Wake-up Call – Chapter 27 (Patreon)

Riding my bike through Brockton’s most deserted streets with Taylor hugging me from behind, feeling her sticking to my back as if we were cuddling in bed should have been a distant dream for the future.

A future where threats had been dealt with, where she could be free to relax, to rest.

A future earned.

We aren’t there. Not yet. We still are in the middle of it all, still dealing with enemies entrenched and those waiting in the wings, still… No. We aren’t even still healing. Some things we haven’t even decided to face yet.

But…

A dream for the future is, sometimes, the only thing you need to get through the present.

I take another turn, leaving further behind the Docks, the Trainyard, the Boat Graveyard, every little and not so little reminder of how messed up this city is.

And I take a road out of it that soon transitions into something that’s more like a hiking trail than anything adequately paved.

… Don’t worry, baby, I’ll pay for a brand-new paint job as soon as we get back to civilization.

Lisa Wilbourn anthropomorphizing vehicle—

Oh my God! Are you jealous of my bike? I’ll have you know we never agreed to be on exclusive anthropomorphizing with each other.

Non-specified relationship terms usually implied not to deviate from standard—

… While that’s technically true, even if more people could benefit from making sure implicit things become explicit, I’m very disturbed you decided to come up with this piece of trivia at this very moment.

Steep incline combined with poor road conditions and wind direction—

If that’s your equivalent of innocent whistling, you’re very lucky it actually involves potentially saving Taylor’s soft, tender skin from an awful case of road rash.

Also, we have arrived.

I lower my speed as we pass between two trees that are too near for a car to manage, and I finally brake and kick back the stand as we get near the edge of the small cliff with only a perfunctory fence around it.

Taylor relaxes her hold on my waist, and I take off my helmet to look at her.

Sound of cicadas increasing—

Yeah. Anti-Thinker tactics. I hate when she does that.

Lisa Wilbourn’s insincerity—

Fine: I hate when she does this for non-sexy, trauma-related reasons.

“Tay? You with me?”

“Always,” she whispers.

…

“I can’t even begin to tell you what that word just did to me,” I tell her as calmly and composed as I can.

“You make it too easy to be mushy,” she replies, a measured smile on her lips.

The cicadas get louder.

“It’s perfectly reciprocal,” I say, looking into eyes that are a bit less expressive than they should be.

And I rest my palms on her cheeks, my fingers spreading through her hair above and behind her ears, and slow lids hide deep green from me as she lets out a pleased murmur.

I wait, just looking at her, just watching her simple enjoyment of my touch on her skin, of still being seated on my bike, our bodies sharing heat.

It would be so easy to just let go, forget everything, take her out of this place…

She would let me.

Right now? If I framed it right? She would ask me.

But that wouldn’t be Taylor, and sooner or later, she would realize it, grow past me, come back.

So I’ll be selfish and help her through this rather than be selfish and short-sighted and run away.

Lisa Wilbourn’s self-deprecation—

Power… As endearing as that is, let me have a bit of self-loathing from time to time. I’m only human, after all, and I need the reminder.

“Tay… Do you want to talk?”

She opens her eyes, the green slightly more expressive than seconds ago.

Not moving too much, slow enough not to dislodge my hands, she shakes her head.

“All right. I’ll do the talking, then.”

“As if that could ever be a surprise.”

“Smartass.”

“Good talk.”

She smiles at me cheekily, and I laugh more than maybe I should, given the circumstances.

“I love you so much,” I end up saying.

Her smile widens. The cicadas quieten.

Something in my gut unclenches.

I panicked when she called, when I heard how raw she was, how much of a plea her asking me to pick her up really was.

I lost count of how many traffic infractions I committed on my way to her.

By the way, Power, thank you for being such a wonderful co-pilot. This would be a far less heartwarming tale if I got into what I should reasonably get with the way I drive my baby.

Anthropomorphizing vehicle—

Just take the damn compliment, you tetchy—

Lisa Wilbourn’s use of thesaurus—

Fuck you.

“Are you—” she starts, looking at me with concern.

“Power is jealous of my bike.”

“… I used to think bug control was a shitty power, you know?”

“Don’t ever say that out loud. You may hurt its feelings.”

