An Unwanted Legacy

This is a short story I wrote on Twitch yesterday! IT was a ton of fun to work through. I think I ended up deviating from the prompt just a bit, but I really enjoyed writing this fast little story!

https://writing-prompt-s.tumblr.com/post/634687730044010496/many-think-that-your-power-is-the-strongest-in-all#notes

Many think that your power is the strongest in all the lands. “An ever changing and growing power” they say. Your power is called “legacy” and it’s effects are based on what your opponent thinks it does.

————-—

If you’d known what they would do with the word tattooed across your arm, you would have run away a long time ago.

You smile at the Leader of yet another superhero team, hands fisted under your backpack where he can’t see. He hasn’t decided on what your power is yet and you can’t help but brace for it. “As I said. I’m still in school. I don’t want to make any decisions yet.”

“Smart,” he compliments. He’s complimented you a lot since you sat down on the couch across from him. Every time he does, the Dean, the one who facilitated this meeting, grows smugger as he silently looks on. The Leader crosses and uncrosses his legs, spandex creaking with the motion. Finally, he stops beating around the bush. “We’re prepared to sign a non-exclusive contract with you today, Ms. Hassel. It’s not an offer you’ll receive after graduation.”

You keep smiling. Ever since your power’s name leaked, you’ve had to deal with guys like these. Everyone thinks that they have something new to offer, something that will entice you into signing your whole life away. You’re fairly certain that none of them actually know what your power, “Legacy,” entails, but that doesn’t matter.

Leaders are always looking for new powers. New powers get a lot of attention and a lot of attention leads to a lot of funding.

“I can vouch for Mr. Silva’s offer,” the Dean says when it’s clear you don’t plan on saying anything more. His own power, a small sway over wind, causes his silvery hair to drift as if caught in a current. “His team’s very well established. Plenty of funding and opportunities for continued education. I would not have asked you to meet him if that were not the case.”

You eye the Dean out of your peripherals. He’s not supposed to have let this Leader meet you at all. Part of the reason you agreed to let your parents send you here is for anonymity, or at least an attempt at it.

This breach in trust firms your resolve.

“Thank you for thinking of me,” you tell the Leader. It won’t do you any good to lose your cool here. You let your smile soften so he thinks you really do appreciate it. “I’m really focused on school right now. Do you have a card or something? Maybe I can call you with any questions I have about your team.”

“Of course.” You don’t know where he gets the card from, his suit being rather tight, but he has it in hand between one blink and the next. He smiles winningly at you. “I’d be happy to answer any questions you have. Even if it’s just about homework.”

The three of you laugh. It’s ridiculous to think of this Leader as mere homework help—even you’ve heard of him. He runs one of the largest hero groups in the country and the fact that he’s come to recruit you personally isn’t funny at all.

“I’ll keep you in mind during finals,” you say lightly. You stand. “My next class is about to start. Please, excuse me.”

“She’s a very dedicated student,” the Dean tells Mr. Silva.

“Dedicated is good,” Mr. Silva says. “Before you go, Ms. Hassel.”

You pause, one hand on the door. Nearly there. You turn to look over your shoulder, but don’t let go of the doorknob. “Yes?”

“Forgive me,” Mr. Silva says, “I know it’s rude to ask. I know your power is significant, but there’s no clear explanation for what it does.” He smiles ruefully. “I have ideas, of course.”

Your smile doesn’t falter. He has ideas, yes. You can feel his ideas churning your power under your skin. Pyromancer. Telekinetic. Linguistic. He’s researched you if he knows your parents’ and grandparents’  powers. “I’m sure one of those ideas is right.” You nod to them both. “Have a nice day.”

You hurry out into the hall before he can ask you another question. You grit your teeth as you power surges and twists, clawing and snarling as Mr. Silva’s “ideas” haunt you.

Luckily, you are out of sight when he finally decides.

You throw yourself into an empty classroom as pyromancer sears into your bones. You can feel the flames licking up your throat, begging to be spit out, and it’s only because you’ve had pyromancer before that you’re able to swallow it back down.

Legacy, legacy, legacy you chant and think of the time your mother looked at you and saw Linguist. Your power resets begrudgingly, the flames diminishing until all you can smell is smoke.

Linguist is your mother’s power. The ability to make people understand you, no matter the situation, isn’t considered superhero material for all that it’s a big power. All of the words in your head melt together so that you have a hard time picking them apart. It’ll be hard to speak clearly without using her power to just make people understand you.

