Memoirs (Chapter Four)

[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.

I had to admit: I felt really awkward, being a twenty-five-year-old woman sitting in a circle with four twelve-year-old girls. I knew that rationally there was a very good reason I was here and that these weren’t normal twelve-year-olds, but all I could think about was what people would say if they saw me. We were far enough away from the town proper that there wouldn’t be anyone out here, but still. Fears were irrational, hell, people were irrational, and I really didn’t want to get any concerned parents interested in what I might be doing.

But the risk was worth it if I finally got answers about what was going on.

There were four of them, and they were clearly a tight-knit group. Avery, Lucy, Verona, and Snowdrop; they chatted amongst themselves like close friends. It was in their words, their body language. They cared about each other. I felt a bit like an intruder, pushing my way into somewhere I didn’t belong.

“Magic,” I said, just to bring the conversation back to its point.

“Yeah, it’s a lot to take in,” Lucy said. “Imagine how me and Ronnie felt when we first got introduced to it. Took me days to really wrap my head around it. I mean…” She waggled her fingers. “Practice? Magic? Come on. But then we saw it with our own eyes.”

I leaned in. “There was a cape back where I came from. He called himself Myrddin. He was convinced that his powers were magic, different from everybody else’s. He made it his whole thing, called himself a wizard, had the robes and staff and all that. Everybody thought he was crazy, but…” I trailed off.

“I don’t think we can comment on that either way,” Avery said. “Not without seeing him first hand.”

“He sounds really smart,” Snowdrop added. “Extremely stable.”

“He had a staff, and he was able to do a variety of different things with his power. I saw him draw symbols in the air that caused different effects, shoving people back, catching water. I mean… that sounds like your magic, right? Practice?”

“I think if he was a Practitioner,” Verona said, “it was probably a really friggin’ dumb idea to announce that he was a wizard to the world. I mean, innocence protects people. And when you tell someone about magic, you’re responsible for them, for what happens to them and what they do. Telling the whole world about magic? Sounds like a fantastic way to obliterate your karma.”

“And Karma is… important?”

The girls looked among each other, before they all turned to Lucy. “And we’re going to have to stop here for a second. Before we get into deeper explanations, you’re going to need to agree to something.”

I frowned. More agreements. More questions. More things standing between me and what I needed to hear.

“It’s not that we don’t want to tell you—really—but we swore oaths not to reveal certain things to outsiders. We really can’t break those oaths without facing some serious backlash. So if you want to get answers to everything, if you want to hear about magic, you can’t be an outsider.” She took a breath before continuing. “You’re going to have to agree to become a part of this town. You’ve got to agree to protect it and defend it from outsiders. I’m offering this to you because I trust you. Because I believe your story—that you’ve been mostly innocent up until now, and that you don’t have any agenda of your own when it comes to Kennet. But this isn’t something to take lightly.”

“If you want to back out now,” Avery added, “this is your chance. After this, you’re in this deep.”

“No going back,” Verona said.

“It’s not a big deal,” Snowdrop said.

I gave the last girl a side-eye as I inhaled. I could feel the weight these girls were putting behind what they were saying. It felt like…it really didn’t feel like anything I’d experienced before. Joining the Undersiders had felt less serious than this. It was more like when I’d been recruited into the Protectorate, with the weight of the world behind me, a ticking clock on counting towards when it all ended.

Which was ridiculous, wasn’t it? These were a handful of kids. Whatever was at stake, it probably wasn’t world-threatening.

“You sound like you’re recruiting me into a cult,” I said with a nervous chuckle.

“You can say no,” Avery said. “If you’re having doubts, you really should say no.”

“I was never good at backing out when I should,” I said. “Maybe I should’ve learned my lesson by now, but…” It wasn’t me. I wasn’t the kind of person to run from danger. “No,” I said. “I’m not backing out.”

“Then promise,” Lucy said, “Promise that you’ll agree to protect Kennet. That you’ll give your aid if we ask it of you, that you won’t attempt to harm us, and that you won’t reveal anything you learned here to outsiders.”

“For how long?” I asked. “Are you saying I’ll have to stay here for the rest of my life?”

The girls glanced at each other. “Let’s say five years,” Lucy said. “You agree to remain in Kennet for at least five years. And you have to mean it. Your words might not have much weight, but ours do.”

“Does that mean you’ll hunt me down if I renege on our deal?” I asked, injecting a little mirth into my tone.

