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“Quickly, quickly,” Dragon murmured to herself, actuators whirring under the strain as she — paradoxically — made sure to slowly, cautiously lift what had once been a supporting internal wall from the rubble of the collapsed building. It was somehow, miraculously, mostly intact along this side, the remnants of bright wallpaper still clinging to it. She sprayed containment foam at strategic points along the underside, hopefully keeping it propped up and intact long enough to create a hollow in which further excavation could take place without risk of collapse.
Before the battle, this had been a house. A postbox was still visible, a couple of crumpled letters still poking out. More importantly, her sensors were still registering heat and possibly movement of a far too small form beneath the remnants. Her analysis software suggested that there was still a 75% chance that she could reach them in time. Plus or minus 25%.
Minus, distinctly minus if the rate at which the yellow rim around the periphery of her vision was turning orange remained unabated.
Under the wall there were isolated shards of brickwork, half-buried in a thick dust, as if what had been here before had suffered a thousand years or more of weathering in an instant; the result of a direct blast by Ash. She simply didn’t have the tools on hand to dig through this before whatever the next incipient emergency was became too urgent to put off any longer.
The thought caused a melancholic twinge inside her. She’d hoped… Well, it didn’t matter now. She sprayed the dust with a thin layer of containment foam — just enough to bind to as much dust as possible, then whilst she was waiting for it to harden — she switched her speakers off and sighed. “Okay, AudreyPlus. What have you got for me?” she said out loud.
The colour around the rim of her vision had reached the orange of a setting sun that had disappeared a few hours previously. She didn’t dare to hope she could stay much longer
And, as ever, AudreyPlus had started to talk even before she’d finished. “There are reports of a Spinnerknock manifestation in southern Calgary.”
“How sure are we?”
“We just breached fifty percent chance for a full blown manifestation, and it’s still climbing upwards.”
“Any idea what kind?”
“Reports are still unclear.”
She passed her lips together and called up the location of her nearest suits. She’d kept her Zilant suit in Calgary after the last manifestation… but, no, last week interfering in a fight between the Rippers and the Shadowborn had run it low on supplies, and she hadn’t had a chance to run some more out there yet. She could probably deal with the manifestation if it was a Roses or even a Mary, but if it was one of the more physically resilient ones like a Hickory…
If she counted the time she’d need to pilot this suit to the nearest of her facilities, she was better off just taking the Cawthorne she was currently piloting, and changing it up if needed.
She switched the speakers back on, and radioed Otter, the hero in charge of this scene. “I need to leave,” she told her. “There’s still someone living under that rubble, but time is of the essence.” She dug her hands into the still hardening foam, and managed to scrabble away most of the dust with it, leaving smaller blocks of rubble that she didn’t have the time to deal with. She painted the spot closest to the heat signature. “About 1.4 metres behind that spot. Good luck.” She strode off before Otter could respond, engaging her jets to launch herself into the sky.
The wide, open sky that could swallow her whole without a second thought.
Even with the screen resolution reduced to something far less than realistic, she couldn’t help shuddering. She leaned back in her seat and pulled her headset off with one hand, making sure to keep her other in control mode. Not that the auto-pilot wasn’t capable of taking care of pretty much anything from there to Calgary, but still. Regulations were regulations. No fully autonomous units were allowed. A human had to be in the loop at all times.
With her sway in the Protectorate, she could have almost undoubtedly gotten special dispensation to bypass that rule, but… she hadn’t. There’d already been too many cases of tinker tech gone rogue — she’d even dealt with some of them herself — that the thought of adding to them, the thought of something she’d crafted killing people… she just couldn’t.
And so she kept the glove of her left hand in control mode, and the monitor showing the visual feed from her suit in her peripheral vision at all times.
AudreyPlus had already brought up some reading material on another screen. The first thing she noticed was, of course, the countdown in the top left hand corner, flicking down from 12:52 to 12:51 as she looked at it. Her stomach twisted nervously just looking at it, so she concentrated on the text instead. At the top there were some conversations people had thought they’d been having with Dragon, broken down so that she could absorb all of the pertinent information with a minimum of effort. Ten requests for information, five requests for tinker tech that the Protectorate had approved.
