Chapter Text
With myself, I was working on homework in the main area of the Undersiders' loft; with Lisa, I was reading a mystery novel on the couch.
Since I was able to suppress her power much better than she could, letting her finally read mystery without every surprise being spoiled was a beneficial side-effect of me being in control. The downside was that Lisa actually read a bit slower than I did — and while I could control the minutiae of her physical movements, I wasn't actually affecting her mind itself — so there was an adjustment period as I learned to look at each word a little slower when using her eyes.
Luckily, 'frustration' was a feeling with plenty of physical analogues, since I could 'feel' her muscles trying to tense whenever she got annoyed with me reading too quickly.
Over the past couple hours of experimentation, I had gotten much better at reading comfortably with her. As a side benefit, the novel actually was pretty interesting: when in two bodies at the same time, I could very easily read and do homework without losing focus on either.
The timer on my phone went off. Now for the hard part. I did my best to give Lisa control of her own voice. We’d been testing partial control as the main exercise of the past couple hours, but I was only just starting to get the hang of it.
My control was absolute, which meant that Lisa’s attempts to act went ‘nowhere’ as I controlled her muscles instead. Trying to control her while not controlling a specific part of her was an exercise in futility that had made the first hour of practice frustrating.
Then, with Lisa’s help brainstorming, I tried a new strategy: she couldn’t act, but I could still ‘sense’ the stymied commands Lisa sent to her own muscles.
Controlling her in general was easy, which freed me to focus in-depth on a specific area: through careful attention and a lot of effort, I could ‘sense’ what Lisa was trying to do, and immediately ‘copy’ her commands to the relevant muscles, effectively letting only a specific part of her move according to her own will.
It was more like me acting as a relay than letting her have real partial control, but the important part was that it was working. With each bout of practice, the relay loop between her commands and the muscles under my power got tighter.
“Still good?” I asked Lisa, putting all my focus on her throat and mouth to relay.
“Good,” she replied, then clicked her tongue a few times as a test. “Speech is much easier this time. A lot less delay.”
The upside of partial control: I still had the comforting feeling of never losing power over the situation, but I got to talk to Lisa at the same time.
The downside of partial control: in the same way that standing or full-on crouching were easy but squatting halfway in between was hard, having full control or no control over a person were simple, but partial control drained me fast.
I managed another few seconds of relaying before I had to release Lisa from the effect of my power.
There was a half-second of disorientation as I lost my view through her eyes, being trapped back into my own perspective with only the jumble of sensory scraps my bugs passed to me as an outlet.
She stretched her entire body out; I had her shift posture often enough that her muscles never got stiff, so it was for purely psychological reasons. Much as I was unexpectedly enjoying being in control semi-frequently since I first used my power on her a few days ago, it was always entrancing to see how her mind-sparks flared and took paths I couldn't predict as she got back into full control over herself.
"Good," she repeated, trailing off into a yawn. "You're getting a lot better at this," she added.
I shrugged. "It feels good to be getting better with it, but it’s not like my human-control power will ever be practically useful. I doubt anyone but you would ever agree to this." Some part of me — my conscience, maybe — wished I didn’t even have to control Lisa, but now that I’d broken that dam, it would be incredibly hard to go back.
She hummed noncommittally. "You never know what the future holds — your power could be pretty relevant in the right situation."
I shrugged again, not seeing it, but also not really in the mood to argue the point. I wasn't ever going to use my power on anyone else, so the discussion was irrelevant.
"Good to go again," she said.
"Another ten minutes okay?" I asked, setting the alarm on my phone.
Lisa nodded, relaxing back into the couch cushions as I took ahold of her again. Instantly, my mild claustrophobia lessened as I was no longer trapped in a single too-small body. With Lisa's hands, I opened the book back to where we left off, and kept reading while I worked on my trigonometry homework.
It was strange how... real Lisa felt.
Humans were, pretty much by definition, forever locked into only their own brains. We assumed other people felt and thought — were capable of thinking and feeling — to the same level as us. We assumed other people had the same complex internal worlds we did, the same depth of feeling, the same pain when hurt and the same joy when they won. But most of it was, by necessity, a benign illusion; we could never actually know for sure what went on in others’ heads, but in order to cooperate we had learned to believe they were fully real.
It reminded me of learning about pareidolia, the human tendency to see faces in inanimate objects like electrical outlets or architecture. Slap some googly eyes on a random object, and lots of people will feel at least something for it, maybe even be sad if the object is destroyed. Empathy was, on some level, the same. Show your mind a detailed enough face and suddenly it was a person and you were happy when it was ‘happy’.
None of this is to say I didn’t have empathy, or think it was important. I loved my dad, and I’d cared for Emma once.
It wasn't until I finally caved and started mastering Lisa that, by comparison, I realized just how thin that all was.
Controlling Lisa gave me a taste of a real connection, something that went beyond just a guess. Her heartbeat was, in some sense, my own. I could feel when she was cold: even when the temperature felt fine to me, I could feel how the chill on her skin differed from my own. The way her fingers felt the paper of the book, how her body relaxed into the couch. Her sensations, her feelings, her everything was immediate and real and just a few degrees off from my own experience in a way that words couldn’t communicate.
