survive on this world before she worried about getting back to her own. That meant knowing how things worked without revealing how little she knew. Nothing lured enemies like ignorance, and no one was as ignorant as an outsider. Right now, Vin was more ignorant than a child, and it showed.

"What happened earlier?" Vin asked. "The first thing I remember was a storm and there were ... those were capes? Capes all over the place, fighting something." The storm and the waves, the screams and the cries, they were all focused on that thing, centered on it like the vortex of a whirlpool.

Taylor went still. "That was Leviathan. An Endbringer."

Vin had never heard that term before. "Has that happened before too?"

She nodded grimly. "Happens all the time."

WWW

Looters soon arrived, making scavenging thrift stores too dangerous to continue. Well, other looters. Maybe it was hypocritical for Taylor to resent them when she was doing the same thing, but she had helped fight Leviathan. If anyone deserved to take what she needed from the ruins to survive, she did. Besides, she had no friends, no support, no home to go back to, and on top of everything else she had an interdimensional refugee to look after.

She still felt scummy, though.

Vin looked uncomfortable in her new clothes. She looked uncomfortable in her new world. She would get distracted and stare into the sky like she had never seen it before in her life—and from what she had told Taylor about Scadrial, that may have been true—but often she would watch everything around her with nervous agitation, as though expecting something horrible to try to hurt her without warning.

Taylor could relate to that.

They had searched for the neon orange coveralls of emergency responders to get directions to one, then two, then three slapped together shelters before they found one that had room for them. It was a warehouse that had been abandoned long before Leviathan struck, now filled with rows of cots with thin pillows and thinner blankets. No food and no electricity, but it was dry.

There was a line at the front desk to register their names for anyone who would want to find them. This was a women's shelter with families split right down the middle full of wives looking for their husbands and sisters for their brothers, but Taylor had skipped that. Who would even want to find her? The Undersiders? Yes, Bitch had saved her life, but Taylor had still quit the team. If Coil pushed them to go after her, would they be able to say no? It might be better to cut ties with them entirely. Easier. Safer.

And as for family ... that was another can of worms. She needed to go home—if her home was even still standing—and see if her dad was still alive. But even if he was, she didn't think she could just go back and pretend that the last few weeks had never happened. And if he wasn't ... well, then there wouldn't be anything to go back to.

She scribbled on a still damp notepad, one of the few things she had on her that she hadn't stolen, trying to get her thoughts in order. She'd tear it up and feed it to some cockroaches later, but for now it helped.

"Okay," she said at last.

Vin, sitting with her back against a wall, looked up at her.

"First things first, interdimensional travel. It's possible, but only barely. I mentioned Professor Haywire, and there are probably a few others, but you can't just get a bus ticket to another world. You'd need a tremendous information network to even know where to start."

"So I won't make it back this week."

A joke? Taylor couldn't tell. "No." If Lisa were with them, she'd be able to skip the information network and tell her what she needed on the spot, but she wasn't, and Taylor was going to have to work things out without her superhuman analysis. "You could try to join a group that already has what you need, but you'd have to trust them to help you out instead of taking advantage of you."

The only local factions that might fit the bill were the Protectorate and Coil. Coil would promise Vin anything she wanted, just like he had promised the Undersiders anything they had wanted, but the last thing Taylor wanted was to steer Vin toward him. As for the Protectorate, part of her still whispered that sending Vin to the heroes was the "right thing" to do, but how much did she trust them? They looked the part of heroes, but it didn't take much to chip away that veneer and find people as petty and vindictive as everyone else.

The fact that Taylor had unmasked to Vin and told her her name didn't even factor into it. Vin could easily leave that out if she joined the heroes, and besides, the unwritten rules covered that sort of thing.

Of course, the unwritten rules covered Endbringer events too, and how had that worked out for her? The fight had started with Legend thanking the villains for joining the fight to save the city, and it had ended with Taylor chained to a bed, forced to either risk the mercy of a hero who hated her or to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.

She still didn't understand what had happened. Panacea had hinted that Taylor was being arrested, but if the heroes arrested every villain who joined the fight, the villains would stop showing up. Maybe they only arrest independents. Maybe they saw me standing alone in the beginning, and they knew that if they got rid of me, no one would care.

Regardless, the written rules made the heroes a bad choice for Vin. There were laws about dimensional travel, and the only reason Haywire's portal to Aleph was still open was because no one knew how to close it. The heroes might take her in, but they would never take her home.

And they were dicks, so there was that, too.

"Your best bet might be to strike out on your own. You'd need a name and a costume, but I can point you in the right direction. You'll need a new city to start out in. Brockton Bay has been pretty bad for a while, and it's going to get worse." Brockton Bay had been falling apart even before Leviathan, and Taylor doubted it would last much longer. Not a place for new beginnings.

Vin nodded. "I guess one Earth Bet city is as good as another. Could ... could you come with me?"

Taylor blinked. "Do you want me to?"

Vin gave her a look that would have been sardonic if she hadn't seemed genuinely confused. "I don't know anyone besides you, so there's literally no one else in this world I'd rather have with me."

Taylor almost smiled. It was ... nice to be around someone who wanted to be around her, if only because Vin was entirely ignorant of everything about her. It kind of reminded her of when the Undersiders had recruited her when all they knew about her was that they had saved her from Lung.

All Vin knew about her was that she had saved her from Armsmaster.