She smiled as she saw that Bataille had checked in. She’d have to touch bases later, when she wasn’t getting ready for a fight. And Armsmaster. AudreyPlus had been chatting with him again. A slight groan escaped her lips. She was certain enough that she’d like him if she talked with him — she had enough faith in her engineering of AudreyPlus to know that much — it was just… they’d talked enough that he might well consider her a friend, and she just didn’t have that connection back. It would just be too awkward, not that dealing with that kind of situation was her forte at the best of times.
Ugh.
She distracted herself by reading the latest tinker tech inventions filed with the Protectorate on one screen, making notes on another. This at least was something she could do that no one else could, not even AudreyPlus. Huh, the pompously named Einstein had just filed an interesting variation on a wormhole generator that she’d never seen before. She’d never had much success with transporting her suits with any kind of teleportation before, but maybe…
She jumped as an alarm beeped at her. Her eyes slid automatically up to the countdown — 12:39 — before realising it was telling her that her suit had almost arrived at Calgary.
She put the headset back on, full haptic mode re-engaging automatically, and suddenly she was flying high above green fields, rapidly approaching the textured grey of the city.
“Manifestation area marked on display,” AudreyPlus said.
“Any reports about which one?” Dragon asked, trying to concentrate on anything other than the wide open spaces around her.
“Not yet, efforts are still concentrating on evacuating.”
As she approached the marked area, she slowed down and cranked her audio receptors up.
Knock knock knock knock knock
Ahead, several city blocks and the air above them was tinted ever so slightly darker, a very faint rose against the background of white clouds.
Knock knock knock knock knock
She passed a woman being loaded into an ambulance. She must have staggered out of the affected zone. Medical staff were under strict instructions not to enter under any circumstances.
Knock knock knock knock knock
Ahead she could see several more people lying in the street, unable to continue, illuminated by street lights. Squinting her eyes activated magnification, abruptly bringing them closer to her, at least visually. Close enough that she could see thin threads of skin and blood being spun out of their bodies, pulled up into the air, away and to the left, out of the cone of light of the nearest lamp.
Knock knock knock knock knock
At least she had a guide to the centre of the manifestation now. Slowing down further so she could follow the streamers of flesh and blood. There was nothing she could do for the fallen people apart from stopping this.
And for the first time, the knocking somehow resolved into the rhyme of this manifestation, sounding, as it always did, like a chorus of men and women, their voices cracking as they tried to sound like children.
Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clements
Okay. Oranges and Lemons. This was definitely a better suit for handling that than the Calgary one in its current state. Though some of its tools would have been useful.
“Get me whoever’s on duty at Calgary PRT HQ,” she told AudreyPlus.
You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St Martins
Current theory was that the cape who generated these manifestations was either English, or someone who spent a lot of time there as a child. Or maybe had a parent who was from there.
Who knew, really? In any case, it hadn’t helped track them down, whoever they were.
Ridiculously, she could feel her stomach tighten as she waited for a response.
“Captain Liam Tremblay for you,” AudreyPlus said.
When will you pay me, say the bells at Old Bailey
“Captain,” she said. “Can I have permission to black out the area affected by the manifestation? I’m facing Oranges here.”
When I grow rich, say the bells at Shoreditch
He hardly hesitated at all. “Permission granted, Dragon. Good luck.” His voice seemed familiar — they’d probably worked together before, most likely at a previous manifestation. AudreyPlus would doubtless know, even if she couldn’t recall off the top of her head.
When will that be? say the bells at Stepney
Not that it mattered. She ran a hack on the Calgary power grid and cut power to the affected region. Around her the lights went out, leaving her to fly through dark streets, illuminated only by her vision enhancement.
I do not know, says the great bell at Bow
Finally, finally she managed to find the nexus of the drawn blood and skin, a whirlwind against the night with an unseen centre. She turned all her lights on to full power, the one bright thing for several blocks.
Here comes a candle to light you to bed
She whirled around, firing with her confoam cannon as soon as she’d acquired a targeting solution on the raw and bloody bulky shape charging at her with an oversized axe, hoping to slow it down enough that she could use some of her more lethal weaponry safely.
And here comes a chopper to chop off your head
The figure was hardly even slowed down. Warning lights flashed all across her HUD as the axe slammed into her side, cleaving through reinforced metal into her insides.
