52 Project #45: No Rescue (Patreon)

Meg Santoro was enormously tired of plane crashes.

She had joined this hero team because they focused on rescue, not on stopping crime, and she wanted to be able to use her powers to heal, openly and freely. She’d spent too long using them to kill or maim or even just fight. But the leader of the team -- a guy who could fly, was super-strong, and had impossibly good hearing -- was always dragging them off after plane crashes. He could hear the sound of a bolt in a plane wing shearing from hundreds of miles away, and he was always pulling the team in on plane crash rescue missions.

Sometimes they got there too late. Often, too late by seconds. Meg had seen, again and again, the moment when a plane fell and struck the ground. It was horrifying. If her teammates successfully stopped the plane crash, no one needed medical attention – aside from, sometimes, the pilot. If they didn’t, nobody needed medical attention because they were all too dead. One time she managed to save a baby girl whose mother had been a low-powered Proxima without power mitochondria. The mother’s body was as pulverized as any of the others, but she also had cranial hemorrhaging. She must have thrown all the power she had, far more than she could afford to spend and live, in keeping the crash from killing her baby.

The baby wasn’t a Proxima when Meg picked her up to heal her bruises and gashes. When she handed off a physically healthy if still plainly traumatized baby to a social worker, the baby was a Proxima. Meg had gone straight, joined a hero team, but she was still Dr. Mystery.

And Dr. Mystery had no powers that allowed her to stop a plane. She wanted to go to a hospital and heal all the people there. Her teammate didn’t think that fell within the purview of rescue, which Meg thought was ridiculous. How was there a difference between treating a person who’d been in a car accident at the site of the accident, versus treating them at a hospital? But she needed the legitimacy of going through the team; she couldn’t just go to a hospital and heal everyone. She was a former supervillain. She needed to have her hero team with her to lend her official authority.

She tried appealing to Dan, but he agreed with their team leader, despite being a legit medical doctor and another superpowered healer. He thought that they should be focusing on the victims of natural disasters. Well, yeah, she said, when there’s a tsunami or something, but they don’t happen every day. But Dan seemed to care more about the aesthetics of the team’s motif than about actually helping people.

What was he even doing on the team? She could do everything he could do, better. The team didn’t need two healers.

Eventually she asked the team, doesn’t anybody have a loved one in a hospital or something? Another teammate had a mother in the cancer ward, it turned out, so he was willing to escort Meg to the hospital and it was an official super-team action, not just Meg going rogue.

The mother was almost too far gone – skeletally thin, she’d been in a hospital bed entirely too long, and was in constant pain despite the medications. She should have been a candidate for comfort measures only, maybe hospice, but for some reason she wasn’t, which was good because that meant she was here for Meg to work on. There wasn’t enough life force in the woman’s body for Meg to fully heal her – Meg’s power needed there to be some life energy in the target to do anything that wasn’t disruptive to living tissue – but she could shrink the tumors, and turn off the pain without removing other sensation. And jack up the woman’s appetite so she’d eat like a horse and get her physical resources back. If Meg never came back and fixed it, the woman would end up seriously obese. But then again, if Meg never came back and fixed it, the woman would die of cancer, since Meg hadn’t fully healed her yet.

After that, Meg swept through the pediatrics ward. Followed by a gaggle of doctors, nurses, and parents – as well as the press, because her hero team generally had the press involved, when you weren’t the Peace Force you had to keep your name in the news to keep your funding – she touched child after child, and made them well, or at least made them healthier than they’d been before if they weren’t strong enough to be fully healed. Cancer, type 1 diabetes, congenital birth defects, rare blood disorders, burns… a litany of terrible things that should never befall a child, and she reversed them, drove them away, made little bodies whole again. Or in some cases, whole for the first time.

And they loved her for it. A weeping father hugged her; she had just enough time to register the body heat and feel and smell of a male body against her before he backed off and apologized, and she told him nothing was wrong, she was happy to accept hugs. Children chanted her name like they were little cheerleaders. Women promised her home-baked goods or knitted socks, and she accepted because why not? Let them demonstrate their gratitude, if they wanted. It would make them feel better.

Then she went into the ER, followed by beaming members of the press, thrilled at the human interest story they were getting. People with bullet wounds, people having heart attacks, people who fell off a ladder and broke their spine. People from car accidents. No one from a plane crash. Meg touched them all, and made them well. Everyone loved her.

This was what she was born for. This was what she should always have been doing with her life.

Her teammate asked her if she was tired yet. Meg beamed at him. “Tired? I’m just getting started!”

She decided to go to the ob/gyn ward, make sure all the mothers and babies were healthy. But she never got there because the alarm clock went off.

***

For a moment of disorientation, Meg couldn’t figure out why she was lying down, looking at an unfamiliar ceiling, when she’d been just about to go to the pregnancy ward. And then she realized that she was in a hotel room, in a bed, and none of what she’d just experienced was real.

Tears pricked at her eyes. Goddamn it.