“Are you—does that—you mean—”

“Tay, I don’t fucking know. But if I was you, I would be careful about emotionally neglecting the thing that looks at the Ten Plagues of Egypt and takes it as a challenge.”

“… Each day brings new horrors upon me.”

“Nice segue!”

“Segue?”

“Yes, you know, a way to take the conversation into a different—”

“I know what a segue is, but how is that a fucking segue?!”

She leans back far enough my fingers trail from her hair to her cheeks, and I take the chance to turn toward the cliff.

And I point at the city below it.

“Each day seems to bring something new, something worse. There are times you just feel like the world is set against you, that nothing you do matters, that things can only get worse, no matter how hard you try.

“But that’s a lie.”

I look back at her, and she’s looking at me, still bewildered by the previous topic and quickly becoming concerned by the current one.

“You… Tay, you are strong. Much more than I ever could be, ever was. And… And things change, and sometimes it’s for the worst, but sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes wemake the changes, decide how things are going to be from now on. Sometimes… we make the world a better place.”

She keeps looking at me, silent, attentive.

The cicadas sing around me.

Damn it.

“And… Coil had a dream. He told me, once, about how he wanted to bring order to this city, taking control of both villains and heroes, bringing it to heel. It was a stupid dream, and we crushed it.

“But… I have another dream. It’s kinda new, and I’m not used to it, but… do you wanna know what it is?”

She nods, still hieratical to an unsettling degree.

“I…” I take a deep breath, “I dream about turning this city into a safe place. A good place. I dream about making this the one place in this messed up world where good people have a chance, where lives don’t get interrupted by the mess all around us. I… I want to make it. For you. I want to… My dream is to help you turn this into the Brockton Bay you always dreamed of. It’s naïve, it’s childish, it isn’t even original, but… it’s my… I swear, if you laugh at me right now I’ll—”

She kisses me.

She drags me to her, our bodies pressing against one another, her heat once more seeping into me, her scent filling me with a sweet haze that slows down my thoughts even as they all turn to Taylor, Taylor being here, Taylor being with me, Taylor kissing me, desiring me, loving me…

Her tongue pushes past my lips, and I feel my toes curl inside my boots.

“I would never laugh at your dreams, Liz,” the swarm choruses, “I love you too much.”

It should horrify me, make my skin crawl.

My heart melts.

And a cynical, little part of me thinks it’s profoundly unfair that she’s managed to find a way to keep talking while we make out.

***

We are sitting on a patch of grass beneath a small oak, my bike resting a small distance away.

I feel far more comfortable doing this when I’m with someone who controls all the bugs around us. I never thought about it, but Taylor may even make me enjoy hiking.

I shudder at the horrific thought.

“Why… why did you say all that?” she asks, still looking at the city beneath us.

I sigh. Of course she couldn’t let it be at the grand declaration.

“We need direction.”

“What?”

“You just left high school for good, haven’t you?”

She shuts up. Her eyes drift across the coastline. From here, from this distance, the city is beautiful. Everything is washed away; every stain faded into another splotch of color as if turning into an impressionist rendition of the wreck we both know.

Maybe distance makes the heart grow fonder because all the little imperfections are so much harder to see.

“I don’t know. I think I have,” she finally says.

“Why?”

“You know why.”

I take a deep breath and lean against the trunk of the oak. It’s not big enough for both of us to do it at once, but Taylor is leaning forward, her arms on her knees, her chin on her arms.

“I know why I wanted you to leave Winslow. I suspect why you did. And I can guess why you would leave your studies completely.”

“That’s a very convoluted way to say you want me to tell you.”

“I already asked why. If you don’t want the convoluted version of me, don’t ignore the monosyllabic one. She doesn’t get that much time on the spotlight.”

She turns her head till she’s looking at me with her cheek on her folded arms, a few strands of hair falling across her face and draping it in lustrous shadow.

“Maybe because you can’t stand to have the spotlight on you and not deliver a monologue.”

There’s a trace of a smile on her tone.

I answer it.

“You know me so well.”

Her lips curl and she just stays like that, looking at me with warmth in her eyes.

… I should remember to breathe from time to time.

“I don’t think it’s worth it,” she finally says, and I have to remind myself we were talking about her going to high school and not about me pushing her down on the grass and—

“Worth it for what?”