It made me aware, by contrast, of all the ways I just had to assume with everyone besides Lisa. I still knew they were real, but in a detached, desaturated way. I didn't want people to be hurt. But with Lisa, even though her injuries didn't 'hurt' me, the urge to destroy whatever caused her pain was more immediate, visceral. As I looked at her, reading peacefully on the couch, the mere thought of someone causing her harm filled me with an intensity of rage that took me by surprise. The feeling surpassed anything I’d felt even in response to my own pain. Maybe it was a side effect of my power? Or maybe I was just more accustomed to tolerating my own pain.
Only two minutes into this, our routine was disrupted as Lisa’s phone rang.
Even though I hadn’t fully recovered from the last bout of burning all my focus on partial control, I immediately started relaying Lisa’s hand closest to her phone — she could pick it up if she wanted, or wave me off if she wanted to answer it solo.
Once she realized she had control of that arm, she grabbed her phone, flipping it open.
Lisa had been relaxed as we opened the phone, but when we looked at the caller ID — just labeled ‘Boss’ from her contacts — I got sympathetically lightheaded as Lisa’s heart exploded into motion, her involuntary reactions kicking into gear for fight-or-flight.
Was there something I needed to protect her from? There was no way I could read her reactions as anything other than panic.
I had mostly sidelined my quest to find the Undersiders’ boss and turn them in to the heroes; I wasn’t sure I was actually capable of it at this point, not with how quickly I was growing attached to all of them, and especially to Lisa.
For the first time, though, I was tempted to go find the Undersiders’ boss to vet him for other reasons.
After a half-second, I reluctantly pulled my control back from Lisa. It was the first time I had to actively fight the grasping of my power since its cravings had been sated a few days ago.
Lisa opened the phone, her face immediately slipping into a polite but distant expression I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen on her before. “Heya boss,” she said calmly, her voice carrying no trace of the intense panic I’d felt in her. “What can I do for you?”
A long pause as she listened, completely still.
“Mhmm,” she replied. She paused for a few more seconds, then added, “The one on the corner of Main and Penn?”
Her face was entirely placid as the tinny sounds of talking on the other end presumably added more details.
“You got it boss,” Lisa replied, “I’m on it. I’ll call back later when I have the details ready.”
Lisa closed the phone and her face fell, mask dropping off. I didn’t need the ability to feel her mind to know she was upset, but the chaotic sparks reinforced the impression. She gave a weak smile.
“Another ten minutes?” she asked, voice filled with forced calm.
“Lisa,” I said. “You know you can ask me for help if something is going on, right?”
She stood and walked over to me at the table, looking down at me in the chair. Her eyes were intense, boring into my own. I was almost afraid to move under her gaze.
“Can I?” She asked. “Alec is in this for fun, Brian needs a legitimate looking job, Rachel just wants money for her dogs and a chance to tear shit up. Those motivations tell me exactly how far they're willing to go, what they're willing to do. You said when you joined that you’re here for an escape from your real life. How real can things get before it’s not worth it any more? How far will you take this?”
Her face changed as she spoke, growing sharp and analytical. For a moment, it felt like she was peering into my very soul, examining every guilty thought I had about planning to betray the Undersiders, seeing me with more clarity than even my human-control power ever had a hope of letting me look at her in return. I understood how our enemies felt, like she was dissecting my very soul and finding it wanting.
Behind her cold-reading power was one of the sharpest people I’d ever known, and given the intensity with which she was looking at me, suddenly I felt sure that she’d eventually be able to fully pick apart every part of me even without her parahuman power.
I wasn’t going to be able to lie to her here — and I didn’t want to lie to myself, either.
It took me a few seconds to really think about it, as she watched me with discomfiting intensity.
Unlike the others, I would easily choose Lisa over any amount of fun or money. I had partially joined the Undersiders as an escape from my own life, yes — but spending time with Lisa herself was even more of an escape than any amount of quick fights or daring getaways could be.
The other reason I’d joined the Undersiders was for my own conscience. Or perhaps my own ego, if I was being cynical. It was strange to think that only a few weeks ago I had been wholly committed to taking them down from the inside.
Even stranger was realizing how repellant the idea seemed to me now. The idea of seeing the Undersiders locked in prison cells, their freedom, family, and dogs taken away from them, sparked a hot flash of fury in my chest.
They mattered too much to me. Lisa mattered too much to me.
I had idly noticed earlier how her letting me in made the idea of anyone harming her absolutely repulsive, even worse than the thought of myself being harmed. I just wanted her to be safe, free, and happy, under nobody’s control — except my own, when she was willing.
Finally, I was able to say with absolute certainty: “If you’re in danger, I’m with you. However far.”
She examined me for a few more moments. Then she gave a single, sharp nod, heavy with finality.
“Let’s go on a walk,” she said, conspicuously putting her phone out of arm’s reach. I followed her lead, leaving my new burner phone on the coffee table as we left.
On our way out of the loft, she casually hooked her arm around mine, keeping me close as she tugged me though a seemingly-random configuration of side streets.
Eventually, we pulled into a random alley.
“Um,” I said eloquently, examining the litter-covered ground and dirty brick walls.
“No surveillance here,” she explained, giving one last look around the alley, presumably to double-check. Then she focused her full attention back on me.
“You already know the Undersiders have a boss, of course. I’m the only one that knows who he is; the others think that’s at least partially a power play on my part.” She paused and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly before meeting my eyes again and continuing. “They’re wrong. I was explicitly told not to tell them anything about our employer.”
