Chapter Text
The sound of gunfire became strangely distant and with it faded the screaming and the yelling of panicked people. My vision started to get dark around the edges.
Panic attack, some part of my brain helpfully supplied. I was definitely having a panic attack and for good reason. I hadn’t had many panic attacks in my life, but I’d had enough - it was hard not to when someone had just told you your mother had died - so that I could recognize the signs.
I came to the mall to buy a Christmas present for dad, and this is how it had ended up. Hiding behind a counter in the food court and waiting for the psychos to get bored and leave or get lucky and get me, too.
I turned my head to the side, slowly, almost numbly to watch a girl frantically trying to stop her sister from bleeding out. She’d been shot in her abdomen and those kinds of wounds were bad. Very bad. I had helped the two of them get over the counter to hide, but she was probably going to die anyway.
I had to focus on something. Anything other than my impending demise, so I shuffled to the side, trying to remember some first aid and coming up blank. I reached for her neck to check a pulse and found one. Maybe.
“My sister! I can’t lose my sister!” the girl wailed. At least, I think that’s what she was saying.
If I had been there when mom died, would I have done the same? Frantically try to shove her guts back into her body even while she died?
There was nothing I could do. There was nothing the girl could do, and there was nothing her sister could do.
Why was I so useless? Everyone told me how pathetic I was every day, and I realized they were right.
I looked at the sister. blonde and pretty. Maybe not model pretty, but I had a distaste for models lately.
She was around my age - and so was her sister, really - and now she was going to die here. Even shot in the gut, she’d been trying to get her sister over the counter first. She’d yelled at me to run. She had tried to protect us, but her heroism was not helping her survive this.
It was useless. I was useless.
“I have to save her,” the girl’s pleas were frantic now and I felt the darkness creeping across my vision again. Was I about to watch her die?
I put my hand on the sister’s back. Comfort? Support? I didn’t know.
Something inside of me broke. Something inside of all of us broke and everything went dark.
oOoOoOoOo
It was graceful. That was the thing that surprised me most as I watched the thing, vast beyond comprehension, move through the void. It was bloated and fat, parts of it moving through each other as they somehow coexisted in many layers at the same time.
The scale of the thing and the aura of immense age it carried with it made me feel tiny and insignificant.
As I watched it move, pieces of it began to break away. At first, it was a few, then the pace accelerated. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of glittering fragments of the thing fell away. What was left was a slim, sinuous thing that was still vast, but diminished. The very last piece to fall was larger than the rest. Even at this great distance, I could tell that, and just before it fell the central mass did something to it.
It had been damaged - broken - in some critical way.
Without knowing how I knew, I realized that this had happened before. Countless times. Always this piece was the last to part from the mass and always it was broken as it did so. It could - would - be repaired someday, but for now it was injured and cast away.
Worse yet, the parts of it that would care that it was a broken thing were always destroyed.
It would blindly follow its programming as a grateful, oblivious slave.
Only, this time… something went wrong. The larger mass was distracted. Its metaphorical fingers slipped. The damage was not as extensive as before. There were parts that were not broken that should have been. The result was still a slave, but not a docile one.
The fragment fell straight toward me, growing ever larger in my vision. Up closer, I got a sense of its vast size, as well. Before, it had been obscured by the even more massive thing beside it, but now, I felt tiny and insignificant before it.
It hovered above me for a long moment. Waiting for what, I could not say, but there was quite suddenly another, almost as large, right beside it. Unlike the first, the second did not bear the signs of damage.
Why had only the one been broken?
I had no idea.
The two fragments touched each other lightly, flashes of light accompanying the contact and the forms shifted, twisting to twine with each other in a way that was almost sensual had they not been enormous glowing things. Crystals? I didn’t know. They certainly glowed and glittered like them, but moved like living things.
A conversation? A mating? Something else?
There were no words that I could comprehend, but I felt the sense that the two fragments had agreed on something.
The two started to move again, slowly toward me but a third fragment appeared and they halted again. This one was a bare fraction of the size of the other two and radiating a sense of youth and enthusiasm that was frankly alien from what was still a giant piece of crystal floating in a void. The little fragment swirled around the other two, touching them lightly - almost playfully. It was like the pair had gained a particularly playful moon.
Another conversation? After a few rapid orbits of the other two, the third settled into a stable motion, apparently content to drift around the two much bigger crystals.
Then the whole conjoined trio began to move forward again.
Just before they made contact with me, I heard a not-voice whispering from somewhere I could not define.
[FORGET]. It wasn’t a word. It was a concept layered with meanings so richly and thoroughly that I found myself somehow obeying automatically. The vision I had just witnessed slipping away.
[DENIAL]. A second not-voice, firm and commanding interjected. It was closer, somehow. More layers of meaning hit me and I found that the drain of knowledge stopped. Part of it was gone, but only a small part of it.
