Chapter Text
Amelia smiles at Taylor, swinging their held hands as they walk along the very crowded Boardwalk. "Do we need anything in particular, or are we just window shopping?”
Taylor says, “So, there’s this shop that sells some specialty tea flavors that I wanted to try, and it also has chocolate. I was thinking we should treat ourselves. What do you think?”
Her eyes go wide, “Oh! I heard of that place, Specialtea Chocolatte, the coffee place, too, right?”
“Yeah, it’s got a really fancy shopping section, and I want to have you go through it and buy what you want. My treat.”
“What’s the spending limit?”
“Uh… five hundred dollars, I guess?”
Amelia stares at Taylor, “What?!?” Tugging her lightly closer with their connected hands, “You’re joking, right? Right?”
“You want more? I guess I could go higher, I mean it wouldn’t be that hard to-”
“No!” Amelia yelps, feeling lightheaded. Is this how Vicky feels with Dean? To be just given an insane amount of money and told it’s okay to buy candy and other frivolities with it?
“You don’t have to spend all of it, you know,” Taylor says. “I was thinking of the five hundred as our week’s amount to spend.”
“Oh, okay.” Still a lot, but not as insane as she assumed before. “Are we going to a movie?”
“Do you want to go to a movie? I’m okay doing it if you want to? I can’t think of a movie I want to see, but if you can, we can. Remember, we need to meet up with the others in an hour, so we’d be watching with them.”
“I can’t exactly forget,” she points at Taylor’s hand, where there’s a markered message for the time and place where to go. Mostly since Amelia is wearing fingerless gloves to hide her own soulmark, a thought that saddens her more than she can describe. Just like how Taylor wearing lipstick to hide her soulmark is so sad.
Taylor laughs, pulling her along, making sure to dodge the various people around them, with a bright smile that makes her heart melt. “I know, I know! Still, let's go have fun, and it’ll all be okay! Let’s have fun on our date!”
“Yeah, I’ll have to just-” Amelia starts, only to be interrupted by a hand on her shoulder.
“Excuse me, Amy?”
She turns and it’s one of Vicky’s friends, who always sits at the lunch table. Nicky… something. Look, she doesn’t exactly go around memorizing Vicky’s friends' last names.
That’s not her thing.
She scowls, “Did you need something? My name isn’t Amy.” And it isn’t. While she’s out on the date, it’s Amanda. Taylor is Tyla, or Tye.
“Uh, do you think I wouldn’t recognize you, Amy? It’s me, Nicky! We sit together at lunch. Even with the dyed green hair and makeup, I know what you sound like.”
“I don’t know who the hell you are, but you can leave me alone. I’m on a date,” Amelia says, moving closer to Taylor, and leaning on her.
Taylor asks sharply, voice dangerous, and looming ever so slightly over Nicky, “Is there a reason you’re harassing Amanda?”
Nicky seems to catch on that she’s causing a scene in the middle of the Boardwalk, and scowls, “Amy, I don’t know what’s wrong with you! You got kidnapped, and now you don’t recognize me!”
“My name is Amanda, I’m here on a date with my soulmate, and I don’t know you! What’s your problem?”
Nicky looks around, and can’t see many friendly eyes in the crowd, so mutters something unintelligible. The girl slinks off, hurrying away, thank fuck.
Pulling Taylor along, she says, “Come on, Tye, let’s go to that cafe we were talking about.”
Taylor follows, brows furrowed, a frown on her face, “That girl is going to be a problem.”
“No, it’ll be fine,” she insists. Her voice drops down low to explain, “Nicky is all talk, if I remember right. A real worrywart, though. Just not much of a doer, however. Now if it was any of Vicky’s other friends, it would be something to be fucked up about, or if Nicky met up with them, yeah, that would be a problem.”
“She’s getting in a car with a bunch of other people right now?”
“What do they look like?”
Taylor gave her an apologetic look, murmuring, “I can’t tell? Bug senses are horrendous. They suck so badly.”
Gesturing Taylor down a bit, she kisses her soulmate’s cheek, “It’s okay. That’s a project for another day. Let’s go to the cafe.”
“Okay,” Taylor says, smiling at her, and they head out to go have a good time.
--
After they finish their drinks and small desserts in the cafe, Taylor tells Amelia, “I need to use the bathroom. I’ll be back in a bit. You go wander around and see what chocolates you’d like in the store. I’ll meet up with you soon enough.”
“Okay.” She gets up to walk with Taylor, passing by the counter where they paid earlier, and heads back out to the main store area while Taylor goes to the restroom.
Amelia instantly turns to the chocolates. She ignores the prices listed, knowing that Taylor will insist on getting on what she wants, and goes searching for what looks most interesting.