Chip, chop, chip, chop, The. Last. Man. Is. Dead.
She fired a full salvo of missiles into it, point blank.
And maybe prayed a little.
She was sure that she cut an ungainly figure cruising across the sky, the Zilant suit buried up to its arms in the guts of the Cawthorne suit, accessing the latter’s engines to make the best time back to her main base. Thanks to an underground rave near the nexus site, the manifestation had been far stronger than anyone had been anticipating, and the Cawthorne had suffered severe damage during the battle.
It had also meant that casualties had been far higher than she had been hoping. Responders were still going over the site, but early reports indicated that the number dead would be in the dozens.
The worst Spinnerknock manifestation in years. But still, given the disasters she semi-regularly had to deal with, all those deaths barely touched her.
She kind of hated that she felt that way. She’d be better next time. More data, better responses.
Maybe they’d even be able to trace the Spinnerknock.
Her eyes flicked down to the countdown again. 11:14. Her stomach twisted uneasily again.
Maybe it was time to check in with Bataille, if she was free.
She hardly had to wait for Bataille’s face to flick up on the overlay, the far too open sky barely visible through her short cropped greying hair and dark skin, scarred all down the left hand side.
Dragon glared at her hand, paused as it was halfway to her head, doubtless to flatten down her hair. It wasn’t as though it’d matter. It wasn’t as though she showed anyone the actual mess she was, just a semi idealised reproduction of herself from before Newfoundland. And yet it always felt like Bataille could see through her little deceptions, could actually see her schlub-like slouch in her chair.
“Greetings,” she said, trying her best to dispel her unease.
“Hello, Dragon,” Bataille said, her voice a bit scratchier than its usual rich timbre. “Sharon sends her regards.”
“Uh, yeah, pass mine back,” Dragon said, never really sure how to respond to Bataille passing messages back and forth from her ex. It wasn’t as though she didn’t like Sharon — one of the few non-cape, non-PRT she’d really talked with before she and Bataille had broken up — but… This all felt so awkward, like if she made a misstep her friendship with them both would come crashing down around her. “How is the reception on her lichen paper going?” she tried anyway.
Bataille gave a short laugh. “I appreciate that you didn’t try and drag me into the technical details. She was stressing for weeks before publication that she’d missed something, or that she could have stated something more clearly.” She quirked her lips. “Apparently that part never changes, however many papers she publishes. So far it seems to be going well, apart from Haut apparently having a very passive aggressive footnote referencing her in a presentation he made last week.”
AudreyPlus was doubtless already aware of all that, but these kind of details were personal, the kind of thing that Dragon preferred to find out in person, or not at all. “Hope she gives him hell,” she said, smiling a little wryly.
“Oh, no doubt,” Bataille said. “She was still in plotting evilly mode the last time I spoke to her.”
“So, how are things personally?”
The humour faded a little from Bataille’s eyes, and she raked a hand through her hair. “Could be better,” she said. “We’ve just got a new Ward that seems to have an utter gift for getting on Travois’ last nerve. I can’t even say she’s completely wrong — it isn’t as though I haven’t known he’s a bigoted prick in private for a long time — but he also usually keeps it to himself, and Œil is just completely unable to let it go. To the point where they’ve had screaming matches in public. It’s a pity, because her powers cover his weaknesses and they would work really well together, but I’ve already had him demanding that she be kept away from him, and apparently she’s on the verge of considering leaving the Wards completely.”
Dragon looked at the notes on Œil’s and Travois’ files and winced. It was times like this that she didn’t envy more socially capable capes their teams, no matter how useful they could be. “If anyone can sort this out, it’d be you.”
“Yeah,” Bataille said resignedly. “That’s what I’m known for.” She winced a little. “Honestly, just thinking about it gives me a headache.”
“So is this a request for another bad movie marathon night? I’ve got a serious tinkering backlog that I really need to attend to.”
“You, my friend, really need to be less of a workaholic,” Bataille said, but Dragon could already see the tension easing from her shoulders. “But yes, thanks.”
“No problem,” Dragon said, getting up and stretching kinks out of her back, limbs and neck. “What are we going to watch first?”