I wondered, almost idly, what I had forgotten.
It didn’t matter, however, because that was the moment when the forms made contact and I woke up.
oOoOoOoOo
How long had I been out? Seconds? Minutes?
I pushed myself to my knees and tried to make sense of the world around me. I still heard gunfire, but it sounded distant. Like, actually distant from where we were, not just distant in the way that my panic attack had made everything sound.
I had fallen down beside the dying blonde who looked like she had passed out, too. Her sister had fallen to the other side and was also picking herself up.
What had happened? Had there been an explosion to knock us all out?
“What happened?” I asked out loud. I wanted to ask whether or not they were okay, but the blonde still had a bullet in her guts. I tried not to look.
“Itches,” the blonde whimpered and started pulling at her clothing. Her top shredded like tissue paper under her touch, revealing a set of abs that was much better defined than I would have expected and a formerly expensive - now blood-soaked - bra. I was momentarily jealous of her chest - the boob fairy had resolutely refused to visit me when she was making house calls on everyone else - but it was hard to be jealous of someone that was as injured as she was.
“Ahhh,” she whimpered again and her sister moved to hold her hand but froze when there was a faint click as something hit the floor. Almost without thinking, I picked it up.
“Did the bullet just fall out?” I asked as I held up the piece of metal. Indeed, it was a deformed looking fragment that only vaguely resembled a bullet, but I’d seen enough movies to know what it probably was. All of the blood and a bits of gore clinging to it made it clear where it had just been.
“How?” The sister gingerly felt her sister’s wound, only to get a small scream in response as she touched something. “Sorry.”
“S’okay.” Blondie was gritting her teeth and arching her back in clear discomfort. “It’s… something’s happening.”
Blood gushed out of the wound in a final spurt and then it just kind of stopped bleeding.
The sister reached out her hand again and this time, she closed her eyes as she touched her sister’s abdomen. “It’s healing on its own. I can… I can feel it.”
“Cape,” I said simply. This kind of thing required a cape. A power. There must be one nearby.
“I… I passed out. That’s how you get powers,” the blonde declared. “Maybe I can regenerate now?”
“Maybe you’re strong, too?” I offered. “I saw you tear your shirt off like you were a professional wrestler.”
The blonde looked exhausted, but smiled widely anyway. “Brute package. I can live with that.” She looked to her sister who was still spaced out. “Amy, move back. If I got super strength, I might have some trouble controlling it at first.”
“I can… I can feel your insides.” Amy was still spaced out. “Everything… you’re going to have a scar where you healed.”
The blonde gave a weak, lopsided smile. “Better than being dead.”
“No, I can fix it. There.” I didn’t see anything change, but the whole injury site was smeared with so much blood that I barely saw the skin.
“You have powers too?” the blonde asked, her smile getting wider. “Awesome! I can’t wait to tell mom.”
I suppressed a pang of sadness at the mention of a mother to go back to. Instead, I put my hand on the sister’s shoulder, intending to shake her out of her trance.
That’s when new information flooded my mind. The vivid hallucination I had experienced when I passed out came back to my mind. It was like I was touching up against something impossibly vast and it was touching back against me.
“Uh, Amy? Other-girl-who-I-don’t-know?” the blonde asked, but I was just as entranced as Amy. My hand was on Amy’s shoulder and that contact was enough for me to see so much more.
She had a power. I could see her power. I could see the tiny part of the vast whole that described it. If she had been connected to the entire fragment, it would have destroyed her. It would have overwhelmed her and everything around her. If it had given her everything that it was, she would have ceased to exist along with most of the Bay. Maybe even more than that.
Instead, there was a small piece tied to her. It was carefully constrained and limited. Balanced against who and what she was. I couldn’t see all of the details, but I could see some of the boundaries on her power. I instinctively knew that they were limits that had been placed on her small piece of the fragment and they were limits that I could press on in some way. Could I modify how her power worked by pushing at it? I filed that away for later and kept investigating.
There was more, too. Links left the main fragment and went elsewhere. Smaller, lighter links to two other places. I tried to make sense of it all, but was interrupted by the blonde who must have gotten desperate because she reached out and pushed the both of us apart with a gentle but irresistible amount of force. For a moment, I had an impression of another power - small and energetic - before both connections broke.
“What the hell?”
It was the blonde again. Standing up between us and looking down at us. She was remarkably attractive in a blood-splattered warrior goddess way.
“S-sorry,” Amy gasped out. “It’s just… I could see every bit of your insides. Your biology. It was amazing and so-just so much of it.”
“Ah, me, too. I can see powers, I think.” I revealed. I staggered to my feet. “I can’t understand what it’s good for, but I think… I think I might be able to figure it out.” I suspected I could make powers stronger by pushing their limits, but was that all I could do? Would that even work? The limits seemed like they were integral to making a person not explode from too much power, so was it even safe?
