Wordsworth – Chapter 21 – Colors 7

Amy healed me.

She… I was expecting her to bitch at me, to be her snarky, grumpy self as she held my hand and funneled the indistinct biomass into my body to replenish everything of mine that was spent in restoring Tattletale’s body.

She didn’t.

She grasped my wrist, delicately, as if afraid I would break or her fingers would, and kept staring anywhere but my eyes as I felt my muscles return to me, my thighs toning, my chest lifting my paper gown and the thin sheets above.

I felt the awareness of absent parts of me return, the strength I’d lost rush back with every steady beat of a heart that became louder by the minute.

And then…

Then my eyes sharpened. My hearing, as well. Something shifted in my knees, along my spine, my wrists… All minute differences, but all keenly noticeable to the me at that moment as Amy went beyond healing, beyond restoring what she herself had taken away when I’d begged her to.

And she reforged me.

I… I remained there, half-sitting, leaning on two pillows, and I kept looking at my body beneath muddled, shifting colors as, for the first time in years, maybe since the last time I listened to a thin, tall girl speak about the latest book she had discovered, I felt wonder bloom in my breast.

The vein of Gold was still hidden in my forearm, the hope too valuable to ever let go of, but then there were boughs of silver spreading over me, their glow gentler, like moonlight falling on a shadowed glade, and…

Amy looked at me. Brown eyes that are often painfully plain even as she looks at everybody else with the disdain and bitterness few will ever understand contemplated my face, my own eyes, and opened in more ways than they ever had before.

“Why?” she whispered.

“Amy…?” I asked.

“She… She is a villain. And you risked yourself. You fought Lung. You… Emma, you… why?”

There was pain in her voice.

And so, still feeling Silver pour coolly, soothingly over me, I twisted my arm, her grip on my wrist lax enough to let me do so, and I grasped her hand.

“There… There once was a girl with too many friends, and a girl with not enough. They were sisters in all but blood, until the first one was… lost. I… The girl with too many friends couldn’t stand herself, what she saw in the mirror, and she hurt those around her, but none more than the sister who reminded her of what she had once been. She couldn’t… It didn’t make sense. It was madness, folly, and… And it shouldn’t have been allowed. The girl should’ve been punished, made to apologize, to make amends.

“But nobody did, and so she continued.

“She… She became hateful, looking for a meaning in what had happened to her, a way for the world to make sense when it didn’t have to.

“And she kept hurting her. Her sister. The girl she loved.”

Amy’s fingers clenched around mine, almost painfully, and her breath shook.

“Wordsworth…?” she finally managed to ask with a rough voice I could feel encroaching on me.

I nodded.

“The girl… A lot of things happened. She found one of the answers she had been looking for, except it turned out to be unlike anything she had thought she would find. And, in doing so, she hurt her sister yet another time. More than she ever had. She did… something unforgivable.

“But that’s no excuse, is it? Because… Because the girl knew. She knew she was scum, that she would never be anyone worthy of anything she had ever wanted. She knew there was no going back.

“But that… That doesn’t mean she could go lower.”

Amy wrapped both hands around mine, bringing it to her forehead as if in prayer.

“Emma… you… What did the girl decide?”

I closed my eyes and took the deep breath Amy could feel rushing through my chest.

The silver was steadily beating, and I saw what it was doing. How it was connecting me to her, the Wonder I still felt at Amy being so unlike herself, so giving when she didn’t have to be, with someone she shouldn’t be.

I could feel my Wonder bridge the distance between her and me, letting me… Letting me see, if not understand, letting my words be shaped by something that…

I felt Wonder at Amy. And my power wanted to give something back.

I think.

“She was terrible. Awful. A wretch. An ugly thing that should never have been born.

“Yet… Acting like it? Sinking in that? It would just make it… worse.

“And so the girl remembered. Remembered a dream somebody else once had. A worthy dream. A beautiful tale.

“She would never reach it. It wasn’t her dream.

“But… But she could follow it.”

And Amy Dallon, surly, full of spite, always keen on badmouthing each and every one of our common acquaintances… cried.

She sobbed, shaking, her forehead trembling against my clenched fingers over her own.

Tears dripped as I allowed myself to open my eyes and look at her.

