Wordsworth – Chapter 9 – Colors 4

Wordsworth – Chapter 9 – Colors 4

Sophia always called Piggot ‘Ms. Piggy.’ She felt the obese woman didn’t deserve any kind of respect, obviously far more prey than predator, given her only claim to fame had been being maimed by Nilbog.

Sophia… I won’t say she’s a moron. She has a kind of cunning that I’ll never grasp, an instinctive understanding of the world around her, if not the people.

No, people are Sophia’s blind spot.

People are mything.

So, when I look at Piggot sweating, at her body barely answering the demands she forces upon it, at the woman who should’ve retired years ago, I don’t see ‘prey.’ I don’t see weakness.

I see a woman towering over Kid Win, a powerful Tinker in his own right, with a body as fit as dedicated trainers can manage to force on him, and weapons powerful enough only lawful restrictions keep him from wiping out quite a few of the city’s villains.

I see somebody who should be broken stand alone, browbeating the powerful, the chosen few, through mere presence and force of personality.

I see what I could have never been.

“Twenty-nine,” she says, staring him down, the number said like something he should take as a personal attack.

“What?” he stammers, flailing for a meaning, knowing what the tone and posture implicitly state and, unknowingly, accepting the condemnation. Because he just doesn’t have enough information to realize how he could reject it.

There’s a part of me that admires the interplay, that takes note.

Another is disgusted at a grown woman manipulating someone who willingly named himself Kid.

None of them are strong enough to make my colors swirl.

“Twenty-nine heroin users showed up at Brockton General, asking for treatment. Do you know why they did, Kid Win?”

“… Because the ‘just say no’ posters finally worked?” he says with a tone that mixes cluelessness with hidden wit.

It almost makes me smile.

“You think you’re funny?”

“Some of my teammates often call me a joke, Ma’am.”

She represses a growl, and Chris a shudder.

Because… he’s afraid. Intimidated. Against the wall.

And a hero.

So… that’s what heroes are supposed to do, isn’t it? Fight against the odds, act in spite of fear.

That’s what Taylor said they did.

‘Yeah, I want to fly, and be superstrong, and have all the rainbows like Legend, but… There were many heroes before capes, Emma. Most of them didn’t have powers, just… attitude. We can have that, don’t we? We don’t need anything else but that.’

And she smiled at me. That bright, wide thing that always cheered me up. That thing I didn’t know how precious it was until I…

Until I killed it.

And she was right. Of course she was.

A hero doesn’t need anything but the right attitude. Which means if you don’t have it, you’ve already failed.

“Maybe they are right,” Piggot finally answers once Chris shows he will cringe away, drop his bravado, make himself small…

But he won’t look away.

“Yes, those teammates may be onto something, Kid Win, because those twenty-nine heroin addicts said they heard a poem. A poem that showed them a forest made of black ink, and that made them rethink their lives, believe they could do something more. That they weren’t trapped, and could choose,” she enumerates, the words and phrasing uplifting, the tone and cadence anything but.

And I picture it. A drug den, full of lost people, of desperate souls…

And Taylor bringing light to them just with her words, with a use of her power that is far more about having the right attitude than about anything else.

Because she’s a hero. A real one. What she always wanted to be.

And, for the first time since I saw her speaking with Chris, a color thrums.

“Do you know what that means, Kid Win?”

“That… she’s trying to help?”

She looks at him. Her head is bent down, putting too much emphasis on their height disparity, and her arms are crossed on top of her chest, not quite defensive but acting as a barrier… Disgust. She’s displaying disgust at having to interact with him.

And Chris isn’t experienced enough to consciously realize it, but the animal part of him gets the message, and he shrinks a bit more.

We are alone in her office. It’s likely I’m here as the resident expert on Wordsworth, as the independent who tangled with her a couple of times before joining the Wards, my name already known—both the cape and the real one.

Because Cauldron wanted to fulfill their end of the deal, even if I no longer wanted to. Or especially because I didn’t.

But it’s still… weird. That Piggot would get me here when it’s so obvious my power’s been acting up, that I’m currently barely functional, that Dean’s boosts only work for a short while before I go back to drab, pastel, lifeless colors that barely do anything.

Unless she wants Chris to feel the pressure of having an attractive girl witness him getting torn apart. Which is such an obvious tactic it didn’t even cross my mind the Director would lower herself to using it.

“Do you know how addictive heroin is?” she asks curtly.

And Chris looks at her for just a moment before his eyebrows shoot up.

“We are currently labeling her as a human Master—”

“No,” I think, something inside me instinctively rejecting the accusation. Not that Taylor would have that power, because I cannot even begin to fathom what her intellect could do with something as versatile as what she’s already shown to have, but that she would use it like that.

Taylor may have the power to be a human Master. But she won’t ever be.

Piggot and Chris are looking at me.

“Anything you want to add, Iridiscent?” she asks, her eyebrow raised.

I... may have spoken part of this.

Piggot’s eyes are harsh, mostly because she planned on me either being completely subdued like I’ve been over the past couple of days or to have me corral Kid Win for his actions toward Wordsworth.

Chris’ eyes… there’s a cautious gratitude in them.

That unknown color thrums yet again.

It’s barely more than a vein over the muddled blue covering my right forearm. Barely a stretched mote of light.

I lean on it.

“What rating does Dr. Yamada have?” I finally ask.