I was starting to see the shape of the conversation she was leading us down, so I gave the obvious next line: “You’re not one to follow rules like that without good reason.” A few streets away, I had multiple ant colonies dancing in intricate spirals, trying to focus and prepare myself for what I could feel coming.
She gave me a tired smile. Behind her eyes, the motes of light slowed, their paths curling inward.
“He made a very convincing argument. I was recruited at the wrong end of a gun, and I don’t doubt he’s still capable of offing me with minutes’ notice,” she replied.
I had been with the Undersiders long enough — and used it firsthand enough — to know that Lisa’s power was scarily good at predicting or manipulating her enemies, especially if she had plenty of time to plan for them.
For her to have been recruited against her will and be sure that she was still in danger, almost a year later—
“The boss has a power,” I said, “or at least someone close with a strong power, but if there was a meaningful difference you already would have subverted them.” Lisa was watching me closely as I put the pieces together. “Something you can’t out-plan, something you can’t predict — either someone with another mental power, or someone whose power messes with yours.”
“The former,” Lisa said. She took one last scan of my whole face, the corners of her eyes tightening a bit in pain at what must be a pretty decent headache by now.
“Coil,” she said. The leader of Brockton Bay’s third largest gang; nobody knew whether he was actually a cape, because he seemed to rule his moderate slice of territory entirely through unpowered mercenaries.
For him to have some sort of Thinker power, for him to have a group of capes discreetly doing his bidding — I was starting to see the bigger picture, and it was uglier than I had expected.
I said, “So some Thinker power that has a way of foiling yours, with bad consequences for disobedience.”
Nothing about Lisa’s external body language changed, but the languid movement of the constellations of light comprising her mind exploded into a flurry of activity. She was silent for a moment, then her posture straightened as she seemed to steel herself, before saying: “I’ve seen firsthand what would happen if I was too hard to keep on a leash but too valuable to die.”
I was suddenly, inexplicably aware of the twitching joints and antennae of my swarm, as my attention diffused outward from my body. I braced myself as best I could for her next words.
“He used our bank run as a cover to capture another Thinker. A preteen, some sort of precog power; he keeps her drugged to the gills to prevent her from even considering escape, making her a personal fortune-teller that he can lock in a room when not in use.”
My bugs exploded into a frenzy, tearing into each other and anything else destructible in their reach.
I kept my breathing steady.
My first instinct was somewhere between fury and despair. A young girl, drugged and used for her power — and myself partially complicit in providing cover for it. I wanted to destroy Coil immediately. Screw the comfort of having friends, the Undersiders and I needed to focus on saving her right now .
I tensed, almost ready to walk out and make a phone call, before I truly looked at Lisa.
She was stiff, tense, watching me closely. Her mind was erratic, messy; I still wasn’t accustomed enough to the endless minutia of mental sparks to divine a particular meaning from that.
She trusted me. If she was telling the truth — and I had no particular reason to doubt it — I was the only other one she’d let in on this.
The drugged girl could be her if I messed this up. The thought of an unknown preteen used like that enraged me, but the thought of Lisa—
It must be the empathy inherent in having lived in someone else’s skin. I could imagine her pain, could viscerally recall her frantic heartbeat and spiking stress at even just seeing ‘boss’ in the caller ID. The thought of her in that sort of pain felt like a crushing feeling in my chest, and not even letting my swarm rend each other into viscera could bleed off all the emotion.
The hesitance with which she looked at me. I knew people weren’t fully predictable to her power, that even the slightest chance of me doing something dumb could ruin her here. Still, though, it hurt to have her think for one second that I could spend hours sharing her mind, only to throw her into danger at the first chance.
“I’m with you,” I echoed myself from earlier. “However far.”
Lisa relaxed a bit, though not completely. She gave me a wide grin, but I didn’t need to be borrowing her power to know that it wasn’t genuine. There was a certain tightness around the corner of her eyes, a minute involuntary furrow between her brows.
“I promise it’s the full truth,” Lisa said. I didn’t doubt her, and didn’t know why she thought I would. I promised her I was on her side. Though, given my own experience with a best friend who promised to never betray me, maybe I could understand her misreading.
Before I could think of something to say, she continued, “If you control me and let me speak, you could probably tell by my heartbeat whether I was lying. You’re the ultimate power-based polygraph.”
The idea made sense; I did get a lot of clues through involuntary movements, and though Lisa’s power gave her a massive advantage in social situations, it didn’t help her completely suppress her reactions.
If I were extra careful, I could borrow Lisa’s power to examine her. She likely already had a bad headache, but she would probably agree if it made it more likely that I would work with her.
The thought of using Lisa’s power against her without her permission — or with only grudging permission that I’d gotten by pressuring her — made me feel physically ill with revulsion. Thinking about it more, even using it against her as a polygraph felt bad on some visceral level.
Did I really think any part of her claim was a lie? I wanted the drugged preteen and the threats of snipers to be a lie, but I didn’t actually expect it. Everything she’d told me lined up too well with both her and Coil’s known actions.
I’d been standing silently for far too long. Eventually, I shook my head. “I trust you,” I said. “You’ve trusted me, kept me sane, when you could have left me to struggle alone. Let me return the favor.”
She gave a small smile. Given that it was the first truly genuine-looking smile I’d seen from her since she got the call, the pressure in my chest loosened at the sight.
“It’s not like that’s fully selfless, Taylor,” she said.