And, with my newfound strength, I bent forward to hold her, to wrap my single free arm around her shoulders as I let her soak my green, paper gown.

“We… We cannot stop being who we are. What we did,” I told her, not knowing what it was that she felt so wretched for, but knowing that she did. “But we can choose. We can choose what we do, what we want. Not what we will be, not what we will become… but that we won’t sink any lower. That we will refuse that call, that soothing, seductive whisper. That we will never give in.

“That we will live.”

Amy threw herself on top of me, her arm shaking around me, her tears flowing freely, her sobs wracking the both of us.

And, for a single moment, I almost believed my own words.

“Ready in five,” the PRT adjutant says, her head peeking through the grey, thick curtain separating me from the podium.

“I could—” Dean starts to say.

And I glare at him.

He smiles sheepishly at me, at the bands of colors boiling over me, with red constantly trying to overwhelm all the others.

Green is also there, no matter how hard I try to tamp it down.

“Just offering,” he says with half a shrug.

“I’m far from appreciative of your generosity when it comes to Mastering me, Stansfield.”

“I don’t see why. Amy seems to be doing better after you—”

And Red surges.

I’m holding him up by his armpits, refraining from slamming him against the wooden wall behind him just because I don’t want to deal with the scandal of my breaking it during Piggot’s speech that my pounding blood doesn’t let me hear.

His armor would be fine.

Maybe he also would. But I doubt it.

“I didn’t Master Amy,” I tell him, the metal under my hands heating up with every second my arms strain to hold him aloft.

“Then what did you do?” he asks, a bitterness in his tone that he never shows.

“I talked to her—”

“And suddenly, she’s acting completely unlike herself—”

“Yes. Because I said something she was both ready and willing to listen to. Because that’s how people work, and you shouldn’t need a Thinker power to know that—”

“I don’t need one to see you, Emma. You’re out of control, and you could do irreparable harm if you don’t—”

“I could? I could?!You—you fucking moron, you don’t know what I have already—”

“Ready in—” the woman from before says before freezing in place.

I slowly turn to look at her while I lower Dean until his metallic boots set on the carpeted floor.

“Is that my speech?” I say, pointing at the clipboard in her hands.

It isn’t. Of course it isn’t.

My speech is on a chair near the curtain, and I’ve been forced to memorize the damn thing beforehand. But it’s a good question to get her to look down while I force the Red beneath…

Beneath what?

I don’t have Amber, the joy and exultation of living in the moment.

I don’t have Blue, the solid, unmovable sadness of knowing I can no longer advance.

I don’t have Indigo, the urge to protect that grants me insight—no. No, I do.

A push of my mind so that the emotions slot in the right place, the right order, and Indigo comes forth. Because I do want to protect. I need to protect.

Not… Taylor. Not this time.

Anne.

Anne, my whole family, but mostly Anne, is in danger after I put Lung behind bars. They are now targets, ways to get at me, so this press conference may be instrumental in reducing said danger. In letting her live her life, free of being my sister and all that heaps down upon her.

So I let Indigo flow over me, my mind both sharpening and expanding with every thrum of defiant emotion, with every step I take inside of me to bathe in the urge, the craving, the need.

I feel… everything.

Every minute shift in the air around me, the ways in which it swirls when it meets the heat still surrounding me from my Red bursting forth, the curlicues of shimmering currents that are suddenly clear for me to see in the almost imperceptible diffraction of the light going through them. The way my weight is irregularly spread across a grey carpet that is lumpier than I first thought, the individual strands of the woman’s brunette hair, the dilation of her pupils as her eyes involuntarily drift to me when my aura changes suddenly and dramatically.

The smell. The smell of cleaning products, and air freshener, and fifty people, each one with their particular cologne.

I cling to Indigo, and so, I am not overwhelmed.

“Never mind,” I tell her with a calm I can now fake, with a precision of syllabic enunciation that is indefinably harsh. “I just remembered where I put it.”

Then, perfectly aware of the way my weight shifts with every motion, I walk toward the chair I left my speech in and grab it before I turn to look straight at her and not at Dean.

“I do believe five minutes have passed,” I say.

And, through the open curtain, Piggot’s voice comes in.