“Woman on Fire,” Bataille said with relish.
Dragon resisted the urge to run a search on the name. That’d spoil at least some of the fun.
Her eyes flicked again towards the countdown.
11:03.
Time to concentrate on some good old fashioned tinkering, with Bataille’s commentary keeping her company in the background.
By some miracle, she managed to get through Woman on Fire, and most of the the way through The Amazing Invasion, the sound of Bataille’s commentary comforting her and occasionally making her laugh, before the familiar yellow rim appeared around her vision.
She sighed a little, and started putting the missile launcher she was working on back together, the sound of the the tools echoing off into the darkness of her repair facility. Time to reassemble what she’d repaired of the Cawthorne as quickly as possible. She’d managed to make most of the necessary repairs, though, as always, she’d have liked to have a little more time for tinkering.
Lack of time to do everything on her list — always her bane. As always, the thought that she could automate her repair facilities more intruded. As always, she dismissed the thought with a shiver.
Giving an AI capable of using it access to what she had here would be one step away from a Skynet situation. She’d fought and dissected enough tinker tech gone wrong to know that the first step in any of that was a tinker going, “Ah, but I know better this time.”
Maybe she actually could do better, but she didn’t know of a single person truly qualified to tell her that.
As the rim crept towards orange, she said over the link to Bataille, “Sorry, got to go now.”
Bataille gave her a slightly sloppy smile in return, the wine she’d been drinking over the last couple of hours having clearly had an effect. “Sure. Thanks for the company.”
She found enough within herself to smile back at her. “No problem. I could say the same.” She severed the link, then opened one up to AudreyPlus.
“What have you got for me?”
“Hopefully nothing too strenuous. There’s a new cape they’re hoping to recruit or at least calm down, and Ironsight thinks it’d go better if you were there to help. Apparently you have a fan.”
It really wasn’t the kind of thing she felt comfortable intervening in… but apparently AudreyPlus had already had this conversation and lost. There were prices to be paid for being part of PRT Vancouver, and jobs like this were part of them.
“Okay,” she sighed.
“I’ll relay the message, and say you’ll be there in 15 minutes?”
“Let’s say 20,” Dragon said, unable to resist feeling a brief, completely unwarranted, surge of victory when AudreyPlus said, “Okay.”
She couldn’t help looking at the countdown as she disengaged from her repair servos.
8:43. Not that it mattered.
As she approached what otherwise looked like a perfectly ordinary residential street, barring a small plume of smoke, she could see the area that the PRT had cordoned off, even without the aid of the electronic overlay. As she got closer, she identified the source of a smoke, an overturned PRT van that, from the damage it had suffered, had been impacted from below. Just under sixty feet away, a girl in jeans and a hoodie, hood pulled down low over her head, slouched against a brick wall in the middle of the cordon, glancing nervously from side to side.
“Hello,” she said brightly, hovering about thirty feet away from the girl. Close enough for easy conversation, but hopefully far enough away that the girl wouldn’t feel threatened. Not that she could probably do much against the Ladon suit’s forcefields, but with capes you never quite knew. And the whole point about inviting her here was to try and avoid further confrontation. “I’m Dragon. You asked to see me? How can I help?”
The girl immediately stood straight up, craning her neck a little to see Dragon. “Dragon?” she said, sounding like she’d been crying. “I’m… it’s you. It’s really you.”
“It certainly is,” Dragon agreed.
The girl brought her hand up to the approximate location of her mouth before lowering it again. “And you’re still a hero here, still part of the PRT?”
“Yes?” Dragon asked, feeling a little out of her depth.
’Ask her what you should call her,’ AudreyPlus flashed onto her screen, and Dragon could have kicked herself for having forgotten that protocol.
“What would you like me to call you?”
“Betty. It’s not my real name, but I thought of it after…” She made a bouncing gesture with her hands. “I- I think when I got my powers, I was shunted off into an alternate reality. But I still want to be a hero. Join the Wards, if they have them here?”
There were a few things there she wanted to unpack. But first things first. The report said that the PRT had first been summoned after she’d started screaming at passersby, had even caused a few small explosions to clear the area, but hadn’t actually hurt anyone before the PRT arrived. That at first negotiations had gone well, until suddenly they hadn’t. “They do have Wards here,” she confirmed, and then gently asked, “Then why did you attack the PRT?”
