Bab 2498: 81
Chapter 81: Depravation 8-6
Depravation 8.6
I'd severely overestimated the time it would take to fly from Brockton to New York City.
Maybe it was because the Big Apple felt like a world away, like some distant land far beyond the reaches of my much smaller, much less important city. Maybe it was because "out of state" conjured images of week-long road trips and RVs loaded to the brim with supplies for an extended journey. Maybe it was the fact I was being flown there that made it seem so much farther than it was.
In reality, it was only about an hour. Fifty-some minutes, spent lost inside my own head with the heavy thoughts of what was to come in the morning. There wasn't even enough time to watch an in-flight movie.
The small jet I was being flown in set down in a private, one might say quarantined section of the airport, and I was let off into an equally private terminal, reserved just for occasions like this, where the government didn't want someone mingling with the general populace. This time, that someone happened to be me, because apparently, my interview tomorrow was supposed to be a surprise.
Still didn't know what to feel about that. Forget about the fame and the interview and stuff, Khepri had spent so much time and effort just trying to get people to listen to her, to take what she said seriously rather than just ignoring her for one reason or another, and here I was, with enough pull that I might accidentally set national policy if I said the wrong thing. It was still utterly surreal.
I wasn't sure what I was expecting, exactly, when I stepped out into the terminal, a duffle bag slung over my shoulder. Maybe a squad of troopers escorting the local PRT director? One of the more PR friendly heroes from the Protectorate? Maybe even Weld, if they thought that was a good idea.
Being greeted by Legend definitely wasn't it, though.
"Apocrypha." He held out his hand. It was really more reflex than intent that made my own reach out and shake it. "It's good to see you."
"Oh, um, I, uh, yeah. Good…good to see you, too."
Eloquence, thy name was Taylor Hebert.
But he smiled and didn't take it the wrong way — was probably long since used to people stuttering and stumbling when they met him; being one of the top three heroes in the country tended to cause that kind of reaction — and he shook my hand in a perfectly gentlemanly way for a perfectly normal length of time, then let go.
I'd been a little worried. Sure, there hadn't been any apparent bad feelings at the meeting before the Leviathan battle, but that sort of situation had always called for putting aside any hard feelings for the sake of the greater good, and that didn't mean he hadn't been nursing a grudge over the Echidna incident. Khepri had almost used him to kill Alexandria, after all.
If it were me, I…wasn't sure I could be as forgiving. Then again, at the end, old hatchets had been buried, hadn't they? Even Lung had worked alongside Khepri, despite the two humiliating defeats she had handed him prior to that, and she had even recruited Shadow Stalker, Sophia, one of her — my, our — tormentors, into her team.
Maybe that wasn't exactly the same as forgiveness, though. There were leagues of difference between actually forgiving someone their transgressions against you and just putting it behind you for the sake of more important things.
I think I was still learning how to do that.
Legend turned briefly towards the car waiting on the other side of the terminal, visible through the glass doors, where half a dozen PRT troopers in fully kitted gear stood at attention like a squad of bodyguards. "VIP treatment" might be the appropriate term. I wasn't sure if they were there for me or for him, but… No, I was pretty sure they were there for me.
Not that either of us necessarily needed it. We were the strongest Blaster in the world and the Endslayer (ugh, these epithets were horrible). Nothing that gave us enough trouble to need backup would be something these troopers could really help with.
"We're supposed to take the motorcade back to Protectorate HQ," he began with something like reluctance, "but…" He turned back to me with an almost mischievous smile. "Do you have any heroes you can use who can fly?"
Khepri came immediately to mind, but I knew before I could even think of suggesting her that no one would be comfortable with that idea. There were others whose mounts could pull it off, including Medusa and Alexander the Great, but I got the sense that he was really asking if I had anyone who could fly under their own power.
In that category, there was really one other of my heroes who I thought of after Khepri.
"Sure."
He jerked his head towards the windows. "Then what do you say we take the scenic route back, huh?"
I glanced back at our escort, my escort, and for a moment, I considered insisting on following the rules and playing things by the book. But that was making me miserable, right now, and in a way, it was the entire reason why I was even here, in New York, the night before I was supposed to have an interview on a major news network in the first place.
Screw it.
"That sounds good to me."
He smiled a smile full of straight, perfectly white teeth. It made me feel a little self-conscious about mine. "Great!"
He waved one of the troopers over and told him, "I'll be escorting Apocrypha back to HQ personally. We'll be flying to the rooftop access."
The trooper shifted uncomfortably. "Sir, my orders are to escort her back to HQ and hand off security at the entrance."