“So I leave you with Iridescent, the hero of the hour,” she says, her tone more constrained than the wording would suggest.

Then I walk around the woman whose face I’ve just memorized down to the distribution of the pores beneath her incipient eye bags, but whose name I’ve never been made aware of.

Piggot steps aside, throwing me what the cameras will show as a respectful, soldierly nod as I approach the lectern.

I smile in a calculated, not entirely cold way and set my speech in front of me, beneath the microphone.

Then I take a deep breath.

I know what I have to say.

I’ve memorized it, repeated it, parroted it.

I can make the delivery perfect, even without Indigo enhancing my awareness to superhuman levels, as long as I do this for Anne.

Not Taylor. This wouldn’t do anything to protect her, and thus Indigo won’t react to her.

So. Anne.

I… I love Anne. Even more since she said how much she resents me, how much she despises what she thinks I’ve done. Since I learned how much she would hate me if she knew me.

I’ve never loved her more.

So, I have to do this and do it well.

Thus, with the carefully rehearsed movements I learned through a career as an amateur model, guided by a power that feeds on my ever-shifting emotions, striving toward a simple, single goal, I lift my head to look at the gathered reporters with a smile that is a bit more open than my earlier one, but also a tad overwhelmed. Somewhat humble. Just enough to be relatable without being subservient.

Then I open my mouth to say the words in front of me, the ones I don’t really need to read…

And I see a hat.

I stop.

My eyes, eyes enhanced by Indigo, eyes that should be able to discern the most minute of details, that should be able to pick up any face in any crowd in the world…

Fail to catch her.

But it’s her hat. Hers. She is here, or was, and she’s looking at me, looking to see what I’ll do, and there’s Yellow boiling over my hands, and I’ve never used Yellow before, even if fear should be the one thing Emma Barnes has in abundance, but I always covered it with Red, reflexively going to Anger so I wouldn’t feel anything else, so I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by anxiety attacks, and the dread of picking up the phone, and…

And Red burns.

The dark wood blackens beneath my fingers, the papers shifting between my hands despite me not touching them as I let Red take over so I won’t break down like I’m supposed to, so I won’t tremble, and…

And…

I let Red simmer down before the lectern bursts into flames.

I look at the pretty words. The ones meant to assure the public that I’m a hero, and that heroes triumph, and that the ABB won’t dare retaliate. At the prepared answer for when they ask me about my family, and I tell them that they are safe, that I trust the PRT to keep them so.

At the speech about me defeating Lung because of a sense of duty, because I was answering a noble call that didn’t have anything to do with white skin and midnight black hair.

Green bursts out.

Piggot had taken a step toward me, but her face twists in pain before she quickly backs away, not quite knowing what to say or do as I let the silence stretch before I look up at the cameras pointed at me, at the reporters finally showing a smidge of interest at what should have been a straightforward statement.

Green beats around and through me. Self-hatred. Shame.

But… Taylor.

Taylor’s unconscious body, how they showed it to me when I woke up. How they told me what she had gained.

What she had lost.

What they had taken away.

And what they would do to me and mine if I ever stepped out of line.

So there’s Green. And there’s Red.

But… there’s Taylor.

And so, there’s Indigo.

“You’ve come here to listen to me tell you about how and why I defeated Lung. You’ve come here to know that Brockton Bay has a new hero, one more powerful than anybody suspected, one that you can trust to keep you safe.

“You’re lucky, because that is true. There is such a hero.

“Her name is Wordsworth.”

Indigo grants me a single fraction of a second to turn toward the disturbed, grey curtain to my left, but I don’t have Amber at the moment, and so I can’t step aside quickly enough to dodge Gallant’s blast and keep talking. Keep telling my city who they should trust and who they shouldn’t.

My colors escape from my control as I drop down to the uneven carpet below me, my mind once more human.

But… I’ve got one last second before the darkness claims me as I’m overwhelmed by the interaction between his power and mine, as the exhaustion of the emotional drain shreds my consciousness.

In that last second, I can see Piggot’s horrified face. I can hear the screams from the reporters. I can see Dean, pale and scared.

And so, before darkness claims me, without paying any mind to what I can or can’t feel, and just because I want to…

I smile.