Agrippa
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Wake-up Call – Chapter 93
🕑 Added 2023-08-05 01:23:41 +0000 UTCBreakfast.
Breakfast is… the most important meal of the day? Something like that.
It’s also, apparently, a way for Alec to emotionally blackmail me yet again into getting up early because otherwise, I’ll miss Rachel’s attempts at culinary excellence that often involve some kind of charred bread.
Today it’s blackened toast with fried eggs so overdone that the yolk has become solid. Also, a few more-than-browned sausages.
And bacon.
Which, really, only brings to mind the excellent, power-assisted bacon that Tay cooked to perfection in my apartment what feels like ages ago. You know, that place I used to stay at rather than the supervillain lair that I, for some reason beyond my ken, have been confined in since Behemoth’s fight.
Lisa Wilbourn’s emotional support base—
No clue at all. Truly, it’s a mystery why I’m staying here.
“Is everything all right?” Taylor asks as she uses her Orwellian power to discreetly slip some bacon to an eager Rottweiler who tries very hard to wag a non-existent tail.
“Sure,” I say with a weak smile that fools absolutely no one as I take the pitcher of freshly squeezed orange juice—okay, is Rachel planning to become a stay-at-home mother? Because this kind of display is rarely seen outside of TV shows with absolutely no regard to the logistics involved in feeding five hungry teenagers, never mind doing so in a timely manner.
And that’s for regular teenagers. You know, the ones that don’t have trauma-fueled superpowers.
Rachel Lindt’s frame of reference regarding healthy family interactions—
Sure, I’ll take a sidedish of relatable trauma along with Rachel’s not disturbingly TV-like breakfast. Thanks. That’s just what I needed to whet my appetite.
“The social Thinker, ladies and gentlemen, the one with powers that let her pretend to be a regular human being,” Alec says in a tone that, in anyone else, would be hurtfully sarcastic but is actually slightly below his average levels of snark.
“That’s not what my power does. It just lets me be insightful enough to know who has been hiding Angelica’s squeaky mouse toy in ever more creative places,” I say as I daintily pick up a stripe of crunchy bacon that’s about to be less fulfilling than the drama I just unleashed.
There’s a sudden silence around the breakfast table, only broken by my delightful, gleeful crunching of something that, while subpar when compared to Taylor’s culinary delights, is still bacon.
So, to sum up the scene? Taylor is looking at me with exasperation that may still hold some fondness, Alec in betrayal, Brian in terrified awe, and Rachel is not looking at me at all.
No, she’s looking at Alec.
…
Damn me and my bleeding heart.
“He only does it when he’s trying to watch something and doesn’t want to be interrupted,” I point out.
“He could ask,” she says after a long moment and barely turning toward me.
“He could. But, really, out of all the assholish things Alec does on a regular basis, not complaining to you about Angelica doesn’t even rate,” I say, studiously dismissive of the crisis I almost set off.
Why set it off in the first place if I wasn’t going to take advantage of it, you ask?
…
Because.
Lisa Wilbourn’s emotional attachment—
I wasn’t asking you.
Lisa Wilbourn’s unexplainable lack of insight into her own motives—
That was a joke! I know why I don’t want breakfast to devolve into an actual argument! I just…
Lisa Wilbourn’s need for external distractions—
Yeah. That.
“She’s doing it again,” Alec comments from the other side of the table to Taylor’s left.
“What, arguing with the voice inside her head? I am baffled at your bewildering guess. However can you come up with such deductions?” Taylor says before studiously taking a long sip from her cup of tea like an English villain who, somehow, decided that wearing red and black flannel pajamas was a fitting sartorial choice before receiving James Bond.
No, I’m not feeling petty. Shut up.
Lisa Wilbourn’s pettiness—
What part of ‘shut up’ don’t you understand?
“It’s mostly when she starts making faces,” Alec literally points up, waving a piece of toast in my direction. “See? Like right now, when she made that frustrated thing she makes when she’s gotten caught up in a verbal trap—”
“Are you really sure you want to keep prodding me? Because I know who’s been feeding bacon to Brutus despite his dietary restrictions,” I say.
Alec blinks.
Taylor very carefully doesn’t react.
“I don’t know what you’re—” my French Canadian nemesis starts to say.
Before he gets interrupted by a long, uncharacteristically articulate diatribe from Rachel on what bacon does to Brutus’ digestive tract and the subsequent dangers of walking him in a populated area.
This, somehow, and despite the undeniably scatological topic, lets me finish my breakfast in peace due to Alec confusedly defending himself from accusations that he’s for once innocent of, Taylor studiously doing her best to ignore a Rottweiler laying his head on her lap and looking at her with sad, round, orange eyebrows, and Brian blinking at me before deciding to stop worrying and love the Thinker seven.
