Wordsworth – Chapter 32

I’m too used to walking in beauty like the night.

Unseen, unnoticed, each footstep light as that of a fairy bringing ice to a winter lake’s surface.

Each movement a dance.

Because poetry never hid its roots. Poetry is rhythm and rhyme, the beauty of the spoken language on full display.

Song.

And so, I move with it, with the song wrought by Byron two centuries ago, with the cadence of verses flowing in and out of me, repeating and twirling around one another as I recite for an audience of one, my words this time unheard by anyone other than me as I move across empty streets that Shadowfax’s hooves will not bless with their own staccato rhythm.

Their own poetry.

Because poetry never hid its roots. Never claimed to be anything other than song. But tales did. Tales flourished from spoken verse and took root in books, in pages that no longer needed a cadence, a rhythm, and a rhyme to be easily remembered by traveling storytellers peddling their craft and passing down that which they had received.

Tales birthed prose, and prose retained just enough of poetry and song to keep their spirit alive. To move hearts rather than limbs.

It makes it all the more precious when you can find the poetry hidden in them.

But it is not night. It is not the time when all that’s best of dark and bright meet in Lisa’s eyes.

It’s the middle of the day, even if it shouldn’t be. It’s stark light falling upon carnage and ruin. It’s all the ugliness that night’s shadows would soften and cloud.

It could be argued that it’s not the time for poetry.

It could be stated that it’s the best time for it.

That there’s poetry in war, death, and cruelty. That the Devil itself can be praised in words crafted by the most envied of our poets. That there’s beauty in the flowers of evil.

That stories have always been truthful lies, telling us of things that never were through things that have always been. That tragedy and pain have been there from the very start.

That we could all sink in them.

Or rise above.

And I struggle. As I dance, guided by my words, around a crashed car with dried blood pooled underneath it, I teeter. As I take a side street to circle around the wall of molten flesh pulsing in my way, I almost stumble.

And, as I finally reach the place where Lisa has determined I’ll find the monster responsible for all the evil flowers I’ve left behind?

I dive.

Inside myself, barreling past books beckoning me with open pages, with stories that I devoured and have yet to digest even if all of them would leap eagerly to my hands.

I dance not on empty streets. Not amid ruined buildings or broken men. Not through barriers set in my way.

I dance in the library that my mind became when I drank the bottled fire stolen from a cruel god. I twirl around glimpses of lines that would bring agony and torture.

I glimpse vengeance, the story of a man who would be called Count, who would devote his entire life to bringing about the downfall of traitorous friends.

But I don’t have the time for Dumas.

I touch then upon a portrait laden with the sins of its subject. With youthful beauty turning into horrific ugliness with every sinful deed.

But Bakuda’s vanity has nothing to do with beauty.

I then walk across the haunted halls of Otranto’s castle, the start of it all, the first work of Gothic horror.

But there’s nothing in there that echoes. That rhymes. No poetry to be made in its meeting with Brockton Bay’s own haunting monster.

And then I walk past another aisle, one with an eerie light that calls to me, that guides my steps as surely as the beauty of the night as I step deeper into what my mind has become than I’ve ever done while not being the Lost Girl.

There are newer books in here, the sound of ancient quills and melodic typewriters busy at work, chronicling…

Me.

I take a deep breath, and so does my body. Outside of me, powdered concrete and burning plastic. Inside, fresh ink and ancient paper.

It would be so easy to stay.

But I keep walking instead, deeper still, and I brush the tips of my fingers past the uncracked spines of volumes yet to be read. And, with each brush, something of me flashes through my memory.

Laughter and red hair and sorrow are among the first ones.

Grayness and stale beer follow.

And then…

Then the world flourishes.

There’s color, and change, and motion. There’s adventure, and heroism, and true love, the kind that doesn’t happen every day.

There’s… There’s me.

The Found Girl.

And the Clever Fox.

I find myself smiling despite the stench of a wounded city. I find the start of tears in my eyes that eyeshadow made of inky, skittering words prevent from staining my pages as they run down my face.