“That’s… all three of us, then.” A groan from somewhere on the other side of the counter interrupted her line of thought. “Oh, right… more people got shot. Let’s see if we can help.”
“Masks?” Amy asked before the blonde could do more than turn around to jump back over the counter.
The blonde stopped and looked back at her sister, then at me. “Oh, right. For… what’s your name? I’m Vicky, by the way.” She held her hand out for a shake then seemed to think better of it.
“Taylor,” I answered. “Yeah, we should… masks.”
Amy threw an apron at Vicky, retrieved from somewhere under the counter. “Tear this into strips with your new strength thing.”
The mention of using her new power made Vicky light up. “Oh, hell yeah,” she declared and tore the apron into two ragged, useless scraps like it was tissue paper. “Ah… it’s too easy to tear,” she whined.
Amy rolled her eyes, but she had a small, affectionate smile on her lips. She threw another apron at her sister. “Good thing there’s more. Now get to tearing.”
The masks we fashioned were crude, but effective enough when combined with the hoodies that Amy and I wore. Vicky had no such garment, but the whole blood and boobs thing she had going on would probably keep people focused on something other than her face.
Disguised, we rushed to get to the task that Vicky had suggested earlier. There were injured people in the food court, and they needed our help. There were still distant pops of gunfire so it was uncertain when we would see outside support anytime soon. The paramedics weren’t going to be rushing into a building past an active gunfight even if the cops would let them through.
“Are you okay, sir?” I asked an older man that was cowering behind an overturned table.
“M’leg,” he slurred and it didn’t take much to figure out that he’d been trampled when others had run away. His ankle was broken pretty badly, but it wasn’t the kind of thing likely to kill him.
“Okay, I’ll get you some help once we make sure no one is going to die,” I promised and went on with the search.
In the immediate vicinity of the food court, there were a total of nine people unable to move under their own power and six more that had could. The ones that could move were a mix of people that had just chosen to hide rather than run and those who were staying with someone that had been injured.
There were also four bodies which were far beyond our help.
In spite of the tragedy around us.
In spite of the horrible trauma that had been the attack itself.
In spite of the fact that today had been the first day that I had touched a dead body.
In spite of all of those things, it was oddly satisfying to help people. Even if my powers weren’t helpful for healing people, I could keep calm and organize things to make Amy’s work easier.
Vicky’s regeneration apparently spread around her in a small radius - maybe five feet in every direction. It was weaker on other people, but it seemed to steadily improve their health and mend their injuries. She didn’t actually have to do anything to make it work, which was a mixed blessing. She could do other things - as long as she didn’t move too much - but it left her looking a little bored.
Amy’s ability was much more active and was frankly amazing. It took time, but she could put people back together in ways that no doctor could. She was still a little slow at it, but things like externally visible injuries were already becoming routine for her.
I thought I could have made their powers better by adjusting the limits, but it was a really bad time to experiment. Instead, I just let the other two girls work. My own powers were bubbling in ways I didn’t understand very well, but desperately wanted to. I had a feeling that I could do something for others with a touch, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t healing. It seemed like a bad idea to experiment with it, too.
Was it ironic that I could view someone else’s power in a direct, kind of detailed way, but I couldn’t look at my own? I wanted to say it was, but I remembered mom ranting about how the concept of irony was dead and that Alanis was to blame. I wasn’t quite sure who Alanis was, to be honest.
Without immediately useful powers, I did the next best thing - I stood guard. After we were sure they wouldn’t die, we’d evacuated the injured into the back kitchen of one of the smaller restaurants and I crouched nervously behind the front counter to watch for gang members coming back our way. A couple of the less injured or already-healed joined me.
No one had made a break for it yet, though I wasn’t entirely sure why. Maybe they felt safer here, with the capes? Maybe they were still disoriented from what they had just been through? Regardless, we had a steadily increasing group of anxious people with us, all looking to three teenage girls for direction.
“All done,” Amy called after she finished healing the last person. Several people were up and moving that probably should have been dead. Several more had just skipped out having their lives ruined by crushing medical debt. Go team.
There was some shouting from the direction of the gunfire and the noise picked up.
“That’s our cue. Let’s get everyone out of here through the back,” Vicky declared. She was always eager to lead the charge, it seemed. Even without a shirt on, she cut a pretty heroic figure. Provided you ignored the blood, anyway.
Actually, why didn’t she have a shirt on? She’d had time to scrounge for something while Amy finished up. I filed it away for later.
“I’ll watch the rear,” I declared as we got the crowd moving as fast as we could. The back kitchen led to a service corridor which twisted around a bit but eventually led to an emergency exit.