I still didn’t understand what she could possibly get out of it, but given that both pieces of my power were centered around a need to be in control, maybe her willingness to give it up was just something I wasn’t built to understand.
I just shook my head mutely, unable to comment on that front.
“What’s the plan, then?” I asked.
She walked me through everything she knew about Coil, his body doubles, and his operations — not much, but enough to get started on. As far as Lisa could tell, his combination of moles and power was too useful for us to be able to bring in outside help; we’d need to flip as many of his assets as possible and try to corner him in two timelines at once.
It would be a lot of work. When I watched Lisa’s expression as she explained, though — the tension in her voice, the pinch between her eyebrows, but also the first hints of relief in how she leaned toward me — it was clear that I’d made the right choice.
I owed it to the girl that Coil had kidnapped to make sure we did this right the first time.
Somehow, though, it wasn’t the girl I found myself thinking of. All my effort was instead spent on trying not to imagine Lisa in her place.
It was strange how quickly time passed with the Undersiders.
Luckily, with the next Endbringer attack all the way in Texas and some of the local gang warfare cooling down a bit, Brockton Bay was only an average amount of ‘bad’ right now. It was a decent time to be a small thieving team, and on the boss’s orders, the five of us made off with a few decent hauls over the next few weeks.
Behind the scenes, Lisa managed to flip a decent amount of his mercenaries and get a slightly better understanding of his base, but it was slow-going in an attempt not to arouse his suspicions.
If we tipped Coil off early, even just in an alternate timeline, it could be over before we’d even really gotten a chance to begin.
At the loft, we continued practicing with my partial control: I was now able to relay for a small area like a hand for nearly fifteen minutes, or do a full-body relay for about ten seconds before I tired.
The more time I spent using my power on Lisa, the easier it was to care about her; her pain was my pain, and her joy brought me joy. Outside of the moments where I was mastering her, we spent more and more time just relaxing in each others’ company.
Back before I had used my power, I had been tortured by her tendency to always hover within sixteen feet of me.
Now, I was following within range of her just as often.
Even with the stress about Coil hanging over us, these were some of the best weeks I could remember. Certainly the happiest since I still had my mom and Emma: for the first time in a long time, I didn't feel quite so alone.
Coil was the one dark spot. At the rate our plans were progressing, it would be another month before I could start mapping out his base with my insects, then another two for us to tighten the net around him, assuming all went well.
But of course no plan survives contact with the enemy.
Only three weeks after I had learned that he was the boss, all of us Undersiders were called in to meet him.
Even as he praised us for our successes, even as he demonstrated his ‘fate control’ with a coin, even as he offered a bigger bribe to all of us to take bigger jobs working under him — keeping myself from flicking on my power for a half-second to feel Tattletale's heartbeat was hard, but managing not to even look at her was harder.
I kept my gaze firmly fixed on Coil, stance relaxed as he offered me a cleaned up Brockton Bay with a functioning ferry.
My mind was split over millions of insects until only the smallest, calmest piece of me was focused on my body.
“That sounds good to me,” I said, smiling under my mask. Even with the full-faced cover and decorative mandibles hiding it, I was hoping he could hear the smile in my voice.
When he turned to Tattletale, I finally had a good enough excuse to look at her too without arousing any suspicion.
Her eyes were wider than usual and she was breathing too fast, but I sincerely doubted anyone would notice unless they were as familiar with her tells as I was.
Tattletale noticed me looking. She looked at me, flicked her eyes to Coil, then back to me, before biting her lip.
Not a body double, then; we had discussed a couple useful signals, but we didn't think we'd need them so soon.
What could I do?
I had insects in the vents and outside, but inside Coil’s base was very low on usable critters; he must have it treated extremely frequently, probably as a precaution against me in particular.
My small swarm contained some utility insects. I carried black widows, various weaving spiders, and my capriscin-laced attack bugs in my utility compartment and hair, but they weren't enough to take down Coil and all his mercenaries. Even if I attacked Coil, odds be damned, he likely already had a timeline split plus a paranoid number of dead man’s switches.
With Tattletale’s preparation incomplete and my insect control nearly useless, it seemed like we had little choice but to keep going along at Coils whim.
Tattletale hadn't predicted Coil calling us in; the change in circumstances made it possible that it would be even longer before we could get her and the precog safe.
Unless— my human control gave me control of powers as well, and there was no reason Coil should have prepared for it. He was only slightly out of my range, barely a few steps from my web.
It was odd. Before controlling Lisa, I had constantly craved settling my power over her; here, the thought of being forced to empathize with Coil made me feel ill just to contemplate. Though if it was either tolerating controlling him for a short time or leaving Lisa under constant threat of being shot or drugged for months…
I stopped examining Coil and his gestures as he spoke to the others so that I could look toward Lisa.
She was already looking closely at me, lips pressed into a thin line.
“Would it work?” I asked silently, trusting her to understand.
She glanced at Coil briefly, examining him with the little flickers of her attention that always seemed to accompany her power use. Then she looked back at me, expression set, and gave me a single tiny nod.
I considered calling his name, coming up with a pretense for getting closer to make the transition smoother. However, I didn’t want to risk giving him extra time to react, and expected the transition to be obvious anyway — at least to someone like Regent, who would recognize what I was doing instantly.
Silently, I took three steps forward toward Coil, putting him in my sixteen foot radius. He didn’t even finish turning to me before I could sense his mental sparks: a disorganized mass of dull lights, traveling around each other in messy lines. It vaguely reminded me of looking at tangled earbud cords.