I find…

Enough.

Enough to keep going.

Enough to choose.

And so I call beauty like the night once more around me, Byron’s words still as deft as when they were first written, still as striking as they carry me past my last hiding place and toward the den of a villain about to meet the horror I’ve chosen for her.

***

“Tay… Lung’s been contained,” she says in my ear, not telling me of the Red Sister or the one wearing her corpse.

I nod, trusting the camera hidden in my veil to convey the gesture.

“Oni Lee wasn’t there,” she adds.

I wait, looking down from the lighting truss I’m perched on, sneaking behind a spotlight like a ghost in the opera.

“You’re making me nervous. Can’t you please say something? I… I’m pretty sure you can get away with it if you just whisper.”

I roll my eyes.

And try not to smile.

Then I concentrate, and part of my veil shifts, turning into distinct shapes in front of the borrowed camera.

‘Better?’ I ask through words that I don’t send out, that I just hold steady for her to see.

“… Not at all. Fuck, please don’t turn into a creepy mime scrawling cryptic messages across the walls. There’s only so much scarousing I can take.”

‘You’re impossible.’

“Says the reality warper…”

I roll my eyes.

And don’t try not to smile.

“Okay, so, how are you doing this?” she says with a surer, warmer tone that is not her battle voice but is close enough for me to slip once more into the mindset I’m going to need for what’s to come.

I think about the next step, maybe longer than I should, but I don’t find the perfect tale for it. Just… an adequate one.

So I sigh and take out three earbuds. Three of the things that Lisa once thought could be of use to me if I ever needed a discreet audience.

“A poor, hardworking shoemaker had so little leather…” I start to whisper, falling into the cadence of a bedtime story for Lisa to hear as black words skitter along my gloves to take the shape of three elves that have nothing of Tolkien on my hands, each of them swiftly taking the piece of technology I need them to carry.

Because I’m no shoemaker, and I have little use for leather, but I’m in a time of need, and they are meant to be helpful.

I keep talking about poverty turning to riches and riches to gratitude. About a man wiser than the owner of the golden goose who nonetheless lost the magic that gave him his fortune, even if he still managed to keep his wealth.

And so each elf turns toward me and cheerfully waves when I feel gratitude for the task they have carried out for me.

After each of them has delivered an earbud to a member of the bound and gagged family that I once belonged with.

The elves fade out as I keep watching. As I keep looking at Alan, Zoe, and Anne. At the parents and sister of a Red Sister.

But the Red Sister is dead, and so is the Black Sister.

Now… Now there’s Emma and Taylor.

And my breath hitches once more. Another time that I’ve hesitated and flinched since I came in and first saw them, almost losing the beauty of the night when I found them in front of me for the first time in… in long enough that I thought it would be forever.

Another stab through my chest. Another reminder of a time lost. Another tearing at a scab covering a wound that should’ve been healed.

A wound that should have meant nothing more after we became Iridescent and Wordsworth.

But this isn’t about me or about Emma. It is about…

What a hero would do.

And so I speak for an audience of five. For Lisa and each of the hostages.

And for me.

“True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” I say.

And the story surges forth.

Swifter than ever, far faster than the building of the House of Usher was, I call forth the Tell-Tale Heart.

And I ignore Lisa’s indignant gasp at what she no doubt thinks to be a dig at her moniker.

But it isn’t.

It’s… Poe was the master. Of beauty that can be found in horror. Of melancholy flirting with death and murder. Of clever detectives and gruesome crimes.

Just…

A master.

And I already touched his work when I drowned Coil’s evil in the fall of a broken house. But that’s one aspect of horror, just one of the many he explored. That’s the hand of the supernatural reaching from beyond the grave, the vengeance of a ghost that maybe wasn’t. The terror we feel at the unknown.

There’s other horror.

