Memoirs (Chapter Two)

[keighthundred]

Title: Memoirs
Rating: Teen
Major Warnings: No major warnings apply
Genre: Worm/Pale Crossover
Summary: Seven years after gold morning, the ghosts of Taylor Hebert’s past still haunt her. Seeking some solitude to hopefully help with her head, she moves to a small town called Kennet for some rest and relaxation. She doesn’t get it. Co-written with the beautiful Chartic.

Capes. There were fucking capes in Kennet. That they all knew where I lived seemed less important than the fact I finally had found capes. The smart thing to do, I knew, was probably to leave town immediately. It was the sort of thing any normal person would do. It was the most surefire way to keep myself out of their crosshairs and I was in no shape to fight. All I had to do was run back to Boston with my tail between my legs, try again somewhere else. I’d had four fresh starts already—what was a fifth?

But I couldn’t. I’d been alone for the last seven years, isolated, kept away from anything resembling my old life as much as possible. And I knew it was probably a good thing that I had, but it had hurt. It was like I’d moved to a foreign country and never picked up the language, and I’d spent the last decade of my life just one beat out of step, mingling amongst the people of this world but never quite belonging.

Dad used to understand. We’d talked about it at length, about the things we’d missed from Earth Bet. The people we’d missed. Our friends and family, a world away.

I didn’t know when it had changed for him. I didn’t see the moment when everything had clicked for him, and he was able to move on, chat about local politics and sports with his head held high, meet new people and start new relationships without a single stumbling point. I was happy for him—really, I was—but…

It wasn’t me. Kennet probably wasn’t me, either, but it was the closest I’d gotten to anything like what I’d had in seven years. And besides—I had my memoirs to work on, didn’t I? And this town had brought out a level of productivity in me that I hadn’t seen in a long, long time. I’d actually managed to pump out two whole chapters in the time since I’d arrived in town, which, compared to the meager scattering of notes I’d had before, was a world of progress. That meant I had to stay, didn’t it?

I decided to play things slow, keep my head down, and ensure I looked as non-threatening as possible. I wasn’t that stupid teenage girl anymore, I could do this the right way. I kept to myself, dived into my work, and didn’t go outside unless I had to. The most I did was a little research: a few cursory Wooble searches on Finders and Boon Companions. I hadn’t come up with anything useful, in the end.

The whole time, I felt like there were eyes on me—some supernatural sixth sense that warned me I was being watched. I should’ve called someone. My dad, Annette. Anyone. But I didn’t. I wasn’t really sure why. Maybe I was scared they’d convince me to go, leave all of this behind.

But nobody came to visit me. Nobody knocked on my door. I kept my head down, and the situation continued in its uneasy balance. As long as I didn’t push, and they didn’t push, both sides were content to pretend the other didn’t exist. But it couldn’t last forever.

Eventually, about a week after the deer girl—Avery—had visited me, I had no choice but to go out. I was out of groceries, and there was no way I could stretch the bare leftovers in the fridge any further. I needed essentials. If Kennet’s capes were watching, they’d know that. They wouldn’t panic at the sight of my leaving my house.

I hoped they wouldn’t, at least.

It was an uneasy drive to the grocery store. The entire time I felt like a sword of Damocles was hovering over me. How many ambushes would I have set up if this had been me back in the day? How many different ways would I have managed to stop myself? What would I have done if I had considered myself a threat? The thoughts weren’t good. They were the kind of things I’d forced myself to forget, taught myself to push down.

But in the end, nothing came. No capes were waiting in the bushes, no PRT-like groups had dropped in to snatch me up. I saw nothing except stop signs and schoolkids before I made it to the local supermarket. I didn’t think I’d ever been so anxious picking out cheerios.

“Excuse me,” someone said. “Can you help me out?”

I turned. A woman with a bland, average looking face was standing beside me. In every way, she was as nondescript as possible—mid-twenties, dark eyes, a boring blue blouse and boring gray slacks, basket in hand.

But there was one thing that stuck out about her—her hair looked a lot like mine. Black, curly, flowing down to her shoulders. She pointed toward a box of cereal on the top shelf that was just out of her reach. I stood about a head taller than her.

“Yeah,” I said, pushing my cart out of the way. It was a struggle, reaching up with my non-dominant hand, but I managed to grab the box of cornflakes without fumbling it. “Here.”

