Agrippa
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Wake-up Call – Chapter 88 – Healing
🕑 Added 2023-06-14 21:56:28 +0000 UTCAmelia Dallon
I am not flying in Vicky’s arms.
I am… holding Emily, my arms wrapped around her waist as she drives her bike through empty roads, turning from one street to another so smoothly that I barely feel the changes of direction.
She’s driving slowly.
And I am grateful for it.
Because, at the end of this night drive, I’ll be at my home, and I’ll have to do something I fear. Something I never wanted to do. Something I never wanted to acknowledge I could do.
And Emily knows.
She knows what I’ve held back. She knows how much it took for me to push past any of the lines we’ve crossed together. How slowly we had to take it, not because I don’t know how to use my power, but because…
Because of how long I’ve held it back.
How much of a reflex it is for me to shy away from the whispers of possibilities that bloom in my mind when I so much as brush past another person. How many intrusive thoughts I get each and every day. The things I know I could do and the things I’m morbidly curious to learn if they are an actual danger for me to fall into.
She has… She has talked to me. About it. About my power. My fears.
She’s the only person who ever has.
To Mom?
I was a healer.
I could be something else. I could use my power for… for things she wouldn’t approve of.
But I didn’t.
And so, we didn’t have to talk about them.
To Vicky?
I am a healer. A hero. She… She sees that part of me as something noble. Something that she could never manage with her fists and radiant power.
She could have talked to me. Would have.
If I hadn’t been so scared of disappointing her.
And… And there really was no one else.
Dad is barely there even when he manages to be; I don’t have any real friends; the nurses and doctors try, but… but I…
Okay, that one may be my fault.
And then came Emily.
Twisted, deranged, violent, bullheaded Emily.
And she barreled past all of my barriers.
I have crossed almost every line I was afraid of. Learned more and more about myself and my power. About what I am and what I can do.
And she has supported and encouraged me in a way that Mom never did, and Vicky never could.
Because… she isn’t on some impossible pedestal. She isn’t someone I wanted to impress. She was just as guilty as I was. As selfish, as…
As…
I lean forward, and I tighten my arms around her waist. Around tight, packed muscle that is denser than humanly possible.
Her metabolism is always impossibly high, constantly burning calories to manufacture and maintain all the structures I’ve crafted inside of her.
And so she feels warm.
Her back on my chest. The toned muscles standing out as steel cables that shift minutely when she gracefully slides around yet another one of Brockton’s potholes. The deep breaths that seem to rock me back and forth when I just lie against her.
The warm, reassuring back of the woman I reforged.
The woman who, according to a world-class Thinker, has a crush on me.
One that I didn’t cause.
And, after the exhaustion of the day, in front of what awaits me when I get home, the last line I will have to cross…
I close my eyes.
And snuggle against Emily while she drives me around the empty night streets of our city.
***
“Thank you,” I whisper into the back of the loose sweater she wears over her tank top, enjoying one last time the warmth trapped between her body and my face.
She doesn’t answer.
The bike has stopped, the motor is quietly rumbling, and she’s holding both of us straight with her left leg resting on the sidewalk of a house two blocks from mine.
She still doesn’t answer.
And I know she’s heard me.
So…
So I squeeze her tighter, and then I allow myself to tremble.
“I was so scared…” I mutter.
“I know,” she says.
“She… She sent me a couple of messages, and I thought you were injured, and then I woke up, and you were tied, and Vicky had that collar, and I… I thought I was about to lose you both, and it would all be my fault for being so petty, for wanting to hurt her…”
Emily’s hands are still on the bike’s handlebars.
She isn’t wearing gloves, not today.
And so I can see the way her tendons stand against her tanned skin when she clenches her fingers as hard as when she was trying to tear through the ropes holding her hostage.
A hostage just for me.
“She told me she had captured you,” she tells me, her voice as steady as ever, “and I rushed to rescue you.”
She stops talking at that.
But I know there’s more.
“She… they tied me up. Interrogated me. Kept pulling details out of me no matter how I answered or tried not to. She got inside my head, and…”
Her hands shake on top of the handlebars.