Betty’s face fell. “I-I- they were trying something. I had to make them back off until I could talk to a hero.”
She switched her speakers off and radioed PRT Actual. “She’s saying that you tried something?”
Actual, a Sergeant Bann, sounded baffled over the coms. “We didn’t try anything. I thought we were establishing a rapport, that I’d get her to come in without any more trouble, when it all went to hell. The only thing I tried was lifting the visor of my helmet, give her a more human face so she didn’t feel like she was talking to a bunch of stormtroopers.”
She switched her speakers back on. “What do you mean ‘they tried something’?”
“I- I-,” she looked confused. “It was all so fast. I didn’t have time to think.” Her hands started to shake.
Ease up, she thought and decided to change the line of questioning a little. It was clear that she’d thought she was under attack, and it wasn’t as though capes, especially after the trauma of having triggered recently, were immune to seeing threats where there were none.
“You said you were from a different reality. Why do you think that?” It wasn’t exactly impossible, but Earth Aleph didn’t have anything like the Protectorate, and certainly not a cape version of her. And Betty had asked for her by name.
“No one here is human!” she practically shouted, before quietening down again. “Well, not my sort of human at least. I’m sure you’re all your own sort of human.”
Betty looked human, under her shapeless top. Dragon switched to thermal to confirm. Certainly on preliminary glance, Betty looked as human as Dragon was. “What do you mean we’re not your sort of human?”
Betty balled her fists then relaxed them. “I just do, okay. It’s obvious,” her voice started to get higher pitched and louder. “It’s really obvious! Why can’t you see?” She waved her hands around and they started glowing.
“I’m sorry,” Dragon placated. “I’m sorry. Maybe it’s the resolution on my screen.”
“I’m sorry,” Betty repeated back to her. “I’m sorry. I’m… it’s just you’re the first normal person I’ve spoken to here. If it wasn’t for everything else, I could almost believe that you’re my Dragon. Not that I’ve ever spoken to my world’s Dragon,” she hastened to clarify. “But I’m a huge fan of hers, and you sound just like she does.” For the first time since they’d started speaking, it sounded like Betty was actually smiling. “She was why I wanted to be a hero. I thought… I thought I might be so scared here, trapped in a world with aliens, but she managed to recover and save so many people after Leviathan…”
For just a moment, Dragon saw waves like the end of the world again, curving the horizon ever towards her, like the sky had become solid and was coming to crush her. For a moment, it felt like she couldn’t breathe again.
When she could concentrate on the outside world again, Betty was still speaking. “… She managed to beat all that and become a hero, and so I thought I could too. Did you defeat Jörmungandr here as well? That was my favourite battle of yours in my world. I did a presentation on it at high school.” She started hiccuping again. “Oh god, I just realised I’m never going to see Ellie and Steph again.”
Wasn’t this too many coincidences? How could there be another world that mirrored this one so completely, and yet… Dragon circled back to something that had been niggling at the back of my mind. “This is just a question, I’m not blaming you, but when you attacked the PRT, was it when you realised they weren’t your sort of human?”
“I…” She paused. “Yes, yes that was it. How did you know?”
She displayed an outline of a human on her view screen. “Does this look like it could be your sort of human?”
“From that little, sure.”
She filled in details of the body, leaving just the face blank. “How about now?”
“I guess…” Betty said dubiously.
She filled in the face. “And now?”
Betty recoiled, glowing hands coming up again. “No! No!” She took a breath. “No, definitely not.”
One last check. She dropped opaque forcefields around them both. “You don’t have to do this, Betty, but could you show me your face? I promise I’ll keep it to myself.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. You’re Dragon, and even if you’re not my Dragon, you’re still her, still the person I’ve always looked up to. Just don’t hurt me if I’m too hideous.” She ripped down her hood, exposing her face for the first time, and screwing up her eyes, like she was expecting to be hit.
She looked like a completely normal teenager, pasty and spotted with acne, with dark bruises like rings of tiredness around her eyes. And, contrary to what she’d told Betty, her visual suite on this had better resolution than human vision.