She half-shrugs, the gesture brief with the way her arms are still on her knees.

“It’s work, and I would never get my GPA to a point where I would get into a good college. My academic future is effectively over, and I could instead be doing something of worth.”

I pause, because there’s a bit to untangle in there.

“You are right, of course… but do you want to be?”

“What?” Her eyebrows scrunch up as if the mere notion of not wanting to be right was alien to Taylor Hebert.

… Oh God, social mirroring is a thing.

Moving on!

“If you feel like ten years from now you are going to regret not even trying, I am going to do my very best to tutor you and blackmail a few professors to get your records up to where they should’ve always been. If you feel like this is no longer something you want to do—”

“Direction.”

“What?”

“I think I like ‘monosyllabic Lisa.’”

“I think ‘teasing Taylor’ has a time and a place.”

“Get your mind out of the gutter.”

“I haven’t said anything!”

She chuckles and raises her head, looking once again at the city below us.

There’s a hint of a blush on her cheeks.

And now I’m grinning like a loon.

“You… You want us to have direction. To work toward something.” She pauses, straightens her back, hands on her knees, her profile gorgeous enough even before a slight breeze makes her hair sway. “I want that too. I don’t want to feel any more like I’m just reacting, just going from one crisis to the next. I want… not control. Not quite. But maybe this kind of control, the control over where I want to go and what I do to get there.”

“Something to work toward. Something you can feel like you’re making progress in.”

She nods.

“How long have you known I needed that?” she asks. And I’m immensely relieved the cicadas don’t scream around me.

“Since the beginning. I tried to help you in small ways, giving you small objectives one after the other, but once we broke out from the Undersiders… I got swept up in all of it. This has been as much of a chaotic mess for me as it’s been for you.”

She’s inexpressive as I confess, but not unnaturally so. I could read her if I wanted to.

I don’t.

“I know,” she admits. “I know all the times you’ve… All those moments have been real. I know that; I feel that. I… today, I had my own moment, my own breakdown while I thought about… everything. Last night, and this morning, and what we’ve gone through, what we’ve achieved, finally being a hero… I hid in a toilet like I used to do, like they were still chasing after me and I needed to get away, but I did it in the one where you shot Sophia, and… It felt good, afterward, but I feel like I’ve been running through this… this fog, with shapes that fade in and out, some things clear in stark relief and others almost indistinct, but they are the same things at different moments, through different angles… I’m not making any sense, am I?”

I get up.

Taylor keeps looking at the city until I kneel in front of her, meeting her eyes.

“You are my fiancée, Tay. I think you are supposed not to make any sense and drive me mad with confusion.”

She laughs, and I kiss her.

On the forehead.

I have someself-control.

Lisa Wilbourn—

Fuck you.

“I… I felt guilty,” she says, and my stomach drops, “about robbing you of that moment. About you not being there to be for me what I was for you when you cried, about not having you feel the same… the same closeness, the same chance to be nurturing, caring… I felt guilty I broke without you there to pick up the pieces.”

“Oh, sweetie… You didn’t break. No one could break you. Not even you.”

“I—”

“You are far stronger than you know, Tay.”

“You keep saying these things—”

“And I’ll do it till you believe them.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s gaslighting.”

I flick the tip of her nose, and she yelps before scrunching it in the cutest—

Lisa Wilbourn’s infatuation—

Yeah. Yeah, I know.

“Tay, no jokes, no sarcasm, no filters: you are a wonderful person. You are a goodperson, someone who wants to do what’s right no matter the cost, who wants to help despite everything you’ve gone through. You’d have every right to be bitter, to want to take out your anger and pain on the world, and you—”

“I punched Madison’s nose.”

“… Is there video of it?”

“… You are supposed to rethink your whole stance about me not taking my anger out on others, not look like I’m giving you a puppy.”

“Can you housetrain kits?”

“… Shouldn’t you ask Rachel that? Also, aren’t you the one with the endless source of esoteric trivia? And are you really avoiding the—”

“Well, there was that experiment with the Russian silver foxes, but that just made them tame, I don’t know if there’s a breed that could live in an apartment. And I don’t think Rachel knows about all canines. That doesn’t seem to be how her power works, though I could ask her if—”

“You areavoiding the subject—”

“Oh, no, I’m just ecstatic that you’ve finally done something that amounts to self-defense. The fact you think it’s some kind of moral failing is endearing, hilarious, and concerning, but, well, baby steps and all that.”