So I let go of my hug and lie my own palms over her bare forearms, sliding them down slowly and gently until I reach the back of her clenched fists, even if I have to flatten myself against her to do so.
She’s… a bit taller than I am. Not much.
Just enough.
She takes another deep breath.
Her hands don’t unclench.
And so I let go of my power.
I dive inside of her, the whole picture of her new body blooming inside of my mind. The reinforced bones, the subtly shaped joints encased in regenerating cartilage, the elastic sinews, the dense muscle.
The three-lobed liver. The compartmentalized lungs. The fractal bronchioles. The heart that pumps blood without a closed chamber system. The nerves that have been branched or culled. The nociceptors that no longer send paralyzing signals. The bone marrow loaded with antibodies for any infectious disease I’ve ever encountered. The improved cochlea. The olfactory chamber.
The kidneys.
I smile at that. At the first thing in her that I fixed. The one that saved her when she gave herself a death sentence on a timer.
They are… Quite normal. Almost the same as they would have been before her injury in the field.
They are almost nostalgic.
“Do you want me to help?” I ask, my voice softer than I intended as I lean over her shoulder, the side of my helmet pressing on hers.
“You already are,” she answers.
“Emily…” I say, dismissing her non-answer.
She sighs, and I feel the cartilage of her breastbone straining in just the right way as she does. As each chamber of her lungs fills, and the alveoli lining their insides transport fresh air to rushing blood.
She nods, and I feel the chains of muscle involved in the motion ripple down her spine.
And so I…
I take away the cortisol, wondering what I could replace the stress hormone with so that she would have all the benefits and none of the drawbacks. I massage her heart into a steady, slower rhythm. I open her lungs and nudge her diaphragm down to fill them as far as they can go.
And then I go over each and every muscle in her body, lightly tensing and releasing them, letting her own body readjust into a forcefully relaxed posture as I go across the tightness in her scalp, her face, her neck, her shoulders…
I wash across her with the warmth of light exertion and of relaxed flesh that allows warm blood to rush in.
Down her back. Her chest. Her belly.
Her legs.
And then down her arms. Her forearms.
Her tightly closed fists.
And, not even acknowledging the urge, not wanting to know what it means or how it will be received, I have her open her hands.
Turn them up, the back of them resting on warm rubber.
And I have her slide her fingers between my own.
We could talk more. There’s a lot to say.
A lot to think.
But I’m still scared. Still very much avoiding what I’ll face in a few minutes.
So, before I dismount her bike, before I walk back into my house…
I’ll just have Emily hold my hands as I lie across her back, with her deep breathing and reassuring heartbeat lying to me and telling me that everything will be all right.
***
“Are you… why are you doing this right now?” Mom asks.
“Does it matter?” Vicky asks. “She’s… Amy is doing it, Mom. She’s going to… she’s not afraid anymore.”
Vicky lies.
She does it often, even if she doesn’t always realize it.
“It does matter. This comes out of nowhere, and you know just how long it’s been since… Why? Just tell me why?” Mom says, going from stern, to disoriented, to reproachful, to…
Scared.
It’s… It’s taken me a long time to see that’s what she’s always been.
We’re sitting around the round kitchen table, where we usually manage to have at least a few family breakfasts every week, with her insisting on drinking those disgusting kale smoothies even if I always make sure to keep her in perfect shape. Even if she would still look like she does if she decided to stop eating healthy food and going to the gym. Even if she dropped all that wasted effort.
Unnecessary effort.
But… But I know fear now.
I did when Vicky bled below me, when I thought I would lose her, but that was a mere moment.
I did in the bank, but that came and went as fast as it took for Skitter and Tattletale to flee.
I did since I finally realized why my breathing always quickened when she looked my way. When she smiled at me.
When I touched myself.
But that was… another kind of fear. A dull, persistent one. One that I could pretend to ignore.
What happened in Emily’s house?
That… That was longer. Deep. Intimate.
A new kind of fear.
And I can see it in Mom’s eyes when she looks away from Vicky and straight at me. When she tries to look stern, and just… doesn’t.
Mom’s still afraid.
Has always been.
And I have… In the hospital? I’ve dealt with this kind of persistent fear. With women who tripped down the stairs one too many times, who never deviated from a story that nobody believed.