Against my own instinctive revulsion at even brushing against it, I grabbed control of Coil’s mind, settling myself inside his skin just as he finished turning to see me.
Rather than seeing out of two sets of eyes, I suddenly had three ; I was looking slightly up at Coil, slightly down at myself, and
at the wall of a room I didn’t recognize.
This must be the backup timeline. I quickly made my way out of the room with backup-Coil, passing through a double layer of doors using his fingerprints on a side panel. Once I was through the doors, I climbed up a ladder to a hatch at the top, pushing it open to be in what must be Coil’s office.
He had a bunker underneath, then, one he could get to quickly with a backup timeline as soon as he finished showing us his coin flip trip. Once I closed the hatch, it blended seamlessly with the surrounding floor. Likely some sort of Tinkertech to help hide it; there was no way we’d have found him before he could retaliate.
I had Coil leave his office, looking around at the surrounding hallways and memorizing what few signs I could see.
“Sir?” one guard asked, tensing up. The Coil I was piloting was probably moving strangely — plus there’d be no reason for the real Coil to leave his bunker just to wander aimlessly.
Before any guards could further react, I pushed this timeline until it collapsed into the regular one, where
I had Coil look at myself, then Tattletale. His heart rate had been rising, presumably a stress reaction as I could feel his futile, instinctive commands to tense or flex various muscles. My power blotted them out, letting me keep him perfectly still.
“Tattletale. Skitter,” I had him say. He had slightly more of a middle-of-the-country American accent than me by default, but when I spoke through him, our names came out sounding like a Brockton Bay native. I’d have to just hope neither the guards nor Grue and Bitch were alarmed by the minor change. “I’d like to talk to you briefly in my office.”
“Yes boss,” Tattletale said, fully at attention.
I could feel Coil’s heart rate accelerating further as he realized that I wasn’t letting go.
Regent looked over Coil for a long moment, then turned to me, his usual lazy posture shed as he examined me closely.
I was tense, waiting to see what he said. This was the biggest point of weakness; if we could get Coil alone in his office we’d have plenty of time, but depending on how much Regent gave away here, tipped-off teammates or mercenaries could end this half-baked plan before it began.
“You need any help?” Regent asked, looking straight at me, before turning to look at me through Coil’s eyes. “Happy to assist, especially if there’s money involved. Boss.”
“Regent!” Grue hissed at him quietly, before straightening up as I had Coil raise one hand.
“That’s quite alright, Regent,” I said tonelessly through him, “though I’m sure we’ll have use for your eagerness soon enough.”
Luckily, that seemed in-character enough for the onlookers, as nobody outwardly reacted besides Regent shrugging listlessly and Grue losing some of the tension in his posture.
When nobody had anything else to say, I had Coil nod and turn, waving a hand to gesture Tattletale and I to follow. Internally, I could feel all of his useless attempts to thrash around as he tried to get even a single muscle to spasm. His heart rate was slowing, though; reacting to the seeming-inevitability of my power, planning something, or just unable to keep up the acute panic for an extended period of time?
Tattletale fell into step behind me, reaching out to loosely grab my wrist, and the mercenaries serving as Coil’s personal guard for the moment tailed us as we moved into the hallway.
I could hear a distant buzzing, though I wasn’t sure whether it was the electronics in the base or just my lightheadedness as I tried to remain calm. I had a lot of my mind focused on the intricacies of maneuvering my swarm, but given their relatively small number, I hadn’t yet been able to figure out a route to Coil’s office.
Coil approached the first branching option in the underground base, and I had a moment of terror as I realized that having him wander the wrong way may well prove fatal as it raised the mercenaries’ suspicions. I could split the timeline at each juncture and hope I figured out which had been correct by the next split, but if I didn't learn of my mistake in time, we'd be dead—
Tattletale gently tugged my hand to the right, fingertips somehow warming my skin despite both of our costumes in the way.
I had Coil turn right, and the rest of us followed silently.
Having Tattletale silently guiding me allowed me to let even more of my mind drift outside of myself as we moved through the base.
Oddly enough, I found myself shifting much of the focus into Coil. Although feeling Lisa’s panic often panicked me in turn, feeling his fear was… meaningless? Surprisingly, it wasn't impacting me at all. I could study it, dive into the web of movements he was trying to send his muscles, without feeling like I was being pulled underwater.
It wasn’t clear why the empathy portion of my power hadn’t kicked in yet. I was in full control of Coil and could feel every little detail he felt, but it left no more impression on me than the sensations of my insects.
I needed to make the most of this before I was crippled by concern for Coil. I didn’t want to care about him, but given how often I spent thinking about keeping Lisa safe and trying to fix anything that might harm her — well, based on past experience, being able to use my human control against Coil like this likely came with a time limit.
I subtly sped us up a bit, relieved when Tattletale managed to guide us to the door of his office mere minutes later.
Before we entered, I had Coil turn back to the mercenaries tailing us. “That will be all for the moment, gentlemen,” I said through him.
“Yes, boss,” they replied with no hesitation, saluting before moving off in a different direction. Returning to their stations? With any luck, we wouldn’t find out until Tattletale already owned their organization.
Soon enough, the three of us had stepped into his office, alone.
Tattletale immediately flounced over to Coil’s leather swivel office chair behind his expensive, ornate desk, jumping into it with enough force to make it do a full spin before she kicked out a foot to stop it.