She flicks my nose.

Hey! That smarts!

“Liz… I… I thought about it. A lot. And I finally decided to do it because I realized I wasn’t sinking to her level if I was reacting to her. It… It wasn’t easy to—”

I hug her head to my chest, my hand drawing circles over her back.

“I know. I’m so proud of you, Tay—”

“You shouldn’t. It was… It was so obvious, so stupid that I hadn’t ever—”

“That’s not how it works. What you know now will always seem obvious, like the you from the past was missing this thing that was right in front of her. But the you from the past saw other things, saw as much as she could. You now see more, but only because of what she learned. Be proud of her: she has helped you reach what you are now.”

“… I’m pretty sure that level of dissociation can’t be healthy.”

“Tay, we are former villains, undercover heroes, lesbian lovers, parahumans, and teenagers.”

“… We are doomed, aren’t we?”

“To sappy scenes where one of us keeps being on the verge of a mental and emotional breakdown while the other gives the best speech she can come up with at the moment while suffering the worst stage fright ever? Certainly.”

“You don’t sound like you’ve stage fright.”

“No actor ever does. Not the ones worth the title.”

“I’m pretty sure that isn’t true.”

“Oh? You mean that people are human and, no matter what, fallible, and we shouldn’t think it’s the end of the world when one is less than perfect?”

One of her legs slides between mine, she twists her hips, and I’m lying on the grass, staring at a sky that is soon filled with Taylor and her swaying black hair.

“Stop using your powers to direct the conversation.”

“I… Wasn’t doing that?”

She pauses and looks at me with her head tilted in a way that makes me want to pat it.

“You… That thing you just did. With making me acknowledge people failing…”

“Wha—oh, that. Uh… I don’t want to spoil the magic, but that’s just called bantering, Tay. It happens naturally.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, really, if every time this happens, it was because I was using Power, the headache would be awful. Sometimes he interjects, but it’s usually… Well, me. Knowing you.”

“Knowing me enough to predict how I will answer to something.”

I look up at eyes that are a bit too open.

“Tay… You are the most important person in my life at the moment. I’ve no better friends, no family, and I’m deeply in love with you—and Power reacts to my interest and focus. Do you really think I don’t know you by now?”

She just looks at me.

And keeps looking.

All right, this is making me nervous.

“Tay?”

“I’m trying to decide whether what you just said is romantic or horrifying.”

“Both. Can’t it be both?”

She looks for a bit longer and finally sighs before dropping down and hugging me, her hair tickling my cheek just as the grass tickles my nape.

“Fine. It’s both,” she concedes.

“Yay.”

My arms wrap around her, and we stay just like this until she decides to break the silence.

“This whole thing was supposed to be about me dropping out of high school.”

“Sweetie, you are an active superhero with a millionaire fiancée and contacts with some of the most powerful and celebrated heroes in the world. Your future is as safe as it can be given your vocation. Dropping out is about what you want to do, not a gigantic issue.”

She shuffles a bit on top of me, and I keep thinking chaste thoughts.

Sexual frustration commonly linked to high levels of stress—

See? My bike never tells me things like this.

Lisa Wilbourn’s lack of technopathy—

“Will you help me get a GED?” Taylor mercifully interrupts Power’s latest, disturbing tantrum.

“Of course I will. Just let me buy a sexy tutor costume.”

“I’m the one who wears glasses.”

“I never said who the costume was for.”

She chuckles, which confuses me for a bit.

Ah, yes, she may have been under the impression I was joking.

“About everything else…” she sounds unsure. Uncertain.

I don’t like it.

And so… Well, I do what I intended to do when I brought her up here.

I give her a direction. An objective. A goal to strive forward.

“We are taking down the Empire.”

She stiffens in my arms for a moment, and then her body relaxes as her mind whirls with possibilities, with angles of attack, objectives, plans.

And that…

That, I like.

Lisa Wilbourn’s infatuation—

I’m also liking my bike more and more.