Agrippa
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Wake-up Call – Chapter 95
🕑 Added 2023-09-06 01:18:50 +0000 UTCDays go by.
It’s an easy sentence, isn’t it? Three words. Three syllables. Three sounds. The bare minimum to say that life goes on, no matter how you feel about it doing so.
And… sometimes? It is that easy.
Bantering with Alec as Rachel steadily improves on her culinary pursuits. Helping Brian overcome the last bureaucratic hurdles he needs to pass before his sister becomes his official responsibility. Joining Taylor on a few walks when Rachel decides that we’re both ready to take her dogs out, then categorically refusing to join Taylor on her runs, no matter how much the dogs seem to want me to come along…
It paints a nice picture. A relaxed life. An everyday thing that most parahumans give up on long before the day that marks them as irrevocably damaged.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come in?” she says, squeezing my hand.
And I look down at it.
At Taylor’s long, enticing fingers. At the gentle, caring touch that turns briefly possessive when I delay on my answer.
“You can if you want to. But I think you should go see your father,” I finally say.
Her mouth twists in an unpleasant quirk that she tries to hide from me before realizing how futile it would be without having engaged her anti-Thinker tactics beforehand.
And then she pouts.
“It’s… I don’t even know what to tell him,” she says, her free hand going through her hair with more frustration than the sensuality the gesture deserves.
“That you’re moving in with your fiancée?” I helpfully suggest.
She may have differing opinions on my helpfulness, though, given the flat gaze my inquiry gets me.
“We don’t even know where we’re living. You have an apartment, a recently refurbished apartment, but you’re somewhat set on living with Rachel and Alec, with Brian possibly bringing his sister along for the ride, seeing as secret identities are so prone to becoming not-secret when family’s involved, and—” she says, going on a rant as her fingers tighten around my hand.
And I kiss her.
Her lips are as soft as ever as I press against them, and she pretends to protest for a single moment before cupping my cheek and bending over me, making me look up as she dominates our few seconds of tenderness, almost turning them into something else.
But we’re in the small garden by the entrance of Brockton’s General Hospital, and our forays into public sex have yet to become this daring.
We aren’t even on the rooftop.
“You’ll know what to say when you meet him. You always do,” I tell her when she leans back, still looking down into my eyes, the sun coming from behind her shining bright lines between strands of black hair.
“That is very unhelpful advice,” she mumbles.
“It wasn’t advice. Just the truth,” I say.
And then, with as bright a smile as I can, I let go of her hand and take a step back, waving goodbye at her with my fingers and pretending to be perfectly all right with going alone into the hospital.
As soon as I turn around, I drop the façade because things may be draining enough already without having to add a fake pretense on top of it.
So I walk into the white building, past the sliding glass doors that were quickly replaced after Bakuda’s last rampage.
And I can feel Taylor’s eyes on me the whole time.
***
I’ve come here often enough. So often that I don’t have to follow the signs of the brightly colored lines on the floor that lead everyone to where they should go.
That I don’t have to check on what floor I’m stepping out of the elevator.
That I don’t have to second-guess what intersections to take in the labyrinthine building, going down corridors that are always wide enough for at least two stretchers to roll down on.
It takes a few minutes to go from the lobby to Colin’s room. Barely noticeable.
Except it is.
Except it’s a pause where I can’t bring myself to take up my phone and distract myself from thoughts I’d rather silence. A time when I don’t feel the urge to reach for Power and futilely ask yet again about the chances that today will be the day.
I promised Dinah I’d not ask her.
Despite herself.
Because… It’s one thing to ask Power, but Dinah? What if she told me something I didn’t want to hear? What if she told me that struggling was worthless? What if…
What if she told me there was almost no chance at all, that I shouldn’t try, that it would be fruitless…
And I listened?
What if, then, I spent the rest of my life asking myself about that tiny, insignificant, mathematically irrelevant chance that I let go of?
And I know it’s stupid. I know she could have helped with my plans as much as she helped me defeat Behemoth. I know all of that.
But… But there’s something about knowing things that isn’t always as straightforward as it should be.
And so I conclude my minutes of uninterrupted thought for the day right as I reach a green door with a small window.
And I open it.
Dragon and Hannah are there, by his side, the wide window letting the sun in behind them even as Dragon stands with her hand on the backrest of Hannah’s chair, and I smile in greeting before going to the unoccupied side of his bed.
We could talk. We could share whatever it is that we’re going through.
And we have. Plenty of times.
But… sometimes it’s just this. Just a silent greeting and then standing around until one of us feels the need to fill the silence.
Dragon’s warm eyes meet mine, and I know that, human as she is, she still isn’t used to this. To so many unstated things that one learns both from instinct and social interaction. That she mimics out of knowledge rather than an intrinsic need for them.
But in mimicking, she adopts them. She experiences them. She’s molded by them.