There’s Bakuda looking around her, in the throes of manic energy that demands to be used. There’s Bakuda surrounded by voices telling her how sanethey are. How perfectly natural it is that a heightened state of awareness be called something other than madness.

“The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.”

But the one who speaks is a madman. One convinced of his sanity, his genius, the impunity of his crime.

And so is Bakuda.

“Tay… You are terrifying,” Lisa says with whispered awe.

And I feel something that a hero shouldn’t. Not when trying to take down a terrorist who holds her city hostage:

A hint of a smirk.

But I steady my voice and my words, crafting with them a mirage for Bakuda to lose herself in even as she futilely detonates a bomb that showers her with water that doesn’t wash ink away. As I weave a stage for her to feel the blind eye of an old man upon her. The always present annoyance that grows with each passing day into something unbearable. Maddening.

Something that beckons crime.

Poe doesn’t mention any details. He just tells us of the murderer fixated on a blue, veiled eye and the need to get rid of it. Of obsession that turns to violence.

He tells us of the madman waiting to ambush an old man in the middle of the night, stalking with unnatural patience and stillness until he hears the very heartbeat of his victim to be. Of frantic aggression bringing blissful silence. Of the methodical, butchering hiding of the body.

The Black Cat inherits a bit of it, of the moment when the policemen come. When they interrogate him amicably, and he’s convinced of his superior genius and the impossibility of his crime being exposed.

And then the heart beats again.

“No! No, please!” Bakuda yells, looking frantically around her.

Because Poe didn’t use any names. Nothing specific. An anonymity that could’ve been entirely deliberate, a way to make the crime universal, the madness ever-reaching.

But I’m not Poe.

No, I’m Wordsworth, weaving a tale heard by an audience of five yet meant for a single person. A tale all for Bakuda, to cloud her senses in a way not as kind as when I spoke of two roads meeting in a forest.

Because the eye she feels upon her is not blind, and the old man has a name.

“Please!” she begs, running around her stage, tripping on a piece of equipment none of my words can name, and falling on her face, sobbing hysterically as I keep talking. As I keep telling my former family and my new one of a senseless crime.

Of a young girl stalking the halls of Ornell University.

Of loud bravado covering up the quiet deed. The one that didn’t reach the papers.

The one that Tattletale unearthed for me.

And so there’s a judging gaze upon Bakuda. There’s stern, distant contempt. There are the pervasive words, telling her that she’s not enough, that she never was. That poor Yuki would never be anything other than a disappointment.

And there’s a beating heart, frantically thundering.

But it doesn’t belong to the eye or the voice.

It beats in Yuki’s own chest, connected to the deadman’s switch meant to turn my city and the ones around it into a crazed Pandemonium that Poe would’ve loved to write about.

It’s a heart she can’t run away from.

A tell-tale heart.

“No! I killed you! I killed you! You can’t hurt me anymore!” she yells, pathetically struggling on the floor below.

And this all should be unnecessary. A cruelty I could’ve spared her just by walking with beauty and showering her in confinement foam.

But we never found Oni Lee.

So we wait. We observe as she digs her nails on her face, yelling and crying when blood finally flows in rivulets from torn skin. As Yuki pleads for her dead father to leave her alone like the madman pleaded for the policemen to acknowledge that they heard the beating heart of his victim.

And then, finally, Oni Lee comes in, teleporting right beside his new master, kneeling by her side with a concern that Lisa told me he shouldn’t be able to feel.

Not unless Bakuda gifted the broken man with a bomb all of his own, one that could give him his dead feelings back.

The one thing that would make Oni Lee betray Lung. Give up everything. Absolutely everything just to feel. Just to live once more.

It’s a tragedy.

But, this time, it’s not about heroes.

“Now!” Lisa yells.

And I hit the spotlight I’m hiding behind in the spot Lisa had me prepare beforehand, immediately flooding the stage with light brighter than any of them can tolerate.

Bakuda doesn’t see it, my words still blinding her with the gaze of her dead father, but Oni Lee screams with pain and rage, trying to run away from what he knows to be an ambush set up just for his sake.

