Agrippa
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Wake-up Call – Chapter 83
🕑 Added 2023-05-04 05:03:55 +0000 UTCThere is… not joy. Not joy, but something similar.
There is companionship in mourning.
Hannah has refused to leave Colin’s bedside since he was put into the hospital room assigned to him.
The one I paid for.
Because I’ll be damned if I let them stick him in a coma ward.
So, this is it. This is the best room available in Brockton Bay, a place where hospitals should be no more than waiting rooms for our local miracle worker to traipse through. A place that should have an economic boom by mere virtue of a certain cape existing and bringing all the rich people around the world who could afford to stay at any of our perpetually overbooked luxury hotels devoted to medical tourism.
That’s… not the case.
Our hotels are mostly empty, and the hospitals in Brockton Bay are the same as they are everywhere: sad, lonely, and scary.
There are patients waiting in empty rooms for visitors that never come. There are those who don’t wait because there’s nobody left to care for them. There are those who… who wait for something else.
Something final.
He can’t stay here.
I won’t let him stay here.
“Liz…” Taylor whispers, holding my hand, sitting by my side on the yellow pine and green corduroy row of chairs set along the wall just outside Colin’s room.
“I am sorry, I keep getting distracted,” I tell her, my neck still tilted forward, my head almost parallel to my thighs even as I turn to shoot her a small, tired smile.
“Don’t be,” she says, her own tired lips answering mine. “We can stay as long as you want.”
I don’t want to stay.
Nobody wants to stay at a hospital.
But you come in and put on a brave smile, then greet the person who needs you to be strong because they can’t be anymore. You hold their hand, trying not to show your shock at how… how small it is. How thin the skin, prominent the bones.
You hold their cold hand, trying not to jostle the tubes dangling from their arm, and you hold a forcefully cheerful, one-sided conversation, telling them how everything’s going to be all right and not letting even an ounce of your terror show.
Because you have to be strong for those who can’t be.
You have to lie to them.
You have to stay silent by Hannah and Dragon’s side as they exchange looks pregnant with words they won’t say in front of you.
You have to look at… at him. Still.
Lifeless.
He was never still. Not for long.
As much as he would have liked to claim otherwise, as much as his power-induced fascination with efficiency would chafe at it, Colin was always full of… not life. Not the way this line would evoke.
But he was full of ideas.
Of things he wanted to do, planned to do, needed to do.
Things he can’t do.
Not while he’s trapped in his own head. Locked away from… from any of the people desperate for him to come back.
Come back from the other side of a coma.
I am staring at the knees of my white jeans once again, and I can’t remember when I looked away from Taylor’s worried eyes.
She’s not holding my hand. Not anymore.
There’s the brief impulse to look at her inquisitively, to ask why she has stopped, but it never grows past the point where I can push myself to do it.
So I just stare at my knees. At the two uneven circles on the outside of them that are showing some wear and tear, the white no longer pristine, just… faded.
And then an arm wraps around my shoulders and pulls me into a soft embrace that carries the scent of chamomile.
So I return my mother’s embrace, bury my face on her shoulder, and do all the noises people who cry after the tears have run dry do.
Because we’re in a hospital.
But there’s nobody for me to pretend to be strong for.
***
“I came as soon as I could,” she says, her words a warm breeze over the top of my head, her lips tickling my hair with the soft movement even as my spine protests at me twisting around just to keep hanging from her.
From Mom.
From the woman that I never wanted to see again, the woman I fled from.
The woman who’s trying not to chide me for not contacting her after the Endbringer fight was over, who’s trying to just be here.
For me.
Like I desperately tried to stop her from doing.
“When did Taylor call you?” I mutter, not loosening my arms at all.
“Don’t worry about that,” she says.
And starts patting my head. My hair. Caressing it down my back, teasing it out of my side-tail, evening it out with careful fingers that first taught me how to take care of it when I started growing it out, because I had been a bit of a tomboy as a kid and kept wearing it short until I had my princess phase and suddenly wanted Rapunzel locks.
She was so happy when she could play at being a mother. At teaching me the things that only she was supposed to tell me.
How did it all go so wrong?
“Mom, I…”
Her hands on my hair hold me against her, and I stop moving away, losing my strength until she sustains me once again.