"I'll take the heat," Legend promised him. "Tell Director Wilkins that I'll take personal responsibility. Anything happens, it'll be on my head."
The implication being, obviously, that nothing was going to happen and we'd be fine. Personally, I wasn't sure how much I bought into that idea. My career as a cape so far hadn't been anywhere near as hectic as Khepri's, but she and I did seem to share a propensity for being dragged into things that shouldn't have anything to do with us.
But I would be with Legend, and the only cape I could think of anywhere near here that could be a problem was the Butcher, and she should still be up in Boston.
The trooper hesitated for a moment longer, and then gave in.
"As you say, sir. I'll let Director Wilkins know to expect you on the rooftop access." Under his breath, I heard him add, "But I don't think she's gonna be happy about this."
"Good man," Legend said, smiling. Then, he turned back to me and gestured to the window. "So. Should we get going?"
Set. Install.
A moment later, once the transformation had finished, I took a breath with Medea's lungs and smiled.
"Let's."
He opened the window as though this was something he did every day — and, when I looked at it that way, it probably was — and took off into the sky. I followed behind him a moment later, letting him lead, since he actually knew where to go, and we started off towards the sparkling lights of the city in the distance.
It was my first time flying just for the sake of flying. Every other time I'd been in the air under my own power, it had been during a moment of tension, of conflict, where there was no time to really feel the awe-inspiring freedom of actual flight. The closest I'd come had been that serene moment of free-running with Atalanta, and even that had been a sparse moment, a brief few seconds, in the middle of a pitched battle.
The feeling was… hard to describe. It was mundane, for Medea. A trifling thing, nothing unusual, something she'd done many, many times before. But for me? It was…exhilarating, almost. There was a feeling in my chest, not quite happiness but not really otherwise definable, and it swelled like a balloon. Every time I looked down at the ground beneath us, at the buildings and then the water, a little jolt shot through my stomach and I wondered what it would be like to fall.
It was incredible to think I'd been missing this. If I'd known just what it was like to fly, to really, truly fly, I think I would have spent many more evenings just soaring through the Brockton Bay skyline. If this was what it was like for every Alexandria package out there, then Glory Girl must have been devastated every time she was grounded.
I sympathized with her. Just a little.
"First time flying?" Legend asked me over the wind, smiling.
"First time outside of a fight," I corrected him.
"I see. What's your top speed?"
"Far less than yours, I'm sure."
Medea balked at the idea, but I wasn't stupid enough to think she outpaced him. As far as I knew, Legend had no top speed. Probably a cutoff point, where he was moving too fast for point-to-point locomotion, a speed that was too fast to be reasonable, but an actual, hard limit on exactly how fast he could go? Not to my knowledge.
"I'll let you set the pace, then."
And true to his word, he slowed down, and it was only as he did that I realized I'd been straining to keep up with him, pouring more magical energy into my flight so that I could go fast enough to stay within sight.
I guess it wasn't an exaggeration to call Legend the fastest hero in the world. Maybe there was a speedster out there somewhere who was faster or some space-warper like Vista who could cover large swathes of ground in "an instant," but for fliers, he must've been it.
I was so distracted with the excitement of flying for the first time that it took me ten minutes to realize that we were taking the long way around, rather than going straight for the Protectorate HQ. Two months ago, I wouldn't have thought anything of it, but two months ago was before Echidna, before Alexandria writing my friends off for dead, before seeing the uglier side of heroics that Khepri had known so well.
A little starstruck, I might have been, but naïveté was something I'd been stripped of a long time ago.
"So," I started. Without the kind of speed we'd been moving at before, the howling wind was much less overwhelming. "Perhaps I'm making an unreasonable assumption or two, but… Legend, is there some kind of ulterior motive behind this? You never struck me as a flighty sort of man."
The pun came to me the moment it left my mouth. Ugh, Medea, what the hell?
Legend didn't respond right away, but he moved closer, like he wanted a private conversation. It seemed to me like the midair equivalent of pulling someone off to the side.
"There are some things that happened between us that I think we need to talk about," he said to me. "I thought you'd appreciate the relative privacy we would have up here, where there's no one who can hear us."
I knew immediately what he was referring to. How could I not, when I'd been dreading the subject? Maybe it was just too much to wish for to hope that it was in the past and would stay there.
"The Echidna Incident, you mean," I clarified.
"Among a few other things," he hedged, "but yes. That was the big one."
My lips pursed.