“If that’s what it takes,” Lucy answered, dead serious. “If we don’t, it’ll screw us over pretty friggin’ bad, because it’ll mean that we broke our oaths to others. So I hope it doesn’t come to that.” She looked me in the eyes. “So, five years. You’d be allowed to leave the town temporarily, for shorter periods of time, but until those five years are up, you’ll live in Kennet.”

Five years. I wasn’t sure if these kids were even on the level, but I needed answers. This was my first chance at anything like my old life and I needed to know. Besides, I wasn’t planning on leaving anyway. I let out a breath and nodded. In for a penny. “I agree.”

“No, you’ll need to say the whole thing. We can’t risk an agreement without weight behind it or something that could be misunderstood.”

I put a hand over my heart. “I promise to protect Kennet. I’ll help out when you ask, I won’t do you any harm, I won’t reveal any secrets you reveal to me here today, and I’ll stay here providing help for at least five years.”

At the last word the girls looked at each other, and all of them gave off the appearance that something had happened, but whatever it was, I couldn’t see it. I felt like an idiot, sitting in the dirt and making promises to tweens.

“Alright,” Lucy said. “We agree to those exact terms, staking our reputations as protectors of Kennet on them.” She let out a breath. “Okay, I think that we’re good. Where were we?”

“You were talking about Karma,” I picked back up without a beat. “You were saying how it’s important to some things?”

“Right, so karma isn’t just important, it’s fundamental. Seriously, you can’t really do anything without running into karma. It affects everything you do, and I mean everything. People with bad karma tend to have it not only affect their practice, but it seeps into their everyday life. It changes how people view you, how badly things affect you. It can go all the way down to always burning your tongue whenever you drink coffee. Tripping over the root of a tree that everyone else steps over. Or your car failing you right when you needed it. When there’s an imbalance, the universe itself jumps in to fix it.”

Like pressure in a valve.

“So Myrddin wasn’t really magical?” I asked.

“We can’t be sure,” Verona said. “It might have been magic—drawing runes to summon power lines up with what we do. Then again, maybe it was just something he did that just had similar aesthetics. We don’t know one way or the other without seeing it first hand.”

“Yeah,” Lucy said, “It may have just been the way his power worked.”

“A whole world of maybe-Harbingers,” Avery said, frowning. “And they were superheroes? It just seems so crazy. How is that even possible?”

“If the Other is strong enough, it’s theoretically doable,” Verona said. “But it would have to be a really strong Other to do it. Remember Ted? Something with that much power could make a world, or worlds. Something on the level of a god. Maybe beyond that.”

“You called it Khepri, didn’t you?” Lucy asked me. “Khepri’s an Egyptian god, right?”

“Technically, Khepri was me,” I said. “I’d had someone modify my power, and it made me stronger in some ways, weaker in others, but it wasn’t how my powers were supposed to work. She had to play with the corona, mess with my brain, to even attempt it. It wasn’t pretty, a hack job, and at a certain point…” I looked away, staring over the ridge, watching the sun set over Kennet in the distance. “My power took over. So if you want to be technical about it, the name refers to both my power and who I was at the time.”

“Not the Egyptian god, then,” Lucy muttered. “And I’ve never heard of anything called Scion before. It feels like something that big should be noticed.”

“Durocher might know something,” Verona said.

“Maybe. Getting her help with this might be a little tricky, though. Especially with all of—” She waved her hands vaguely. “—this going on.”

“And I still don’t know what a Harbinger is,” I said. “And to be honest, I’m still not sure if I entirely believe all of this is magic and not just really esoteric powers.”

“We might be getting ahead of ourselves,” Lucy said. “Sorry, the basics.”

“Magic,” I said again.

“Right,” Lucy said, nodding. “At its most basic, Practice can be considered like bridging the gap between human and Other.”

“Other?” I asked.

“To simplify things, basically consider it any supernatural being,” Avery said. “Uh—spirits, faeries, goblins. That kind of thing.” She patted Snowdrop on the head, smiling. “Like our favorite opossum here.”

I frowned. Snowdrop wasn’t human? She looked human, albeit a little strange. Her blonde hair drooped over her eyes, and today her shirt displayed a design of an opossum having a beer in front of a mobile home, with the words ‘Upper Class Trailer Trash’ encircling it.

She had a theme going for her, at least. If she wasn’t human, what was she? Some kind of… opossum spirit? Was that a thing?

“I’m a perfectly normal girl,” Snowdrop said. “Normal human girls love sleeping in trash.”

Uh—

“Becoming a Practitioner means awakening.” Lucy continued, ignoring her. “You give up your ability to lie, but it means your words have more weight.”

Right, what she had been talking about before. I raised an eyebrow. “Weight with what?”