She eventually walks to the front of the store to pick up a basket to drop a few of her choices into, and then heads to the tea section. She wants to see about getting some loose leaf black tea of some sort. She’s sure that Taylor will be better at this than her, but right now, Amelia is just gonna look and make choices on what she knows she likes, or what seems cool.
For example, she approaches a display of clear teapots with a ball of dried tea that turns into a flower, and looks really pretty on the box. Amelia crouches down, studying it, not wanting to pick one up just yet. It says the little teapot is made of borosilicate glass, which means that it can go on a stovetop if one wanted, but mostly that it will absolutely hold boiling water.
She straightens up, and picks up a box; inspecting it further. It’s a white tea, so she isn’t sure if she wants it. But the idea of it is so very interesting….
She taps her teeth with her thumbnail, thinking it over before placing the box in her hand in the basket in her other arm. She wants it, and Taylor won’t say no. May as well.
She’s about to turn around when a hand is placed on her arm, and she absently says, “Yes, Tyla? I grabbed a teapot and-”
“Amy Dallon,” a masculine voice says, and she turns to see a fucking PRT trooper with a full facemask and uniform touching her. “You are to report to the PRT Headquarters now.”
“No, fuck off. I’m not Amy Dallon, I’m Amanda Lumi. Go to hell.” She attempts to shake off the man’s arm, “Let go of me.”
“I’m under orders to take you to the PRT Headquarters.”
“Yeah, well, you can fuck right off. I’m not going, and you got the wrong damned person, asshole. I’m not Amy Dallon. Do I look like her?”
“You look like her with makeup on and with hair dye, so yes.”
“Well, you’re fuckin’ wrong, go to hell, and eat shit. Now let me go!” She yanks hard on her arm, hoping to be let go, but all she manages to do is hurt herself a bit. She yelps in pain at that.
It seems that the trooper takes her moment of disorientation as an opportunity, and starts to pull her along to the front of the store, lifting her off her feet. He says, “Come with me to the truck, Amy Dallon, no more games.”
At this point, she can’t get her feet under her, so she yells, “Help! Help! Kidnapping! I’m not Amy Dallon, and I’m in the bonding stage of my soulmate process! Tyla is in the bathroom! Help!” She just hopes anyone will listen. Sha can see the various other customers staring and recording on their phones, so hopefully something will happen.
That does seem to get a few people to rush to the restroom, but Amelia is shortly yanked out of the building, and several other troopers start to block several people from trying to come forward to try to save her as she’s bodily yanked along into the back alley and into an official PRT van. Mostly since the only way to get into the boardwalk with a vehicle is by using the backways.
The door slams shut, and the man holding her says, “Drive.”
“Don’t we need her soulmate?”
“We have our orders. Go.”
“I don’t feel comfortable-”
“I said, go.”
“Fuck, on your head, then, asshole. I hope you know there’s a special place in hell for you.”
The backroads also makes it less of a publicity nightmare as she’s driven away quickly from her soulmate, causing a horrendous tearing and ripping feeling inside of her that shouldn’t exist. Like someone is reaching deep inside of her on a fundamental level deep within her guts. A pain she can’t describe, and all she can do is scream and howl, perhaps claw and rip at her insides.
“Shit, grab her!” Amelia hears someone yell, but that’s all she can make out before she’s too lost to the pain to care about what’s going on.
--
Brian is leaning on the counter, watching as Alec and Lisa are picking through various shirts and pants in the clothing store they’re at. He doesn’t see what they’re so damn picky about, since he just chooses what fits and gets on with his life, but they just call him an idiot when he says that.
He raises when Lisa gets a phone call, and she looks visibly confused as she checks the number. “Yes, boss?”
The boss? That’s… surprising. The man never calls when they’re in public. Like, ever. It’s like the man has a sixth sense for it. So this is very new.
“Specialtea and Chocolatte, yes, sir! We’ll be there to pick up Tyla right away!”
Taylor? What about Amy, uh, Amelia? He watches as Lisa drops all of her clothing down, and snags Alec’s clothing to put it down, too. The smaller boy yelps, “Hey!”
“No time! We gotta go! Tyla needs our help, and we can’t buy any clothing right now!” Lisa snaps, snagging the both of their hands, and pulling them out of the store, before hurrying along the boardwalk, and lamenting, “I shouldn’t have worn high heels!”
“Sucks to be you,” Alec gloats, actually keeping pace as they hurry along.
Brian’s phone goes off, and he does an honest to god double take at the caller. Sophia. His soulmate only calls rarely, and never in the middle of the day. So he answers cautiously, like he’s handling a rattlesnake, which for all he knows, this interaction is. “... Hello?”
“About damn time you picked up,” Sophia snaps, which is annoying, since he answers his phone fast.
“What do you what, Soph-”
“No names.”
