Chapter 65: Wake-up Call – Chapter 64
It will come as no surprise at this point in my story that I will state this: I like rooftops.
['As you all know' narrative device—]
Shut up. That doesn't apply here.
Not when I'm overlooking my adopted city from my own rooftop, the cold wind of early evening rustling my hair behind me after letting it loose as I grasp the white, metallic railing in front of me with both hands.
There are a few buildings taller than my own, breaking up the skyline with jutting spires of concrete, steel, and glass, but most of Brockton Bay is below me, particularly when I look down the slope that ends on a beach that should be more of a tourist attraction than it currently is.
Even from here, I can see the sand is too uneven, patches of almost white marred with detritus, and flotsam, surrounded by the brown that was always the natural color of this area and that the local government no longer has the funds to cover with ever diminishing, prettier sand.
It's a very Brockton beach: the echo of better times trying to endure as the underlying poverty is laid bare, growing with every day that passes.
It's also dirty.
… And probably has quite a few corpses and needles buried in it.
Yeah. Very Brockton.
Behind me, the door to the roof opens and closes with that gentle forcefulness that is so quintessentially Taylor as she first throws the door open and then remembers herself and pulls on the handle, accompanying it back so that it closes with a click rather than a crash.
My girlfriend, everyone: a careful bull in a china shop.
I guess I'm the china in this instance.
Or so it would seem when the gentle tips of her fingers lay on the right side of my back, below my shoulder, near my spine, just… just barely enough that I can feel the reassuring pressure, her presence, through my white jacket.
"Dinah is back with her parents," she says.
I nod, the wind rustling in my ears when I change the angle, the sea briefly disappearing from my view before I hurry to look back up, to see the unending stretch of blue darkening as it nears the horizon, the shadowed part of a world getting away from the light of the Sun.
"Lisa—"
"Your wording," I cut her off.
She pauses. Then she steps near, her palm following her fingers, the pressure increasing.
"Yes?" she says.
I close my eyes. Take a deep breath.
"Back with her parents. Not 'I escorted her back to her home,' or 'She's safe,' or even 'Dinah is still worried about you.' No, you specified that she's back with her parents," I tell her in a clinical summation.
"I did," she answers with all the detachment of somebody who can hide her feelings in a swarm.
"Which was… a prompt. A non-intrusive way to get me to talk about my parents, except I'm me, and you may as well have screamed what you wanted."
The hand leaves my back before it drops on my left shoulder, and Taylor pulls and spins me around until the cylindrical railing digs into my lower back, and I look up into her seafoam green eyes, remembering a young, beautiful woman reading to me from a book with tall, hard covers. Telling me of a mermaid who became seafoam because she didn't want to hurt anyone, because she had already lost her voice, yet didn't want to lose her soul.
I wonder what Taylor would've done? No. No, I don't.
Because I know.
"Sometimes, it's really hard to be your girlfriend," she says, still inexpressive even as my chest presses against hers, and I can feel our mingled heartbeats over her immobilized arm.
"[Some?"] I ask with all the eyebrow arching such a statement merits.
"Yes. Some. Because loving you is… [it's easy], Liz. You're… you're light, and wit, and beauty. You're the kind of girl I never wanted to be, because it was a ridiculously unachievable goal. You're the main character in a fairy tale, evil dragon included—"
"Coil was—"
"Snakes [count]. And yes, I realize the irony of me beating the [other] dragon before meeting you, but I'm still more suited to the role of prince than that of princess, but…" Emotion is now in her voice, reverberating across it, and I stare in fascination at green eyes unveiling yet another thing they kept hidden from me. "But I don't mind. I no longer mind, Liz, not if it's you who is the princess."
She stops, just looking at me, her free hand gently pinching my chin, redundantly making sure that I can't look away.
Not from her.
"Yet, sometimes…" I prompt her.
And she sighs with a weary, smiling exhalation.
"Sometimes… I know that you know. I know that you get what is hidden behind a gesture or a particular word choice, that you'll always know. And so, when I try to be indirect, it's in the labyrinthine fashion of somebody just saying aloud that they're going to say something and that it should be taken as indirect."
"Yeah, that sounds about right," I tell her with my own chagrined smile.
"It usually works. But then, [sometimes], you get in a mood, and outright ignore us both knowing that you know. You act out, treating the conversation as something different than intended, just because on the surface it is, and I… I don't like it when you do that."
Her fingers are still gentle on my chin. Gentle enough that I can close my eyes and lean forward until my forehead rests on the side of her neck.
And the arm wraps around me with trembling, suppressed strength.
"I'm sorry," I murmur, my breath warming the air trapped between the two of us.
"I know. Or I think I do."