“The spirits,” Verona said, “Basically the things that make up everything. They make up the trees around us, the dirt we’re sitting on, your clothes, everything. They’re always watching and always judging what you do. Becoming aware means you’re able to interact with them and you’re able to interact with Others, but you lose all the protections granted by being unaware. Being awakened means that when you speak, the spirits listen. Your words and actions impact the real world.”

I thought of how serious they had been when talking about oaths, about keeping to my promises. “It seems like a lot of this is a give and take,” I said.

“I guess it can be seen like that. Gaining power opens you up to others using their power against you. Knowing more means the things you know can leave you open to being sought out because of that. Again, this is really basic. Like, a full discussion on any one of these topics could be super, super long. Like, college-course long.”

“And you do not wanna get Ronnie started on that,” Lucy said with a smile.

Verona let out an overly dramatic mock gasp, before lightly pushing Lucy, who pushed her back. Both girls had smiles on their faces. The joke hadn’t been taken poorly, like I’d worried it might be.

They really were just kids.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to be honest—I’m still not sure if I believe all this, but go on. Why can’t you lie?”

“It takes away power and hurts your karma,” Avery said, “Every lie you make takes power away from you, and breaking an oath is enough to have you stripped of all your magical power. And it doesn’t matter if it was accidental or not. The spirits don’t care either way. If you lie, you take a hit to your karma, and things don’t go your way for a while. If you break an oath? You’re forsworn, you lose access to most practice, and your karma is ruined pretty much forever.”

“And that can happen?”

“We’ve met somebody who had it happen to them.”

That explained why they seemed so serious about holding me to what I said. That at least lent some credence to what they were saying. Powers could do varied things. I’d never met parahumans from another world, the only time I had was…well, I couldn’t be sure exactly how powers could differ in that regard. But the one constant was that powers didn’t just go away. They needed to be used. A power wouldn’t just lock itself away permanently. Not unless someone else did it.

I scratched my head. “Okay. So being a Practitioner, having your words have weight—what does that actually mean? How does that help?”

“It means you can work with Others,” Lucy said. “Draw on their strengths, make deals. Or you can manipulate things to your advantage. You’ve heard us say that labels have power? They have extra power when you’re a Practitioner. When we draw diagrams, they have meaning. If I draw something that represents fire, it can actually become fire.”

“Like the thing you used to blow up my arm,” I said, raising an eyebrow.

She sheepishly averted her gaze. “Uh—sort of. Sorry about that.”

“It’s fine,” I said, even though it kind of wasn’t. “You called it a connection blocker before?”

“That’s what it was supposed to do—block a connection between two things. It works in the abstract a lot of the time, so we usually use them to keep attention away from us. As long as the blocker’s up, our parents are less likely to call us, people are less likely to pay us attention—that kind of thing. But there’s a limit to how effective they are, and when they break, there’s backlash.”

I hesitated. “You’re saying…” My passenger was still active? Still looking for me? I shook my head. “Tell me I’m misinterpreting this.”

“Your patron is still watching you. The connection blocker wouldn’t have failed if it wasn’t.”

“And with the force behind the backlash, whatever it was doing pushed back hard,” Avery said.

“Like trying to use a coffee filter to block a fire hose,” Verona added.

It felt like the entire world was focused directly onto the ground in front of me. I should be reacting, but I felt so disconnected. Like trying to block a fire hose. Watching me.

It was still attached.

I forced myself through the breath exercises a therapist had taught me what felt like decades ago, when I had first moved here. Focusing on breathing. Focusing on myself. I rubbed my fingers against the dirt, trying to force my attention back to the present, back to reality. Four sets of eyes watched me. I realized my hands were shaking.

“It can’t,” I spat. “If it reconnects to me, if it comes back—”

That figure at the end of the world; the me that wasn’t me; the wounded animal, lashing out. Khepri.

“How bad?” Avery asked quietly.

“Catastrophic,” I said. “Maybe. I don’t know. It would be bad for me. Really bad. But what made Khepri a threat seven years ago was all of the other capes that were nearby.”

“It increased your strength, having others with powers around you?”

“Wait.” Suddenly, Lucy’s eyes widened. “You said Khepri’s domain was control? Controlling bugs, controlling situations?”

“Yeah,” I said. My mouth felt dry. I couldn’t bring myself to continue.

So Lucy filled in the final blank for me. “Capes,” she said. “People.”

“...Yeah.”

She nodded slowly, almost cautiously. “How thorough was it? Your control?”