“All good, Tay?” she asked me, grin wide and feral as she looked up to where I had Coil standing emotionlessly just off to the side, angled so I could see the screen of his computer through his eyes.
I focused more closely on him for another moment. There was a cold pricking feeling starting in his fingertips, running up his arms and down his spine. I couldn't interpret it as anything but absolute dread.
A single thought as to what Lisa had told me of her recruitment, and any hint of sympathy I might have felt faded.
“Good for now,” I said, half my attention going to making a backup timeline where I hid the three of us in Coil’s secret bunker, “though he's obviously very unhappy about it.”
Tattletale raised one eyebrow, and I could tell it was directed at me even as the brunt of attention was captured by breaking into Coil’s computer. “For now?” she asked. “I haven't seen a time limit on your power.”
“There's no time limit to being able to direct movements,” I said. I didn’t know how to put the actual issue into words.
Or rather, the obvious words — ‘my power has made me unwilling to hurt you’ — could destroy me. For some reason, Lisa trusted me with full control over her, giving me an asymmetric power over her at no risk to myself. If I admitted that I was unable to harm her — or even just to voluntarily scare her — with my power, I would lose that tenuous level of control over the situation. While outside of my power she had the ability to destroy my life by turning me in, I didn’t know how I would handle her knowing that even being within my power still kept her above me in other ways.
A new fear took root: did she already know the empathy weakness built into my ability? It would at least partially explain how she had been so blasé about letting me use it on her, if she knew that the more I used it the more she could twist it against me.
I was so caught up in trying to work through the idea internally that I left my verbal thoughts half-finished, apparently obviously enough to prompt her to look over at me.
Whatever advantage I might have had from keeping my weakness a secret, I couldn’t rely on it. The way she pinned me with her sharp gaze made it seem like even if she had missed it before, every thread of fear in me was hers to unspool.
But rather than the sharpening grin of victory or even an expression of surprise, when she looked at me, she inexplicably softened. She was still smiling, yes, but it was more gentle with a tinge of sadness than her usual smug look.
Coil was trying to look between us. I was almost tempted to let him, to see if a different perspective would somehow make any of this make more sense.
Tattletale turned back to the screen.
“I’m in,” she said a few moments later, brushing past the whole exchange. Some part of my mind was left chewing through all the implications, but having an immediate goal to re-focus on helped me drag most of my attention back to the task at hand.
“Nearly set off a self-destruct with the red herring password,” she added.
“I have a backup timeline of us in Coil’s personal bunker,” I replied. “Though obviously I’d prefer that we didn’t have to use it.”
I kept Coil’s eyes on the computer, but with myself, I started rifling through his office. There was a lot of physical paperwork; I gathered it into bundles for easy transport, in case Lisa wanted to look over them later elsewhere.
In the bottom drawer of his desk was a gun.
I pulled it out, gingerly fiddling with it. I didn’t know much about firearms, but I was at least familiar enough to make sure it was loaded with bullets, the safety clicked on.
I held onto it. It didn’t seem like any mercenaries would interrupt us, but it was good to have a backup option at hand if we needed to disable any of them. Tattletale had the small pistol she carried with her costume; I now had both a handgun and the spiders I was slowly amassing in an air vent right above the office.
I stood guard, cycling insects through the base to keep a collection of compound eyes on any potential problem, while keeping Coil focused on the screen Tattletale was working on. Whenever I started to feel something approximating ‘hope’ or ‘relief’ through him as he saw Tattletale do something, I shook his head to warn her.
Tattletale seemed pleased with the arrangement, humming to herself as she worked her way through Coil’s files, occasionally gesturing towards him with her loaded gun when she got caught up in muttering about paranoid failsafes.
“That's the last of it,” Tattletale finally said, nearly an hour after we started. She turned from the computer, already looking surprisingly at home behind the desk. “We’ll have a period of instability: some time spent ferreting out disloyal assets, taking over payment accounts, things like that. But we have the major access we need, and frankly most of his mercenaries don't care who’s signing the checks anyway.”
From where I had him standing silently off to the side, I felt the dread building within Coil redouble. We hadn’t discussed what we’d do with him and I could tell he was cottoning on to the most likely outcome. From the impulses in his brain, I could tell he was trying to talk. He wasn’t as easy to work with as Lisa, his neural impulses were a little odd and off-putting compared to Lisa’s familiar ones. Even then, I could have let him talk. It would have been awkward and stilted, but we could hear him out, let him have a say in what happened to him. His jaw didn’t so much as twitch, all his attempts to speak were mere suggestions to his body at this point and they were going completely ignored.
“We can’t let him go,” Tattletale said. I knew. “Once we let him go, his power means he gets as many chances as he needs to get back at us.” I knew that too.
“Even if we walk him right to the PRT, we’ll never be safe. He’ll tell them about your power and they’ll come after us both. He might even be able to use that to pawn off his previous crimes.” She was being nice: giving me a justification for what we both knew came next, making it seem like I needed to be convinced in this moment. In reality, I’d known where this was going from the moment it started. I’d started this for Lisa, and I could finish it for her too.
The part I’d been really worried about was the actual follow through. I expected the empathy effect of my power to make me instinctively cringe away from Tattletale’s thinly-veiled implication. Like with Lisa, I’d felt his mind. Felt the way he understood the world, let him become real to me in a way almost nobody was. I should be just as furious at the idea of him coming to harm as I was with Lisa. And yet— I wasn't.
