Chapter Text
There were moments - brief, and thoughtless - that Evelyn caught herself humming the Elastigirl theme song from her teenage years. Insomnia would have her dangling precariously over that [thinly] divided edge of exhaustion and madness, crafting blueprint after blueprint to ease her brain when a few familiar notes — whether beginning, end, or in between — would manifest in the base of her throat, and her hand would jerk and her jaw would clench and she'd tip just a little bit farther. They were heavy sounds in the otherwise torpid confines of her workspace, startling like they'd come to life all their own and pummeled their way through her deepest subconscious to breathe for a half second, for a fraction of a minute. And still, Evelyn didn't think they had to push very hard, very far. Elastigirl did not lurk in the corners of her brain or within the battered boxes Evelyn had crammed away; she was so present, she strong, so goddamn irritating.
Evelyn was fourteen the first time she heard Elastigirl's anthem. She was lounging in the den, legs dangling off the armchair as was her haphazard nature with a pencil in hand for when inspiration struck. The television was droning—Winston was sat in front of it with a crooked smile and excited eyes, supers on the news. She remembers so tortuously clear the cut to commercial - some sugar-bomb cereal - and then, the squawk her brother all but choked on when the first flash of red and white crackled behind the screen.
Supple flesh.
Smooth, copper hair.
And gloves the color of sin.
It shook Evelyn to the core, so sweetly and so painfully. Her eyebrows had sunk low, nostrils flared and lips screwed shut as if she'd just been viciously insulted.
Win was calling out for their parents—her father had had a part in the orchestration of this new line of publicity, and wouldn't he have liked to see the final cut?
♩ Here comes Elastigirl ♬♩
Stretching her arms
The tip of her pencil splintered under the pressure of her clenched fist, a tiny piece of lead rocketing away from her with a perverse sɴᴀᴘ. Evelyn could hear the blood in her veins, the tightening pound of her heart, so loud she nearly missed the next lines.
She thought she was dying.
♩ Elastigirl ♬♩
No one's beyond her reach
She didn't understand it. She didn't want to understand it. And in fact, she was terrified of whatever it was coursing, ripping through her, eating her alive. It was with complete indignity that Evelyn would recall how her younger self had nearly burst into tears at the way her gut coiled deep, deeper within her—except it wasn't quite her gut, and it wasn't quite a hunger that could be satisfied with food that caused it to corkscrew so alarmingly.
It all came in waves and rose and fell with the crescendos, decrescendos of the music, as if it'd been written in tune with the fiery discomfort of her body.
Of course she'd known Elastigirl's name, of course she'd heard the feverish stories that broke out in the halls of her school every time a thug was caught red-handed—red-gloved, red-booted, red-belted red-masked red red r e d ——
Evelyn had never seen Elastigirl. She never paid attention to the trading cards or the news reports, was never in the right place-right time to see Elastigirl.
And now, she wished she hadn't.
She had felt her body shift on its own accord, was surprised by it the way you'd be surprised to find how much tension you were holding in your shoulders just a second ago before you remembered to relax. Except there was no way to relax here, as her legs crossed at the knees and her hands feverishly clung to her notebook. There was no peace, no let-up―
She quickly glanced to where her brother sat, where her parents peeked in at the doorway, and just as quickly tore her gaze away guiltily, as if to say she was doing something horribly, traitorously wrong but wouldn't get caught if she didn't see anybody catching her.
It ravaged her. The white leotard, the boots. Evelyn's body had never looked like that―she was gangly, purpled easily with sleep deprivation. There were no signs of significant womanhood and no suggestive curves; she was not built the same way as Elastigirl, and wondered for a moment if she envied her her body, her ability to shape herself and the way people perceived her.
Then she wondered if she didn't want to have the super's body, she wanted to feel it―to reach through the television screen and pinch the spandex of Elastigirl's suit between her fingers, grip her forearm to feel the way her gloves molded themselves, find the expanse where boot ended and silken thigh began―――
God, she hated Elastigirl.
She hated every piece of her, every fiber.
She hated her as much as she wanted her - her body? or her body? - and each feeling burned within her so severely, Jesus Christ.
Evelyn could never tell where hatred began and desire ended. Maybe they were one in the same.
For years after, Evelyn followed Elastigirl's each move to her own biting agitation. Every takedown, every publicity stunt, every insufferably bright measure and countermeasure. She had a brain, unlike the supers that hurled their powers along with reckless abandon, fissuring buildings and collateral lives and using brute force to validate their own godly neurosis. She was intelligent, calculating, so sure of herself. It was easier then for Evelyn to convince herself, in fleeting moments in between, that she admired Elastigirl; she wished to emulate the personal and public power that Elastigirl exercised, wished to grasp such confidence and nerve within her own two hands.