“Not now. Whatever you want to decide about… us? That can wait. Just… Do you want to tell me? About him?” she says, her voice as gentle as her grip isn’t, her hands almost trembling with the way she clutches me, with the way she holds me as if afraid I’ll fall apart as soon as she lets me.
It wouldn’t be the first time. Not today.
So I tuck my head forward, nuzzling into the maroon cashmere of her coat, breathing in the scent of the soft wool and the vague hint of chamomile that should be as calming as it once was when she taught me about the magic of yellow flowers that seemed to be good for anything and everything.
She used to love teaching me things…
And I…
I used to love her.
I used to sit on her lap and hang on her every word because Mom was what Dad never was. Because she… I used to think I wanted to be just like her. To be as pretty and smart, to be as kind and knowledgeable.
Then I learned the truth because Power wouldn’t let me look away from it.
The truth of an underage girl marrying into a rich family after an unwanted pregnancy that she wouldn’t rid herself of. Of an uneducated waitress doing her best to fit in, doing her best for her children to fit in, to give us everything she ever lacked.
Including love.
It made her less perfect. Fallible. Full of flaws I’d never seen.
It made her human.
And maybe I could, with some time, learn to love her once more.
Learn to love not the perfect woman who failed me (us) at the worst time, but the imperfect one who sometimes succeeded, who always tried.
What do you think, Power? Could I do that? Would I ever manage that?
Lisa Wilbourn… Correlation between intimacy and knowledge—
Yeah.
Yeah, there is a correlation, isn’t there? Dunbar’s number. There are only so many people we can come to care about, and it’s only those we know. Those we are closer to.
So I talk.
“He was just an ally of convenience,” I start. “A professional hero who was at just the right place for me to make use of.”
She nods, her hands lightening her clutch on me and resuming the caresses down my hair.
“I just gave him something he wanted. An offer he wouldn’t refuse, so he would cooperate with Taylor and me. It was a spur-of-the-moment idea to get the heroes off our backs, so they wouldn’t come at us looking to avenge a sociopath they believed was a hero like them.”
I can tell she doesn’t follow. That she lacks the details needed to understand what happened.
But this isn’t about that. This isn’t about my story and how it went entirely off the rails that morning when Sophia Hess forced me to kneecap her.
(That’s my story. And I’m sticking to it.)
This is about…
“It worked. Of course it worked. I had analyzed him. He was a prominent figure in the local Protectorate, and conflict with him was all but inevitable in the medium to long term. I needed to be prepared for it.
“I needed to study his profile. His history. Poke at his weaknesses and hidden levers.
“And then… Bakuda struck.”
I pause for a moment, threading through the memories of a frantic afternoon spent saving as many lives as we could, Taylor and Danny rushing to follow my latest idea as I tried to decipher how to best tackle each new puzzle the madwoman threw in our path.
“I saw a lot of dead people that day. A lot of injured. Saved some. Lost many.
“So did he.
“So did he, and he told us. He recited the litany of fallen comrades and coworkers, adding a bit of detail to every name, just a hint of color for us to understand that they were human. That they had been. That they had lived.
“That they were a reason for what we were about to do.
“But, in doing that, he also became human. I also saw him as… more than that profile I had studied. I had learned he had a delightful, sharp, sarcastic wit. That he was devoted to his job for all the wrong reasons that had once been right. That there was a man in there that had been trapped for too long in things that stopped him from being who he was.
“And then Taylor killed.”
Mom doesn’t gasp, but I know she wants to. I know the way I’ve worded things makes it all but impossible for her not to be shocked at Danny’s daughter having blood on her hands.
But she doesn’t ask. She doesn’t prod.
She just holds me, caresses my hair, runs her fingers through it.
And waits for me to talk.
I could learn to love her. Just for this.
“It was part of the plan. She just relayed my orders so that another cape would execute a fourth one. A fourth one who had killed so many before the attacks, it was a wonder he hadn’t a kill order already. A monster who only fought and murdered.
“It still shook her.
“I didn’t know what to do. What to say. Yes, the words kept on flowing, and I pretended, to myself, that I understood what she was going through because the plan had been mine, so I should have been feeling moreguilt than she did.
“But I didn’t.