Then she thought about it. Brockton Bay wasn't a place for new beginnings, but maybe someplace like Boston or New York was, a place where she could accompany this girl on her otherworldly adventures.

That would mean turning her back on everything she had here, but what did that amount to, in the end? She had already turned her back on her dad, her home, and her team. What did she have left besides enemies?

Dinah.

She had guilt. She had regrets. She had ruined the life of one innocent little girl and had given her to Coil before she even knew what she was doing. The rest of her crimes she could forgive herself for. Robbing a bank? It was a villain cliche. Crashing a party? It had been a pretentious affair from the start. But right now Dinah was trapped, exploited, and begging for drugs that she never should have been forced to take, and it was all Taylor's fault. That was something—she was someone Taylor could not turn her back on, not now, not ever.

"No," she said, shaking her head. "I have ... some things here I need to take care of."

They fell silent for a moment. Nearby, a baby started crying despite the mother's exhausted attempts to quiet him down. Around the wide open room, people were gradually picking out cots to spend the night in. Taylor was tired, but too agitated to fall asleep. Normally she'd go out for a run when she was feeling like this, but that just wasn't an option right now.

"Really," Vin said at last, "I only need one thing. Where would I find a good metallurgist?"

Taylor blinked. "What for?"

"My powers don't work well without metal. They need to be precise alloys. Steel, pewter, that sort of thing."

Taylor hadn't asked her what her powers were, and Vin hadn't asked about hers either. They'd both had other things on their minds, but she didn't miss how deliberately vague Vin was being. There had probably been a few metallurgists in the city the day before, but would any be available now? "You'd need to go to another city and order it there. It might take about a week."

A week after figuring out how to order a piece of metal. A week after coming up with the funds to pay for it. What would take Taylor a week might take Vin a month.

"I'll make you a deal," Vin said after a moment. "If you come with me and help me get what I need, I'll come back with you and help you with those things you said you needed to take care of."

Taylor hesitated. "Are you sure? You don't even know what sort of trouble I'm in."

Vin shrugged. "It can't be crazier than the last job I was working on."

"What job was that?"

Vin bit back a smile. "My crew leader, a man named Kelsier, was a legend in the skaa underground even before he snapped. After he got his powers, he recruited me for the biggest heist ever pulled."

"A heist," Taylor said dryly.

"Yeah. The man wanted to steal an entire city."

Taylor stared at her, thinking of Coil's ambitions for Brockton Bay. "You're kidding."

WWW

The next day Vin stared out of a window, watching the landscape go by.

Green plants, she thought. Just like Kelsier said.

The bus they were in was nice too, but it boiled down to a big, fast carriage ride. The line at the station had been immense that morning, but with buses arriving every few minutes to carry people to neighboring cities, it had taken them only a few hours to get a ride. Inside, over fifty people filled the seats with the broken weariness that Vin associated with skaa laborers, but just outside, the wide open countryside grew more beautifully than the finest gardens of the Central Dominance.

"It just grows on its own?" Vin asked. "No one has to come and take care of it?"

Taylor glanced up from her book. She had visited her home that morning where Vin was specifically not invited, and had returned with money and some books. "Who would bother to take care of it?"

No one, but the idea that something so lush, so vast, so perfect could grow on its own seemed like something from a dream. Kelsier's dream. Kelsier had held the crew together through sheer charisma, but that charisma came from being able to dream the sort of thing that Vin was now seeing with her own eyes.

They passed by a forest of trees that grew tall and proud, opening up her view to a field of green that was speckled with gold, crimson, violet–colors that would overshadow the stained glass windows and finest gowns of Luthadel.

Flowers. Kelsier's picture hadn't done them justice. Sometimes even dreams fell short.

She thought about her home, about her friends in Kelsier's crew. What would they think when they couldn't find her? Would they think that she had abandoned them and their insane plan? Would they think that the Steel Ministry had captured her and was torturing her to make her betray the crew? Would they pull out of the job thinking that it was compromised? Would they rush it before it was too late?

Either way, it would be a long time before Vin made it back, if she made it back at all. Maybe she would be able to pick up some kind of Earth Bet weapon that could be used against the Final Empire. This world had some strange things that not even an immortal tyrant would see coming. But even if she came back today, she'd have some stories to tell.

WWW

A/n And that's the end of the chapter. Not a lot of action, but hopefully there was enough development in other aspects of the story to make up for it. One of the pitfalls I ran into during the earlier drafts of this and other Mistborn crossovers is finding Allomatically pure metal. It's incredibly easy to get distracted looking up the metallic composition of pennies, door knobs, and other common items and see if Vin can build anything with those resources before moving on to the rest.

Then I remembered that Taylor has two thousand dollars in cash in an Alexandria lunch box in her basement that she has never touched. I don't know how much customized metal ingots cost, but I'm pretty sure two grand can cover it.

Thank you so much everyone for your feedback. I have far too many projects going on right now, and sadly Vindication isn't even in the top three, but it's a fun idea that I enjoyed, and it seems that a lot of other people did too. Thank you, Exiled, for taking the time to edit this even when reality does its best to give you a hard time, and a special shout out to my Patrons, Exiled, Prime 2.0, Sphinxes, Kelsey Bull, Hubris Prime, Apofatix, Janember, Yotam Bonneh, Svistka, Lady Charon, LordXamon, Victoria Carey, and Bridie for supporting me and my writing.