And becomes that much more human.
As hard to believe as that can be.
“How are you holding up?” I ask Hannah.
She looks away from Colin and meets my eyes, a smile on her face that is a bit exaggerated after training to make it visible past a bandana for so long. It’s… It’s easy to believe it’s a fake smile, but it isn’t.
It’s just hers.
“Better. Minnie has been… Well, has been a bit less Minnie than she usually would be,” she says with quite a bit of fondness.
“That sounds like a travesty,” I say with a bit of a smirk.
Hannah snorts.
“Yeah. Yeah, it really is,” she says.
And then she goes back to staring at Colin’s closed eyes, and I can easily guess what goes through her head. How she imagines the usually deadpan man interacting with Mouse Protector, of all people. How they would drive one another up the wall, and how likely it would be for him to unintentionally add an acrobatic teleporter to their domestic routine.
Dragon meets my eyes and rolls hers, telling me that she knows exactly where my mind has gone.
“You tell me that’s unlikely. Come on, I dare you,” I say.
Hanna blinks up at me, realizes that I’m talking to Dragon, and, quite rudely, rolls her own eyes.
“I wish you’d stop doing that when there are non-Thinkers around,” she says.
“You are a Thinker,” Dragon immediately answers.
“All right, let me rephrase things: I wish you would stop doing that when Thinkers who can’t act as functional telepaths are around,” the tanned woman says, the eye-roll a bit harsher.
“That limits the possibilities too much,” I interject before this turns into a couple—throuple—thing. “How about we compromise, and I tell you that I was guessing that you are thinking about Colin, Minnie, explosive chemistry, and the possibility of your menage-a-trois turning into a quatre, that Dragon then guessed about my own projections for such a scenario, and that she tried to clumsily redirect my attention by accusing me of having a dirty mind?”
Hannah blinks at me.
Dragon facepalms.
And I could easily imagine that Colin’s eyebrow twitches.
“Minnie is one of my oldest friends—” Hannah starts—
“So was Chevalier,” I helpfully point out.
“—and I’m pretty sure she isn’t into women—”
“That’s patently false,” I say.
“—which would make—wait, what?!”
Oh, I live for moments like this.
“Mouse Protector has been hiding her bisexuality from you since you were teenagers and she felt horribly awkward about sharing a shower with you,” I say, my grin spreading.
Dragon, yet again, facepalms.
And Hannah gawks at me.
“Wha—Minnie? But—I… Minnie?” she, more or less, says.
“Oh, yes, Minnie. The girl who always managed to stretch in front of you when you had physical training together. The one who used to ask you for help to reach just a bit lower. The one who was a very clingy drunk, but only with her very best, perfectly Platonic friend, Hannah,” I say, listing things off my fingers as the most famous heroine in the city blushes deeper and deeper.
“Wha—bu—Minnie?”
“Hot, isn’t she?”
“I… Uh… Yes… But… Minnie?”
I smirk.
Dragon groans.
“She’s lying through her teeth,” my currently least favorite maternal figure says.
“What?” The one tied at the top asks, blinking at the woman that she is currently entangled in, even if in a way that none of them have quite formalized.
“What the wet blanket here‘s trying to say, even if with less panache and showmanship than I would’ve preferred, is that I’ve yet to meet Minnie and haven’t had the mental space to investigate her over the past few days, so there’s absolutely no way I could know whether or not she’s a closeted lesbian, bi, or particularly into you,” I say.
Hannah, yet again, turns toward me.
This time, a bit more miffed than baffled.
“Why would you do that—” she starts.
“Because I love you,” I say.
She blinks at me, then at Dragon, then back at me.
“Lisa, as much as I—”
“Platonically. Much to Victoria Dallon’s future frustration, I’m basically Taylor-sexual, and I think I’ll keep being so in the future.”
“Ah,” she says, deflating with a quite offensive sigh of relief as she visibly sinks into her chair.
“So, as I was saying, because I love you—”
“And you can’t help hurting the ones you love?” Dragon asks with an innocent lilt in her tone that fools absolutely no one.
“And I haven’t met Minnie, but I have met Hannah. So, yeah, I know who felt awkward in those showers. I know whose eyes lingered on a bent-over, gymnast-level body. I know precisely who always made sure to be there to care for a messy drunk. I know who needs a little nudge to come to terms with what she’s feeling.”
Hannah stares at me.
“Why?” she finally asks, taking advantage of the pause Dragon and I have given her.
And I…
I take the folding chair resting by the door to the room’s wardrobe, the one that Colin is definitely not taking advantage of, and I set it by the head of his bed before tiredly taking a seat.
His hand still has the plastic tubes coming out of it, but, at this point, it’s easy for me to take it between two of mine without disturbing them. Without tripping the alarms connected to too many sensors to properly care for.
I learned what they meant on my first visit with Power’s help.
