“What?”
“He thought he could use me to get to her, but then Caleb…”
“I got overwhelmed,” Caleb said, looking at his hands. “All the emotions … everyone’s anger … I’m the reason his power is gone. I beat it out of him.”
“God,” I breathed, wincing.
“No one blames you, Caleb,” Dr. Bright said soothingly. “You were protecting Adam. Who knows what Damien would have done.”
“Damien had his ability back by then,” Mark explained to me. “It took him a while, after our abilities collided, but he got it back. And he’s dangerous with his ability. He used it to gaslight me for months, to manipulate my sister for years, put Adam in danger…”
“I had no idea,” I said, thinking about the man crawling out of the ground and what else Damien had used his ability for.
“Yeah, he’s good at making you believe he’s a decent guy,” Mark said darkly, looking down at his hands, and my stomach dropped. “Believe me.”
“After everything you just told me, I definitely do,” I said. And I did. The way Mark talked about Damien … I know he wasn’t lying. He didn’t hate Damien, that much was obvious. I don’t think he had any reason to lie.
“I have to ask…” I started and everyone stiffened in preparation. “If Damien is really as dangerous as you guys say, why didn’t the AM just … keep him? It doesn’t seem like they have a problem with that kind of stuff.”
Mark snorted in agreement while Dr. Bright jumped in with a theory.
“I think Wadsworth is hoping that Damien’s ability will eventually come back. If she put him away or continued to experiment on him, he might not heal properly. But if he returns to his life and some semblance of normalcy…”
“He’ll bounce back,” Mark said.
“I think that’s her hope,” Dr. Bright said.
“But if his ability makes him dangerous, why would she want that?” I probed, filing away that Damien had said the same thing.
“I imagine she’d want to use it for something,” Dr. Bright said.
“Make another drug. Like the immunity,” Sam said grimly.
“Exactly,” Dr. Bright agreed.
I sat there, taking it all in, trying to separate the lies from the truth, figure out who to trust. It seemed like Damien had been lying about the AM taking away his ability, but not the fact that Atypical immunity was possible. And the big takeaway from the whole night was clear: the AM could not be trusted.
I hate when my mom is right.
The rest of the details of the night are a bit of a blur—it feels like I’ve been over here living out my own fantasy novel and, for a moment, I stepped into a companion series with its own cast of characters and plot lines. I watched the personal drama unfold in front of me, trying to pick up on as many clues as possible, and understand who—if anyone—I could trust.
I don’t really know where I’ve landed with how I feel about Dr. Bright. I don’t think anything she told me was a lie, but she’s absolutely still hiding things from me. And maybe from her friends and family too.
We did agree on one thing though: I need to find a new therapist.
FEBRUARY 4TH, 2017
I didn’t really plan on going to see Damien, at least not yet. I had planned on calling Owen or Mags or Dr. Loving, go all Nancy Drew at the AM and try to uncover a little bit more of the truth so I could line up everything that everyone had said and compare them, find the real truth amidst all the hurt feelings and different perspectives.
But the recent snowfall had melted away, and it was a cold and bright day, sunny and clear enough to go rollerblading. And without thinking, I ended up at Damien’s building.
Suspecting that Damien wouldn’t buzz me in, I waited, changing into my sneakers and tossing my skates over my shoulder, until someone left the building to get through the locked front door and then I knocked. I immediately heard footsteps rush toward the door, which swung open as fast as light, revealing Damien, looking the worst I’d ever seen him. He was wearing jeans, a ratty black T-shirt, and no shoes, comfortable and vulnerable in his own space, and his eyes were lined with red like he’d been crying.
“Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”
“Were you expecting someone else?” I asked, not waiting for an invitation and instead choosing to act braver than I felt, breezing past him to stand in his apartment.
“Please, come on in,” he said dryly, closing the door behind me and coming to stand a few feet away.
Damien cleared his throat and I refocused on him. He was standing with his arms crossed and looked down at his feet as he spoke.
“I assume you’re here to yell at me?” he asked, his voice even raspier than usual, like he’d been shouting.
