It's nice. It's always nice.
“Why did you leave the city in the first place?”
I almost don't hear her, her words are so quiet. When they register, I tense up out of habit. “Why does it matter?”
“You never told me.”
“I didn't?”
“You changed the subject a lot. Usually with your tongue.”
I frown. “I suppose that option is right out the window in this particular instance.”
“Yeah,” she says with a laugh, eying my currently male body with thinly veiled revulsion, “you might want to save that gambit for when the shit's really flying, baby.”
“Hazel –“
“Tell me why you left. That's my price.” She lifts her gaze to mine then, steely and determined. Her grip tightens on my hands, and it's obvious she's not letting me go anytime soon. I can stay silent but I won't walk away from this. “Was it because of your dad and Morris? Did you just have some mental breakdown that crashed and burned so badly you couldn't teleport? You're not secretly on psychotropic drugs you never bothered to mention to me, are you?”
“Yes, because I could have so easily hidden them from you for that year and a half we lived together,” I joke.
Her expression is steady and serious. “Vera, I'm trying.”
I nod. I know she is. I know she's attempting to take baby steps on the whole superhero thing, to dip her toe into the water without freaking out, but that doesn't stop this from being difficult.
“I took another girl as my date to my senior prom.”
I pause for so long after saying it that Hazel frowns. “That's it?”
I shake my head, plunge ahead before I can stop myself. “I wasn't allowed according to the school's rules, but I did it anyway. Mariel was … well, for starters, she wasn't a guy, and she wasn't a hero, and she wasn't rich or beautiful or anything else my parents would stand. She helped her dad repair motorcycles at his garage. She went to a public high school, had a couple of tattoos, was tough but nice.”
Hazel's smile grows, a sweet wild thing. I can't say I don't have a type. “I think I would have liked her.”
“I think you would have torn each other to shreds,” I say, unable not to tease.
She shrugs. “Yeah, probably.”
“My parents never hassled me about who I was. Not once. Not anymore than they would have if it were simply boys I was attracted to. Even when I had to go to movie premieres and club openings in designer dresses that were too small, I never once heard that I wasn't allowed to do so with a woman on my arm.”
“So you left because you were happy?”
“I left because my dad had my prom picture on the desk in his office at his apartment. The one he moved into with Morris.” I stare at Hazel for a long moment, hoping she understands why it bothered me so much to see that photo on constant display, me in a frothy pink monstrosity my mother picked out, Mariel in a tailored suit with her short hair slicked down and dyed Manic Panic red. “I brought my girlfriend to the prom and I took a stand and they let us stay. They let us stay and nothing happened.”
I felt like something should, though, that a shoe should drop sooner or later. A few weeks later when I saw my parents faking a loving marriage for the cameras before the smoldering lobby of the Rafters while my father sported a deliberately benign expression, I decided that if anyone were going to drop a shoe, I'd much rather it be me.
It is not my fault that my father left my mother for Morris. It never has been.
But when you can look at a prom picture and imagine an entire city of angry citizens pointing their torches and pitchforks your way for inspiring one of their greatest heroes to run off with a notorious supervillain, maybe it's time to take your ball and go home.
Or, more aptly, away from home.
Hazel's sharp, just like she always is when it comes to me. “Vera –“
A swimming sensation whirls through my head, funneling through my mind and bringing me to my knees. Hazel clutches onto my elbow, a sorry attempt to keep me upright. “Vera?”
A moment later, my consciousness flickers and blacks out.
I come to in my own body once again with hot water spraying directly into my face.
I shove at the shower head and stumble backwards, unable to stop my disoriented body from grabbing for my surroundings as though they'll vanish in a heartbeat if I don't. I'm wet and slippery with soap bubbles, so it's a shock I don't completely topple to the bottom of the tub and slam my face into the porcelain.
Outside, a familiar cheerful whoop fills the air, almost smothering a low muffled grunt of pain.
I want to cheer about being back in my own body, resplendent in soft rounded flesh and thrilled to have my breasts back. Instead I switch off the water and quickly dry off before throwing on a pink terrycloth robe. Nate managed to turn on the water and stand underneath it but didn't even get a chance to grab the shampoo, so my hair hangs damp, limp and still rank over my shoulder.
I tighten the belt of my robe around my waist and throw open the door to the bathroom.
Hazel's backed away from Nate, her brow furrowed in confusion as he hoots and hollers with no consideration for the little girl napping on my couch. Troy, meanwhile, is slumped onto the floor next to the couch, not moving.
I ignore the others and go to him first, and my breath hitches when I get closer and see his fingers pretzeled at unnatural angles.
It doesn't make any sense, and makes a boatload of sense all at the same time.
I've seen what the remote watchers at the SLB can do when their rules and regulations are broken. Off somewhere even my vaunted all-powerful father can't mentally locate is what I've always imagined to be a small windowless room full of people too powerful to be heroes but not ambitious enough for common criminal villainny. They sit in their drab little cubicles and watch the whole damn lot of us, boring themselves into an early grave witnessing our check-balancing and laundry sorting.
Every so often they catch us in a crime, spot us using whatever phenomenal cosmic power they possess as we rescue without a license or wield our powers with reckless endangerment outside of our current security level.
Sometimes you receive a ticket in the mail. Sometimes you collapse in agony in someone else's living room, swimming back to consciousness to find your arm broken or a warning tattoo etched into your arm.
And sometimes … well, sometimes the outcome is so much worse.
I reach out to touch him out of instinct, but pull away when I notice the odd angle of his neck.
“Troy, wake up,” I order.
He doesn't move. His eyes, glassy and hollow, stay fixed and open in their sockets.
“Troy?” I ask. My voice cracks like punched glass.