…
Platonically.
Lisa Wilbourn’s sexuality—
Fuck you. Platonically.
***
“Hey,” I say as I lean on the handrail of the second floor of the lair, base, or whatever the correct nomenclature is nowadays, my crossed arms almost brushing Brian’s elbow as he keeps resting on the same handrail, looking down at where Rachel has recruited Alec to help her walk her dogs and my adopted sibling who doesn’t live inside my head nor is a world-class precog does his best to mess up the no-longer straightforward task of putting a collar on an enviably excited Brutus.
“Hey,” Brian laconically replies. Because he’s Brian, and why wouldn’t he be laconic if that suited his forcefully cultivated cool, tough guy image?
I roll my eyes just slightly before showing him a fond smile.
He doesn’t reciprocate.
He just…
Stares down until Alec and Rachel finally leave, the first of them stuffing into his pocket a few plastic bags meant to deal with what Brutus does when fed bacon.
And then Brian deflates.
He’s… He’s a big guy. He usually looks much older than he is, with all that muscle and how tall he is, but there’s also the way he stands, almost with military discipline, just blunted with enough spite for the man who instilled it in him to appear barely casual.
Now?
Now Brian looks very much like who he is: a boy trying to be a man and incapable of knowing if he’s succeeding.
“I blame you for this whole thing,” he says.
“That’s fair, but I’ll still protest it,” I answer.
“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” he says.
And then he pushes himself up and turns around before leaning back, his elbows and middle back on the handrail as he bends to stare up at a ceiling that was perfectly painted right before Coil gave this building to us.
I don’t move from where I am and just keep looking sideways at him. At the aesthetically pleasant profile of a man too beautiful to keep getting in fistfights.
Seriously, the whole family has ridiculously good genes. It’s a wonder they aren’t Internet famous, at the very least.
“I don’t know if I can manage, Lisa,” he finally says after a stretch of contemplative silence.
And without looking at me.
Which…
Well, I sigh. Loudly.
Brian turns in my direction, and I chuckle, a smile that is not a smirk spreading by the second.
“You know precisely what you’re doing,” I say.
“I don’t have a clue how to—” he almost protests.
“Not with them. With me. Here and now.”
He raises an eyebrow.
I let the smile become a smirk.
“Letting out some vague, self-defeating sentence to the Thinker who tasked you with them? The one person you are positive has good reason to trust that you’re doing a good job? Come on, Brian, even I don’t fish for compliments that aggressively.”
“That’s a lie!” Tay says from the kitchen, yelling into the void for unknown reasons that I’m too polite to inquire about.
“She’s listening?” Brian asks, looking at me with some mild confusion that I’m about to turn into outright alarm.
“She’s honed her power to the point where she understands speech, and the thing lets her never be distracted. Let’s just say that getting ambushed in our apartment has given her plenty of motivation to exploit those two particular quirks. She’s always listening.”
Brian, rather than widen his eyes and tense up, frowns.
“Your apartment?” he says.
I blink at him.
Taylor drops the skillet she was polishing to an OCD finish.
And then I lick my lips, steady my breathing, and sound as casual as I ever have.
“It’s temporary. She still hasn’t patched up things with her—look, it’s a whole thing, and I don’t want to intrude on her privacy by sharing something she doesn’t want to share in a conversation she isn’t included in—”
“I can hear you!”
“Well, maybe you shouldn’t! And you’re intruding on my privacy.”
“Pot, meet kettle!”
“That’s different! I can’t help picking up on your clearly broadcasted signs of… of whatever you’re broadcasting when not using those anti-Thinker measures of yours! It’s just regular human interaction!”
There’s a silence coming from the kitchen at my back.
Brian seems to be silently laughing.
No, I don’t know why.
I just know to lean slightly to the left right before a wet dishrag sails over where my head was a mere moment ago, the white piece of fabric flopping to the floor below with an ominous splat that doesn’t sound at all like how a defenestrated blonde may sound.
Really.
“Regular is the last word I’d use to describe you,” Taylor mutters as she walks toward the stairs.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“To take a walk and give you two some space,” she answers before reaching the metal landing.
And then she hesitates, looks at me, and walks over to grab my side ponytail and twist my head around so that I will—
Her lips are as soft on mine as the kiss is sudden, and I turn more fully toward her, letting out a small, muffled moan that accompanies me opening my mouth to have my tongue—
Ridiculously waggle in mid-air.
Damn it.
She… she holds me, looking into my eyes with her green ones, the ceiling lights barely adequate to scatter glints of bright amber over flecked emerald.
Then she leans back down yet again to lay a slow, soft kiss on my forehead that makes me close my eyes and suppress a whine of need and yearning.