We shouldn’t have bothered: they mean there are no changes.
“Because…” I finally start to answer before I force myself to lift my eyes away from pale, cool, thin skin and up into those of the woman holding his other hand. “Because I don’t know what Minnie feels, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. But I know you. All of you. And there’s nobody in this room who doesn’t want you to be happy, Hannah, no matter how complicated that will make their lives in the future.”
I let the words hang in the air for a moment, Colin himself the perfect reminder of why it’s so important that heroes, of all people, reach and grasp for the happiness in front of them before they can regret wasted time.
Wasted chances.
Wasted lifetimes.
“You only say that because it won’t be you stuck in a foursome,” Dragon says, pretending to grumble and doing a very poor job of it.
“We… We haven’t—we haven’t even decided that we’re a trio,” Hannah says.
And the hand on Hannah’s chair moves to her chin, dragging her face up to meet intense eyes that more than live up to Dragon’s moniker.
And that’s before she leans down and kisses her.
It’s long. Intense.
Or, at least, it seems to be.
Because they’re framed by the long window, the tall buildings of this part of Brockton Bay turning the skyline behind them into a spectacle of blue and yellow sky, the sun shining around their meeting lips as Dragon holds Hannah, and Hannah holds Colin.
It’s almost a fairy tale. The dragon kissing the princess as their knight sleeps a cursed sleep.
I squeeze his hand and blink away something that itches and stabs.
“I did. I decided,” Dragon whispers.
And Hannah, her lips still open, her eyes wide in astonishment and something else…
“I thought you…”
Her eyes go back to Colin, but they don’t stay on him for long.
Dragon smiles. Something soft, warm, and tinged with sadness.
“I love him. I loved him for longer than it took me to understand that I was capable of it. And that love grew and shifted with time, as I keep understanding more of him and myself.”
Hannah nods as far as Dragon’s fingers on her chin let her.
And the most powerful Tinker in the world closes her eyes, shying away from her second lover.
“I used you to—”
“No,” Hannah says, cutting her off, harsh but not unkind. “You didn’t use me. We agreed.”
They don’t say anything for a moment that stretches long enough that I feel I’m intruding. That this is a moment I shouldn’t be a part of.
But… Emotions. They don’t care much for circumstances.
And I’d rather not break their moment with misguided consideration.
“Hannah,” Dragon says, licking her lips in what doesn’t come off as the nervousness she finally feels as she lowers herself to one knee. “Whatever we started as… I learned to love Colin. As I spent time with him. As I understood more of him. As I discovered more and more things to love about him. And I… I have spent a lot of time with you.”
Hannah’s eyes glimmer, and her mouth quivers.
Then she tries to speak, and only something strangled comes out. Something that should be words, but…
But end up with Hannah leaning forward and down to return Dragon’s kiss with a sobbed, joyful, wordless exclamation that is cut off by the meeting of their lips.
By two women knowingly in love kissing one another.
Took them long enough.
So I avert my eyes, letting my own smile come upon my lips as I look at Colin’s hand between mine. As I imagine the world he will wake up to and how much more joyfully, messily complicated it will be.
How he will grumble and protest as he’s forced to be happy despite his best efforts.
I squeeze his hand, yet again noticing how the slight callouses and scars of a lifetime of tinkering have gone away, how the healers at the battle took that little piece of history from him, even if one that he’d likely be thankful to lose.
Because it’s inefficient. Because callouses need to be kept at bay so they don’t go from useful protection to actual nuisance or painful impediment. Because scars tighten the skin without offering any benefit to a man so obsessed with being at his very best at any possible time for whatever circumstance he may be needed.
That’s something most people miss about Colin. Yes, he’s an efficiency Tinker, and that shines through in his character, but… But that’s not the actual piece needed to understand him.
The key is that efficiency is a meaningless metric by itself. It’s the goal that determines if the means are adequate.
And Colin’s goal always was about what he could do for others.
So he’ll be happy if the people he loves are happy. He’ll enjoy Hannah and Dragon loving one another as much as they love him. And he may even learn to tolerate an embodiment of chaos and bad puns occasionally joining their bed if Hannah’s long-time crush goes anywhere.
He will.
Please, please, let him—
There’s a brief knock on the door, and then it opens to let a middle-aged doctor in.
“Panacea has entered the building. She says she’s ready to try,” he announces with no inflection.
With the careful lack of emotion of a doctor about to witness an unprecedented procedure.
And this is it.
This is why I come to visit at this hour, around when Arcadia’s classes finish for the day, when the sun is low enough to come in through a wide window and between two women who’re trying to look calm and composed.
This is why I stand up and walk in front of a man who isn’t quite clear on who I am nor why I’m here so often.
“I need to talk to her,” I say.
Because this… What comes after this…
It’s what I’ve been aiming for since before Behemoth’s attack.