A torn piece of notebook paper lies on the floor next to him. Hazel mutters a low curse under her breath as I pick it up and read the words hastily scribbled onto it.
I nearly drop the paper at the simple brief sentence.
Vera and Nate return to their own bodies right now.
The period nearly presses a hole through the lined paper. The eerily bright green ink of the circle spreads outward, the point of the pen apparently shoved down on the paper with excessive force.
He'd pushed his will into his words, and he'd
wanted
.
“I didn't know the Scribbler had a son,” I hear myself say.
“He didn't.”
I teleport in place out of ingrained reflex, reappearing in a standing position facing the unfamiliar speaker rather than struggling to my feet from my awkward crouch. Now it's Nate's turn to curse, a crass gesture I don't blame him for. Once I see the uniforms on the three men who've materialized in my living room, even I'm tempted to let loose with an impressive string of uncharacteristic slurs.
“Mr. Lampwick was not the son of the Scribbler,” one of the men says in an official tone of voice. His navy blue SLB-issued uniform sports a label which declares in dark red lettering that his name is Dr. Morioka, and through the dull fog in my mind I immediately know why he's there. He's a doctor. Doctors retrieve the bodies. “The Scribbler doesn't have any family,” Dr. Morioka continues. “Mr. Lampwick's powers being similar to his was merely a coincidence.”
Listening to him talk about Troy in the past tense forces bile to rise in my throat. “You didn't have to kill him,” I murmur. My voice doesn't seem to want to rise in volume, and my throat suddenly feels like it's been sandblasted.
Dr. Morioka's smile is gentle but firm. “There are laws, Miss Noble. And Mr. Lampwick understood them when he agreed not to use his powers.”
“He uses his powers all the time,” I snap. “All he does all day is sit in my cafe and write.”
“Have you ever actually looked at what he wrote?”
I pause, unable to answer one way or another. Troy said they were stories, but he never let me read them.
Dr. Morioka takes advantage of my sudden silence to rest his hands on my shoulders and calmly move me aside. I faintly recognize Hazel's angry “Hey!” which I can only presume is due to me being treated like an obtrusive piece of furniture. But I don't protest, not even when the other two men unfurl a body bag and lay it out on the living room floor next to Troy.
I know better, after all. Troy merely used his powers and they killed him. I don't want to imagine what terrible fate will befall me if I start an argument with them.
“What was he writing?”
Dr. Morioka stops directing the other two men through binding Troy's limp fingers together, which I guess is meant to keep him from accidentally scratching a story into the sturdy plastic body bag. “Pardon?”
“Troy,” I say, and his name croaks out of me. “What was he writing?”
“Oh, that.” Dr. Morioka waves a dismissive hand in the air. “Grocery lists, mostly. Nothing that caused any serious damage.”
Nate's fists clench at his sides when he finally pipes up. I silently pray that he doesn't decide to throw a punch, although a morbid part of me wonders what they'd have to do to take out Nate for good measure. “Now how in the hell does returning Vera and me to our own bodies fall under serious damage?”
Dr. Morioka's professionally polite facade slips a tad before he firms up his smile again. “Mr. Lampwick's subsidy did not allow for emergency situations. Nor did it allow for him to use his abilities in cases when there were already heroes available to solve the issue at hand. Now, if you'll excuse us, we must transport the body to the morgue before rigor mortis sets in to ensure he doesn't permanently gesture something dangerous in sign language. We'll return to complete the clean-up process shortly. Thank you for using the Superhero Licensing Board for your disposal needs.”
“Wait –”
A blink of my eyes later, the three men and Troy's bagged body are gone. I'm impressed at their speed even for a teleporter. My head feels like I stuck it in a laundry dryer, a pounding headache growing behind my temples. The last few minutes swirl around me like a dizzying tornado. My stomach churns, and I wonder for a moment if my memorial to Troy will be me heaving my guts into my toilet for the next half-hour.
Dead. Troy is
dead.
Oh, Lord, I really am going to throw up.
Heavy hands weigh down on my shoulders, and it takes me a moment to recognize Nate's smooth palms on my skin. It's strange, how calming it is to know Nate is there, to hear Hazel sniffling in the kitchen. “Breathe, Vera.”
I inhale, then exhale. I'd been holding my breath.
“Again.”
Inhale. Exhale.
“Again.”
“No, I'm good. I just –“ I bend my head and close my eyes. “I need a moment.”
Nate leans close to whisper in my ear. “A moment's all you get, peaches. You know that, right?”
Breathe, Vera.
“I know.”
I can't stand here forever. I can't even stand here for five minutes. My powers still simmer too low to use, and probably won't reach a good boil for a while. I can't hold off preparing to go into battle so I can stare at the floor and show respectful mourning for Troy's sacrifice.
I have to go shower. I can go feel bad in the bathroom.
If there's one thing I learned as a little girl at my mother's knee, it was how to compartmentalize during times of strife.
“I can do that, too.”
Nate and I both look up to see Sierra peering over the side of the couch at us, still tucked up under the blanket, her gamine brown eyes peeking out over the silk-bordered edge. “Swap people, I mean,” she says in her soft wee voice.
“You can?” I ask.
She nods as best she can with her head still down.
There are reasons I don't want children. My patience only lasts so long, wearing thin more quickly than a two-dollar pair of pantyhose. My anger flares like sunbursts. I don't have a pet because I knew the first chewed-up shoe or pile of cat vomit will have me contemplating bringing it back to the store. Lord only knows how badly I'd react to filled diapers or regurgitated breast milk on my favorite dress.
I stare at Sierra for a long moment, my expression deceptively serene, while a vicious voice in the back of my head hisses,
Troy died because of you
.