Agrippa
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Wake-up Call – Chapter 97 – Disarmed
🕑 Added 2023-09-20 05:14:32 +0000 UTCColin Wallis
“I’m so proud of you,” Mom says, sitting by the side of my bed, holding my hand, smiling down at me with tears held back in her eyes, doing… doing what I’ve been doing to her for years.
Since she started losing herself.
“I’m trying to establish a baseline here; stop throwing him for a loop,” Panacea says from the foot of my bed, touching both my bare ankle and the disturbing, oversized model of a white brain floating on a tank fitted with a laser array that—huh. Those are my servos, so it’s meant for precise targeting—Dragon’s work, obviously, with the way it seamlessly integrates at least two other sources of tinkertech. Is this a prototype biological read-write memory? Though the use of optics to both stabilize, write, and read may present difficulties if—easily degradable? Inherently unstable? Brains prone to—
Oh.
Mom.
Mom, looking down at me with her eyebrows furrowed, and…
Her skin is smooth.
Her hair is not dyed, just her natural, dark blonde shade.
Just like she looked when I left for college and before I got the one call that destroyed everything.
“Thank you, Panacea,” I say.
“I’m still not done. Your brain is flaring up like a fireworks factory that employs chain-smoking drunkards, and—”
“For her. For healing my mother,” I say.
The surly teenager (a not uncommon combination) looks up at me from the bottom of my hospital bed, past a thin, white sheet, and seems to struggle to come up with an answer to that.
Then she looks back at the contents of the tank.
“You’re welcome,” she grumbles. Refusing to meet my eyes.
… I shouldn’t tease her. Not while she’s still rewiring my own, firework-prone, brain.
“I know that look. Don’t,” somebody says with a tone that should be halfway to a scold yet is soft, gentle, and—
“Dragon?” I ask, my own voice almost breaking as I manage to focus my eyes behind my mother’s smiling face to find…
Her.
Here, with me. In the same room.
Not on the other side of a screen.
“Fucking soap opera junkies…” a surly teenager who clearly lacks parental guidance bites out.
And I don’t care.
“How… Here?” I say. Stupidly. Without any wit or—
She smiles.
And it doesn’t matter.
Nothing else other than the two smiling women—
“I’m feeling left out,” Hannah says, pushing past Dragon, walking around the bed and the tank to stand by my side. Like she always has.
Like I thought she always would.
And then, as I stare up at her, full of marvel and disbelief, she punches me right in my solar plexus.
“Ghk!” I claim in protest of her sudden betrayal.
“We were supposed to do it together, you jerk!” the mad woman wearing glowing knuckledusters says.
“What the—” Mom starts.
“Hannah, not the time—” Dragon continues.
“Together! We were supposed to face him together! And you went behind my back and recruited Minnie to keep me safe when you charged to your death! Do you even know how I felt when you—you jerk!”
Something warm blooms across my abdomen, and I regain my breath.
One point for surly teenagers with healing powers who may have suddenly become invested in soap operas, I guess.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I’ll assume that you’re being completely unfair and nonfactual in your accusations—”
A screen floats over me.
In it, I’m riding the Armscycle in the configuration meant for Behemoth, but one slightly tweaked beyond my latest iteration.
Hannah is sitting behind me, and I’m running down a wrecked street, surrounded by a bubble of—oh. I guess I did manage to hack that, after all.
“Told you it would work,” I say, barely toning down the triumphant grin—
“Keep watching,” Dragon answers as my mother’s hand tightens on mine.
And I do.
I watch… A battle. An Endbringer battle. Against the Hero Killer.
From beginning to end.
I barely react when the me I don’t remember throws Hannah to safety so that her oldest friend can shield her from the monster’s senses. But only because she’s here, angry at me, and that tells me that it worked, that I didsave her.
Even if I didn’t save myself.
I see far too many things that my past self did wrong. Ways in which the improvised Faraday cage could be supplemented, the suboptimal targeting of the ionizing lasers meant to divest lightning from its potency. Didn’t he even think about blasting rubble in front of the attack? A shockwave of void to at least blunt the effects of thunder? Rapid shifting of the time bubble boundary to destroy the continuity of the electric flow?