“Maybe I’m broken. Maybe that part of me no longer works as it should. Maybe I felt detachment at the whole thing because it was my plan, but not my actions. Maybe… Doesn’t matter.
“What matters is that I couldn’t help her.
“And Colin was there.
“And he could. Did.”
My arms squeeze her once more, the soft fuzz of the cashmere warm and comforting on my cheek and the side of my nose as I look away from her, at the green wall by our side lit by a low evening Sun coming in from the window at the end of the corridor, tracing yellow lines across the glossy paint, casting long shadows after every doorframe.
“He told her about his own first time. The first time he killed in the line of duty. Without even meaning to. Defending someone else but failing to keep his attacker from dying a stupid, senseless death and leaving an orphan behind.
“That day… he became a friend.
“I liked him already. A part of me was desperate to find an… an adult man to fill the void you know was always there, and I was quick to see in him things that I may have just wanted to be there. But… But seeing him delve into that open wound, that pain that hadn’t dulled a single bit after all those years, just to give Taylor a better chance at understanding what she was feeling, what she was going through?
“Seeing… understanding him rather than what I knew about him?
“That was… I think that was the true start.
“And then everything kept happening. He kept helping, kept being funny, smart, and caring. Kept being there.”
I stop, something in my throat rising up yet again despite thinking I was too tired for it as I feel myself finally be strong enough to break down again.
“And now… and now he isn’t. And maybe he won’t ever be,” I say.
Then my voice breaks, and I cry.
And Mom holds me.
She holds me as my hands clutch at her coat, as my tears damp the soft wool under my cheek, as I finally turn away from the green wall and toward her, toward the woman who held me so many times when the world didn’t make sense.
To the woman who should have been there the last time the world hurt me like this.
… But she’s right.
I lost a brother.
She lost a son.
And she never blamed me for not being there. For running away and leaving her alone with my father.
She failed me. She let me be hurt. She didn’t make things better.
She was… imperfect.
My tears slow down, a stream of irregular droplets, of blurry vision, rather than… that something that paralyzes and chokes me. That clutches at my heart.
She still holds me.
She wasn’t there.
She’s here.
I wasn’t there.
And I still am the furthest thing from perfect.
“You don’t believe that,” she says, her words a fierce whisper as her arms once again tighten and draw me closer to her before she speaks over my shoulder.
“Mom…?” I say, my imperfect voice hesitating, still caught in tears and hiccups.
“Sarah… you’re the most stubborn person I know. When you were not even two years old? We had a lacquer box, a decorative thing from Japan with a bit of a tricky latch that your fat baby fingers couldn’t get to work.”
“Fat?” I ask reflexively before I remember that I’m not talking with Alec.
“Adorably chubby. They were too thick to properly work it. And every day, every single day, you would ask for me to hand you the box and spend… far too long for a baby trying to get it open.
“Until the day you did. The day you managed to hold the bottom of the box with your two hands, press the latch against the corner of the coffee table’s leg, and have it spring open.
“Then you closed it, opened it again, and did that about ten times.
“And you never asked for that box again.
“Because you had solved it. Because your baby brain, barely able to understand a few words, had refused to let a box’s latch defeat you.
“Because you can’t give up on any problem in front of you.
“And this? In a world of Tinkers, Thinkers, Trumps, and whatever else? This is a problem, Sarah—Lisa. This is a problem for you to solve and—”
“Sarah,” I say, finally pulling back, facing her, looking into wide, tearful eyes that are so much like mine it pains me. “Please, call me Sarah.”
The tears falling from her eyes glimmer in the low Sun, the blonde girl looking back at me from the twin reflections trying to smile despite it all before giving up on it.
Before letting herself be dragged back into the embrace of a crying woman who doesn’t know the man I’m crying for, but knows me.
“Sarah,” she whispers, her lips once more tickling my hair. “I’m so, so proud of you, Sarah, my Sarah, my beautiful, clever, braveSarah…”
I don’t answer; I just hold her as fiercely as my arms let me, my eyes furiously closed, trying to squeeze my tears away as everything inside my chest tries to burst out at once.
And, when I open my eyes, when I look over her maroon coat darkened with my tears…
There’s a jumping spider waving its arms in front of me.
Mom gets concerned when I laugh.
Because… she still doesn’t know this part of me.
But it’s all right.
She can learn.