"I'm not sure what you're expecting. An apology seems too simple for what happened, and if we're discussing the outcome, I don't have such a thing to offer you."
Should I tell him I was sorry for saving my friends? That was ridiculous. I wasn't about to apologize for that. Even though the method was…not ideal, it had let me walk out of there with only one casualty. Considering what a clusterfuck the whole thing had been, I'd say that was nothing short of a miracle.
"Nor should you, I think," he said. "There were mistakes made that night. I'd argue the events that led up to that fight was a series of errors in judgement that we all learned from, some of us better than others."
Did I? Sometimes, it didn't feel like it. Sometimes, it felt like I was just retracing Khepri's steps, learning exactly why she had been pushed down the road she had been.
"But," he went on, "that one hero you used, at the end, the one who took control of us all. Khepri…"
"I won't apologize for that, either," I told him, and it felt like Medea was egging me on. "It was working the way it was. What happened was as much Alexandria's fault as it was mine."
And in that moment, I believed it. Yes, Khepri had been my nuclear option. Yes, maybe Mastering the entirety of the Trainyard hadn't been the best decision. But it had been working, hadn't it? I'd only been hanging onto sanity by a thread, but I'd been hanging on, and Alexandria had been the one to tip me over the edge. If she hadn't, I might have managed a perfect, flawless resolution.
"Maybe it was," Legend agreed, and it surprised me enough to shock me out of my stubbornness. "I've known Alexandria a long time — almost twenty-three years, now — and I know what she can be like. Hard, uncompromising. She's used to being able to put her foot down and have it mean something. She's used to being in control."
He paused a moment.
"But using Khepri was a mistake. She was unstable. Using her made you unstable. Things ended well enough as they did, but in her madness — and yes, those of us under her control could feel her deteriorating mental state — she nearly killed a member of the Triumvirate by Mastering the other two. Do you understand what company that would have put you in? The only other cape to have managed something like that was the Siberian, who killed Hero."
I didn't look at him, because I wasn't sure what I would say if I had to look him in the face. The one thing I was sure of was that it would be much, much harsher than what I did say.
"My friends' lives were on the line, and so were a number of innocent bystanders and several heroes," I told him coldly. "If you mean to say that the appropriate decision then was to make the hard choice and let Eidolon kill Noelle and all of the hostages inside of her, then this conversation is over."
"As a Protectorate hero who has been around the block a couple of times, that's exactly what I should tell you," he said. "We like to pretend that heroism is all bright banners and witty one-liners, but the reality is that sometimes, we have to make hard choices. Sometimes, we have to weigh the risk involved and decide who can and can't be saved."
My lips thinned. I can't accept that. Not when it was my friends' lives on the line, and not even when it was a complete stranger. Not after that had been my reality for nearly two years — when going against the grain and helping me had been too inconvenient for anyone to step in and stop the Trio.
"Personally, however," he went on, "if it had been me in your position, with my husband and son's lives on the line… I wouldn't have done anything differently than you did."
When I looked over at him, he gave me a smile.
"It's easy for people to talk about what's right and what needs to be done," he told me. "It's easy to sit back and say you need to think of the greater good, when the people at stake are people you don't know or have never met. When the lives on the line are your friends, however, or your family's or your spouses or just anyone you care about, it's a lot harder to say that sacrificing them is the right move."
"And Alexandria?" I asked. "Eidolon? Do they share that opinion?"
"I'm not sure they do," he admitted. "For the two of them, there isn't really much of a life outside of the job."
"Should you be telling me something so personal?"
"Maybe not, but I want you to understand their positions. They dedicated everything to being heroes, and they sacrificed everything to that goal. Maybe some of those things they sacrificed are things that you shouldn't ever sacrifice. I think, to some extent, they've become so invested in the job that they don't really understand why they're heroes in the first place.
"For them, the job is everything. They don't have friends or family outside of it. And I think that it's important that you do have more than just being a hero in your life. I think, without having people you care about, people who are important to you, and people whose deaths you'd mourn, you lose sight, a little, of exactly what being a hero is all about."
When I thought of it like that, I could see it. Alexandria and Eidolon had no friends except each other, no one to ground them. They had no one to lose and they thought in big numbers, in huge populations, where there were always "acceptable losses." If you thought like that all the time, then people stopped being human beings and started being statistics.
That was exactly the sort of thinking that I'd rejected.
I could even see now Alexandria's panic, that night. She and her trio of friends had been invincible, until suddenly Hero was dead and they weren't, and then I'd taken control of her two remaining friends, and she hadn't had anything to fall back on except intimidate. She'd just chosen the exact wrong person to try that on.