It has nothing to do with Dad, not in Mom’s case.
It’s likely her trigger event.
An event that I know nothing about because she’s never told me, and Aunt Sarah said it wasn’t her place to tell us.
But… But today, I got a very poignant reminder of just how much capes can come to resent their past. The things that gave them powers. That shaped them.
That haunt them.
So I look at Mom’s wide, blue, scared eyes.
And I reach across the table to hold her hand.
I can see it when her eyes briefly narrow. When she almost flinches away.
But she doesn’t.
She, instead, inches her hand forward for me to hold.
I don’t know why I’m so grateful for that.
“Mom… I should’ve done it long ago,” I say.
Her lips part, about to say something, but then she looks away from me and to her right.
Not toward Vicky, anxiously holding her breath to my own right, but toward Dad.
Toward the man who doesn’t go to the gym. Who always accepts my little tune-ups with a smile that is often tired and forced. Who will sometimes just vegetate in front of the TV, never quite processing what is in front of him as he dives inside of himself while trying as hard as he can not to. While he passively absorbs the world around him so as to drown all the intrusive voices that he isn’t strong enough to fight off.
Because nobody is.
I… I didn’t understand it for a long time. I thought that heroes were supposed to be brave. Courageous. That they couldn’t succumb to something as meaningless as mere thoughts and moods.
How stupid I was.
I remember Doctor Willis trying to teach me, the short woman looking heartbroken when I told her that brains were beyond my limits.
That didn’t stop her.
She made it a point to talk to me, to get me to understand why her patients could still benefit from my touch. Why something so apparently meaningless as losing a few pounds could do marvels for people who were like Dad, who constantly struggled against an enemy that didn’t stop, that neverstopped, that was always there, waiting, lurking, ready to pounce at the first show of weakness.
She told me about drugs that helped and how often people stopped using them because they couldn’t even stand the thought of doing something that would benefit them.
Told me about therapy and how that could give tools to fend off the enemy. But that those tools often went unused.
About… About a lot of things that could be done. That somebody could do. That many didn’t.
So I helped. I helped people like Dad with precisely calibrated medical cocktails brewed in their veins that, at times, brought moments of clarity and gratitude. With giving them the benefits of natural exercise and rest that they would be unable to get by themselves.
I thought of it as a chore.
Because if I didn’t? If I remembered the man waiting for me back at home, the man who got worse and worse each and every day, the man I no longer wanted to wear a hero’s costume because I feared what he may do in a moment of indecision and danger?
I would’ve broken down.
I would’ve had a panic attack that no breathing exercises could have gotten me out of. I would’ve looked at each and every one of the people I had refused to heal and begged for their forgiveness.
For undeserved forgiveness.
But now Mom and I look at Dad. At the first man I didn’t heal when I could.
He’s… indecisive.
He looks at Mom and sees something in her that makes him close his eyes before turning toward me.
And then…
Then he, Mark Dallon, Flashbang, reaches over the table and puts his hand on top of Mom and mine.
“You are so brave, Amy,” he starts, stabbing me with a sweet, small, tired smile. “I know how much it took for you to… to reach this point.”
He does.
Of course he does.
Because his heartbeat is steady, his breathing as deep as a man’s in peak shape ever is.
It’s not one of his good days, but it also isn’t a bad one.
“You don’t, Mark,” Mom says, turning her hand around to clench around mine and Dad’s. “That’s why I’m asking. She… She leaves for school like any other day; she and Vicky get here later than they should have, and, suddenly, this? I… I’m not telling her not to do it; I’m asking why. Why now, what’s changed—”
Vicky drops her own hand on top of ours.
She’s… Her aura is subdued, barely a tingling on my emotions, but still there.
Still a supportive presence that was absent earlier, when she panicked and held it back so as not to overwhelm me while Tattletale already attacked my mind and emotions.
Now it’s just… familiar. Something I want to always feel by my side.
Even if I don’t want to want her.