He doesn’t run fast enough.

“Keep going,” Lisa says as I pour more and more hardening foam on top of the two villains from a weapon stolen from a fallen PRT officer who tried to keep an apartment building from collapsing on top of the trapped victims.

Because there’s poetry in stories.

And, sometimes, it rhymes.

***

‘I could leave.’ I tell myself from the inside of rustling pages.

‘I won’t,’ I answer from the other side of a bookshelf that reaches higher than I can see.

‘I’m not needed. Not anymore,’ I argue back, a ghost trailing careless fingers along book spines.

‘I don’t know that,’ I gently remind the other me, the childish me, the one that needs to be coddled and cared for.

And then I reach Bakuda’s stage, and I don’t hear my own answer.

“Tay…” Lisa says.

“It’s all right,” I finally answer, not quite lying to her.

Because foxes hate being lied to unless it’s on their own terms.

“She—they are on the way,” she says, slipping in a way that’s entirely unlike her.

Except I know her. I know how her power works.

And I know how hard she’s been pushing herself since the attacks started.

“Take some painkillers. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I tell her.

“I still can—” she starts to say.

And I take my earbud off.

I can feel it vibrating on my palm, and I can only imagine her frustrated ranting as she refuses to accept that I’m not taking her help anymore. Not until she’s rested and her head doesn’t throb with agony that I wouldn’t wish on a Poe character.

It makes me smile. Something warm, soft, and entirely for her sake.

But I’ll keep ignoring her until she takes the hint and goes to bed.

In the meantime…

I walk around the blob of indistinct foam containing Bakuda and Oni Lee, the two villains trapped beyond anything they can do to escape.

Oni Lee’s blinded, his teleportation dealt with for as long as the Protectorate needs to come up with another countermeasure, and Bakuda is completely immobilized, unable to do anything at all as Armsmaster studies her technology and does whatever he needs to do to turn her into the defenseless Yuki forevermore.

Heh. Nevermore.

I resist the whimsical impulse to call up a mocking raven to remind Yuki of all that she’s lost, and I instead keep walking to the people chained to a bomb.

There are… surgical instruments. Ones that wouldn’t be out of place in any story about an asylum from the times of trepanation. Ones that are stained with clear signs of use.

But they, the people, are still intact.

So I keep walking to them. I approach until I see the light of recognition in Alan and Zoe’s eyes.

Until I stand in front of Anne.

Lisa already briefed me on how to free her. On her still not being a part of the bomb like Bakuda threatened Iridescent with. That I can just take her gag off and cut the zip ties around her wrists and ankles.

That all of them can be free by my hand, something to rub in Emma’s face with maybe a spiteful line. That I did it for them. For my city. For anyone other than her.

I won’t.

Because I want nothing of hers.

Not even her defeat.

So I take a deep, unnecessary breath that has me creak like a leatherbound book that hasn’t aged well and smile reassuringly down at the girl who had always been taller than me until suddenly she wasn’t. The beautiful woman who looks just enough like her younger sister that it aches to look at her, to maintain the curve of my faltering, trembling lips.

She has green eyes and red hair like Emma used to have before I set Beowulf free as she screamed in agony.

Because that’s what a hero would do.

So I whisper about a blade that went snicker-snack and cleave through her bindings, the girl staring at me slumping forward in brief weakness and disorientation.

Falling into my arms.

And so I hold her. The girl who looks like Emma, cradled against my chest, looking up at me with desperate gratitude and raw affection as she hurries to take her gag off, the movement of her hands undoing the strap behind her rustling the red hair in falling waves that glint under stage lights that look like a photography studio for amateur models.

“Taylor… thank you so much, Taylor. Thank you, thank you, thank you…” she says, hugging me, embracing me, clinging to me as she pours all the warmth and love I haven’t gotten from her since the last time I saw her.

I freeze.

A hundred books slam closed.

And I walk away, clad in beauty like the night.