Chapter Text
My bed felt lumpy and squishy. The scent of iron stung my nostrils. My hands: wet and sticky all over. I slowly opened my eyes to an unfamiliar living room.
"Mmmnh..." My head throbbed as my eyes focused. Carpet. Photos of capes, unmasked, posing like they were taking a family photo. I clumsily moved a hand to try to rub the sleep out of my eyes and saw crimson.
My hand. Woozy, swaying. Knuckles, entirely drenched in blood. Fingers too, mostly; it had dribbled down the slender things, traced the edges of my fingernails, formed back into little beads of life that had drip-drip-dripped onto the carpet while I slept. Splatter on the back of my hand, my wrist, my arm. The blood had dried enough to turn darker, and when my fingers twitched, the surface cracked to reveal a brighter hue.
Something welled up in my stomach. I stared at an oily, thick red clump clinging to the skin between my middle and ring fingers, slowly drooping down as I separated the digits.
"Awake, little psycho?" asked a soft voice. Behind me. I tried to turn my head, finding the rest of my body working in a similarly uncoordinated fashion as my hand, and--
corpse. skull pulped brown hair caked with gore scalp loosely hanging down bits of bone in the brain the brain wasn't all there some on my hands my face and the one intact brown eye open lifeless dull freckles covered in blood
I would've screamed, if I hadn't promptly thrown up. I still tried. The bile stung my throat.
Footsteps. Vibration. Approaching. I couldn't–my hands pawed at the blood and vomit on the floor, finding no strength or maneuverability to push myself upright. Or even off the corpse I was lying atop of. The voice's black, shiny leather shoes entered my field of vision.
They prodded my face with their foot. "Yeah, you're awake. I hope you're happy. You sicken me, you know? I'd kill you, but...."
"Whuhghml," I groaned. That was supposed to be words, but my tongue felt like a dead slug and was half as responsive as one. The stranger crouched and, for the first time, I got a look at their face...mask?
A cape, then. The man(?) wore a black suit and what looked like a framed layer of caramel on his face. How he saw through the opaque block, I could not tell. The frame seemed to be made of wood.
"...look at you." There was disdain in his voice. A sliver of guilt, too. "Are you getting your rocks off yet? Con-fucking-gratulations, you're a special sort of sick. There's a million bastards in Broston Bay to choose, and you kill her? And I felt bad for you."
He reached towards me and tousled my blood-clotted hair with a gloved hand. "You utter lunatic, you. I'd stay here to give an account of exactly what happened, but, you know how the older one is."
"Or, well, I suppose you don't. Born anew and all that. But I still hold your actions against you. Eat shit and die. Excruciatingly. I hope there's a cannibal in the Birdcage who craves live flesh."
A sharp pain and a tearing sound from my scalp. I drooled on the corpse I was lying on and winced. The man dropped a tuft of black, wet hair on my face and stood. He stepped away.
Naturally, I protested to this state of affairs. My tongue still refused to cooperate, and all I got out was a groaned "Nnngphh!" before my situation deteriorated with a slam-crunch.
I screeched from the bottom of my puke-leaking maw as something was dropped...well, around me. And on top of my fingers. The sound was jarring and hurt my ears, but the flat crushing pain in four of my right hand's fingers was all I really felt. Like smushed sausages, they held up a heavy metal coffin. Casket? It could've been a locker too, except it was too thick and heavy to be one.
Pain and adrenaline let me rip my right hand back up to my chest. And the verb was rip, not wrench, or pull, or snatch: after the first joint, the coffin's edge dug in enough to tear the skin off and snap the tendons of several fingers. My pinkie survived mostly unscathed, but the three larger ones were bust.
What a special hell this was to wake up in. I screamed myself hoarse, threw up the rest of my stomach acids and digestion, and can only assume I passed out before I could feel too much of my fingers disintegrating in the vile mixture.
⁂
This was my introduction to the waking world. I don't offer it as an excuse for what I would do, simply as set dressing. For the first however many hours of my life – as I consider it – my experience was pain, nausea, and a cooling corpse for company in a cramped, dark coffin.
My eventual reintroduction to light was abrupt and violent. At this point, I was too out of it to commit much detail to memory. A crash that made the coffin rattle. Screaming. The coffin was lifted, I saw gold and white and little else as my eyes readjusted. More screaming. I felt the instinctual fear of a rabbit in its warren when a wolf is digging at the door.
Then I was struck, and my next memory began elsewhere entirely.