“Mom… You’re right,” she says, and I turn toward her with something very much like shock. “This isn’t something planned, but… But Amy’s been working on it. On her healing and what it could mean. She… She can do so much more than she’s already done, and you will be so proud of her when she does, when she shows the world that—”
“No! That—that is not something she will—Amy. Amy, listen to me; you can’t tell people that you can do this, what you can do. They will see you as a potential threat; they will—”
I should be angry.
Indignant.
But I’m touching her. I feel the fear spike into panic.
Panic for me.
And a part of me that was scared she couldn’t feel this way for anybody other than Dad and Vicky… relaxes.
So I close my own fingers around her hand and just…
Just smile at her.
With my own sweet, small, tired smile.
The one that Doctor Willis must’ve recognized from the very start.
“It’s okay,” I say, my throat rough because… I don’t know why. “I just… It’s taken me a long time, Mom, but I can do this… this little good thing that’s in front of me. And, when I do, I will be able to do the other good things, the ones that I didn’t see or that felt too big for me to tackle. I will… I will be better, Mom.”
Her fingers squeeze me.
Her eyes tear up.
“You don’t have to. You already do a lot. You… You do more than I do, more than I’ve ever done. You’re a good person, Amy, and you don’t have to force yourself to do what you are afraid of.”
“Mom, Dad is—” Vicky says.
“In agreement,” he says with a quiet chuckle, never looking away from the woman staring at me, holding my hand, begging me to…
I don’t know.
Is she asking me not to abruptly change our lives? To take care of myself and be safe? To… To take my time before growing up?
I feel it’s a mix of all that, but the swirl of anxiety is there, muddling everything, making her feel more panicked and weaker than Dad ever has.
So I don’t know.
Tattletale would.
“Dad!” Vicky says. “How can—you can be healed.”
Her aura thrums, coming up with her eagerness, with her desperate need to have the world become right where it’s never been.
Because Vicky, as much as a psychotic blonde would harp on about collateral damage or ineffective tactics, is a hero.
And she could never stand a wrong that she could not right.
“Hey, I’ve been like this since before you were born, baby girl. I can wait a few more years until Amy is in a better place, or the doctors find a new cure, or… or whatever. I’m in no rush,” he says.
And he believes it.
He believes this one stupid, wrong thing.
“No,” I mutter. “No, you can’t.”
And then, before any other arguments are made, I…
I dive.
I feel his heart, his lungs, the most active parts of his anatomy, the ones that are easier to tweak and maintain when he devotes himself to a sedentary lifestyle that should’ve taken its toll years ago if I hadn’t been there to keep the worst of it at bay.
I feel the slow, sluggish circulation of lymph pushed around by his breathing and muscles.
I feel muscle, and bone, and sinew.
And then I go deeper. Just a tad deeper.
His nerves are in perfect working condition, his reflexes as sharp as they can be from a purely physiological standpoint, even if he’s still out of practice. Even if he would still be at risk fighting anyone who had faced him at his prime.
I follow them.
I follow the electrical impulses traveling along the neurons that make up his peripheral nervous system. I leapfrog the distance between each cell, crossing the synapses with the impulse of chemical signals propelling me toward the spine and brain.
They are cells. Just cells. I’ve never been afraid of nerves, and they are just bunches of neurons.
Just like the brain is.
But then I brush over it, and I shy away.
I berate myself, and I can’t help the grimace when I do. When I succumb to ingrained reflexes.
But I remember silk ropes wrapped around a hazmat suit, holding my wrists in place as Emily struggled and Vicky looked at me.
I remember the voice that went from gentle and caring to cruel and cutting and back again.
I remember green, long grass rippling with a cool breeze that drew viridian waves over a landscape that faded away into the horizon beneath a summer Sun.
She… Tattletale claimed this was the next step. The thing I needed to do for myself before I could be free of what has haunted me for years.
She’s a villain. A hateful girl who isn’t afraid to dig the knife where it hurts the most.
Kind of like me.
Let’s… I just hope she’s a bit more truthful than I am.
Because Emily has been steadily working with me to push past my self-imposed limitations, telling me in an awed voice about a bright future that I could be a part of. That I could help bring about.
Vicky has stood by my side, not even bringing up my earlier confession, just hugging me and doing her best to show me how little my fears mean to her.