That’s better than setting the school on fire, at least. Sighing, you pick up your bag and head to class. Hopefully the smell of smoke isn’t too noticeable.

-------.

The first time you realize that Legacy doesn’t mean you’ve inherited your mother’s gentle way with words or your father’s control over fire, you’re ten.

You’re ten and there’s a new girl at school who doesn’t ask to see the word scrawled across your arm or seem to think it’s weird that your father’s on the news more often than not.  She’s dark-haired and dark-eyed and she loves the same books as you, wants to play the same games as you, looks for you every recess.

“We’re like the same person,” she tells you on the fourth day of being friends. She giggles, rolling in the shade of the big tree the two of you claimed for recess. The other kids know better than to go against her by now.

“Yeah,” you say. You don’t really agree. The other kids stay away from you because your dad is a Superhero and their parents told them being your friend was dangerous. The other kids stay away from her because she kicked a sixth grader so hard he had to go to the nurse’s during kickball. “Like twins.”

“Yeah!” She rolls back over to you and comes up on her knees. She looks around furtively and then shuffles closer. “We’re not supposed to show each other our powers, right?”

Unconsciously, you press one hand over your word. The wrap the school makes every student wear is coarse under your fingers. “We can’t.”

She nods quickly. “We can’t show each other, but we can tell each other!” She grins at you as if she’s discovered the biggest loophole of them all. “We’re so similar, I bet we have the same one!”

“No, I don’t—” you start to say and then stop. You look down at your stomach with a frown. There’s something twisting in there, like a snake. You’re not afraid, but that’s a mistake. “I don’t feel so good.”

“When we’re bigger we can join a team together,” she says without noticing you’ve spoken. She props her tiny fists on her hips. “The Twister Twins!” Air puffs through her hair, throwing it back over her shoulders as if she’s flying.

Control over the wind is a common power. You stand on shaky legs. You can’t tell her your power and, more importantly, you think you need help. “I think I’m going to be sick—”

And then you are. Your diaphragm seizes and you gag, but you don’t throw up lunch. Instead, air shoots out of your mouth like a cannon, hitting your friend so hard in the chest that she goes flying backwards. She hits the trunk of the tree with a sick thump! And then goes still.

You stand there, hands pressed to your stomach, and stare. The twisting feeling is settling and a new word is filling your mouth.

Wind.

You run for a teacher.

-------------------.

There are hurts in your past. Legacy is not a kind power to have—it twists and claws and burns and gouges. The first few years after you hurt your friend, you have to be homeschooled. You can’t stand to have the teacher’s expectations of you churn your power into a frenzy or the student body’s fanciful fears spear through your heart.

Your dad takes time off work to “help.” His version of “help” hurts too—he pokes and prods and tests until you feel hunted in your own home.

“What do you think your power does?” he asks over dinner. As always when something catches his interest, flames light in his eyes.  “Mimic? Adapt?”

You stare down at your untouched plate. Mom is a statue next to you. She hasn’t looked at you in weeks, afraid what her thoughts would do to you. “I dunno.”

“You have to have some idea,” Dad pushes. When you don’t answer, he sighs. “You’ve got an hour to think about it. My team’s Leader is coming over tonight and I want you to give her an answer.”

At that, both you and Mom look up at him and then at each other.

“Ms. Rast?” you ask.

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Mom asks. Her knuckles go white around her fork. “If—if her power’s mimicry, it might not be good for her to—”

“It’ll be fine,” Dad says. He takes an angry bite of mashed potatoes. “I know what I’m doing. Don’t you think I know what I’m doing?” He gets angrier when neither you or Mom say anything. “It’s a new power. It’s our duty to investigate it. Document it.”

“It’s our duty to protect our daughter,” Mom says quietly.

“I am,” Dad says and then nobody says anything for a long, long time.

When Ms. Rast arrives, it’s a relief for about five minutes. Dad’s nice with his Leader around and Mom quietly excuses herself to the kitchen to start on the dishes. When Dad joins her at Ms. Rast’s prompting, the Leader turns to you.

“So,” she says, pushing her long, red hair out of her face. “What do you think your power does?”

There’s something about her that puts you at ease. Whether it’s the kind look in her eyes or the way she makes your parents nicer, you don’t know. You think it’s safe to tell her what you think Legacy really is.

