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Rating:
Mature
Archive Warning:
Graphic Depictions Of Violence
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Gen
Fandoms:
Parahumans Series - Wildbow亜人 - 三浦追儺 & 桜井画門 | Ajin - Miura Tsuina & Sakurai Gamon (Anime & Manga)
Characters:
Taylor Hebert | Skitter | WeaverDanny HebertBrockton Bay WardsLisa Wilbourn | Tattletale
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Canon-Typical ViolenceCanon-Typical Body Horrorshard-altered psychologytags to be added as we go
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English
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Timballisto's Curated Works
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Published:2019-05-24Updated:2020-03-11Words:99,568Chapters:29/?Comments:226Kudos:730Bookmarks:266Hits:29,374
(Restricted) The Shadow Over Brockton Bay
Temeritous
Chapter 25: Wraith 3.8
Chapter Text
In the interest of fairness, I decided that I should probably respond to my PHO messages like I'd promised before calling Alexandria.
Something simple, easy. I looked up at Dennis' last message, and started typing in the text box.
Vista says she didn't pass out and that you're a liar.
I switched tabs back to the inbox, intending to re-read and maybe answer some of the other messages while I waited for a response. Dennis must have had alerts sent right to his phone, though, because he responded almost immediately.
U talk to her n not me?? Im offended
Just reading her old messages too, about to respond to them.
I meant what I said before. I don't blame you even a little bit. You're making me mad that you blame yourself.
Yeah well if i didnt tell u about it, u wouldnt have left. So.
I would have, I just would have had to do it from the ready room, which means a lot more damage and traumatized troopers. I would have to cut my body up into little bits to fit through the air vents, and nobody wants to see that.
LOL ur fuckin sick. Anybody else tell me that id say there lying.
They're*, you illiterate.
I checked the time, comparing it to the heist timeline and factoring in travel.
Shouldn't you be in debriefing?
Just got done.
My train of thought stalled, wondering what else I could say. There was so much, and I wasn't sure where to start.
So uh u got a new team now right?
As good a place as any, I thought.
Maybe. I'm with them for a little while but… I don't know about permanently. Still weighing some options.
They're nice, though. Not good people, but nice to me. I like spending time with them.
Star-crossed. What u gonna do if u have to face us villain vs hero?
Not likely. If I take Alexandria's offer, I won't be in Brockton Bay for much longer.
I KNEW she was here for u!!! Kid said no way
What does she want? What offer???
Come on I got 20$ riding with Kid on this
I stopped typing to glare at the screen for a moment. I used keyboard shortcuts to cut what I'd written so far.
Calm down and wait for me to finish typing.
I pasted the cut words back in and continued typing. As my fingers tried to keep up, I thought about the offer again.
One Ward to come with me. I'd snap-narrowed it down to Missy, but my first instinct had been Dennis. An angry, petty thought wished that his dad was dead already so he wouldn't have anything tying him here, but I recognized that for what it was and dismissed it. Then I remembered Tattletale saying that Alexandria was still low-balling her offer.
Could I get her to lean on Panacea for a healing? Could she bring in another healer to fix him up? If I made that a condition… I could have what I wanted. A friend, the easy routine of the Wards, a fresh start.
Away from everything familiar, half of me locked away under regulations and public relations, chafing at the bit. That was the trade-off, of course. To get something you have to give something up.
She offered me a place on my pick of any of the Trium's Ward teams, including hers, and if one of you wanted to come with she'd transfer 1 of the ENE Wards with me. I'm still thinking about it, because I've lived my whole life in the Bay and this is where my family was… I don't know if I want to leave.
Y do u hav to leave?
I killed people, Clock.
They decided that I wasn't at fault for Cricket, but I reduced Kaiser and 3 other people to dust.
I was angry
It was impulsive
I stopped, took a deep breath. Centered myself.
So I can't really stick around here with the name Lazarus, calling myself a hero. I would have to move, get rebranded and renamed, use my powers in a different way so people can't make the connection.
Witness protection program 4 paras. They did something like that for Stalker, tho she wouldnt let them change her name
The comparison sent a flash of anger through me, but I realized he wouldn't know my history with Sophia. I spared a moment to wonder at the people I'd left behind - if I went into school tomorrow, would Emma have the guts to try to pick up where she left off? Was she scared now?
GTG, the others are back from their patrols. Talk later ok?
Later.
I went through the other messages, answering Missy and Aegis fairly easily. I dithered over what to say to Dean - I didn't forgive him, really, even if I understood. We hadn't been close; I couldn't expect him to stick his neck out for me like Dennis did. Eventually I typed out I know whose fault it is, and they're in custody now , and sent it along.