A hospital bed. My hand was in a cast, my everything wrapped in bandages, I could not see from my left eye. Men – or women; what did I know – in dark PRT uniforms and face-covering helmets snapped their heads to look at me the moment I stirred. Two at the back of the room, fingers moving onto the triggers of their weapons.
"Don't try to escape," one of them said. "You're under arrest for first degree murder with parahuman powers." The other one grunted. Something about their voices made it clear they would've preferred if I tried to escape.
Those were not containment foam sprayers in their hands, I thought.
⁂
I was interrogated that night by a dark-skinned man in blue Tinkertech armor, for all the good it did.
What is your name? I don't know. What were you doing at the Dallon household? I don't know. Relationship with the victim. None, as far as I know. How did you acquire the Tinker drugs found in your system? I didn't know I was under any. Was it the Merchants? I don't know who those are. Did you have parahuman powers before tonight? I wasn't aware I had any to begin with.
Why did you kill Amy Dallon?
The man left, looking as put upon as he did when he arrived. Later, a lighter-skinned woman – though not as light as I was – arrived. She was wearing some kind of camo and a flag-themed scarf. By her waist, a green-glowing sphere shifted form from lethal weapon to lethal weapon.
She asked me largely the same questions the man did. I explained about the suspected cape that was there with me when I awoke. Unlike the armored man – Armsmaster, apparently – she entertained some questions of mine and answered them. Despite her obvious distrust of me.
A cloying sense of familiarity tugged at my mind. I could not tell you why.
What I could tell you was this: no legal identity was found for me. A Jane Doe, they said. I would be kept in the hospital – actually the medical bay of something called The Rig, but if it looks like a hospital and quacks like a hospital... – until the Tinker drugs in my system were flush and I had regenerated from my wounds.
Because I was a cape. Suspected fresh trigger; something in my brain called Corona Pollentia was showing signs of inflammation. And I was healing faster than normal. The victim's sister had done a number on me when she'd found me, and if it weren't for my powers, I would've been a smear on the walls.
So, I'd won the power lottery in this case. Alas, my destroyed left eye showed no signs of healing, unlike my broken spine and arms. Cracked skull. Bruised ribs, collapsed lung – you get the idea.
And so it was that a week later I found myself in a courtroom. It was not a tastefully furnished hall with wooden paneling and mahogany tables. White drywall and plastic chairs. Myself, I was shackled in both legs and hands, and muffled like a dog. The judge looked angry with me the moment I walked in that room.
My public defender tried for an insanity defense, citing a drug interaction, lack of direct evidence that I had killed the woman, and a lack of motive. By the time the prosecutor was done, even my attorney looked angry at me. And I couldn't really blame him.
Here were the facts. At 21:15, the door cam of the Dallon house showed me entering the premises. No sound was recorded in the cameras, but Amy Dallon seemed to know me. She gave me a hug, and I felt strange watching myself on screen hug someone I only knew as a corpse.
The living room camera footage was unavailable due to a faulty Wi-Fi connection that meant it was not saved anywhere. Amy was last seen alive on the kitchen camera at 21:23, bringing out a cup of tea to the living room.
At this point, the prosecutor brought in a testimonial from someone called Dragon regarding the drug that I'd been found with. The name was a bunch of numbers and letters, but the gist of it was: super strength in a syringe. All of its known side effects were physical: lethargy, weakness, lack of coordination. No derangement, hallucinations, nothing.
The clip of us hugging was played again. Amy showed no signs of receiving a Brute hug. Ergo; I had no trouble controlling my strength during the drug's effect. The half-life calculations of the remnants of the drug in my blood suggested I had received a dose one to one and a half hours before the visit began.
At 21:29, a masked man in a suit appeared on the Dallon doorstep. After staring at his watch for a while, he entered at 21:30.
Cue witness.
"The prosecution calls to direct examination one parahuman, masked identity Jamais Vu."
The man with a writing slate for a mask entered the stand. I could not see his eyes, but I knew he was judging me, just like everyone else in the room. Including myself.
The prosecutor, a short-haired blond woman with a look of absolute cold fury on her face, asked her questions with a voice like steel.
"Most of your abilities are a matter of public record, but would you mind clarifying to the court what is it that you do, Jamais Vu?"
"I perform services for clients involving the erasure of one or more memories from the client my parahuman power. The procedure is, as far as I know, permanent."
"What were you doing at the Dallon household on the night of the murder?"
"I was meeting with the accused to perform a full memory wipe on them. It was explained to me that she had a particularly difficult life and suffered from severe depression, and was desperate enough to start her life over in the hopes that it would fix things. It was also explained that while the healer Panacea could not affect brains, she could check them over for...whatever signs depression leaves in the brain."
