Of Sisters and Shadows – Chapter 13 [3.2 Words]

"She’s still a villain,” I tell Amy as we look at the girl sitting under the night sky at the top of Captain’s Hill, surrounded by three dogs frantically lapping at her face in a messy order that still, somehow, ends with an equitable share of slobbered cutis.

“Yeah. So?” My sister says, not quite arguing but inviting me to tell her something other than a fact with no conclusion attached.

We are resting against the trunk of a tall fir growing on the edge of the round, cleared patch of deep grass at the top of this place that used to be known as Hellhound’s territory and that I refuse to fall to the temptation of rebaptizing as Captainess Bitch’s Hill.

Mostly because I don’t want to give Dennis the satisfaction.

“Hey,” she says, bumping her shoulder against mine without looking away from the girl consoling her dogs.

“Shut up. I’m thinking,” I say, my arms still crossed under my bust.

“Press ‘x’ to doubt,” the actual bitch says.

“That’s it; you’re forbidden from ever speaking to Dennis, Chris, or whatever nerd you’re getting your memes from because I know for a fact you’d throw the controller at my head if I tried to get you to play the game this comes from.”

“Wow. Controlling much? What’s next? Am I forbidden from speaking with single girls?”

“Common sense tells me I should forbid you from speaking. Period,” I tell her, finally looking away from the villainess whose fate I should be contemplating and to the girl casually committing crimes against nature and common sense as a way of flirting.

She meets my frown with a bright smile that shows impossibly white teeth, and the only reason why I worry at my lower lip is, as it’s plain to understand, my anxiety over the moral dilemma ahead.

“So, I take it you don’t want to be the one gagged and tied next time around?” she cheekily answers.

… The tips of my ears are burning.

“Just… Please, do not involve anything equine in future attempts,” I weakly, shamefully, bashfully mutter as I tuck my chin and maybe immediately go back to worrying at my lip for non-moral-dilemma-related reasons.

Amy’s eyebrow is steadily climbing.

Which, in this case, is just an unnerving prelude to the grin.

The kind of grin that would herald something that maybe the rules of our boardgames didn’t explicitly forbid, but only because no sane designer would have ever thought about children capable of enacting them. The kind of grin that a freckled girl would wear while adding drops of lemon juice to her water gun ammo because she had thought the blinding effect would give her a tactical advantage. The kind of grin that…

That has been absent for years since I almost bled to death right in front of her, and that I’ve missed bad enough to try and get it back through maybe slightly ill-advised double dates.

“Attempts? Plural?” she finally asks, the raised eyebrow joining its lower sibling in an obscenely suggestive waggle.

“Shut up,” I immediately answer.

“No, no, please, tell me, Vicky, about all those apparently multiple scenarios running through your head after a single instance of cumming your brains out just because I let you—”

“I’m gonna buy a latex suit. I’m going to buy a full coverage latex suit, and you won’t be able to play with my nerve endings at your pleasure because I’ll be wearing that around the house twenty-four seven, and I—”

“Latex is organic.”

“… Shut up.”

The grin drops down a bit into a smile that has also been sadly absent from her repertoire for a while, one that was rare enough when we were kids growing up and is full of warm memories, and…

She bumps my shoulder with hers once again.

“I love you,” she says.

“I love you,” I immediately reply, but maybe meaning something different as I…

I love her.

I love my sister. The girl I’ve grown up with. The first girl I’ve had sex with, no matter how unconventionally. The one I’ll be throwing out of plenty of windows in the future if the trend holds.

I just…

“It’s all right,” she says, cupping my cheek with a single, impossibly soft palm that perfectly contours every single one of the lines of my face under her touch. “You don’t have to figure everything out at once.”

I look into eyes that are still precisely the same as they were when she stared at me while I hung from the branches of her first attempt at topiary, pretending to be helpless as she remodeled my body with streams of minerals flowing from a city-spanning root network and to the thin tendrils stabbed into my body with no more than an exquisite tingle that kept shifting and growing as the act turned into something… else.

The same hazel eyes with a jagged ring of gold that Amy had before she was granted the power to choose what colors to wear, what pattern to engrave in her irises, what… What to show the world other than the Amy I’ve always known.

The eyes I begged my sister to keep.

“Okay, I get it,” I say with a tired smile that is very much warranted after everything that’s happened today.

“You do?” she says with a slightly canine head tilt.

Which makes me uncross my arms just so I can boop her nose.

The indignant ‘eep’ is, after all, as quintessentially Amy as her eyes.

“Yeah,” I say, leaning harder against her, my back sliding along the fir’s striated bark so my head can rest over the taller girl’s shoulder. “You can stop playing wise old mentor now. I get it.”

“… I would like you to verbalize the lesson just to make sure you’re actually getting it,” she says as her cheek presses against the top of my head. Something that I would like to answer with an eye roll, but that, given that we’re currently not staring at one another, will likely require a somewhat more verbal answer.