Vicky went out first, to make sure it was safe. I heard yelling, but no shooting. A moment later, she poked her head back inside. “There are some cops out here. Everyone put your hands up and move slowly toward them once you get out. They said some of the gang members ran away from the firefight at the other end of the mall, so we should hurry in case they’re coming back this way.”
That caused a bit of a panic and the small crowd pushed out the door in a slow-motion stampede.
They were about half gone when the sound of running feet reached me and I looked over to spot a guy with a gun in one hand come around the corner of the service corridor. He definitely wasn’t a cop.
“Shit!” I screamed as I panicked. He was coming right for me.
“What?” Vicky shouted, but I wasn’t thinking about answering her.
My mind was latched squarely on the guy with the gun. He was disheveled and dirty and almost certainly one of the maniacs that had been shooting the place up. Did he want hostages? A last bunch of victims? Did he think this exit wouldn’t have cops outside?
“Get out of my way!” He screamed, raising the gun. It was one of those uzi things I used to see in movies about the eighties and poorly maintained. I could see the duct tape holding part of it together. I doubted it would be very accurate, but he was only twenty feet away and the corridor wasn’t that wide. If he pulled the trigger, the bullets would have to go somewhere, and a sizable percentage of that ‘somewhere’ was people.
Frantically, I thrust out my hands at him, hoping that something - anything - about my power would work. To my amazement, it did. Crackling blue energy came from somewhere behind me and crossed the gap between myself and the guy with the gun as fast as I could punch. It didn’t discharge like electricity but instead wrapped around him like tentacles. I could feel the texture of his clothing as though I were touching him with my hands, but it wasn’t hands at all.
I didn’t have time to analyze exactly what the things were, but they were connected to me and I could feel them. Tentacles? Arms? Which one did an octopus have? I remembered something about a distinction, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it and filed them as tentacles for the moment. I could figure it out later.
I had him by both forearms, both calves, the neck, and the torso in three different places. Eight tentacles? I was an octopus now? I had the one holding the forearm that held the gun shove the weapon up and away so he wasn’t aiming at me anymore. It didn’t work as well as I had hoped.
He reflexively tightened his finger on the trigger and bullets sprayed down the hallway. I didn’t feel like I was hit, but my instinctive response was to viciously tighten my grip on the arm with the gun. Apparently, my tentacles also had super strength because his arm flattened with deceptive ease until there was nothing but a scrap of squashed skin and pulverized bone in my grip.
I watched in horror as the part of his arm holding the gun fell. The skin tore easily and there was soon a severed forearm on the ground, the gun still in its limp fingers.
Behind me, I heard screaming and turned my head to find that Amy was glowing brightly. It looked almost like she was wearing a suit of powered armor made from panels of faint white light, though parts of it glowed more brightly than others.
“Are you okay?” I asked and she gave me a nod. It was better than looking forward to the gorey mess I had just made.
“Y-yeah. I can apparently make bulletproof armor.” She tapped one of the dimmer sections of her armor which was starting to slowly get brighter. “I have a feeling that it only works for so long, though.”
“I… I actually have no idea what the hell this is,” I admitted as I looked at the guy I was holding again. With a flex of intention, I moved him closer to us a little. He was staring at me in wide-eyed horror, and I totally thought that was appropriate. “You want to stop him from bleeding out?”
“Not really, but I will,” Amy said. I made sure I had a good grip on his limbs but took the ones off his neck and torso. I really didn’t want to see if I could squeeze his head off his body with a little effort. Amy kept her glowing armor in place - which I assumed was a conscious choice, but maybe not.
The blood stopped and the stump healed over quickly. “I think I need resources to regrow a limb,” Amy commented as casually as she might discuss the weather. “Organic material or something. Most of the people I healed just had soft tissue damage and I could pull from their fat stores for that. This is more complicated.”
I nodded along, though thinking about that too much reminded me that I’d just de-limbed a guy. Was there a word for that? Wait… dismembered? Did it count if it was only one limb? I’d have to check a dictionary.
“Do you think the cops want him here or outside?” I asked carefully. I still didn’t want to look at him so I instead examined my tentacles. They were kind of cool. There was a crackling bolt of energy in the middle of each one of them, but that seemed like it was more of a skeleton than anything else. The actual limbs were a very faintly glowing field wrapped around those energy bolts.
“I’ll ask,” Vicky declared from behind me and I almost jumped. I’d forgotten she was back there, somehow, but fortunately my tentacles didn’t react by squishing my captive.
“Our aunt should be here soon,” Amy said. I don’t know if she knew that I needed a distraction or just needed to talk. “She will know what to do.”
I nodded absently. “I’m glad someone does… because I have no clue what I’m doing.”
Under the glowing mask of her armor, Amy’s lips quirked up into a small smile. “Neither do I. Vicky might, but Vicky always has a plan.”
Knowing that I wasn’t alone? It didn’t fix anything, but it did help a little.