Oh. She had a good idea what was going on now. It probably wasn’t even a power-related problem, not directly. Just the consequence of having what was effectively a tumour grow suddenly within someone’s head. Rare, but not exactly unknown.
“Hey,” she said. “Hey. It’s alright. I’m not going to hurt you. No one’s going to hurt you.”
Betty opened her eyes, red with crying, and looked cautiously at her. “Really?”
“Really. Now can you give me your name and address, so I can see if you have a double here too? I’m sure her parents would love to see you.”
She started to sniff, eyes bright. “I couldn’t bear if people who looked like Mom and Dad…”
“They won’t,” Dragon said. “You look like their daughter. How could they?”
Betty hesitated.
“How about I take you for a flight on this suit, and you tell me afterwards?”
A slow smile started to break across Betty’s face. “Deal,” she said.
The countdown read 7:09 by the time she got the Ladon suit back to base. She was about to get back to tinkering when she felt a vague ache in her stomach.
Oh. Yes.
Time to make sure that her digestive system didn’t completely wither away. Something not even all the IVs in her haptic suit could accomplish.
She did her best attempt at a jog across the floor of her facility, breathing unreasonably hard by the time she reached the stairs. Every time she did this, she promised herself that this time she’d start a proper exercise routine. And every time, something always came up that was more important to focus on. She looked longingly at the elevator, but puffed her way up the steps instead, all the way into her apartment.
The mundanity of it always threw her a little. It was like looking at the life of someone she’d heard about, someone she knew. Someone normal. Like a sister, maybe, if she had any family left.
But not her. This place never felt like it belonged to her anymore. Not even with thick opaque curtains over all the windows.
She wandered to the kitchen and opened the fridge to see what was left. Ugh. The remnants of an attempt at stew that she’d really meant to eat more of, some bread passed its use-by date, and some fruit and veg that had obviously been far too close to the stew. Also some milk that she wasn’t even going to attempt to sniff.
It was probably just as well that, well. She looked at the countdown display again.
7:02.
Time to raid the cans. She opened a cupboard and grabbed a can of vegetable soup, opened it up, poured it into a bowl and started nuking it. Her stomach rumbled in earnest as the aroma started to fill the room. Finally the microwave pinged. She grabbed the bowl, only to drop it and curse as the heat burned her fingers. She couldn’t help but laugh at herself. The mighty Dragon, wounded by such a simple thing.
What would everyone think if they knew? She couldn’t even imagine.
The soup tasted amazing, once she’d blown on it appropriately, filling her mouth and sliding down her throat. It was all finished far too quickly, and, as always, for a moment she wondered why she didn’t do this more often.
Then the guilt kicked in, and she couldn’t help but look at all the missions of a lower priority that she hadn’t taken, the ones that might merely have saved people in the single digits rather than the dozens.
Time. There was never enough time. Not for a cape like her.
She rinsed the bowl and spoon and stuck them in the draining rack, then rinsed the can out and stuck that in the recycling bag.
Time to get back to maintaining and improving her equipment, and going over new inventions, to see if there was anything she could do to do better in the future.
Before she knew it, there was an orange ring around her peripheral vision, and the countdown had almost reached 0:45. Her stomach flipped with nervousness, but she forced herself to be calm.
She could do this. She could take this step by step, and she could do this.
The first step was taking off her haptic suit. She winced a little as the catheter, colostomy bag and IVs retracted into the suit, then began the laborious process of wriggling out of it. As always, there were parts that stuck and rubbed her skin, leaving it slightly raw. And she really tried not to look at the little rolls of dead skin left clinging to the inside.
Thank god she had something that could clean that properly at least.
Next she hit the shower and, okay, maybe not all this was completely pointless. She sighed as the heat eased the knots of tension in her neck, back and shoulders. She grabbed the cheap, store brand body gel and applied it with a sponge, massaging all over her body, doing her best to remove any evidence that she’d spent the last week in one haptic suit, trying to avoid dwelling on all the imperfections of her human body, the way it sagged in places, the lack of tone, the way her skin hung loosely she’d lost weight more from negligence than any diet.
She briefly considered just fleeing back down into her workshop and just finding a situation, any situation, that would give her an excuse not to face this.
No. She was going to do this. She wasn’t going to fail again.