"Is it true that you do not witness or experience the memories you erase in any way?"
"When performing a full memory wipe, no, I do not."
"So you did not witness what the defendant had done in the household prior to your arrival?"
"No, ma'am."
At this point, there was an objection from my defender. They pointed towards me being able to walk, talk, and having any knowledge as all as evidence that a full memory wipe had not occurred, and therefore, according to the PRT file on Jamais Vu's powers, page something something, he should've known something. But he claims he didn't, so he is misrepresenting the truth.
Jamais Vu clarified that by a 'full memory wipe' he meant something closer to an 'episodic memory wipe', ie. all personal experiences instead of knowledge and skills. Plus people and places, which for some reason his power considered as episodic.
This sounded accurate to my experience, unfortunately. Even more unfortunately, the objection was overruled, and the direct examination continued.
"What happened next, after you arrived?"
"The accused let me in and asked me to start the procedure. I found it unusual, but I chalked that up to her being eager to start her new life. She showed me a notebook that she said she'd written all the important bits to tell her new self in, and that Amy would help too. I sat down on a stool – my power leaves me temporarily catatonic while I use it to this degree - and asked one final time before activating my power."
"Would you clarify to the court what 'temporarily catatonic' means in this context, and how your power takes effect?"
Jamais Vu glanced at his clock. "I touch the person to begin the process, and then I'm immobile and insensate while I erase memories. A total wipe like this usually takes a minute or two. The process is not gradual, more like a...balloon that fills until it's popped? I'm told it feels 'ticklish' in the brain, but nothing happens until I come out of the trance. When I do, the targeted memories are erased."
"Can the target of your powers walk, talk, or otherwise act during the process?"
"Yes. However, the sudden memory loss is usually very disorienting. Often to the degree it renders the recipient unconscious, so people usually lie down for it."
"Did you see any signs of A–" the prosecutor's voice cracked. I glanced towards her, but if she made a face, it was gone now. Fury remained. She cleared her throat. "–the victim's presence, dead or alive, before the procedure?"
"I could hear the TV was on, but I suppose that's not proof of anything. I didn't see any blood or anything else amiss on the accused or the foyer, for that matter."
I didn't think it possible, but the prosecutor's expression tightened further. Like taut leather. Skin two sizes too small for her skull.
"What happened after the procedure ended?"
Jamais Vu sighed. He faced me and pointed a finger at me. It was gloved. "I went to look for this fuckface and found her on top of Panacea's corpse in the living room, with her hand covered in brain. I said a few words, pissed as I was to find out I'd been played something fierce, and decided to get the hell out of dodge before Demolition Dallon came around and made collateral damage of me. Oh, and the fucking...coffin-thing was upright at the feet of the murder pile. I knocked it over. I'd say I did it so she wouldn't run, but frankly, a little bit of claustrophobic confinement was the least that she'd earned."
Jamais Vu was mildly cautioned for his speech, but the court was clearly on his side. It did not get better from there.
My defender tried, but even he was unhappy with how obviously I had murdered Amy Dallon. Lack of premeditation? Cue footage timestamped with 21:31 of me sneaking out of the backdoor, going offscreen, coming back with a...homegrown Saw-trap-ass rectangular metal box on my back. Ineptly welded, rusty.
Investigators found that it had been made out of scrap from somewhere called the Ship Graveyard.
Someone else did it and knocked me out? The windows were locked from the inside, no signs of forced entry. No one else entered after the rest of the Dallon family left for a patrol that night at 21:00.
It was an accident, a fight gone wrong, circumstance? Exhibit A: hug. Exhibit B: carrying in a big fuck-off coffin. Exhibit C: high enough on brawn boosters to cave a skull in.
The notebook wasn't listed in the evidence. Someone stole it, evidence of a third party? Paper ashes in the fireplace, along with a ring binder were found.
Divine intervention? God was dead.
So.
"Jane Doe, real identity unknown. The court finds your actions deliberate and premeditated, done with obvious intent to not only kill but to try to avoid the consequences via an elaborate scheme using another parahuman's abilities. Furthermore, the court finds your actions abhorrent. Considering all the facts and the circumstances, and the undoubtedly heroic character of the victim, I find there to be sufficient cause to sentence you outside the scope of the Three Strikes Protection Act. This court finds you guilty for the murder of Amy Dallon, a.k.a. the hero Panacea, and sentences you to indefinite imprisonment in the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center."
Down Shit Creek, there went my paddle.