He snaps his mouth shut audibly, and he finally registers that she’s whispering. Shit. He asks, very gently, “What’s going on?”
“I should be asking you that!” she whispers harshly. “I just watched some screaming, green haired girl, that they kept calling Amy Dallon, get pushed into the medical bay while strapped on a medical bed! On Armsmaster’s orders! You wanna tell me something?”
“What the fuck? I don’t know what’s going… on….” He stares up in the air, spotting the gathering swarm of bugs, “Well, shit. I think I have a clue now.”
He carefully nudges a hobbling Lisa, and asks, “Hey, L,” knowing she’d understand the reason he’s using her first initial, “was the call from the boss about Amanda going missing?”
“Yes.”
“Shit.” He refocuses on the phone, “Hey, S?”
“No, I think I got it, Amanda is the green haired chick, and she’s got a soulmate.”
“Amanda is Mantis’s soulmate.”
“... Well, that explains a lot. Fuck. So when they say she’s Amy Dallon?”
“Yeah.”
“Son of a bitch.”
He licks his suddenly dry lips, even as he keeps his steady fast pace. “... Yeah.” He very much wants to curse with her, but he can’t, he has to be the strong one. He has to be the stoic one.
So he’s very glad that on the other side of the line, Sophia is freaking out for him. Cursing rather a lot, and snarling softly into the phone. Normally he’d be getting angry or tired of her while she does this, since it would be directed at him for not joining the heroes, but now? Now it’s… nice. It’s her sympathizing with him.
Brian likes it.
He smiles a tiny bit as he waits for her to work herself out, and get to what she wants to say. Finally, she says, “I’m going to talk to the other Wa- my coworkers. Get them to help me get Amanda out of here. We’ll coordinate something. You got me?”
“I do. I believe in you.” And weirdly, he does. If anything, he knows that the Wards will be sickened by what is happening to Amelia and Taylor. They’re going to want to reunite the two. Soulmates should not be separated in the bonding period, for just this reason.
There’s a reason it’s illegal.
“You damn well better believe in me,” Sophia says, sounding pleased.
With that, he huffs a laugh, and lets her hang up on him. Shaking his head, he refocuses on the mission in front of them, and loses his smile. They get to the cafe, and there’s a huge crowd there, and the sound of screaming. Lisa, thankfully, is on the case, getting them in easily.
She manages to find whoever the hell is in charge, and somehow fast talk him into letting them inside to where Taylor is laying just outside of the woman’s bathroom. Thankfully, not inside of it.
Instantly, Lisa has Taylor’s head in her lap as Taylor screams in pain, hurting their ears, and Lisa yells, “She has an irregular heartbeat! We need to take her to the hospital!”
Brian knows that’s her either powers talking or she’s making shit up to give them an excuse to get out of there, but he can see her fingers on Taylor’s wrist. At least she’s playing to the crowd.
“What?!?” someone yells, but Brian ignores them to scoop Taylor in his arms.
He yells, “I’m taking Tye to the hospital!”
“I can call an ambulance,” the manager yells back, over Taylors screaming, as she curls up against him in a way to seek comfort. He adjusts his hold, making sure she’s more secure in his arms.
Lisa shakes her head, “Do we look like we can afford an ambulance?”
The manager looks confused, “She had four hundred and fifty dollars in her wallet.”
“Had?” Alec asks, looking angry, and taking out Taylor’s wallet to check it. There was over four hundred and fifty bucks, a bus pass, and a photo of her mom. Lisa takes it from him, and Alec yells, “Hey!”
“Enough of that, let’s go to the car, and to the hospital. Come on.”
The trip to the car is simultaneously shorter and longer than it took to get to the cafe. Shorter since no one is willing to get in their way since they’re carrying a screaming person, but longer since it’s a longer distance. Once in the car, Lisa is cuddling and soothing Taylor to the best of her abilities in the back seat, and Brian is buckling up in the driver’s seat. “Am I really going to the hospital?” he yells.
“Yes! She has arrhythmia! It’s super dangerous, and we need to take care of her as soon as possible.”
Alec asks, “You think Amelia has that, too?”
Lisa shakes her head, “Doubtful! Everyone acts differently to bonding separation! Or that’s what the small amount of research we have shows!”
AKA, the shit from wars and other horrible times, or sometimes accidents. Preferably accidents. The accidental ones talk about the feeling of broken bones magnified to the millions. One person saying that it concentrates in the hands, another in the toes, one in the sinuses. The ears, the chest, the stomach, the spine, the kidneys, the back…. The list goes on. He’s surprised that Alec doesn’t know this, honestly, it’s something everyone learns as a basic soulmate education.
It’s why no one tries to separate during their bonding time.
So Brian heads to the hospital closest to the PRT building, which is, unfortunately, not close enough to help with the bond.
Fuck.