I swallowed. “It was more body control than mind control, but… it was absolute. There wasn’t any resisting it. And I could use their powers. There wasn’t any limit to the number of people I could take, either. When my power was modified, it shortened my range down to just sixteen feet, but it didn’t matter, because I had access to a cape that could generate portals. It let me stretch my range indefinitely, and… everyone around me became a force multiplier. So at the upper end, I had thousands of capes under my control, thousands of powers with pinpoint precision. I went toe-to-toe with Scion himself.” I looked up at them, at their concerned expressions. “There aren’t any capes here, in this world.”

“But there are Others,” Verona said. “Spirits, gods, bogeymen. Powers, after a fashion. And if the nature of your connection changes… maybe your power would too. And if your power can control Others…”

“I really hope it can’t,” I said. I let out a mirthless little laugh. “I know my words don’t have the same weight as yours, but I swear on everything that matters: I really, really don’t want my power to come back.”

“And if it does?”

I was quiet for a very long time. “You would need to stop me. By any means necessary.” I took a breath. “I wasn’t very powerful until I had a certain number of capes under my thrall. A bullet would’ve taken me out, I think. If you do it early on enough, before I reach critical mass, it would work.”

“You want us to kill you?” Lucy asked.

I shook my head. “It wouldn’t be me. It’d be my passenger, my power. Not me. And powers… they seek out conflict. They’re designed to be used. Part of some… big experiment, or something. Parts of a whole, fragments of Scion.” I took a breath. “It’d lash out, hurt people. And I wouldn’t be able to stop it.”

I’d already be long gone.

I waited for the moment they told me they’d stop it before it came to that. That they’d make sure it wouldn’t happen to me and they’d rescue me if it did.

They didn’t say anything. The four of them looked among each other, none talking.

Ah. That’s right. They couldn’t lie.

My hand gripped my jeans, rubbing dirt into the fabric. My voice sounded too calm as I started speaking again. “If…if it comes to that. We don’t know what's going to happen.”

“It’s just a theory,” Avery said, nodding.

“Right,” Verona said. “We don’t know for sure what would happen if your power reconnected itself. Who’s to say it wouldn’t reestablish itself in its original form?”

“It wouldn’t,” I said before I could stop myself. The dread gathered like a storm in my gut, churning, boiling. My breath tasted like bile. “Something like that doesn’t get fixed. They told me and I still went through with it. When I lost control, when I started lashing out, they had no choice but to take me down. I’d lost all connection with my humanity. I couldn’t even understand language anymore—not even body language. I was a raving monster, and so they had to shoot me, sever the connection between it and me. The only other choice was...They didn’t undo what I’d done to my power, didn’t fix or heal it—they couldn’t. So it’s still there, exactly like it was at the end, just… detached.”

The silence hung in the air like a visceral weight over our shoulders. The girls all stared at me, probably wondering when this ticking time bomb of an ex-superhero would go off. How much time did I have left? I’d spent seven years on this Earth, and I’d had dreams, but nothing beyond that. Nothing like this.

I’d already made my promises. If they changed their mind, there was no running away, unless I was willing to throw these kids under the bus. And I didn’t think I was, but… if I got desperate enough, I wasn’t sure that my oath wouldn’t buckle under pressure.

And then, suddenly, Snowdrop turned into an opossum right before my eyes, hopping over to me, skipping through the grass. She crawled onto my lap, and I froze. What was she doing? What was I supposed to do?

“Uh—”

“Pet her,” Avery supplied.

Are you kidding? I didn’t move a muscle, staring down the opossum like she was about to bite me.

“She likes being petted. Really.” Avery gave an encouraging smile. “We can’t lie, remember?”

They can’t lie, I told myself. They can’t lie.

God, I really hoped they’d been telling the truth. Cautiously, I pet the opossum, applying the lightest possible pressure against her fur. I really didn’t want to have to get a rabies shot. When she didn’t react negatively, I continued petting her, and eventually, she curled up in my lap with a sleepy yawn.

Huh.

“See?” Avery asked.

“Yeah,” I said. For a scraggly opossum, she was a lot softer than I’d expected. And I could breathe again.

“We can’t guarantee anything,” Verona said, “but we’ll try to help you out with your thing, keep Khepri at bay. We’re here to protect Kennet and the people in it. Now that you’ve promised, that includes you too. There are resources we can reach out to that might be able to help with your problem.”

I let out a few breaths, Snowdrop helping me clear my head. It gave me time to focus, to think. And I realized something.

This entire conversation we’d been stepping around the point. These girls were obviously spooked and were working towards something they hadn’t been willing to share with me before.

I leaned in. “You keep saying that, protect Kennet. Right now, what are you trying to protect Kennet from?”