“Thanks,” she said, smiling wide, dropping the box in her basket. “I’m Lis.”

My pulse quickened. She wasn’t one of them, was she? “Nice to meet you,” I said, forcing a smile, and turned to move down the aisle.

She followed me.

Fuck.

I took a deep breath, and continued forth, briefly glancing at my grocery list before leaving the aisle. I tried my very hardest not to react to Lis trailing behind me like the world’s most threatening puppy.

Don’t act threatening, I told myself. Be calm and collected.

I put three onions into a plastic bag and deposited it in my cart.

“Hey,” Lis said.

I winced, slowly turning to meet her gaze. “Yes?”

“Aren’t you going to ask why I’m following you?”

It took all my strength not to react. I turned away, casually reaching for some potatoes. “No.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very smart move.”

I ignored her, tying the bag shut and dropping it in my cart. Bread. I needed bread. And some pasta, and—

“So what do you do?” Lis asked.

I bit my lip. “I’m a writer,” I said, refusing to look at her. I was starting to sound like a broken record. Bread, I told myself. I started moving for the bread aisle.

A girl cut us off halfway there—a younger girl, around the same age that Avery had been, with dark skin, brown hair with red highlights, and a single earring on her right ear. It wasn’t exactly a cape costume, but something about her radiated confidence nonetheless.

Jesus, I thought. It was like a fucking clown car with them. How many more of these capes were hiding in plain sight?

“Lis,” the girl said, her voice low, “what do you think you’re doing?”

“Keeping tabs.” Lis shrugged. “You weren’t clear on how you wanted me to do it, and I wasn’t learning anything watching her from a distance.”

The girl shook her head. “You have no idea what you’re messing with. Seriously. You don’t know what she’s capable of.”

Lis only smiled, baring her teeth in a vulpine grin. It was unnerving, to say the least. “And you do?”

“Leave,” the girl commanded.

“What?”

“Leave, get out of this store, move away from us. Don’t make me ask again.”

Lis huffed. “Fine. I’m going.” On her way toward the exit, she gave one final glance back toward us. “You didn’t have to be so rude, you know. I was just trying to help.”

The girl rolled her eyes, waiting silently until Lis was all the way gone and had vanished out the door. Then she turned to me. “Can we talk?”

“Yeah,” I said. Then I glanced at my cart. “Do you mind if I finish shopping first? It shouldn’t be long.”

She swept her gaze over the store, which was relatively quiet at this time of day, and gave me a curt nod. “That’s fine.”

We walked in silence, and I tried not to stare. I held my gaze directly forward, fingers on the cart handle, feeling the little vibrations in the metal as I pushed along. My prosthetic arm hung loosely at my side.

“For the record, I didn’t do anything to her,” I said, reaching for a loaf of sliced wheat. “Lis, I mean.”

“I know. I was listening in.” She was watching me intently from a few feet away. “I’m Lucy.”

Lucy. Another real name. I was beginning to notice it was a habit with these capes.

“Taylor,” I said, dropping the bread into my cart. I started pushing it, and Lucy followed. “But you probably already knew that.”

“I did.”

“You’ve been watching me, right? Testing me? I have to ask—if you’re here, does that mean I passed?”

She shrugged. “We’ve talked about you.”

“But?”

“But we’ve had a lot on our plate lately, so we haven’t had too much time to go over your thing. And there’s still a lot of unknowns when it comes to your thing. Sorry.”

“You could’ve just asked me,” I said.

“Maybe.” But there was a look in her face that said maybe not. “You said that you weren’t from this world, right?”

“Sure.”

“Where are you from, then?”

“Originally, a city called Brockton Bay,” I said, stopping at the pasta aisle. “In a world called Earth Bet. An alternate universe.”

Lucy frowned.

“You think I’m lying,” I said, grabbing a box of spaghetti.

She hesitated, just slightly, before shaking her head. “I think you believe what you’re saying.”

“Crazy, then.”

“Eh. Crazy’s kind of a crappy way to put it.”

“You’re burying the lede,” I said, pushing my cart forth. “You don’t believe what I’m telling you.”

“No, I wouldn’t say that just yet. I’m not making any final judgments at this point. Still trying to figure you out.”