“I—” Honestly, I had been, but he looked so beaten down already, it didn’t really seem fair. “No, I’m not here to yell at you.”
He looked up at that, eyes wide with surprise.
“I’m just trying to understand what the hell is going on, Damien,” I said. And then I told him everything that Dr. Bright, Mark, and the rest had told me.
He winced every single time I said Mark’s name.
“Mark—he’s … he’s your ex, isn’t he?” I asked finally, choosing which elephant in the room to address first.
“Ex something,” he scoffed, repeating my words from the other day. “Yeah.”
“You guys…” I wasn’t sure how to ask it. Knowing everything about Damien’s ability that I knew now, I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to ask. What I would be okay with knowing.
“It’s not what you think,” he said. “Nothing ever happened between us, it wasn’t—it wasn’t romantic or sexual or whatever it is you’re thinking.”
“I wasn’t thinking anything,” I lied, putting up my hands.
“I thought we were friends,” he said. “I thought that we could be … I don’t know, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
“Didn’t they die in a gunfight?” I asked. Emily loves that movie.
“Yeah, but they got out first,” he said, smiling hungrily. “They got a second act in a world where those aren’t handed out easily.”
“You wanted Mark to be your second act?” I asked, still trying to understand what Damien wants, what Mark is to him. Did he kidnap him or had they been on the run together? Was it somehow both?
“Look, Rose, why are you here?” Damien sighed. “What do you want from me?”
“I just want to understand, I guess,” I said. “I thought we were friends.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t have those.”
“But you just said—”
“I’m not going to have any answers that you like,” he said, moving into the kitchen.
“I’m not asking you to tell me what I want to hear, Damien,” I called after him, unsure if I was allowed to follow. “I just want to know the truth.”
He came back into the living room, a nearly empty bottle of bourbon in one hand and a half-filled glass in the other.
“Breaking into the booze again?” I asked sharply. “Was your afternoon hangover all but two days ago not a strong enough deterrent?”
“It’s been a rough coupla days,” he said gruffly.
“Yeah, tell me about it,” I snapped.
“Oh please, you just arrived at this party,” he said, setting the bottle on the coffee table and coming to stand in front of me again. He rubbed his forehead with his free hand, looking down at the ground, before lifting his eyes to look at me, his face pulled into a neutral mask.
“I don’t think we should see each other anymore, Rose.” He sighed before taking a big swig from his glass.
“What, are you … breaking up with me?” I asked, confused by the abrupt turn in the conversation.
“Don’t tell me you came here today to say you’re on my side,” he scoffed. “I know how this particular movie ends and I don’t really need to sit through the credits.”
“I came here today because I wanted to give you the benefit of
the doubt,” I said. “Because I know I haven’t known you for very long but I thought we were becoming good friends. I thought you understood me, I thought you could help—”
“Aha!” he hissed. “There it is, the real reason.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s not that you want to let me tell my side of the story,” he said, his smile like barbed wire, “it’s that you want to know which bits I’ve told you are true, right? You want to know if the AM really is withholding some kind of secret cure from your dad.”
I swallowed, trying to match his stare-down as best I could. I recognized the look, knew how he felt. His eyes were unblinking, filled with rage, with a kind of pent-up energy that didn’t exist anywhere else in his body, like he didn’t know how to be angry. Like he wasn’t used to getting into arguments where he didn’t immediately get everything he wanted.
“Well?” I asked finally, doing the best I could to keep my voice steady. “Were you actually going to help me?”
“What do you think?” he said, his eyes a challenge.
“I think you’re scared of the AM,” I said and he didn’t blink. “I think you’re scared of Mark.”
He flinched at that and I kept going.
“And I think that there are a lot of things we don’t understand about being Atypical and that you and I are looking for some of the same answers—”
“You still think there’s a way for the AM—the AM,” he spat, “to help your dad?”
