Wordsworth – Chapter 16 – Colors 6

“What were you thinking?!” Armsmaster yells at me once again.

And far be it from me to decry his earnest efforts to help me in my self-flagellation, but it may be slightly rude to do this while I’m lying on a hospital bed.

“Sir, I just acted according to—”

“According to nothing. There’s absolutely no justification for a Ward to risk their life so blatantly against an enemy of Lung’s caliber. Do you have the slightest idea of how close a call that was? How badly things could’ve—”

“With all due respect, I thought heroes were supposed to risk their lives to save others.”

Taylor would.

Taylor has.

Armsmaster, although he obviously also has, is apparently not completely on board with me doing so, given the wall-shaking punch he lands next to my bed.

Hypocrite.

“Emma, you’re relieved of your duties until a certified psychologist can convince me it’s a good idea to let your suicidal self near any actual danger,” he growls out.

It’s… refreshingly honest, truth be told.

“Sir, I am not suicidal. In my case, it’s even plain to see,” I say, gesturing at the muddled, swirling colors washing over and around me, never quite displaying anything overt.

Because I don’t let them.

“I don’t even know what that mélange means, and I’m not about to trust it enough to let you on duty,” he tells me with a glare intense enough I can feel it through his visor.

I wonder if I have some actual empathic abilities? Would that be from a specific color or just an extension of my usual powers being tied to emotions? I never thought about it, but maybe I—

“Emma. Listen to me,” he demands.

And so I do.

He’s tense, on the verge of panic, and it’s only now that I realize he doesn’t know how to handle me. Because he gave up oversight of the Wards, he gave it over to Piggot so he could focus on things he deemed more pressing, but now he finds himself technically responsible for a cape powerful enough to bring down Lung, and he… He wants to help. Do the right thing.

But doesn’t know what that is.

How… How very Emma Barnes of you, Armsmaster.

“You… You accomplished something today. Something great. But you’re a publicly unmasked cape, and this could’ve serious consequences. It’s not just you that you’re risking—”

Red surges, and the bed burns.

“Where are they?” I ask him as I stand on trembling legs reinforced with the strength of rage.

“Your family’s safe! We’ve moved them to the Rig while we—” and then he stops talking.

Mostly because he has to dive forward to catch me as the red flees, and I sag, still too weak, still waiting for Amy to come back with that bag of biomass that should replenish my spent muscle, that should make me look like Emma rather than Taylor at her worst.

And, even then, I always caught myself looking at her.

Green flashes over me, and I see Armsmaster’s lips thin, pressed into a tight line as he helps me back to the blackened, no longer burning bed. There are traces of quickly dissolving foam on it, so I’ve missed the moment he extinguished the flames; I’ve missed—

It doesn’t matter. I missed plenty of things back then.

Now I just have to… do better with the ones I do notice.

So I suppress the green, the disorienting sickness, and I focus once again on the feeling I had when I saw Tattletale flee, when I convinced Amy and Vicky to let her. I focus on the… the thing beating below regret and hurt, the thing that was almost strong enough to overwhelm the jealousy and possessiveness and loss.

And gold thrums on the inside of my right arm, and my head clears.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him, forcing myself to mean it.

His hands are on my arms, holding me upright, steady.

“You… just tell me what were you thinking. What did you seek to accomplish. Please.”

His tone is stern, his grasp on me firm.

He doesn’t fool me.

Because there’s that minute pause, that moment where his lips thin yet again before he nervously wets them, and I know Armsmaster is scared. Not of me, but for me.

And… I don’t know how to answer that. So I do it with the truth.

“I was thinking… that I wanted to do something good. No, that’s not quite right. I was thinking that I—that somebody else didn’t deserve to lose anything more. That if I could, I should stop a tragedy. That I should… That I…”

“That you wanted to be a hero,” he whispers, patting my hair.

I don’t nod, don’t tell him he’s right.

I just lean forward, hug his rigid armor, and cry.

***

Armsmaster takes some time to leave, but he doesn’t yell at me anymore, doesn’t hit the wall, doesn’t glare with disapproval.

He just… He’s distantly tender. Supportive.

And when he finally steps out of the room without saying goodbye, without breaking the silence that started after my tears stopped, the new silence is different.

So I lie back on the bed, the scorched edge of my blankets grating on my skin, and I briefly wonder why there were no alarms, why nobody rushed in to check everything was all right, but then I remember I am a parahuman, a powerful one, and it all makes sense.

Except…

Today I beat Lung.

That… that doesn’t make any sense.

“Alone at last,” Sophia says from behind and above me.

I almost snort.

“Hey there, Hero,” I tell her.