I sighed, moving toward the registers. At this time of day, there wasn’t even a line—I just walked right up and started placing my items on the counter. Without being asked, Lucy stepped in to help, transferring the groceries over faster than I could manage with just one hand.

“Do you have a rewards card with us?” the cashier asked.

“No,” I said, looking up at him. He was a younger guy, barely out of high school, with greasy hair and a face full of acne. He glanced at Lucy, then back at me. I wondered, briefly, what he must’ve thought of us—a woman being trailed by a girl that kept throwing furtive glances her way when she thought she wasn’t looking.

“Would you like to sign up for one? It’s free, gets you ten percent off all your purchases including this one—”

I shook my head.

“Okay.”

I waited for him to scan my groceries while Lucy watched silently in my periphery. The whole process was nerve wracking. She’d said I was an unknown, but that was true in both directions. I didn’t know anything about her or what she was capable of. I’d learned long ago never to let my guard down around capes, and here was one that was comfortable enough to hang around me out of costume. Either she was friendly, or she was extremely, extremely dangerous—and I didn’t like my chances with that coin flip.

It wasn’t until we were on the way to my car that Lucy spoke again. “If you’re cool with me asking,” she said, “what happened to your arm?”

“I was in a desperate spot,” I said, popping open my trunk. “Got trapped under something heavy, too heavy to move. My arm was mostly gone anyway. It was the only way to get myself free.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You cut it off?”

“Of course not,” I said, tossing the bags into my car haphazardly. “I asked someone else to do it.”

For two heartbeats, Lucy was dead silent. She gave me a funny look—halfway between confused and strangled.

What did I say?

Then she cleared her throat. “Would this be related to your power? Or—the power you used to have?”

“No. It was mostly unrelated.” I shut my trunk. “Is that all you wanted to ask?”

“What was your power?”

“Bug control,” I said. “I used to be able to control all bugs up to a certain radius.”

“...That’s it?”

“It was more useful than you’d think. I could sense through my bugs, keep track of pretty much everything in a four block radius.”

Lucy nodded. “Your power had a theme? Control—controlling bugs, controlling environments and situations?”

“Yeah.” I was impressed that she’d made the connection so quickly. “You mind if I ask you a question back?”

“I can’t promise I’ll answer it, but yeah. Go ahead.”

“I’ve been dying to know,” I said. “What’s ‘practice’?”

Lucy shifted awkwardly. “This is going to sound really lame, but—”

I sighed.

“—the less you know, the better.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that before.”

“Well, this time, it’s true. Because the more you know, the more vulnerable you are. It means more things out there can prey on you. Knowledge is dangerous.”

“I feel like being left in the dark is more dangerous.”

“Trust me. It’s not. Innocence protects people. You seem to not know what Practice is, and from what you’ve said to me so far, I think I believe you. Keep it that way, alright? If you keep digging, you’ll start picking things up that you won’t be prepared for, which can be really bad. I’ve had some people I know—classmates, friends—get into some deep trouble because they stuck their noses into things they only partially understood.”

I started pushing the cart over to a corral, and Lucy followed. “That’s kind of why I’m asking you to explain to me these things,” I said. “I’ve been around the block once or twice in my day. I’m no stranger to powers I don’t understand, secrets that get people killed, danger beyond what I can handle. It helps to know as much as you can, and I get the feeling that you know a lot.”

“In this case, it doesn’t help. Trust me. Have you ever picked up any information where just knowing about it put you at risk?”

I thought about Cauldron, about powers and Scion.

“Yeah. Most of my career was like that.”

Lucy nodded. “Then I hope you understand why I wouldn’t want to talk about it.”

On some level, I understood. After Echidna, cape teams had started disappearing, people had started dying, just because they wanted to get the truth out to more people. Knowledge could be a dangerous thing, especially when you didn’t know everything at play. But I could also read between the lines. She didn’t trust me. None of them did, not yet. In their eyes, I was an unknown, a threat—which was ridiculous, because none of them knew the first thing about me. They hadn’t even known my powers. It was almost comical; mistrusted not because of my actions, but because of what they weren’t sure of.

“I’ve got one big question for you,” Lucy said suddenly. “I need you to answer this as honestly as you can. Give me the first thing you think of when I say this word.”

I frowned. “Okay.”