“I’ll figure things out with Rachel later. She’s… not the same person she was before entering the mists. And what we learned… I can’t judge her. Not now,” I say, looking at somebody who’s finally allowed herself to fall back on the grass so that her dogs can crawl over her to resume their equitable distribution of slobber.

At someone laughing, and crying, and… and going through all the things Amy and I did after we encountered a part of us that we had fought to keep hidden from the world and ourselves.

There’s a silence as we share those memories. The quiet that we went into after a bit of playful, sisterly banter that papered over our fears when we left the mists in which both of us had almost died.

“I have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about,” Amy says after a while.

“… What.”

“Not everything is a multi-layered conversation, for fuck’s sake. I just honestly want you to get comfortable enough with equine shenanigans—”

“Non-equine shenanigans, you goddamn furry.”

“I mean, does it count as furry if it’s a vegetable—”

“It’s a vegetable that brays. That brays with the sound of nightmares.”

“I was going for more of a neigh, actually.”

“You went for ‘Slaughterhouse Nine Audition’ and overshot the mark.”

“I mean, I wasn’t going to pull any half-measures for my first time…”

She lets the words trail out as if waiting for my witty reply.

What she gets is me freezing at the idea of having taken my sister’s virginity, even if my role in the event was mostly being tied up as she played merry havoc with my nervous system. She gets me going utterly still as I finally have the time to process that, yes, I’m now a very literal sister-fucker, and we didn’t even get the chance to cuddlebecause the paranormal event engulfing our city decided that would be a swell time to get us caught in a life or death emergency involving a souped-up Hookwolf evil clone (however that can work) and a more vanilla Shadow fight involving a villainess who has turned out to be a traumatized girl fleeing from abusive homes with only dubiously acquired emotional support animals to give her an inkling of companionship, seeing as she was too scared to allow any human yet another chance to hurt her.

So, in the end? What Amy gets?

It’s me timidly reaching across her lap to grasp her hand tightly, holding her as intimately as I can while giving her permission to read my body. To feel my hammering heart and rushing breath.

To understand better than I do what it is that I feel when leaning against the girl who once was my sister, and still is, but is also…

Amy.

We remain there, under the dark canopy of the fir’s thick boughs, watching a girl feeling emotions that are not muted by scarring trauma for the first time in years as her dogs finally calm down and pile up on top of her, the Pitbull and Doberman lying across her chest with the smaller mutt stretched atop both of them.

On top of a grassy hill, in the middle of a night lighter than the one that the mists just crafted for the three of us.

Away from the forest where the wolf learned to fear the girl.

***

“You did what?” Armsmaster’s surprisingly not unflappable voice tells me over the phone.

“… Rescued a parahuman and helped them overcome their trial by Shadow? You know, the job I’m paid to do?”

“You mean granting a second trigger to a known villain with a body count and letting her go without even checking what her new power does?” he unwarrantedly snipes.

“Ah,” I cleverly answer as Amy slaps a hand over her mouth right before her shoulders start shaking.

“For… at least tell me that you have a way of contacting her,” he says in a tone that very much implies a very Mom-like pinching of the bridge of his nose—by which I mean that it is a gesture that I’ve seen Mom do often enough (particularly when she came home to find the results of my power practice), not that Mom is likely to go up to a tall, well-muscled superhero with a disturbingly neat beard and pinch the bridge of his nose.

That would be silly.

Like nothing else at all in the current circumstances.

“She has our number?” I helpfully point out as Amy’s shoulders move hard enough to make our sofa shake.

“And you don’t have hers because?” he immediately shoots back.

“Because she was caught in a fight against Hookwolf’s evil twin—yeah, I don’t get how that works either—before getting in a blood balloon fight with her own shadow, so the phone kinda became a casualty of war?”

“… Goddamn teenagers.”

“This is why they don’t let you lead the Wards. You realize that, don’t you?”

“I can swear at you. You are an external contractor and can’t file complaints to HR.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not how that works—”

“Let me rephrase that: you can’t file complaints to HR.”

“You didn’t rephrase anything; you just added emphasis to a single word in the previous statement—”

“Goddamn teenagers.”

“Well, now you’ve added emphasis to two words. I hope you’re proud of yourself,” I say, perfectly polite and composed.

And then I stomp on Amy’s foot before her ramped-up shaking tears apart the horrid apple-green sofa that I momentarily forget I’m actively aiming for the destruction of.

… I may even tolerate it turning into a horse, so long as the shade doesn’t make my retinas hurt.

Apparently, though, Amy takes my gentle commination to silence and discretion as a declaration of war, which makes her use her arachnid wings to launch herself at me in an attempt at a tickling bout that my fanned-out shield turns into her flattened face comically sliding down a smooth pane of force, and—

“At least tell me you’ve tested your new power,” Colin says.