I’d felt how he thought, how he looked at Lisa. I’d felt his fear, his rage, his hatred at being beaten. I focused on his sensations, the particular way his brain interpreted his senses. The way he saw color, the way his lungs felt as they took in air. Each thing that was, in my limited experience with a sample size of three human bodies, completely unique to every person. With Lisa every one of those sensations sparked a bloom of warmth and connection, a wonder at her totally unique personhood. Pressured by the guilt of what we were planning, I tried to think the same way about Coil. I looked into every facet of his experience of the world and yet I found nothing worth saving.
That thought alone almost made me falter. I’d been telling myself with Lisa that my power increased my empathy for her, on some level made me kinder, even if it was selfish how I used it on her. But this? This was so much worse. I was fully inhabiting a man and deciding he wasnt worth living. That was the reason people hated human masters. That was the kind of thing that monsters did, that Heartbreaker did. Using up human lives, burning through them at their own convenience. Killing Coil like this, no matter how much I could tell myself he deserved it, was the first step on that path. I needed to stop this before I hurt more people.
Except — if he didn't die now, or if we tried to kill him outside of my control and we failed, we would never be safe again. Lisa would never be safe again. I thought of Dinah, recently freed by Tattletale’s text to a flipped merc and starting the slow process of detoxing in another part of the base. I thought of how we’d found her, of the idea of Lisa in her place. Before I lost my nerve, I closed Coil’s mouth and stopped his breathing.
A gunshot would be faster. Though it would probably be morally cleaner, it’d be physically messier, and loud enough that a few mercenaries might break in before we were ready to deal with them.
As much as I tried to justify my choice to myself based on practicality, I knew that wasn’t the real reason.
I remembered the absolute fear Lisa had felt when picking up the phone call from him, and let myself imagine the physical and mental pain that nearly a full year under his ungentle control would have caused her. Even now, the last conscious signals Coil was trying to send to his muscles were to lunge toward us and either strangle or beat Tattletale or myself.
I let him futilely send his last messages to his muscles until he passed out. After that, it was mere minutes of his diaphragm independently fighting me for control of his lungs before it learned that I wasn’t letting go.
Coil died silently, the last embers of his mind sputtering out into darkness.
Tattletale didn’t watch, but as we finally made our way out of the room to impress the leadership change onto our new mercenaries, her warm hand slipped into mine.
I was cold and tired. For once, my power didn’t even try to reach out for control of Lisa.
Even though our work on restructuring Coil’s organization was far from over, Tattletale soon led me back to the Undersiders’ loft and wrapped me in her warm blankets. She said something that I couldn’t make myself pay attention to, and then she was gone.
Time passed.
I was still swaddled in my blanket-cocoon, propped against pillows at the head of Lisa’s bed when I heard someone briskly making their way up to the loft. In less than a minute, she entered the room.
When she caught sight of me, she wordlessly came to her bed and climbed in. She unwrapped me a bit, gently tugging the blanket out of my tight grip only enough to slip into my blanket pile right alongside me, wrapping herself protectively against me.
Lisa shuffled us until we were laying, fully tucked against each other, buried in a nest of soft blankets. Despite her attempts, the chill that ran through my core refused to lessen.
We stayed like that for a while, silent. Eventually, my even breath hiccupped a bit, my sight blurring. I wasn’t sad, exactly. I couldn’t explain what I was feeling, but in the moment, my own involuntary reactions were surprising me.
For a moment, I looked at myself the way I had looked at Coil: what did these little involuntary reactions mean, and how could I dissect them to reverse-engineer all the internal bits that I couldn’t directly understand? I was trying to put the pieces together, even as the mind working on the puzzle was the very tool that was causing the problem.
Lisa’s arms tightened around me, a pleasant pressure that drew me out of my own thoughts.
We laid like that for a long time. Her grip eventually loosened again as she fell asleep.
I suppose I must have fallen asleep too, because I was surprised the next day by the brightness of the room as the morning sun came through Lisa’s small window.
I got up before her, per usual, and went to brush my teeth and shower with the extra toiletries I left in the Undersiders’ loft.
I should really have gone home. Dad was happy for me that I was getting as close to a friend as I had once been with Emma and didn’t have a problem with our frequent sleepovers, but he’d start to get concerned if I didn’t show up today.
Something about the idea of going home right now felt— obscene. The girl who’d left home yesterday was different in some fundamental way from the person I had become today, and I didn’t want to desecrate my childhood home by returning changed.
I spit out the toothpaste and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked the same as usual, if maybe a bit more tired.
I spent a long moment examining myself, long enough for Lisa to come knock and — when she didn’t receive a reply — enter the restroom with me.
She came to stand next to me in the mirror, examining us side-by-side for herself before smiling slightly at me through our reflections.
“We deserve a chill day, I think,” she eventually said, breaking the silence. “Go back to bed?”
For lack of anything else I particularly wanted to do, I nodded, and made my way around her, out of the restroom, and back to our room.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
I could hear the water running for a couple minutes, then silence. Before long, Lisa re-entered her room, beelining to the bed without any hesitation.
She sat next to me, reaching over to pull one of my hands off my lap so she could entangle our fingers.
“I think I need a break from this,” Lisa said, tilting her head and looking at me with bright green eyes. “Mind taking control for a bit?”