"You're saying that having friends is important."
"I'm saying, from an old veteran to a relatively new hero, don't let the job consume you. Have things you enjoy doing outside of it. Have friends that aren't just coworkers. Have people you love and hold onto them, so you don't forget how terrifying it is to lose them. Remember that you may have to make hard decisions in the course of being a hero, but never forget the weight of each life lost when you do."
My lips pulled into a smile.
I wouldn't say I agreed with everything he said. I wasn't sure I could ever let myself accept that there was such a thing as Alexandria or Eidolon's "acceptable losses." I didn't want to become the sort of person who started believing in that sort of thing.
But the rest of it… The idea of having people and things that tethered you to a life outside of being a hero, being a cape… Yes. One of the major problems Khepri had faced, I think, was that being a cape had eventually taken over everything else entirely. So much had happened so quickly that she'd never really had a moment of rest, a time to be an ordinary girl, and it had shown.
And most importantly, Legend had validated me, he had told me that my priorities that night might not have been the correct ones, but they were most certainly the right ones.
"You know, Legend," I said, "you really are exactly the sort of man I always expected you to be."
Thank you.
He didn't reply. Instead, he pointed out one of the office buildings, aglow with its lights on, and told me, "This is us, right up ahead. Your credentials should be in the system, so we can go right on in as soon as we land."
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
Being introduced to the New York Wards all over again was…an experience. A good one, generally, because Khepri's introduction to them hadn't been under the best of circumstances, but there was a degree of awkwardness to it, still.
I was the Hopebringer, after all. The Endslayer. I had killed Leviathan, one of the monsters that everyone had long believed unkillable.
They were better about it than the average civilian. They didn't fawn over me, they didn't scream and shout or beg me to sign whatever happened to be in reach. Most importantly, none of them threw their underwear at me or asked me to go out on a date.
Thank goodness for small mercies.
That didn't mean they weren't a little starstruck, which was something I was still getting used to. They were friendly and agreeable, but most of all, even though they tried to hide it, I could tell they were excited to meet me, face to face. Well, mask to mask, but still. They knew what I'd done and they were impressed.
They were professional enough, at least, to keep things from getting too weird.
The one New York Ward I'd sort of been dreading meeting was one of the few who was absent. Off on patrol or something, I didn't remember what the others had said by next morning, but not in the building at the time, regardless.
Flechette. Foil.
There were a lot of things I'd changed, a lot of fates that had turned around, mostly for the better, but hers was one that I might have inadvertently ruined, just by existing.
Without Khepri, without Skitter, she hadn't met Parian.
Maybe I was being too sensitive about it, but in another life, she'd left the Wards and the Protectorate, she'd quit as a hero, just so she could be with Parian. I wasn't sure if that said more about her or about the situation of the PRT and Protectorate at the time, but she'd felt strongly enough that she'd quit her job, her career, for the sake of staying with her girlfriend.
I didn't know what became of them later. Whether they lasted past Gold Morning. But the fact that I might have screwed that up for her made the idea of looking her in the face an…awkward proposal.
The rest of the evening passed in a blur of shaken hands and half-hearted smiles, shared jokes and friendly ribbing. At times, I felt like an outsider looking in, and at others, I felt like I was being welcomed by people who weren't all that different from me, in at least some ways.
Before I knew it, the alarm from my borrowed room was ringing and it was time to get up and get ready for my interview.
It hit me in the shower five minutes later like a sledgehammer to the chest, exactly what I was going to be doing. An interview, on live television, broadcast across the entire country but undoubtedly seen throughout the entire world. In just a few short hours, everyone who didn't already know my name would, and they'd be speaking of me in the same breath as the Triumvirate.
Legend. Alexandria. Eidolon. Hero. Apocrypha. The greatest heroes in the world, the frontline against the forces trying to tear it apart.
I wasn't ashamed to admit I nearly threw up. Somehow, and I wasn't even sure how, I managed to keep my food down, but I spent nearly half an hour bent over the toilet, head spinning, pulse pounding, keenly and terrifyingly aware of what was coming.
I wasn't prepared for this. Fuck no. Holy fuck, no.
But it was going to happen anyway. No, it needed to happen, and I couldn't run away from that. It was too important for me to call in and say, "Sorry, I'm not feeling good enough to do the interview today."
Eventually, I managed to quiet my stomach and finish getting ready. My head still felt heavy and thick and a nervous jolt shot through my gut every time I put too much thought into what I was about to do, but I soldiered on.