She rocks back on her heels, making me sway in an ancient, soothing rhythm that is sometimes found near big, tall books with hard covers and black-and-white engravings of a woman with a fishtail and a lost voice.
"You're no garden of roses either," I tell her with something akin to my usual smile.
"Shut up. I'm trying to love you with all my heart at the moment," she says with…
With something quintessentially Taylor.
So I clutch my arms around her waist, keeping her close to me, no longer wanting to feel cold on the open expanse of my top laid bare by my jacket.
This high? Atop one of the tallest buildings in the city? There are no smells. Nothing but the slight hint of concrete powder being lifted from the gravel roof by the wind sweeping in from the open sea.
I could imagine it reaching us, adding to our slight rocking the sound of gentle, lapping waves, splashes of saltwater comfortingly stinging sun-heated cheeks. I could imagine the two of us floating, surrounded by nothing but blue that becomes darkness below, a bright sky above us.
I could imagine fishtails twinned and a foolish prince being forever forgotten after my lover decided not to give up her own voice.
I…
"I love you. I don't even have to try, Tay, it's… It's like breathing. Something I do. Something I [need] to do," I say, still breathing air that flows between us like water through craggy rocks.
Her arm tightens, our chests pressing harder.
"You'll be all right," she says, declares, even as she asks.
And I…
I slide my cold hands beneath her own jacket, the black blazer I bought her what seems like years ago, the one I deemed suitable for 'hot college girl Taylor.'
She doesn't shiver. I suspect power shenanigans.
"I don't know how you did it," I finally say. "Every day, going back, passing by that locker, seeing [them]. I don't know how you were able to confront your trigger every day, without rest, when a single visit has left me… like this."
She kisses the side of my head, pushing forward through wind-swept hair until her lips meet my scalp.
"I didn't. Not really. I… I was there. I saw it all, [experienced it], but… but I didn't confront anything. There was… There was this wall between me and the world, Liz, this wall made of daydreams about a life they could not touch, being a hero who was above it all, [away]. I… I never really thought about… I thought about them. About their cruelty, their monstrosity, the utter pettiness of their entire existence.
"But I didn't think about me.
"I didn't think about my wounds."
I shudder in something that has nothing to do with the chill of the wind coming from the ocean, and I press my cheek against her collarbone.
"Didn't. In the past," I tell her, mirroring my earlier picking apart of her statement.
She… chuckles.
"I… I am with you, Liz. It's impossible not to be introspective now, even if by proxy," she condemns me with a smile and another kiss, this one on the side of my forehead.
My eyes are still tightly shut, the darkness behind my lids maybe redder than that of a deep ocean.
Yet Taylor's voice…
It's about right for a mermaid.
"You're braver than I am," I whisper.
"That's not true," she almost brusquely answers.
"I ran away, Tay. I… I left my home, my family—"
"You left, and that took more courage than it would've for many to stay. And then you got here, and… you know what you've gone through. I've seen you fight with your life on the line, Liz. I've seen you offer your life up for me."
I remember. I remember Taylor bleeding, her life dripping away from me, my fingers only steady through Power's reassurance that we knew what we were doing, that we could stop death from claiming my love.
And I remember standing up, facing Victor, my arm stretched out in an offering, a bargain.
Tay wouldn't have been able to operate on me.
I knew.
Yet I forbade myself from thinking about it.
"More cowardice. I feared living without you."
The palm lying on my back rises and clutches my hair before pulling back, making me let out an embarrassingly surprised gasp.
And then I'm looking yet again at angry, seafoam green eyes.
"Don't you dare do something like that ever again," she says.
And kisses me.
And… It's the kind of kiss I dreamed about when I was young enough to remember all those tales between hard covers and with engravings rendered in black and white. The kind of kiss girls dream about when they still believe in true love.
In fairy tales.
It's the kind of kiss that burns through you, that consumes you without harming, white ashes being carried by upward drafts of heated air until, amidst the blaze, only something… something purer remains.
Something worthy of being loved with such intensity and devotion.
I do my best to return it.
I don't know if I manage.
But that's all right: we have a whole life to practice.
***
I love my apartment. It's the first thing that became mine after I was trapped, and I made it more so with every little touch, with accessories, and furniture, and paint color.
So I clung stubbornly to it when Victor breached the safety it represented. I claimed, 'This is mine, and nobody will force me ever again to abandon something of mine.'
Fuck you, Panacea.
"I didn't even realize there were so many of them," Taylor mutters as her Beelzebubian host crawls, flies, leaps, or is otherwise transported into partitioned, [opaque] cages.
With the ease of long practice, I refuse to shudder.