“We’ll talk when I come back, okay?” she says, her smile soft and her tone reassuring.
“Are you breaking up with me?” I immediately ask.
She blinks. Closes her eyes. Swears under her breath.
“Why would you even think that was—”
“You told me we’d have a talk. That’s code for breaking up. Just ask Brian; he’s had plenty of talks.”
Taylor looks at Brian.
Brian pretends he hasn’t been staring at the two cute lesbians making out right by his side.
Taylor arches an eyebrow.
Brian nervously licks his lips.
And finally nods.
Which, somehow, ends up with Taylor not sighing in longing for the beefcake, but rolling her eyes and sighing in frustration to the cheesecake.
It’s all cake, as far as I’m concerned.
“Right. I’m going to leave and let you have some privacy or as much as you can get with regular human interaction.”
“That’s me, Lisa Wilbourn, regular human being. How do you do, fellow kids?”
“Wha—”
“It’s an Internet thing,” Brian interrupts with the tone of somebody using the words ‘Internet thing.’ “Just one of those stupid things Aisha likes so much.”
Taylor arches an eyebrow.
Brian, still leaning over the handrail in a way that looks too effortless to not be a struggle, shrugs.
And my girlfriend, soulmate, fiancée, or whatever new term we may add to the list this week sighs yet again.
“Okay, that’s me going away, now, no matter how distracting you try to be,” she says, turning around and stepping on the metallic stairs with a loud, conversation-ending clang.
“Are you sure? I can be very distracting,” I say, not letting architecture have the last word.
“I know. Oh God, I know…” she mutters low enough that it doesn’t quite count as her having the last word but also not as me having it.
Compromises. They are the core of a good relationship.
So I stare silently as she puts her jacket on and waves at me over her shoulder before leaving, my hand returning the parting for the benefit of her swarm still watching me.
It’s… It should be disquieting, knowing how often she has her eyes on me. How little of my daily routine she ever misses.
It isn’t.
Not to me. Not to my particular kind of damage.
“You really love her, don’t you?” Brian asks, finally moving from his pose to mirror mine, our elbows almost brushing on top of black-painted wood.
“I do,” I say with a tone that has wistfulness on it, but also…
Also a lot of other things it wouldn’t have had before.
Speaking of…
“You are doing great, really,” I say to Brian.
He tilts his head, not knowing what I’m talking about, possibly because his superpower isn’t to keep multiple threads of thought in mind at once.
Lisa Wilbourn’s parahuman ability unrelated to—
What? Are you saying that is just something regular humans can do and not at all the work of an otherworldly entity constantly whispering in my mind, adding what amounts to a parallel train of thought to my inner monologue and familiarizing me with abnormal thought patterns and modes of cognition?
… Lisa Wilbourn’s parahuman ability tangentially related to—
Glad we’re in agreement.
“With them. Alec and Rachel,” I clarify, getting him back on the thread of conversation that he actually needs to deal with rather than the one our chaotic circumstances have landed us on.
“Ah,” he says.
Laconically.
Because of course.
“Don’t give me that,” I grumble. “You are really… Brian, this is…”
I trail off, and then, for lack of a better thing to do, I silently glare at him until he turns to look at me.
“What?” he asks with a barely raised eyebrow.
“You are the only stable influence those two have gotten in their entire lives. Both had to flee from monstrous families where they were horrifically abused and then became villains on the run until they landed here.”
The eyebrow rises slightly.
“I know all of that?” he stupidly says, which gives me the perfect excuse to roll my eyes.
“And then, despite all the unpleasant associations, despite their need to flee at the first sign of trouble as the only survival mechanism they ever learned, despite their lives being at risk more than they thought they would ever be when they signed up… they stayed.”
I let the words hang between us until he rolls his eyes.
“You aren’t going to convince me that they stayed because of me,” he says.
And I smile.
“Oh, but they did. Because of you. Because of me. Because of Taylor. Each… Each of us? Each of us has become the one thing Alec and Rachel never really had. The one thing they had given up on.”
This time, the silence is heavier.
“You are fucking corny when you want to be, you know?” he finally says, his head dropping slightly over his crossed arms.
“I do. I’ve recently discovered that being devastatingly sincere can be somewhat disarming.”
“Somewhat,” he says ruefully before chuckling the tension away.
But, well, not all of it.
“Hey,” I repeat, going back to the root of our conversation.
“Hey?” he answers, following in spirit, even if not in comprehension.
“I’m proud of you.”
This time, he turns his head over his bare forearms, his left cheek resting on them as he just looks at me with more confusion than the line should warrant.
“I’m just being a decent human being,” he finally says.