All too soon, I was in the studio and being ushered into a chair backstage for a last minute makeup pass to get me "camera ready." Legend was with me, offering me tips and advice on what to do and how to act, things hard won from experience. I think I retained maybe a tenth of everything he was saying; the rest went in one ear and disappeared before it made it to my brain.
I felt hyper aware of the show going on just a few dozen feet away, separated from me by stage props and a curtain. The lights being shone on me as the artist worked on what little of my face was visible were blazing hot and sweltering, like the heat of half a dozen midday suns.
Finally, he pronounced me done and I stood on leaden legs, turning towards the stage. Whether I walked there to a place just out of sight of the audience and the cameras under my own power or was steered, I wasn't sure. I think if someone hadn't pushed me, I might have just stood there dumbly, frozen, so it was probably the latter.
I swallowed thickly as the opening monologue started to wind down. My pulse roared in my ears.
"— be right back in just a few minutes with our surprise special guest! Don't go anywhere!"
The crowd roared as the show's theme played out to commercial break. My heart jumped in my chest.
It was almost time.
Fuck. Fuck, I'm not prepared for this, whose idea was it to put me on television, I'm gonna screw this up, I'm gonna screw up on national television and everyone will see it, fuck, fuck, fuck me —
"Do you think you're ready?" Legend asked gently.
I took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to calm my pounding heart. His voice gave me something to latch onto, something to focus my mind a little to distract from just how screwed I was. It helped ground me in the reality of an utterly unreal situation.
"No," I told him miserably, voice shaking, "but I don't have much of a choice, do I?"
"You always have a choice."
Liar.
For a second, I hated him. Just for a second, a bare, fractional moment where something ugly burned in my gut and acid sat on my tongue, waiting for me to spit it out. I thought of what Medea might say, what cutting barb she might fling back in his face. I thought of the tone she would use, honeyed venom that purred out of her mouth.
The moment passed. The burning in my gut churned and settled back into nauseous unease. Another deep breath was gulped down.
"If it'll help Brockton Bay get back on its feet," I said, "then no, I really don't."
A few seconds of silence slid past, and he said nothing. Then, his lips quirked up on one side and his eyebrows slanted, and without a hint of irony or mocking, he told me, "That's what makes you a hero."
A thrill jolted through me, a spike of pleasure that shot through my belly and landed in my chest, which suddenly felt too sizes too small for my lungs. I swallowed and licked my lips, feeling suddenly childish and naive, because Legend himself just fucking complimented me, holy fuck, wow, and the fact that something that simple could still blindside me was…
I thought I'd moved past that. The hero worship. The remnants of awe from my childhood, from simplistic, innocent belief that these people were somehow grander and better, just because they were the Triumvirate.
Maybe it was just because it was Legend saying it, because I didn't think I'd have anywhere near the same reaction to Alexandria's praise.
" …introduce today's special guest. She comes to us all the way from the city of Brockton Bay, where she's been making a bit of a splash recently. First, she brought down Lung, the leader of the Azn Bad Boys. Then, she was instrumental in the capture of his underlings, Oni Lee and Bakuda. Finally, just a little over a week ago, she did the impossible and killed an Endbringer."
The audience erupted into cheers, whooping, hollering, and clapping so loudly it sounded like pounding rain on the roof of a rickety shed. The host had to shout to be heard over them.
"Please give a warm welcome to the superheroine who slew Leviathan: Apocrypha!"
I took a deep breath. That was my cue.
"Good luck," Legend whispered. "And remember: you're a hero."
His words didn't really help with the nerves, but I appreciated them for what they were. They let me focus myself, center my mind, so that when I stepped out onto the stage, smiling and waving at the audience, I had already pulled on the presence of one of the calmest, most personable heroes in my repertoire — just enough to keep myself calm and friendly.
Jeanne d'Arc settled in with the warmth of a comforting hug.
"Apocrypha," the host greeted me as I sat down in the chair next to his desk. "It's great to have you on the show."
I beamed.
"It's great to be here."
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
NOTES
Two more chapters left until the end of arc 8. The interlude is next.
Also, if you've ever doubted this story's pedigree as a Nasu crossover, there's one line during Taylor's conversation with Legend that should absolutely dispel all doubts.
Late, today, on account of sleep needed. Had some really good luck last night and couldn't keep my eyes open long enough to post this morning. EDIT: Perverts. I was talking about getting Musashi and Sanzang back to back in FGO.
Special thanks to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best.
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Status Power Mingguan
-- Peringkat
Power 
-- Power
stone