“… My what now?” I cleverly answer.

***

Hellhound – Bitch – Rachel Lindt

My shelter is fine.

I… I was afraid. I kept getting more afraid as I neared it. I had talked to John and kept checking on him and the dogs during my absence, but…

I knew the mists only attacked parahumans, but, still…

My dogs are fine.

I keep walking from one enclosure to the next, greeting them with gestures, whistles, and sounds that are not words because I’m still too sore for words.

Brutus is the only one walking by my side. Judas and Angelica are sleeping in the small shack I set up for anybody who needed to stay overnight. The shack that Lisa helped me…

I try to smile for an enthusiastic giant poodle with an ear missing that is shoving his head over the fence to greet me after… after my time away.

The time since Lisa begged me to run and not come back.

And the time it took for me to disobey her.

“Hi, Tap,” I tell the affectionate, white, fluffy male.

And I remember a story. One that Lisa told me.

It’s about dogs. About a poodle.

There was a writer called Victor Hugo. A French guy. He had to move from France to go live in Russia, and… And he was not a good owner. Not a bad one, but neither a good one.

He decided that he couldn’t take his dog with him on that harsh journey and left him with a friend of his. Then, a few days later, he was in Moscow and got a letter from his friend.

The dog had escaped.

He was sad at the news, but there was nothing he could do—and Lisa, at this point, smirked and added, ‘Was there?’

No. No, he couldn’t.

He had left the dog behind, and the dog had escaped. Dogs sometimes do. It’s… It’s why good owners take care to chip them, keep an eye on them, train them not to rush away…

He wasn’t a good owner.

But he had a good dog.

Because months later, there was scratching at the door of his apartment in Moscow, and when he opened it, he found a dog that no longer looked white and fluffy, his paws stained with blood, his coat tangled with twigs and mud, thin and hungry after having crossed all of Europe to look for an owner who didn’t deserve it.

That’s what dogs do. What good dogs do.

Even for bad owners.

I ruffle Tap’s head, my fingers going through white fur that wasn’t this soft when I rescued him, and lean forward to kiss the top of his head, the poodle backing away in mild confusion because that’s not a dog thing, but a human thing, and I…

I’m human.

At last.

I smile at Tap and bid him goodbye, my round complete, all my dogs safe and healthy despite me being absent like a bad owner, and I walk with Brutus by my side toward the grassy plain that they all run through when It’s playtime and there’s enough staff to supervise them.

Then, I let my power flow out of me.

I first touch Brutus, his body shifting, but no longer like before. He isn’t pained or scared. I’m not twisting him, hurting him.

I am…

I look up at him as he grows taller than he’s ever been, his fur turning into a thick, full, orange and black coat with a thick mane around his neck that makes him look more like a wolf than he ever has and that I just know I can grab with both hands without hurting him if I ever have to ride him.

But I don’t think I’ll have to.

Because my power keeps pouring out of me, flowing in a way it never has before, smooth instead of jerking in uneven bursts.

I touch my dogs. All my dogs.

But I don’t change them.

They change me.

I… I feel the power reaching inside of them, to the part of them that loves me, a part that is absent in my most recent rescues, and I feel that part like… like ink on water, traveling back to me through the streams of power.

Then I reach up on my tip toes to pet Brutus’s neck, my fingers combing his new mane, marveling at how smooth it is before he turns around and licks me with a happy grin that he would’ve never worn in his other form, the one with split skin and bone spikes.

I let him tell me that he loves me. I let myself believe it.

And then my power surges, and I dive into his body.

The world becomes sharper, even as it loses some colors, and the scents all around me sing of the stories of dogs who were taken away from bad owners.

Of dogs luckier than I was.

Our paws pad softly through the grass, silent as the night around us, our body moving in a way my human one never could, more agile. Stronger.

Faster.

We launch forward, and my connection to my dogs doesn’t strain with distance. I keep feeling their presence and their love for me, pouring into the chest I share with Brutus, strengthening our heart, making the white clouds of breath come out smoothly even as we eat the distance and take a leap over the confine’s fence that makes us soar under the moon and stars.

We touch the pavement, rough under our paws, and keep running. Keep taking swift, silent turns. Keep racing through the night.

The city falls behind us, and we reach Captain’s Hill, our body snaking between trees old and young, the scents from earlier still drifting through the cool air, low branches making us duck down, quickly crawling and scampering not to break any of the forest that is ours.

Then… Then we get to the top of the hill.

We sit.

Look up.

And our maw opens as a howl crawls up our throat, pushing past our fangs and lips to fill Brockton’s night with a single, sustained note that tells the world nothing it can understand, even as my dogs join us in their shelter.

We let the howl endure, our lungs emptying until the stars above seem to twinkle more harshly than before.

And then we look down at the first city I have stayed in since I first ran.

Take another sniff of night air.

And, like a good dog, I run toward the mists.

To the girl who told me to run.