She remains silent at that, the whisper of her clothes rustling about the only indication she hasn’t left.

“You haven’t called me that in a while,” she finally continues.

“You just fought Lung, Sophia. I know how scared—”

“I wasn’t—”

“Don’t lie to me.”

I don’t yell at her, don’t think I can, at the moment, but my voice still snaps, and it takes her another moment to speak again.

“I pick my fights. I’m not suicidal—unlike others.”

I close my eyes. The reddish tint of the light going through my eyelids is a definite improvement on the hospital’s ceiling, and it has the added advantage of not letting me see my colors while speaking with Sophia.

“I know. That’s why I said I know how scared you were—and it wasn’t an insult. That’s why I called you Hero.”

She won’t understand.

“I don’t—”

“Think about a… a rat. A cat’s scary, right? Five pointy ends, all geared to murder it—normally, the rat will flee given the slightest chance. Now, have the cat be near her nest, near her young, and what does the rat do when faced with a killing machine bred to exterminate her?”

“Are you calling me a rat, Emma?”

“Stop being difficult for the sake of it.”

Another silence, and there’s a shadow over my eyelids. When I open them, I see her leaning over the bed, her face right above mine, her dark hair falling around her.

She’s beautiful, always was.

She’s also angry, and she always was.

“Is that what you are, Ems? A rat protecting her ratlings?”

Part of me wishes to reach up, to brush her cheek with the tip of my fingers, but it’s not weakness that stays my hand. No, I think it’s the opposite of that.

“What did you see?” I ask instead.

And I can see the moment she flinches.

“Why? Why did you… You weren’t trying to get killed, I know you weren’t, you moved differently, with a purpose, and… Why can you fight like that? Why can you do what you did today and still be… you?” she almost rambles.

“Ouch. Not pulling any punches, are you?” I smile up at her, and Sophia’s upside-down face grimaces at the sight of it.

Guess I’m still not good at those.

“Stop… stop playing around and just answer the damn question,” she says. She doesn’t ask me, though, because she’s holding something back, and I know her enough to understand what that is.

Because I hate Sophia. I hate her for what she did to me, what she convinced me of, how she led me to forsake Taylor and enabled me to do all that came after.

But I still like Sophia.

I like that she saved my life; I like that she went out on her own for so long, fighting against the odds, risking her life. I like that she’s a… no. I can’t bring myself to say that. She isn’t.

So I could murder her. I’ve thought about it, about the sheer relief at cutting off that part of me, about the temptation of blaming her entirely for what my broken self did over months of harassment and cruelty and betrayal. I’ve thought about grasping her head and calling all the red she inspires in me, boiling her brain before she is able to shift to shadows and flee.

But… But if I can… If there’s hope for me, if the golden thrum in my arm is to mean anything at all…

I close my eyes. I don’t want to look at her.

“Long ago, I met a little girl. She was alone, maybe also lonely, not playing with the others in the park, so I decided to approach her, more out of curiosity than anything else.

“She changed my life.

“It turned out she hadn’t been alone, you know? Her brain was full of stories, and she was imagining one of them, bouncing between the trees as she chased something only she could see. She was having more fun doing that than trying to fit in with other kids, but she accepted me asking.

“And she taught me.

“About her stories, the ones her mom had read to her and the ones she always came up with so we could play together.

“The stories… were always about heroes.

“Years went by, the stories grew more complex, more interesting, and at some point we stopped tumbling along the ground and just talked about… things. Plenty of them. But still about her stories.

“Because she wanted to be a hero. Even if she didn’t care that much about powers.

“It wasn’t about that, to her. A hero wasn’t one because of what they were, but because of what they did—no, because of what they tried. Plenty of heroes died tragic deaths while trying to reach the unreachable, stop the unstoppable… save the doomed.

“‘That’s what heroes do,’ she often told me.

“And… And I’m called a hero. I have a uniform, a codename, a salary. But…

“But if that girl I met so many years ago saw me now, Sophia? She wouldn’t call me a hero. She wouldn’t think I am, not with what I’ve done, what I’ve let myself be, what I haven’t tried to do.

“So… I saw Lung. I saw Lung about to hurt… others, in a way I understood, a way I knew far too well, and I…

“I just want to be a hero, Sophia. It’s that so hard to… Can I… Can someone like me…”

I can’t. I can’t finish my speech, can’t tell Sophia what it all really means, what I want for me. For her. What Taylor would’ve wanted me to want. I can’t be the girl I was, that Taylor thought I was, and tears choke out my voice at each failing word that reaches without grasping.

When I open my eyes, Sophia isn’t there.

And, once again, I’ve failed.