“Furs.”

“Rachel.”

Lucy blinked. “Huh. Who’s that?”

I sighed, pushing the cart into a row of other carts. “Someone who was important to me. She wore a lot of fur coats.”

“Okay.” She was silent for a moment, lost in thought. And then she nodded. “Okay. There is something I can tell you. Be careful with who you talk to. There’s kind of a messy situation going on in Kennet right now, and not everyone you meet is trustworthy.”

A situation? Villains? “Should I be worried?”

“Maybe. Look, everyone who’s been allowed to stay here is meant to be working to protect Kennet, but that doesn’t mean they don’t also have ulterior motives. I’m not saying they’ll hurt you, especially if you keep yourself innocent, but I’m not saying they won’t, either. If anyone strange comes up to you, try to leave. Avoid them.”

“Someone strange?” I scoffed. “Like Lis?”

“Yeah. Exactly like her.”

I forced out a laugh. “You make it sound like there’s a conspiracy going on in town.”

I really didn’t like the fact that Lucy didn’t respond to that.

“Just be careful,” she said after a beat of silence. She pulled out a scrap of paper and a pen. “I’ll give you my phone number. If you see anything weird, call me. Don’t do anything else. And I really mean it when I say this: don’t try to use your power. Don’t try to reach out to it—your patron. Khepri or Queen Administrator or whoever.”

I took a breath. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
 
There had been times, over the last seven years, that I’d fallen low enough to the point where I’d wanted my power back. But those times had been few and far between. Honestly, I was terrified of it—of what would happen if my passenger ever came back. I’d lost myself, toward the end of Gold Morning. I’d lost almost everything that had made me me.

I didn’t even know how much of me was left.

“I really can’t take that chance. I don’t know what granted you its power, but—”

“Honestly,” I said. “I won’t. There was a good reason I was cut off from my power.” I sighed. “I was too far gone at the end of everything to even really make the choice to take it away. It took two bullets to the head to stop it from getting worse. To bring me back. I’m not in any hurry to recreate that.”

“Uh…” Lucy’s eyes darted to the scars on my forehead. I wasn’t sure if she believed me, and I didn’t really care. I started moving back to my car, and she followed. “Hey,” she said. “If you’re really scared of it, I can try something.”

I gave her an unamused look. “Something?”

“Don’t worry. It’s simple. A diagram—a connection blocker. It’s some of the most basic Practice you can do.” She retrieved some chalk from her bag. “Mind if I draw something on your prosthetic? It’ll work better if it’s something attached to you, something that’s part of you or your identity.”

I frowned. I didn’t know how this was supposed to help, but I held out my prosthetic arm anyway. “Sure. Go ahead.”

She held it firm with her left hand, and with her right, began to draw a series of geometric shapes—lines connected at right angles forming quarter circles, all contained within a larger circle. There was an easy confidence to her strokes, as if she’d done all this a million times before.

“Okay,” she said, finishing up the last few lines. “Here we g—”

There was a bang so loud I thought a gun had gone off. My prosthetic arm shattered like it was a bomb, bits of plastic cracking so deep it cleaved the whole thing into a dozen little pieces. A thin cloud of chalk dust floated into the air. My heart skipped a beat, and I found myself staring at what used to be my right arm. I’d had that prosthetic for seven years. It had become a part of me, and now it was gone.

“...Was that supposed to happen?” I asked, breath wavering.

Lucy took a few steps back, which I really didn’t like.

“Lucy? Was that supposed to happen?”

Slowly, arduously, she shook her head. “I think you should go home,” she said. All of her candidness from earlier was gone, locked behind a tight lipped grimace. “We’ll talk soon.”

“Lucy—”

But she was already moving away, walking quickly, her eyes never leaving the remnants of my prosthetic for a moment. I wanted to stop her, to grab her and force her to answer my questions, but I knew that would only burn my bridges with the town’s capes. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure if I could. I had no idea what Lucy or her friends were capable of. They were capes of unknown strength and number. If they wanted to, they could probably beat me in a fight, because I’d have no way to defend myself. I had no powers, no weapons, and now I didn’t even have my prosthetic arm.

All I could do was watch helplessly as Lucy disappeared around the corner, vanishing from sight, wondering the whole time what the hell was happening with my passenger.