“No. No, you’re being a hero,” I say.
And he understands.
I can see it when he suppresses the need to flinch away. To change the subject. To talk about anything but that.
But… Brian has many faults. Lack of foresight, skewed priorities, a moral compass that only covers those immediately around him.
Cowardice is not one of them.
It may be the one thing we don’t have in common.
“I don’t know if I will go again,” he says, the memories clearly flashing behind his eyes as we both dance around the fact that the man I’m talking to was there when the Hero Killer fell.
“I won’t ask you if you don’t want to. But I think you’ll go. I think if there’s even a chance that your smoke could block the Simurgh’s scream, you’ll take it.”
“Why?”
I look into his eyes.
They are… Well, they are brown, but that is a criminally pedestrian way to describe them, something that implies mundanity when they are anything but.
There are radiant hues, deep, shadowed strands laid side by side with clear, thrumming light bound around black pupils, the white almost immaculate between his warmly black skin and the irises that are fixed on mine.
“Because I’m proud of you,” I finally say, almost whispering. “Because I’m proud of the boy who’s become a man and a hero, the one who has grown to care about others, to open a heart that was wounded by those that should’ve cared for him. I’m proud of Brian Laborn, the big brother of the Undersiders, the slayer of Behemoth, and my patsy—”
“You little—”
“I’m proud of you, Brian. And so will Aisha.”
He doesn’t close his eyes.
Doesn’t look away.
Somebody else would have, shying away from the subject, from me daring to cross that line.
But he’s not a coward, is he?
“There are things you shouldn’t play with, Tattletale,” he says.
Which is when I push off the handrail and offer him my hand, looking down at him over the straight line of my tremulous arm until he takes it.
And then I pull him up with my whole body and I hug him, burying my face into his chest.
“You think I’m trying to manipulate you into going. That I would bring Aisha up just to push you to be the hero I want you to be,” I mutter.
His arms lie by his sides, and I know he’s staring dumbly at the top of my blonde head.
“Aren’t you?” he finally asks.
Laconically.
I have to suppress a snigger.
“Brian… You know what a mess I’ve been since you came back. Now imagine how I would be if you didn’t.”
His arms wrap around me.
And I don’t cry into the chest of the boy I helped become a hero that may one day not come back.
***
We don’t say much else as we finish washing the dishes that Taylor left unfinished when she decided to either give us some much-needed privacy or punish my insolence for daring question her totalitarian reign of terror.
Possibly a mix of the two.
But… But it’s comfortable. It’s not the silence of things unsaid, but of things too recently shared.
Also, it’s laconically manly, so I guess Brian is loving it.
The thing is…
The thing is that silence lets the mind roam.
When everything and anything is at the tip of your fingers? When you can find an article or a video that lasts precisely as long as the time it takes you to walk from the kitchen to your computer or the TV?
Silence becomes scarce.
Particularly when you’re afraid of it.
And I have reason to fear it. To avoid dark thoughts still lurking, waiting to pounce on me. Thoughts about what tomorrow will bring, what failure will look like, if I’ll be able to keep waiting for Panacea to digest her lesson and decide to heal Colin, and if she will be able to do so once she does.
Thoughts about a cold, thin hand with pale veins attached to an IV line.
Thoughts about steel blue eyes never opening up again.
So the silence between Brian and me is comfortable, but I can’t stand it. I’m comforted by it, by him, by a distance crossed.
But I can’t stand being alone with myself.
So it’s a relief when Alec and Rachel come back, not quite bickering as Rachel answers mostly in her own brand of silence, one interspersed with admonitions or encouragements to the other family she built, the one running around her feet that I neglected to mention to Brian when comparing his two newer charges.
It’s… comforting when the four of us end up on a white sofa that I recently bought after Power indulged me, and we tracked down the precise brand and model that once had to be replaced due to Shadow Stalker being a sociopath.
Because there’s no silence. There’s a familiar litany of back-and-forths, of jokes, sarcasm, and arguments that are never quite resolved yet never amount to anything.
It’s the sound of family.
I think.
It’s been a while.
Still, there’s one family member missing, and she said we would talk when she came back from her walk, which are words that, no matter how well-intentioned, will always hang like the Sword of Damocles over any young girl in love.
“Hey,” she finally says when she reaches the second floor, her steps loud on the metallic stairs, her greeting granting me permission to turn away from the movie I wasn’t watching and over the sofa’s backrest to look at her.
She smiles at me.
And then, from a plastic bag dangling from her left hand, she takes out…
A small bottle of rose-scented massage oil?
I blink at her.
Taylor’s smile softens.
And, suddenly, as Alec turns back and catches sight of the quite obvious offer, I wish the next few minutes would involve silence of any kind.