Anything?
Anything other than charging ahead like a fool, his weapon aimed at the monster, his…
His girlfriend behind him.
Death in front of him.
My hands clench around Mom’s and Hannah’s, and it takes a lot out of me not to do it too strongly.
But I keep watching.
As the plan unfolds. As Lisa, because who else could have, guides the survivors to achieve what should be impossible. To defeat Behemoth.
I feel too many things. The… The joy of victory, the baffling disbelief, the warm surge of pride.
It all leaves me about as breathless as Hannah’s punch.
“Never again,” she mutters.
“Hannah…” I barely answer, my eyes on the screen held up by Dragon’s drone showing how they piloted my armor toward the healers’ camp.
“Never again. You promised,” she says, her fingers squeezing mine when I don’t answer.
And I tear my eyes away from the screen, from the people desperately trying to save me, and look at her.
My vision is now clearer, whatever Panacea’s doing finally fixing my visual cortex, and I can appreciate all those details on Hannah’s face that I have slowly come to… love. The things I overlooked when we were friends and brothers in arms but are now so clearly extraordinary that I can’t believe I never just stopped to stare.
And there’s something about her fury that makes her all the more enthralling.
“So. The girl wasn’t lying,” Mom whispers.
“Not about this, at least,” Dragon honestly replies.
And whatever they say next is lost as I tug on Hannah’s hand and make her fall on top of me, the surprise in her eyes muted and then lost when I kiss her.
“I’m back,” I murmur after far too short a time, my hand now on her nape, my fingers buried in her hair.
“Never leave me again,” she answers.
And then it takes Dragon to pull her away from me as Mom giggles, and a part of my brain realizes just what kind of show I have just given my mother and the grumpy teenager who won’t badmouth soap operas in a while.
I think.
I should ask Lisa. I’m not entirely certain.
***
Lisa Wilbourn
I don’t join them.
I…
I am too tired. Too exhausted after days of grief and powerless plotting. After crossing one too many lines and not enough.
I could’ve done… I think I could’ve kidnapped Bonesaw.
I think I will. As soon as I decree just how badly Tagg needs a heart attack.
But that’s just one more thing to add to the pile of terrible ideas that will likely go away once I’ve had an uninterrupted night of sanity-mending sleep. Hopefully, one that will come after a litany of screaming orgasms the likes of which will convince Taylor to drag the two of us back to my apartment and away from Alec’s gleefully judging gaze.
Correlation between exercise and sleep quality—
Don’t make me laugh, you bastard. I’m too lazy for that.
Inconsistency between laziness and long periods of activity—
Look, it is the province of women to be as contradictory as they please. Just ask Hollywood.
Likelihood of accurate portrayals of conventionally sane individuals in cinematic depictions—
I’ve been telling people for years that Julia Roberts is actually trying to come across as a serial killer, but do they listen? Noooo.
Imminent interruption—
Oh.
Trying not to groan in protest, I sit up from where I’ve been half-looking at the monitors displaying what’s happened in Colin’s room over the past few hours. How he’s been reunited with his mother, his lovers, and… And no one else.
It was a family thing. As intimate an affair as it could be with Panacea there, still tweaking his mind, healing him as much as possible, regaining as much as she could of what would have been otherwise lost forever.
I owe her. So much.
Almost enough to turn Vicky bi—
Victoria Dallon—
I am joking! Jeeze, don’t even hint at me being able to bend sexuality; I already have too much temptation on my hands.
Absence of—
Right.
I stand up and brush down my shirt before turning back and straightening the sheets so it isn’t that obvious that I’ve been basically a boneless pile of leaked tension while voyeuristically participating in the joy of Colin—
“He’s waiting for you,” Dragon says from the door behind me.
“Gee, don’t you knock?” I ask.
And I don’t need to turn around to feel the answering eye-roll to my implication that we aren’t perfectly and constantly aware of one another’s movements and presence on this hospital floor.
But I still take a moment more to tug at the blankets, erasing the wrinkles left by my body on cotton sheets.