… I admit the jumping spider on Taylor's shoulder adorably waving at me helps a teensy, tiny bit.
Their mating habits are horrifying, but, well, that's nature for you.
Aaaand this is a very bad time to ponder just how much mental feedback Tay gets from the creatures psychically linked to her in this allegedly psionics-free world.
Right. Just return the friendly waving to Taylor's emissary, and go back to carefully choosing which piles of clothes go into the suitcases and which should go back to the closet they were hastily pulled out of before I attacked them into neatly organized stacks on top of my bed. Not because I'm a neat freak or anything, but—
[Exerting control over environment while undergoing stressful—]
Yeah. That. Thanks for ruining the subtext, jackass.
[Zoological unlikelihood of—]
Don't make me laugh. My girlfriend already thinks I'm enough of a weirdo after our last vocalized exchange.
[Taylor Hebert's propensity to liking behaviors usually categorized as 'adorkable'—]
Don't make me blush, you jerk—Taylor's hugging me.
From behind.
And you [distracted me].
[Anthropomorphizing of parahuman interface abilities—]
I don't know whether to feel mad or mushy.
"We'll come back. Soon," she says as her arm crosses in front of my breasts so she can brush my hair behind my ear to lay a soft, lingering kiss on the outer ridge of it that makes my toes curl before tension leaves my shoulders and I lean back against her.
…
Mushy. I'm settling on mushy.
***
Of course, the mushiness only lasts for so long.
It is, thankfully, replaced by hilarity.
"No. No, please, no," Brian says, metaphorically paling if not physically.
"Look, I pay you, I pay for your living accommodations, and I know every single one of your darkest secrets. There's absolutely no reason why being roommates once again could ever lead to something you'll live to regret," I calmly tell the broad-shouldered man standing in the open doorway to the former site of Redmond Welding.
"… That must've been the most worrisome phrasing you could have come up with on the way here," he says, showing once again why we worked so well together.
"Not even in the top ten! Now, unless you want a breakdown of my greatest hits, how about lending me a hand with carrying the luggage in before Taylor is too much of a Taylor and does it herself despite still being under hopeless orders to rest from two of the world's greatest Tinkers?"
Brian's eyes shoot up as he looks to the back of the hastily rented U-Haul, where, of course, Taylor is struggling to single-handedly dislodge one of my suitcases from the pile, and, being the white knight that he is (heh), he rushes out to help her.
I look at them for a brief moment, at the spark of comradery, at Tay no longer shooting furtive looks at biceps that seem to swim below the short sleeves of his Yale blue shirt (somebody was feeling ambitious—or the color ran out in the washer, one of those two).
So, with a peaceful look at the two of them arguing over upper body strength, I…
I step back into my former lair.
"Back again?" Rachel asks, rubbing Brutus' belly as the ecstatic dog wiggles over the floor, rubbing his back on the rough concrete as he struggles between the urges of receiving a vigorous scratching and pleadingly looking at the collar and leash Rachel is taunting him with.
"Yeah. Taylor and I will stay for a few days. Maybe a couple of weeks," I tell her with a soft, slow smile that I manage to keep at the level where she doesn't feel threatened.
She looks at me from where she's kneeling on the floor, her fingers stopped just below the orange patches of fur at the top of Brutus' chest, and her eyes meet mine for a stretched period of silence that only breaks with the petulant whining of a dog reclaiming his owner's attention.
"Good," she says as she resumes her foremost duty.
And I…
Well, she's not looking at me, so I'm free to smile a bit wider, a bit more like myself, as I start pondering just how to better mess with Alec's global ranking on Call of Douchery.
And with his games. That too.
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This work is a repost of my most popular fic on QQ (https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/wake-up-call-worm.15638/), where it can be found up to date except for the latest two chapters that are currently only available on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Agrippa?fan_landing=true)—as an added perk, both those sites have italicized and bolded text. I'll be posting the chapters here twice weekly, on Wednesday and Friday, until we're caught up. Unless something drastic happens, it will be updated at a daily rate until it catches up to the currently written 88 chapters (or my brain is consumed by the overwhelming amounts of snark, whichever happens first).
Speaking of Italics, this story's original format relied on conveying Power's intrusions into Lisa's inner monologue through the use of italics. I'm using square brackets ([]) to portray that same effect, but the work is more than 300k words at the moment, so I have to resort to the use of macros to make that light edit and the process may not be perfect. My apologies in advance
Also, I'd like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon: Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, Xalgeon, and aj0413. If you feel like maybe giving me a hand and helping me keep writing snarky, useless lesbians, consider joining them or buying one of my books on https://www.amazon.com/stores/Terry-Lavere/author/B0BL7LSX2S. Thank you for reading!
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