Miss Militia got a similar message: I responded to the others . Acknowledging without absolving. I wanted her to remember the mistake and be better next time.
Then I picked up my phone.
It rang five times, enopugh that I became worried she wouldn't pick up. She had to be busy, I thought. It was - I checked the time - nearing ten at night. Was she one of the capes who didn't need sleep, like Militia?
The line connected. "Alexandria," she said. "Who is this?"
"It's - " Real name, cape name, "Lazarus. I'm ready to talk, hear what you have to say."
"That's very good to hear," her voice was warm, satisfied. "I have news that would be better delivered in person. Why don't you meet me at this address?" She rattled off a location in an area I recognized as downtown, in ex-Empire territory.
"Can do that," I said, abruptly remembering I was probably being traced. I wanted to drop the call as fast as possible. "When?"
"I can be there in ten minutes. That work for you?"
"See you then," I said, and hit end call as fast as I could. Stupid to have forgotten. I'd already packed up everything I wanted to keep, so the apartment was okay to burn, but I felt foolish that it was even necessary.
It might be a trap, so I devoted my ten minutes and flight time to reviewing all the ways Alexandria might be able to counter my powers. She couldn't kill me, obviously. It would be difficult to trap me for any length of time with the amount of Dust I now had on hand, and the Protectorate would know that.
On the other hand, I had revealed to them that my Dust dissipates if it leaves my range, and she can fly faster than I can move my Dust. If she just tackle-shoved me out of an area fast enough, I'd lose any Dust not latched on to me.
To resolve that, I split my Dust in half on the way to the Gallery. Half to me, creating massive wings and an invisible trailing cloak. The other half formed Coryn, bigger than she'd ever been before. She was the only construct that I knew could operate without my personal direction.
"Protect me," I told her. "And… if we get separated and you can't find me, find Tattletale. Tell her what happened. She'll help you find me."
She didn't nod or acknowledge in any way, because I hadn't released control of her Dust and I wasn't interested in pretending for an audience of myself. I knew that she understood.
"Okay. Showtime."
I split off a couple of sensors to search for the building number as I flew above, but that turned out to be unnecessary; the right place was marked by Alexandria standing on the roof. I rejoined my sensors and created eyes all over my cloak and Coryn to make up for the lack of my usual awareness, but I still felt nearly blind. Coryn stayed in the air as I dropped down next to Alexandria.
"Lazarus," Alexandria greeted. "Or do you prefer Taylor?"
I calmed myself, smoothing out nerves and clearing my mind. Not even the chilling wind could touch me through the Dust I'd armored myself with. "Lazarus is fine. What is this important information you have for me? Why are we meeting here?"
"It's about what happened with the Empire and your father," she began. I thought about telling her I'd found out some things on my own already, but no, it was better to hear what she had to say first. "Initial investigations led us to the Empire as response for leaking your identity, and given the… slant of the information provided with it, it was an easy trail to follow. Too easy, some would say."
She paused, and I motioned with one hand, Go on . She couldn't have noticed what I was doing - or failing to do. She didn't have blood and muscle and meat to her the way other people did. Her heart beat at a constant, regular pace… about ten times per minute. It pushed something like blood through a limited circulatory system, which connected to the heart, lungs, and brain, and nothing else. I felt withered crystalized vestiges of organs, things from when she was a human being; a stomach with no acid storing undigested masticated food, intestines with no movement or bacteria.
Nobody who saw this could call her human anymore.
Oddly, it made me like her more.
"When he turned himself in, Crusader was able to provide the address of the site where they were holding your father. We were hoping to recover the body for you."
I hadn't even really thought about his body; it was just a shell. The important part of it was gone. Even at my mother's funeral, I hadn't understood the point of honoring her vestige. I hadn't wanted to look into her casket. Headstones and monuments to the dead made sense as a way to honor and remember them; the ghoulish obsession with corpses did not.
"There was no body, but we found other evidence. You may want to look for yourself." She gestured to the roof we were standing on - no, to the building below us.
"Here?" I asked.
"The basement. The door is unlocked." She nodded at the fire escape, since the building didn't have roof access on the top.
I went down, Alexandria following but allowing me a more than reasonable amount of personal space. There were three floors to go through, the top two residential and the ground floor was a typical downtown convenience store.
I busted the lock at the bottom of the stairs and let us in. The front windows were plastered completely in ads for cigarettes and lottery tickets. The only light came from streetlamps filtering in through the steel and glass door, which had a security gate pulled across it.