“Excuse me? Dr. Yamada is not a para—”

“Yet she regularly sits down with highly volatile, violent people and convinces them to keep working for the greater good. Do you know how broken parahumans are? Surely, that’s a human Master in action,” the words come out, part of them the same hateful cadence of a cruel, awful girl asking whether someone was too stupid to realize she wasn’t wanted at school.

But there’s also a bit of Anne in there. A bit of the smart girl who not only had the instinct for reading people, but the intelligence and discipline to polish that gift.

And now Piggot’s glaring at me, and Chris is open-mouthed.

“Do you think you’re funny, Iridiscent?” she repeats the question she asked Chris.

I look at her.

Not with courage, not with defiance, because those require being afraid and acting in spite of it, and I currently don’t have that color.

No, I have dreadful, heavy blue that’s mostly grey, and…

And a single, stretched mote of light that I carefully hide in the inside of my right forearm.

“Quite frankly, Ma’am, even self-deprecating humor has its limits.”

There’s a flash of rage quickly buried in her eyes, a snort of laughter from Chris.

And a pang of disgust in my chest.

Because those aren’t my words, my cadence, my colors.

Those are Taylor’s.

And I’m stealing from her once again.

***

“What was that in there?” Chris asks as soon as the door to Piggot’s office closes behind us.

“What do you mean?”

He gestures wildly, apparently uncoordinated, except he isn’t.

He tried to explain it to me once, when I was new to the team, and he tried to be friendly with the new cape before he realized Sophia had already staked her claim on me—and the suspicious looks started.

He told me about how he saw things. Not literally. Not actual hallucinations, but as a technique that had gotten out of hand at some point.

He visualizes concepts as physical things, volumes and shapes, and then he places them on the space around him so he can establish connections and ways to fit them. And when he’s flailing around like this, he’s just pointing at the things he’s trained his brain to use as a means of filtering the boundless torrent of ideas constantly bombarding him.

It would make him a terrible public speaker, but that’s not what he wants to be, so, contrary to what the old Emma would think, I…

I don’t know what to think, actually. Because it’s the kind of thing that would make him a pariah at any regular high school, but if any kind of eccentricity makes him even slightly better at saving lives, it would be monstrous to tell him to change just because it would make him slightly more amenable to the popular crowd.

And… I am a bit tired of being a monster.

A bit tired of everything, actually, because it would be so easy to—

The thrum of color quietens, and I desperately clamp down on that thought, kill it before it can finish, and try to get back to that moment in Piggot’s office where I realized Taylor is becoming the kind of hero she always dreamed about.

In spite of me.

Vivid, putrid green swirls around my stomach, making me want to throw up, but, at the same time, the thrum grows stronger, steadier. And it’s a small price to pay.

“You defendedWordsworth. To Piggot’s face. You never contradict Piggot.”

I look at him, at the way his eyes dart around some kind of representation of the whole situation that can only make sense to him now that he’s finally letting himself feel all the stress Piggot piled down on him.

I smile.

But I don’t have enough control to know what kind of smile it is.

“Maybe being surrounded by heroes is finally rubbing off on me,” I finally tell him, because what else can I say?

And he groans.

“Please, don’t ever say that in front of Dennis…”

Oh. Right. Innuendo.

I laugh.

I don’t mean to, don’t even want to, and Chris hurriedly grabs my arm and drags me to the elevator as Piggot’s secretary looks at us reproachfully.

“Sorry, sorry,” I finally tell him once I’ve gotten the laughter under control.

The green has faded, taking the queasiness with it, and the blue may not be as grey as it was a moment ago.

The thrum remains, and I keep it hidden, like a trembling ember kept away from a cold wind.

Taylor’s words. I spent so much time with her that my thoughts can sound like her when I’m not careful.

Or when I am particularly reckless.

“What’s the matter with you, Emma—”

“Thank you,” I tell him. And I hug him.

He freezes in a way that has very little to do with the armor he’s wearing locking up.

“Wha—”

“For listening to her. For being a good person when no one—when I wasn’t. Thank you for letting her be a hero even if you knew it could get you in trouble.”

He doesn’t speak, doesn’t gesture, but I see his eyes frantically moving around, and I can almost glimpse the shapes he’s making, the connections between Iridiscent, Emma Barnes, Wordsworth, …

“You knew her. Before she triggered.”

And I think back.

I think about a slip of a girl. Reedy, too thin, but always moving around, always talking, always telling me the latest, exciting story her mom taught her while mine was too busy just being a mom to play at storyteller.

I remember sitting in her backyard as the girl wove worlds around us. The ones she had been taught, and the ones she came up with just so we could play in them.

I remember the girl growing. No longer so thin, so reedy, but her long legs and arms still clumsy, unused to their new lengths in a way I couldn’t afford as I turned my body into an instrument that I excelled at playing.

But I knew.

I knew the beauty she was shaping up to have, and I didn’t even feel envy, because I only felt anticipation.

Because Taylor had always talked about her stories, and her heroes, and her words, but I…

I had always listened to Taylor.

“I did. Once upon a time.”

The words are almost bitter on my lips, not quite a joke, carrying too much wistfulness for them to be something so light.

The elevator opens behind me, and I step back, away from my hug with Chris, and his eyes widen as I push a button and the doors close between us.

I smile goodbye at him and wait a single moment.

Then take a deep breath.

I feel the thrum, roll up my sleeve, and finally allow myself to look at the stretched mote of the unknown color.

And, surrounded by brushed metal, I discover the gleaming, golden glow of hope.