Licking my lips in anxiety.
And then I turn around and face the woman who looks just enough like her avatar that those who knew her before will recognize her.
Even if her nose and cheekbones are a bit more angular, her eyes bigger, her lips plusher. Even if Dragon basically refitted this body, herbody, after finally getting into a committed relationship and, presumably, learning about sex in a way slightly more involved than steamy chatrooms.
Ugh. Gross.
Dragon’s sexuality—
Gah! Fuck off! No!
Lisa Wilbourn’s puerile—
It’s not—look, nobody likes to think about… about certainpeople in those contexts, okay? Or, well, some people do, but let’s not dwell on that because, thankfully, there are no banjos in hearing range, and I’m about to go off on a rant, aren’t I—
“Lisa,” she says.
Softly.
Right in front of me.
And her hand rests warmly on my cheek, holding me steady right before she wraps me up in a hug that, unlike all those that came before it, isn’t tinged by desperation and loss.
“God, I’m so grateful,” she, the closest thing to a god other than Scion that we have, whispers into my loose hair.
“You did as much as I did,” I say, my arms tightening around her without me meaning to. Nor stopping them.
But she shakes her head, her short hair rubbing against mine, and it’s so wonderfully human that I could cheer for her just because of this tiny gesture that she hasn’t planned for.
“I didn’t even think about his mother,” she says, as if a guilty confession. “I… the way he just… softened. If I had suspected…”
I squeeze her a bit tighter before pushing her back. Not far, but enough for me to meet her eyes.
I think that, with time, she will enhance them with cybernetics. She will make this body into something utterly hers, that marvelous technology born of her extraordinary mind becoming an extension of her flesh.
But I don’t know if they will look any different when she does. If I’ll find myself looking into something other than painfully average yet still unique brown eyes, with all the highlights and shadows of shifting hues.
If she’ll look at me any differently. With anything other than this… warmth.
This pride.
I have to swallow an inopportune lump in my throat before I say anything, and I have almost forgotten what I was going to say when I do—
Dragon’s guilt—
Ah. Right. She’s being an idiot. Thanks.
“You’ve got the whole world on your shoulders, Dragon. You need to give yourself permission to be human before you crack,” I say, trying not to sound as patronizing as the words feel.
Going by her steadily raising eyebrow, I may have missed the mark.
“You, of all people, are telling me to—”
“Okay, I know this sounds like a case of the pot calling into question the miscegenation practices of the kettle’s ancestors, but hear me out—hey!”
My (very dignified, thank you very much) protest and subsequent struggle comes from Dragon, the most powerful Tinker in the world, a good runner-up for most versatile Thinker, an unchained AI, and the hero with the biggest measurable impact on the world giving me a fucking noogie!
“You darn brat, you’re going to take your own damn counsel and stop blaming yourself for not being omnipotent—”
“Help! Help! I’m being repressed! Come see the violence inherent in the system!”
“You—stop that! Don’t make me laugh!”
“Don’t be a fascist!”
“I don’t run the trains!”
“What are you two doing?” Hannah asks.
That, somehow, brings the physical struggle between two people whose powers don’t include a Brute rating to an abrupt stop.
It also leads to Dragon and I facing the door to the hospital room, where Hannah seems surprisingly baffled to see Dragon with her arm around my neck and the knuckles of her free hand poised in warning threat over the crown of my head.
“Bonding?” I offer as a likely explanation.
“I’m trying to distance myself from the maternal role that Lisa has assigned me now that her biological mother has returned, and I have decided that engaging in sibling-like behavior could be a good first step to maintaining the closeness of our relationship while shifting the underlying paradigm,” Dragon offers in a voice that’s perfectly calm and measured except for the slight shortness of breath.
I twist my head around to look up into her stoically emotionless, flushed face.
And I stomp on her foot.
It’s cute that, even then, she doesn’t swear.
***
After a few more not-so-baseless claims about Dragon being a deadbeat parent and Hannah muttering something that sounds suspiciously like frustrated praying…
I’m out of the room.
In the hospital corridor that I’ve traversed too many times.