"Should we be in here?" I asked, though I wasn't truly worried about it. I looked around the darkened shelves packed with snacks and overpriced microwave meals. Oh, my favorite brand of chips.
"The place is owned by Victor through some other companies. The employees bailed out after you captured Krieg, haven't been back since."
I nodded and picked up a bag of chips. My Dust saw Alexandria sigh slightly as I tore them open and started eating. "I'm hungry," I defended myself.
"Chips aren't really going to help with that."
"Taste good though." I thought about offering her some, then remembered her digestion was broken. She would probably already have to throw up whatever she'd eaten to keep her cover as a human being; no need to add to that. Instead I said, "Where's the basement?"
"Back room, we already passed it. If you're done snacking?" She sounded resigned but not really annoyed.
"No, but they're portable." It was no wonder that Lisa liked needling people. Their reactions were kind of fun.
I lifted myself over the counter and through another locked door to the back room. There were two more doors back there, one to the alley outside and one with stairs leading down.
The basement was exactly as I remembered it. The camera had been placed at the bottom of the stairs, looking into the rest of the room. It was completely empty and too spotlessly clean, especially compared to the clutter and filth upstairs. A facade, apparently.
There was a brownish stain on the floor, puddled and trickling toward an old disused sump pit. It was dry, but I was familiar with the color of old blood.
"We tested it," Alexandria said as I stared. It happened here while I was half the city away. "In lieu of a body, it's the best confirmation of death for a death certificate. It's pig's blood."
"...Say that again."
"Pig's blood. Not human. Not his."
Black balaclava. Three shots. Red blood.
Center chest, right over the heart.
I've been shot like that before. I know it from inside and out. The heart is gone, destroyed. The blood doesn't spray out because there's no pressure on it. They got it perfectly right.
Why not a head shot?
Because they're harder to fake.
Pig's blood.
He's alive.
I became dimly aware that Alexandria was still talking. "We're still trying to track down leads. It's become obvious now that this was a trick to get you to kill Kaiser and remove the Empire from play. We're still trying to figure out what player set the trick up. Our best guess at the moment is that Accord is trying to move into the Bay area, since this sort of convoluted plan is exactly his preference."
If I told her, she would wonder how I knew. In order to have my information taken seriously, I would need to explain how I got it. I'd be exposing Tattletale and the rest of the Undersiders to more attention and scrutiny than they ever signed on for.
But, on the other hand, I would have a lot more backup for taking on Coil.
"It's not Accord," I said. "It's Coil, the mercenary gang's leader."
Alexandria tilted her head to one side. "You sound very sure. How do you know? Did he contact you?"
"I know someone who works for him, who really doesn't want to work for him anymore. I've been helping her get out from under his thumb. In exchange, she told me all about his power and his secret plans."
"Coil has a power?" Alexandria said it with mild surprise. "What is it?"
I was tired of staring at a fake bloodstain and bare grey walls. "Let's leave, first. I'll explain on the way out."
She listened in silence through my explanation, not even prying when I blatantly avoided elaborating on my source.
On the street outside, I took a deep calming breath and immediately regretted it. Apparently this block had trash collection in the morning, and it was beginning to smell like rot.
"I know you said that Coil has people in the PRT, but I still want to bring in the Protectorate." Alexandria said, starting to hover a few inches off the ground. I raised myself up to match her, and eventually we were flying above the rooftops and the stink of the city. "Unless you think he's compromised one of the local Protectorate?"
I considered it carefully, running over my knowledge of the city's heroes. None of them really fit, though. And I felt that Lisa would have mentioned it if any of them were working for Coil.
"No, they should be trustworthy."
She nodded. "And I want you to come with me." She caught the look I sent her. "I don't assume that you'll be coming back permanently, and I think you're smart enough to realize we don't plan on trapping you. I just want to coordinate with you. What's your plan now that you know your father is likely still alive?"
Lisa mentioned that Coil seemed to like underground bases best, like the snake he'd named himself after. I had planned to start sifting through the earth with my Dust until I found him. Lisa's longer timetable was no longer remotely acceptable.
"Start looking," I said. "Save my dad, then kill Coil whenever I find him."
"Do you know for sure that will work?" Alexandria's lips pressed together for a moment, thoughtful. "Lazarus… let us help you. Remember what happened the last time you didn't."
At least this time she meant for the reminder to serve a purpose. If I didn't let them help me, I would be making the exact same mistake. If you don't learn from your mistakes you'll keep making the same ones.
"I'll come with you," I said. "But I'm not a Ward anymore. You don't try to cut me out, or try to protect me. No one makes a decision for me. Deal?"
Alexandria smiled. "Deal."
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