Yesterday she’d had five appointments in DC, to heal celebrities and politicians who paid ridiculous amounts for her services, because she was a supervillain and no one would believe she’d give it away without nefarious purpose. And then she’d engaged in a nefarious purpose, leaving a Congressman who wanted to strip Proximas of all human rights dead in his townhouse. And then it had been too late to head back home to Baltimore, so she’d gotten a hotel room, and here she was.

That dream had been so real.

Oh, there were bits of it she could see, now, for dream nonsense. There were never that many plane crashes, anywhere. Her teammates had never had names, except for Dan, a real former member of the Peace Force who worked as a doctor these days. She thought. She hadn’t spent a lot of time worrying about what Dan specifically was doing. The Peace Force were her chief nemeses, but she could do anything Dan could do, better. The dream hadn’t been fucking with her about that.

The mother who was a Proxima, and the baby she’d died protecting in the plane crash. The mother in the cancer ward. The children Meg had treated. They’d seemed so real, the details of what her power told her about their bodies so much more vivid than in a typical dream.

And the plot had almost made sense. The team leader’s nonsensical hyperfocus on plane crashes was actually the kind of stupid thing that made rescue teams break up all the time, when they got into arguments about who they should be rescuing from what. Meg really would need the legitimacy of a superteam behind her if she wanted to go straight and practice medicine openly, and the dream hadn’t pretended that wasn’t true.

Also there’d been no sex. Just the one guy hugging her. Meg hardly ever had lengthy, vivid dreams that contained no sex.

Obviously, it wasn’t her dream.

Angrily Meg swung her feet off the bed and stood up, naked. It was her dream, but someone had invaded her mind to give it to her, someone powerful enough to do that from far away, someone who could weave her memories and experiences together into a narrative that they wanted to push on her. Someone who wanted Meg to reform, to quit killing people who needed to be dead. Someone who’d been able to find her deepest hope, the thing she most longed for, and wove it into a story about her reformation to make her think she could have it, if only she wasn’t a villain anymore.

“Get out of my head, Suri,” she said to the silent, invisible, undetectable presence that had to be there.

Suryabati Chandrasekhar – Doctor Sun of the Peace Force – had been Meg’s teacher. Had brought her back away from villainy when she was still a teen, had brought her into the Peace Force trainee team to learn to be a hero. And then Meg had decided to become a real doctor, and do exactly what, in the dream, she had done. So she’d left the Peace Force behind.

Meg had never known whether Doctor Sun had known Meg had been captured and tortured by a dark government agency, and just chose to leave her there, or if she’d just been so blithely ignorant that she’d paid no attention to what happened to Meg after Meg left Peace Force Tau.

She paid attention to Meg now. Which was why Meg’s home was right under a radio station’s monster transmitter, back home. Telepaths couldn’t read through radio interference. But Meg wasn’t safe at home, protected by the transmitter… she was in a hotel room in DC.

So Suri had apparently decided to give her a dream about how happy she’d be if she could reform and go back to the life she’d wanted to have, before. Had she given Meg the challenge of persuading her teammates to let her do what she wanted, or had Meg’s own mind tried to resist Suri’s influence by throwing up ridiculous road blocks such as the plane crash obsession? No way to know.

It had been so beautiful, and it was such a lie. Meg had killed four politicians; they’d wanted to turn Proximas into legal non-humans, who held none of the rights that ordinary humans had, but the world wouldn’t see that as sufficient justification. The government would never forgive her. She’d gotten a pardon for her teen crimes in the 90’s, and Hillary Clinton no longer had breast cancer, but it was years later. President Gore would never know or care about everything she did to get him elected instead of Bush, and he was too straight-laced to pardon a Proxima assassin even if he believed her about the help she’d given him.

“I can’t have it,” she said to invisible Suri. Who might or might not be watching her, now. “They’d never let me.”

She would spend the rest of her life sneaking into hospitals, pretending to be someone who worked there, impersonating doctors and nurses and young interns, so she could get access to the sick and injured and heal them. She’d never be allowed to practice medicine openly, to get accolades and gratitude and hero worship for it. She’d never be allowed to save all the lives she could save, if they would just let her, because no one would trust a supervillain and she’d murdered too many important people.

And if she could… if she could have it… what happened when she met the next person who needed to be dead? What would happen if the Human Definition Amendment grew legs and actually started to go somewhere, because she was no longer killing the politicians who espoused it? What if she had to heal a child with burns on its face and then send it back to the parent who’d shoved it down on a stove burner to mutilate again, because she wasn’t free to kill that parent and she’d just erased the evidence of their crime with her power? How could she do what needed to be done if she went straight?

And it didn’t matter anyway because she couldn’t. No matter what Suri thought she could do, or wanted to convince her she could do.

You’re wrong, Suri said, but Meg didn’t know if it was actual telepathic transmission or just a memory of those words. You can be so much more.

She’d said that to Meg, what, twelve years ago now? Thirteen? It might have been true then, but Suri had fucked it up, had failed to rescue Meg when Meg needed rescuing, and now it wasn’t true anymore.

Meg got dressed. She needed to get home, to her house under the radio transmitter, where she didn’t have to worry about the telepath in New York lying to her anymore.