But none of them have seen past me like Tattletale has.
‘It never goes away,’ a small voice murmured in my ear as the three of us headed to Emily’s door, leaving the harrowing evening behind.
I froze.
‘They can’t hear me; this is just for you.’
I, stupidly, nodded as I watched two blondes walk in silence in front of me, out of the room with a missing wall.
‘So… take it from me, Amy: you will still see the worst parts of you. The ones that you’re ashamed and afraid of.
‘But you can do your best to make sure that there are other parts.
‘That you can look at the mirror and accept the girl looking back.’
I stopped walking, and I waited for her to continue.
To tell me how.
To tell me why.
To tell me the secret of this one thing she offered me.
She didn’t.
The bitch.
And I…
I smile, but it turns into a smirk.
And I push past the point where bundled neurons turn from isolated, safe nerves into the most complex thing I’ll ever witness.
Intuitive understanding floods my mind, and I know which parts of what I’m looking at are stored memories, which are unprocessed emotions, which are sensory and motor cortexes.
There’s much I could do.
And most of it, I won’t.
But I’m also touching Mom and Vicky, so I can compare. I can see deviations from one to another. I can see how Mom’s amygdala is scarred and atrophied, which my power tells me makes her emotions more intense and unstable.
I can see how Vicky is still developing, the healthiest of the three.
And yet she’s still very much a parahuman.
But there’s a difference between trauma and genetics. There’s a difference between external and internal malfunction.
Their neurotransmitters are just… different.
The way dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin are stored and used, their levels, how they are reabsorbed… it’s all intricately different and unique.
But, unlike with a heart, with a lung, there’s not a simple way to make it ideally healthy.
My power pushes maps and systems to me, to my fingertips, eager to leap from my hands to Dad’s brain.
To reshape him.
I hold it back.
Not out of reflex and fear like I usually would, but…
There’s a combination that will make him perfectly happy, in a constant state of near euphoria.
Another that will make him calm and stable, capable of doing what Mom never will and processing each and every moment in a detached, distant way that will leave him unaffected.
Another that will make it so that negative emotions aren’t processed.
Another that will tilt the bias of negative impulses versus positive feedback in a way that’s unnatural.
Inhuman.
None of them is a ‘healthy Dad’ brain.
None of them is him.
So I abstract the three-dimensional schematic of his brain and drag it back into what Emily calls the Thinker part of my power, looking at it from every angle, introducing changes and corrections, and seeing how they cascade into wanted and otherwise effects.
I come up with fifty variations. Fifty versions of Dad.
None of them are him.
I struggle, because that’s not how it should be. It should be easy to find what differentiates him from his illness. The intrusive voices from his own.
It isn’t.
I find the genetic markers that make depression more likely, the ones I’ve seen in so many, but not all, of Doctor Willis’ patients.
I can tweak those.
And I…
I browse once more across all the brains. All the different versions of Dad.
I could make him happy.
But I won’t.
So I wash my power over his entire body, over each and every cell, and just… Rewrite a few meager genes.
I correct the balance of neurotransmitters, bringing them to the same levels that his prescribed medication would.
And then I retreat.
I open my eyes to find Mom, Dad, and Vicky staring at me.
“Is it… done? Over?” Vicky says with more hope than I’ve ever seen in her.
I shake my head.
And it breaks my heart to see that hope shatter.
“It’s… it’s not that easy. I have cured the physiological parts, but… but I haven’t touched anything that makes Dad… Dad. He’s… He willbe better, and he should stop taking his medication, but he will still need to go to therapy and work through—”
A strong, wide, masculine hand shoots away from mine, breaking our connection so abruptly it leaves me gasping.
And then, before I can even process it, strong arms surround me with all the muscle I’ve put in them over the years.
“Thank you. I’ll do my best, Rolly; I swear I will,” he says fervently, his words muffled by my frizzy hair.
Rolly.
101 Dalmatians.
One of the puppies.
He used to call me that to tease me, to kid about my freckles.
He hasn’t in years.
And so, before I can even feel Mom and Vicky joining in on the hug, I turn in his arms, squeeze him with my own, weak, trembling ones, and cry.
Like I haven’t in years.