His mother is in front of the closed door, and she smiles at me as soon as I see her.
“Thank you, Lisa,” she says, making me feel that awful embarrassment that comes from doing something that you know is good while still knowing all the myriad reasons you shouldn’t be getting any praise for it.
“Don’t mention it. I just… I know what it’s like to trigger due to family,” I say, offering her the same explanation I did when the light came back to her eyes as Amy cleared up all the things that had all but destroyed the now middle-aged woman in front of me.
As soon as she calmed down enough for us to explain the very basics of what was happening, Amy looked at me in a way that should have been indecipherable and then asked her what age she wanted to be. And Claire, Colin’s mother, the woman who raised him as best as she was able by herself, decided that she wanted to look the way she did when her son went to college. How she last did right before she started losing him.
Not in her twenties, full of vitality, and with her entire life ahead of her. Not an idealized version of her that never existed. Not… anything that she could’ve asked for.
Just…
How she was before their life was stolen.
And, just for that, I know that I’ll love this woman.
“Not for me. For him,” she says with something bitter in those lips of hers that are now expressive and responsive to her moods rather than…
Enough.
“He has done far more for me than I have done for him,” I say.
She shakes her head, that smile broadening as the bob of her shoulder-length hair sways around her neck.
“It’s not about how much, it’s about… Listen. There were days when I was just a bit better, and I recognized him. Those times, I saw even just a bit of how he was under the fake smiles and reassuring tone. And my mind is… you know how it is. There are memories that I’ll never quite regain, gaps and things that weren’t me, but I still saw, at times, that he was much better lately. That the last time he came to visit me…”
She drifts off.
And just looks at me.
At the girl who spent the time it took Panacea and Dragon to heal Colin bringing her up to speed, telling her all those things that Colin couldn’t have trusted her with while she was ill, her mind not her own.
Telling her that her son is one of the most important, bravest heroes on the planet. One of the guiding lights. The torches against the encroaching darkness.
… I may have embellished.
Because Colin isn’t perfect. Wasn’t perfect. Because, at the end of the day, he’s just a man who does the best he can, and that includes a lot of mistakes, a lot of misplaced focus, and messed-up priorities.
But… he’s her son.
And someone very important to me.
So, a bit of embellishment is a given. And all those things are true, particularly of a man who would give up his life just to further the plan of a girl he met not that long ago, who broke down when he fell, who begged the world to kill the monster who took him from me.
So I step forward, toward the woman looking at me, and she opens her arms in an offered hug before I even think about what I’m doing.
“Sorry. I’m a mess,” I mutter as I let somebody I’ll be very careful not to call Gran embrace me.
“Never apologize for this,” she mutters, not telling me what ‘this’ is supposed to be.
“I’m glad. Happy. I was… so afraid. So scared that it wouldn’t work, that you wouldn’t meet…” I continue, demonstrating how right I was with my earlier sentence.
“But it did. And we met,” she says.
And that’s all that needs to be said.
***
It takes me a while to disentangle myself from Claire, the woman’s smile a bit more sincere and effortless after she’s had the chance to inflict her maternal instincts on a deserving victim who isn’t a grown man.
And then…
Then I lick my lips once again, take a look to my right, where Hannah and Dragon look at me with silent encouragement, and then back to Claire and her painful gratitude.
It takes a lot out of me to grasp the door’s handle.
To twist it.
And then I open the door, and he’s sitting at the foot of his bed, recklessly ignoring his need to keep resting, and he looks back at me, startled out of whatever it was that he was doing to the array of lasers surrounding the brain-tank.
Wide eyes.
A beard kept trimmed and tidy by well-paid nurses.
Skin that is still too pale but no longer morbidly so.
And I don’t even realize when I run. When I jump.
When I crash between his open arms, and we fall on his bed, both of us hugging as hard as we can, unable to speak, unable to proffer anything but wordless emotions.
I cry, laugh, and everything in between.
And my Colin holds me.
Comments
Agrippa
De rien! (It fought me to the bitter end.)
Excellent chapitre, merci beaucoup 😁👍