You look for Dad and, when you don’t see him in the doorway, you lean forward to whisper into Ms. Rast’s ear. “I think it’s what people think it is.”

Ms. Rast’s eyebrows fly up to her hairline. “Is it?”

You only have time to nod once before pain like you’ve never known sears into your bones.

Strength, your power whispers and your muscles tear and heal, tear and heal, tear and heal until they’re as strong as Ms. Rast thinks they should be.

It takes a long, long time.

----------.

When you’re finally yourself again, weeks and weeks later, you find your mother crying over you. There are a hundred ice packs littered on the bed around you and the smell of pain hangs heavy in the air.

“I’m sorry,” your mother sobs, “I’m sorry.”

You let her hug you even though it hurts all of the wounds Ms. Rast’s power left you with because you both need it. You pat your mother mechanically on the back and then nearly leap away when the gesture knocks all the breath from her body.

“It’s okay,” she wheezes when you jump back from her. “You didn’t mean it.”

The thing is that you did it though. Just like when you knocked your friend back into that tree.

I, you think, staring at your own hands in horror, don’t ever want to be powerful again.

-----------------------.

The school’s a fortress. You lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the noises in the hall to die down. You’re not one of those kids sent here for protection, but that doesn’t matter. If one student’s on lockdown, you all are.

You’ve been preparing for tonight for a long time.

You slide out of your dorm in the middle of the night. Your backpack is filled with a day or two of provisions, a change of clothes, your powered off cellphone, and a map. The forest around the school is thick, but shouldn’t take more than two days to get through. From there you plan to follow the main road into town and call your mom.

With any luck, Mom won’t be with Dad tonight. He’s the one who stuck you all the way out here in the first place.

You think about your first teacher at the school, the one who assumed your frequent disappearing acts were due to the power of invisibility.  She’d been wrong, obviously, but you’re grateful to her.

Invisibility makes you feel like you have to sneeze, but it’s by far one of the most practical powers you’ve acquired.

It allows you to slide past the Dean as he runs his route through the school. His wind brushes by you and so do his eyes.

Thank you, Ms. Instructor, you think and slip out the front door.

Immediately, alarms go off. Despite searching for months, you never found a way to shut them off. Red lights flash and a siren starts up in the depths of the school. You can hear the Dean’s wind rushing towards you, searching for who’s set them off, and you slam the door behind you.

You’ve got super speed from a coworker of your dad’s, but you can’t use two powers at the same time. Invisibility is still more valuable. Unfortunately that means your lungs burn as you sprint for the gates of the school, sneakers slipping and sliding over the midnight dew on the grass.

Behind you, the school wakes. You can hear the Dean shouting and pounding feet in between the wails of the sirens. You grin when you reach the front gate.

You’re almost there—

You run into somebody just outside the gate, missing their black clothes in the dark. You fall backwards and lose your grip on your invisibility in the same breath.

“Bad time to run away, kid.”

You look up to see that the person you ran into is huge. Six feet and built like a wrestler. With the moon behind him, he looks like a villain.

Worse, the small troop of similarly attired people behind him also look like villains.

The man steps towards you. “Real bad time.”

You want to run, want to fight, but can’t. They saw you turn visible, they saw you, and your power purrs as it latches onto invisible so hard that you can’t shake it off right away.

“Meep,” you say and don’t try to fight as the man yanks you up and shoves you back towards the school.

--------------.

They have power suppressors.

You sit quietly, normal ropes tied around your wrists, and watch as they slap the last pair on the Dean. You’ve only seen power suppressors, cuffs capable of cutting off access to superpowers, twice before. Once was when your dad was showing off his new uniform.

The other was when your dad tried them out on you.

The Leader—because though he’s a villain, he is a Leader—is standing at the front of the entry hall, blocking the exit. He’s got the school’s attendance sheet in his hand. Every once in a while, he barks out a name and a power. Another villain checks the picture next to the name and then retrieves the kid from the masses, dividing the room into three groups.

Teachers, kids with useful powers, and kids without useful powers.

You’re currently in the section of kids without useful powers. That’s why you’ve got ropes instead of one of the few sets of power suppressors. It gives you a little time to think, to see if any of the teachers are going to do anything more than glare at the villains who have so easily taken over the school.

“You will not get away with this,” the Dean says in a warbling voice. When a villain sneers at him, he stumbles back so fast that he trips, sprawling on the floor.

Yeah, you think, stomach sinking, he’s not going to be much help.