My brain stalled out, most of the insects in my range freezing in place, or falling to the ground where they had been flying. After a moment, I was able to kick myself back into motion. “I just used my power to destroy a man and everything he’d built yesterday,” I said. “I didn’t even feel bad about hurting him.”
One corner of her mouth quirked up into a quasi-smile, but she didn’t seem particularly happy.
“I’ll take my chances,” Lisa said, squeezing my hand for a moment.
“I could hurt you, and you couldn’t do anything about it,” I reminded her.
“You won’t,” she instantly replied.
For maybe the first time since that first day when I made myself sick at the realization that I’d fully Mastered my best friend to move her out of the way, I had a moment of absolute clarity as I realized how insane this whole setup was.
Who would voluntarily, intentionally allow someone uncontested control of every detail of themselves?
She was sitting very easily within my control radius at the moment, her mind an orbiting mass of sparking light, right within my reach. Even if she started to move away, it would take her too long to get out of my range.
I could make Lisa get the gun in her nightstand drawer and shoot herself, and there’d be nothing she could do. I could make her call anyone and say anything, and she’d be unable to stop it. My only real limit was the sixteen-foot radius — but given that my control didn’t slip even when asleep, with her power to draw on to avoid the other Undersiders if we left, I could theoretically keep control of her for a long time.
She had just seen me do worse.
“I could hurt you,” I repeated, my voice sounding faint to my own ears.
I wasn’t the same newbie cape she had trusted days ago. I was a cold-blooded murderer, someone who had Mastered another human against their will.
Her hand only tightened around mine, ignoring the way I didn’t grip her back. She neither hesitated nor pulled away.
I widened my net to grab control of the flurry of sparks, immediately suppressing her power as far down as I could and closing her eyes. I didn’t want to have to see myself right now.
We were frozen there for a long moment, breathing evenly. I was consciously aware of every intake of oxygen into both of our lungs. I didn’t know what to do with us.
I was going to hurt her, eventually. People couldn’t just not use a huge part of their power, and human Masters like me in particular were pretty much universally known for being the worst of the worst. What could it mean that I got this power, except that I was always a monster like the rest of them, even if I had tried to ignore it for a while?
I released my control for a few seconds, and she didn’t move. She didn’t even open her eyes.
As clever as Lisa was, she clearly didn’t understand .
I snapped back into control, forcing all of her muscles into inaction to make her fall bonelessly back onto the bed. Then, with just a moment of hesitation, I stopped both our breathing.
Every second that she went without inhaling made it feel like the rot in my chest was eating its way further through me. There was an insistent, burning pain lodged in my throat and stinging at my eyes, but I had to make her understand.
I had thought my power made me unable to hurt people under my control. That clearly wasn’t true. I had killed Coil with no pain at all, and much as Lisa holding her breath initially hurt me, every second we went was only making me feel more numb.
And yet — even fifteen seconds in, almost halfway to unconsciousness, she still didn’t understand. She couldn’t have. Despite her muscles instinctively trying to twitch or buy her aching lungs oxygen, she never once sent her muscles the order to try to attack me, try to stop me.
I was waiting for it. I think I would have let her, if she tried, but it never came.
At seventeen seconds in, both of our lungs were really starting to burn, and I released control of her; the trapped air escaped both of us in whoosh as breathing dropped out of my conscious control.
Lisa reached over, fumbling for a second with her eyes still closed, before she managed to tangle her fingers with mine.
“I trust you,” she repeated quietly, still gasping to make up for lost breath.
I didn’t know what to do.
After a few more seconds, she sat up fully and opened her eyes, pulling at me until we were sitting knee-to-knee on her bed. She was looking directly at me, eyes inexplicably soft, even as I found my gaze continuing to wander.
She tugged on my hand, a clear nonverbal command, even as her eyes stayed locked on me.
“I don’t want to,” I said.
“See,” she commanded.
Despite my power, I had hardly been able to refuse a direct order from Lisa.
My power gently slipped into the smooth currents of her mind, and I saw my own drawn face even as I took in her freckles, her half-smile, her bright green eyes.
I didn’t suppress her power.
Taylor Hebert unwilling to ever seriously hurt Lisa Wilbourn. Taylor Hebert willing to go to extreme lengths to protect Lisa Wilbourn. Taylor Hebert emotionally fragile but mentally stable; extremely unlikely to cause physical harm to another person except either in protection of close associates or in pursuit of what Taylor Hebert perceives as a greater good. Taylor Hebert loves—
I let go of my control over Lisa.
It was probably just my imagination, but the swirling sparks in her mind almost seemed to curl towards me, reaching out, even as I let them go. I watched their abstract dance through her brain, mesmerized.
Warm arms wrapped around me, tucking me securely back into my own skin as Lisa gently pulled me down to lay beside her.
I expected to feel claustrophobic without my power active. Even worse, being wrapped in arms I couldn't control often reminded me of being trapped, on the rare occasion my dad hugged me unprompted nowadays.
With Lisa, though, it was just a moment of — comfort. Rightness.
Just as I started drifting into my own thoughts again, Lisa's soft grip held me a little tighter to her for a moment, gently pulling me out of my own mind.
I wasn't cold anymore, cuddled close to her like this. With Lisa wrapped around me, presumably using her power to know when to nudge me off a bad path, I was trusting someone else to guide me, just for a little while.
It was comfortable, being wrapped up in her embrace. It wasn't long before I managed to drift off to sleep.