The girls gave each other conspiratorial glances. I wasn’t sure what that meant, and I didn’t think I was going to like the answer.

“There was a murder, a little while ago,” Lucy said. “Someone killed a…let’s call them an important player in the region. Someone big enough and strong enough that when they died it caused waves. Metaphorical and metaphysical.”

“It was why we were awakened,” Verona added. “The Others of Kennet needed someone to investigate so that other parties wouldn’t push themselves in. They thought we would be the best because of how inexperienced we were.”

A frown started to etch itself on my face. Girls this young being pushed into dangerous situations at the behest of what were essentially monsters, brought in because they’d known they wouldn’t be able to do as much as someone who was better trained or more knowledgeable. They’d picked out kids that wouldn’t be able to protect themselves. The fact that these girls had made it this far and hadn’t obviously gotten hurt spoke only to some natural skill, and a whole lot of luck.

It painted a very dark picture, and I really didn’t like it. What rankled even more was that there wasn’t anything I could do to change that.

“Things still haven’t been resolved with that, and we were away for a while,” Lucy continued. “So now there’s new Others in town, new things going on, and new evidence has started turning up in strange ways.”

“Nothing feels like it’s ever a coincidence with magic,” Avery said. “So, it probably means all of that is going to escalate until it finally blows up.”

“I know what that feels like,” I muttered. “Alright, how do I play into this? Are you going to, uh, ‘awaken’ me or whatever?”

“No,” Lucy said. “That probably wouldn’t be a good idea with your power trying to reach out to you. Even though you know about magic now, you still have some protections just by being a mostly normal human. Awakening you would give you more avenues to fight back, but it’d also give your power more avenues to reach you, and it’d probably do more for the latter than the former. I don’t think it’d be worth the cost.”

“Fine,” I said, shrugging. “I like being able to lie, anyway.”

Lucy nodded. “There are options,” she said. “If you want, you can just do the basics, help keep the perimeter in check. We’ll show you how to do upkeep, and that’s all you’ll have to do. It should be safe, it’s somewhat simple, and would help free up others for the more involved options.”

“Or?” I prompted.

“If you’re willing, we want you to get in contact with some of the local Others.”

What? What was the goal here? “Just… talk to them? Why?”

“Because we’ve had our hands tied in a lot of ways. There are rules, oaths, and they make it difficult to work. For one thing, we’re not allowed to bring any Others or practitioners into town without the consensus of our local Others—and when some of the Others here have ulterior motives, you can probably guess it gets really screwy.”

“But you invited me?” I asked. “And I get the impression you didn’t consult with anyone about me.”

Lucy’s lips curled into a small grin. “You’re not a practitioner or an Other. You’re a new face with no history in this town—plus, you’re an adult who can go places we can’t, without a lot of questions getting asked. We can’t promise it’ll be safe, but if you meet with some people for us, force a reaction, you might shuffle things up enough to give us an advantage in things. For whoever is behind all of this to show their hand.”

People, she’d said. But I could hear the part she wasn’t saying. Suspects.

Whatever. I’d help them even if it was dangerous. Sure, they had magic, and they seemed confident enough, but they were kids. They were younger than I’d been when I’d first started. I wasn’t going to leave them in the cold when I had the training and experience to help.

But there was one sticking point: something I needed from them that I couldn’t ask from anybody else. I gently set Snowdrop on the ground beside me, and looked the other kids in the eyes.

“I’m sorry to bring this up again. I’m sorry that I’m asking you this, but I need to hear you say it. What will you do if my power finds its way back to me?” I asked. “What will you do if I lose control, if Khepri emerges—if I become a threat to your town, to everyone?”

These kids were the only ones in a position to take me out if it became necessary. Nobody else in this world knew about powers, besides my dad—and there was no way in hell I was asking my dad to kill me. He’d suffered enough already.

Verona met my eyes with a steely gaze. “We’ll deal with it,” she said. The other girls didn’t speak, but nodded in assent.

I nodded, a short jerk of my head, more difficult than it should have been. “That’s all I needed to hear. Yeah, I’ll do it.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said a voice from behind me.

I jerked around at the sound. A woman stood near the treeline, her face partially obscured by one of the branches. I swung back around to see the girls relax at her presence. Snowdrop had woken up, climbing onto Avery’s shoulder, but hadn’t reacted beyond that.

Not a threat, then. Someone they knew? She moved forward a little bit, but with the glare of the sun and the shadows of the trees it was still impossible to make out her face.

“I believe I’ll take over from here, girls,” the woman said.