It’s not a hard decision to make. You’ve never wanted power, never wanted to hurt anybody, but you’ve also never wanted to stand by as people get hurt.

“Legacy?” the Leader asks. He looks up from his clipboard and directly at you. His lips turn down in a frown.  “You’re in the invisible girl—”

You remember long red hair and kind eyes and the ropes snap the moment you think about snapping them. Your muscles scream with pain, but you’ve practiced this before. It’s going to suck later, but you can push it aside for this.

Strength, your power whispers to you.

When the first villain runs at you, form blurring with speed, you let Ms. Rast’s instincts take over. You grab his outstretched arm and wrench. The villain screams as he’s flung towards the wall, the echo of his bone snapping loud in the air, and then falls silent as he hits.

You swallow bile and turn on the next villain that rushes forward.

The problem with powers is that they’re brutal. You’re beginning to think that you’re the only person who understands that. There is no non-violent power. Even your mother’s Linguistic can be used to trick, to persuade, to lie.

Your childhood friend’s wind throws a henchman into the air.

The super speed your dad’s experiments gave you lets you pulverize a villain’s diaphragm until they can’t even gasp for breath.

The pyromancy that Mr. Silva gave you just yesterday lights two villains on fire.

The strength of Ms. Rast cracks open another’s head.

All of these powers aren’t yours, but you use them because it’s what people think you can do. You’re aware of the horrified stares, the screams, the scrambling of your classmates, but you can’t look at them and their ideas right now.

You stare at the Leader, the unconscious bodies of his teammates scattered around you, and think Legacy.

“What are you?” the Leader asks through gritted teeth.

“What do you think?” you ask and answer in the same breath.

He lunges at you, leaping over the fallen and living alike with hands outstretched like claws. There are claws at the end of his fingertips, you see, and a distinctly feline slant to his pupils.

You hold out one palm and let him run into it. The impact doesn’t move you an inch.

He’s knocked out instantly.

It’s over just like that. Your awareness of the other students and teachers filters back in slowly. You’re tired, your muscles aching, and you can’t bring yourself to dissect the look on their faces. Shock? Horror? Gratitude? Fear?

You find the Dean over them all. He’s looking at you with a carefully blank face. You smile and say, “I think I’m going to pass out now.”

“Do you think you could get this off me first?” the Dean asks, tugging at the suppression band.

You consider. “No.”

The world fades away.

----------------.

Your escape plan is effectively ruined, of course. There are a lot of questions for you after you wake up. Law enforcement and school authorities who want a play-by-play. Mr. Silva swings by again with his team to try and “ease the minds” of the students who were almost kidnapped.

You ignore their thinly veiled attempts to recruit you with an ease born of long practice. You use every excuse in the book to delay meetings and conferences and briefings. You’re tired, your body hurts, you don’t remember every detail right away. The truth is that you’re panicking.

You don’t think you can stay under the radar now, not when they’ve got so many witnesses to you using your power.

Everything comes to a head when your mom arrives. She’s better than any guard dog in the way she chases everyone away from your bedside. She tells you that your dad wanted to come, but couldn’t because of work.

She doesn’t comment on the way you’re quietly relieved. By the way she pets the back of your hand, she is too.

“You know,” she says, “I’ve been thinking about going on vacation.”

I know you don’t want to stay here.

You look up from the textbook you’re pretending to study. Your mom’s voice is warm and deep, the way it is when she’s using her power. You close your textbook slowly.  Your heart beats faster. “Yeah?”

She doesn’t look up from her phone. “I was thinking it’s been a while since it’s been just the two of us.”

You understand words that she doesn’t say. I can take us away from here.

“We could go for just a week.”

We can go for as long as you need.

“I already got permission from your school. They say it’s fine so long as you’re back from spring quarter.”

You’re never coming back to this place again.

You clear your throat to stop yourself from agreeing immediately. If your mother’s using her power, she thinks it’s not safe to speak freely. “Will Dad join us eventually?”

“If work allows.”

Not until he learns how to be a part of this family.

You can’t help yourself. Even though your muscles scream at you, you throw your arms around your mom, careful not to squeeze too hard. You press your face into her shoulder. “Thank you.”

She doesn’t say anything, just hugs you back as hard as she can. She tells you everything you need to know in that hug—that you’re not alone, that she sees how hard it’s been, that she’s proud of you, that she’ll take care of the rest.

For the first time in a long time, you mean it when you smile.