But she knew she was fooling herself whenever she thought she'd caught a flash of red and white, danger and truth, as her chest contracted and her breath hitched.
It was never actually Elastigirl.
Evelyn only met her in her dreams, often glimpses and broken dialogue, like their every encounter past, present, and future had been splintered and cast about into the realm of her subconscious, unknowingly.
But some dreams left her heaving for air in the middle of the night, sheets damp with sweat and a fraught ache between her legs. When she'd jolt awake, she was haunted by the remnants of a weight pressing down upon her chest, phantom fingers looped around her wrists, a tepid wetness just out of her reach, guarded by the firm material of a glittering white leotard———...!
Those were the days Evelyn was particularly inventive; she took creative license in her own self-hatred. She'd lock herself in her bedroom until dinnertime - sometimes until night fell again and it was as if the day had never come - and mocked up blueprints, algorithms, scale models―anything and everything to force Elastigirl from her mind.
Sometimes, she didn't want to push the fantasies or hopes away.
That's when she was flooded with the most excruciating guilt, because she knew - she just knew - that what she felt and what she dreamed of in the dead of night were wrong, that it would be an ugly stain on her family's legacy if anyone were to ever even hint that such grossly deviant things crawled beneath her skin.
Still, when supers were forced underground, she worried at first. In her hatred, Evelyn had grown close to Elastigirl. She was anxious for her safety, for never seeing her flash across the television again―something Evelyn had desperately wished for over and over and over.
But the worry was short-lived. It seemed to be such an abbreviated timeline―like everything happened all at once, an overlapping stream of time that never gave her the chance to just breathe.
Her parents left, and somehow she didn't feel the need to hide anymore――
because the only thing Evelyn felt after her father died pointlessly, stupidly. was rage.
Contempt.
Supers didn't make the world a better place. They weren't selfless or infinite, like everyone liked to believe. They were impermanent fixtures that avidly fled when their livelihoods were challenged by the people conditioned to worship them. They broke you, and didn't care how you felt about it one way or another because they had more important things to do, like play god and meddle with the natural order.
They weren't good people. They were just superficial substitutes for the black and white morality non-supers wished they had. Perception supplanted reality.
They were the reason her father was dead, why her mother died soon after of heartbreak; not because they failed to save the day, but because her father believed so surely that they would put his life above their own.
His idealism failed him. A twisted image of philanthropic invincibility failed him. The desperate reach for simulated life was what, in the end, cost him his own. For how many other dead, dying people was that true?
It took years for Evelyn to succinctly draw out the fibers of reality and consumerism, media and supers and how they wove together so interchangeably. She followed Winston to DevTech, quietly rejected his misplaced optimism and conflated ideas about the place of supers in the world because she was utterly alone without him. She still preferred to live in the background, where she was safe to formulate in peace. To survive in peace, with her work to keep her company at night instead of some childish and confused fantasy.
The alcohol helped, too―especially on the nights sleep refused to meet her.
Which was often.
They spent years building upon the empirical foundations of her father's legacy. Win never let her mind wander too far from the idea of a super revolution, the reinvigoration of everything she had grown to detest, even when there were more pressing matters like the propagandist influence of advertisements on television, the way with which people were striving for ease over quality—quality interactions, quality relationships, quality life. Evelyn loved her brother, almost envied him for his charisma and innate ability to somehow always know what people wanted - she never knew, could never tell, thought that maybe it was because she wasn't victim to the same boundaries and influences - but strained to stomach the way he didn't just buy into the ostensible functions of capitalism, but nurtured them.
He was often no better than the rest of them, just richer. Just benefited more from what it was he lauded. It was easier not to fall victim to the precision of simulation when you were the one building it.
When he told her one day - let slip so casually - that he was waiting for the perfect opportunity to bring supers back, she had almost laughed. How did he still clutch these childish dreams so close to his chest? How did he hold on to them after all these years?
Much in the same way she still idly glanced over a crowd for the hint of a copper 'do, she figured.
Sometimes we can't help but cling to the devotions of our youths, even when all they've done is brought us pain. It was an aspect of human nature that burned her time and time again.
Still, it would be as much an opening for him as it would be for her. Evelyn knew what had to be done. She knew how to fix it, how she would fix it, skulking as she'd always done in the background while her mind took care of the rest; the genius behind the genius. Win would never need to know, not if she played her cards right, and surely, he might be devastated to learn what she'd always known, that supers were conceited and morally corrupt, but it would be for his own good.
She'd fix it all, every sleepless night, every degrading thought, every furtive, shameful glance――every life lost in the name of unreliable, faithless supers――and she'd give people what they needed, even if it's not what they wanted: freedom.