She started in on her hair, and cursed at its lank greasiness, its too-long length — almost down to her shoulders again — and at how bad a cut she’d given it last time she’d shorn it.
It wouldn’t matter. It didn’t matter.
What mattered was taking the next step, which was getting out of the shower and drying herself. She could do it.
Then it was finding some clothes. Some ordinary clothes. She laughed a little to herself as she found some loose jeans, a t-shirt and a hoodie. Well, if it was good enough for Betty… And maybe the hoodie would help hide her, at least a little.
She looked at the timer again. 0:04:38.
Oh Christ. She was going to be here any minute. Panic slammed over her like a black wave, crushing the air from her lungs. She couldn’t breathe. She had to breathe. She couldn’t- She had to- She-
When she surfaced from the blind, blank panic, and desperate clawing for air, her vision was blotchy with colours and she was trembling like a leaf. She squinted at the timer, relief flooding her when she realised it had only been just over thirty seconds. Not one of the bad ones, then. As she got her breathing back under control, she ran a hand through her unruly, ugly mane, and shoved it all under her hood.
Okay.
Okay.
She could do this.
She could do this.
The buzzer went and she almost screamed. For a moment, scrambling under the bed actually looked rather tempting. She didn’t need to be here. She could just let Magritte in to do her business and leave, just like she’d done many times before.
No.
No.
She was going to do this. She was actually going to do this.
She forced herself to the front door to her apartment and buzzed Magritte in directly, rather than just having AudreyPlus do it for her. She managed to make herself stay there, even though her heart felt like it was about to pound its way out of her chest, even as she heard Magritte’s steps echoing their way up the staircase.
This was fine. Everything was fine.
She… didn’t quite manage to get the door, but she at least stood there, gaze buried firmly in the ground as Magritte opened the door and gasped.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you. Not that it isn’t always a pleasure, but…”
Audrey — always and forever Audrey in moments like this, not Dragon, never Dragon — felt herself blush horribly, and stammered in response. “N-no, I-I mean, I-I-I-.” She closed her mouth, and then tried again. “I’m trying to, you know, stretch my limits again?” She risked a glance upwards, despite really not wanting to know what Magritte must think of her, of her appearance, just of her general condition.
Unbelievably, Magritte was just smiling openly at her, like she was somehow so pleased to see Audrey again. “That’s great!” she enthused, moving towards Audrey with an open arm, before coming to a halt and wincing. “Sorry, sorry. Always far too open with the physical affection, that’s me. But I’m really glad to see you’re feeling better again.”
Audrey winced at the reminder that she’d been this good before, maybe even a little better, before everything fell down again and she’d spent months not even able to think about coming upstairs to meet Magritte in her weekly visits. “No,” she said. “Don’t apologise. It’s… it’s a good thing, that you’re so patient with me.”
“Well, it’s not like you don’t pay me,” she said. “Not that I wouldn’t deliver your groceries anyway. I-” she stopped, smiling a little awkwardly, before continuing in a whisper. “You know I kind of worry about you.”
Audrey found it within herself to laugh, just a little. Just enough. “You don’t have to apologise for that either. Thank you.” And, mustering all her bravery, dropping her gaze back to the floor so she wouldn’t have to see Magritte’s reaction, she reached out her hand, and felt it grasped lightly and shaken once before being let go. The first time Audrey had been touched by another human being in months.
She couldn’t help herself but grin a little goofily under her hood, even if she was feeling the ever stronger urge to just run away and bury herself in machinery once again.
“Now,” Magritte said, as if sensing how overwhelmed Audrey was feeling. “I’ll just put these away and get out of your hair.”
Audrey nodded, but, suddenly unable to do so much as say goodbye, she dashed out of there and back down the stairs. But she almost skipped as she did so.
She was capable of getting better. She was. Maybe next week she could even chat with Magritte a little. Of course, common sense warned her not to get her hopes up too much, that she could fall again just as easily as she could continue to rise, but, just for the moment, she didn’t care.
Just for a moment, she could imagine a future where she got to be outside again, even if it was wrapped in a suit. Just for a moment, she dreamed that she would, some day, get to use one of the cockpits that she put in every suit.
And, just for a moment, she dared to think about flying.