“You weren’t lying about the immunity,” I told him. “I know you weren’t. Or about them experimenting on you, so if you think that they have all the pieces to help your friend Blaze, to help my dad then—”
“I lied, Rose! There’s no Blaze, no research about kinetic suppressants,” he yelled. “I needed another way into the AM so I manipulated you—”
“No.” I shook my head. “You don’t have your ability anymore, that’s real—”
“You think I need to use my ability to manipulate you?” He laughed. “You’re a sad, desperate girl who lives inside of dreams and would do anything to save her dad—you were the easiest mark in the world.”
That knocked me back. I was completely speechless, tears forming at the corners of my eyes as I watched Damien pour himself more bourbon. They were all so right. He is the selfish, manipulative asshole they all said he was.
“So there’s…” I said finally, my voice wobbling around the tears in my throat.
“Look,” Damien started gently, a complete one-eighty from twenty seconds ago, “if there really was a cure for those things, I’m sure the AM would tell you. They’d want to shout it from the rooftops.
“And I’m…” He sighed. “I’m sorry about your dad. That—it sucks—”
“Screw you, Damien,” I snapped. Without giving him another look, I turned around and wrenched his front door open, slamming it shut behind me.
So that’s it then. What a wasted month it’s been. I never should have gone back to the AM, never should have supported them, never should have trusted anyone connected to it. And now I’ve burned two whole weeks thinking that … well, it doesn’t matter now.
There’s nothing I can do to fix any of this.
February 4th, 2017
Dear Mark,
I saw you today. You know that, of course, but still it bears repeating. It deserves being written down. It is, quite literally, noteworthy. And you came to me. It was the last thing I expected. Especially after … well. The phone call. Not my strongest moment. But, in my defense, the past few months have been … unideal. Especially now, I thought I was making strides, I thought that maybe I could … I don’t know, make an actual friend. Try a little bit of that normal life that people are going on about.
In retrospect, making my one friend a teenage girl and spending the rest of my time trying to figure out how to exact revenge on a government organization while simultaneously trying to get my ability back may not have been the best way to get to normal but we all make mistakes. I hadn’t hurt Rose. Not yet. Not in the way she thinks.
I lied to her. She came over, twenty minutes after you left, if you can believe it. I hoped thought it was you. I rushed to the door so fast I don’t know why. You made it pretty clear that you’re never coming back.
She wanted to know if all that stuff that you told her was true. I didn’t deny any of it, didn’t even try to explain my side of things, even though that’s what she was begging me to do. The damage was done. Despite what she said, there’s no way she was going to give me a real chance to prove her wrong. I know what I sound like from the outside. My actions have always been an effective poison against me.
So I lied to her. I told her I manipulated her, that I made up everything I told her. It wasn’t fair of me to give her false hope, even if it was based on something true. Maybe the AM really will make something that could help her dad, but I really do believe they’d already have told him if it was a possibility. But I had to tell Rose that it wasn’t true. She wouldn’t have stopped, she’d just keep burying herself deeper and deeper into the AM looking for something that might not exist and I … I needed to give her a concrete reason to write me off.
That was the right thing to do, right? I have no idea what the right thing to do was—that’s what I had you for—but all I know is that there were no good choices.
A lot of things in my life have felt unfair but I know this one is. I had a clean slate—a real, true clean slate. No ability, no one coming after me … a chance to start over. I’m not saying that Rose and I would have become best buds but … I don’t know. It felt like she maybe understood.
Then again, it felt like you understood. And you just told me, in no uncertain terms, that you don’t. Or you don’t want to. Whatever the truth of your feelings or your ability to forgive me, to give me a clean slate, to understand me and give me a second (okay, third, fourth, infinite) chance, you’ve made your choice. You don’t want me around anymore. You’ve told me to leave.
I scorched the earth beneath us and you’re salting the ground—that’s what you said. I thought letting Rose go, pushing her away, was what you’d want me to do. Now I’m not so sure.
You were a good navigator, Mark. People really don’t appreciate paper maps, but even now, with smart phones and satellite GPS and everything else, there are huge parts of this country that push you completely off the grid. People who drive around without an atlas in their backseat pocket are idiots—the last thing you want is to get stuck in the desert with no reception, seventy miles from the nearest gas station, with the sun going down.
But you loved looking at the paper maps and telling me where to go. On the best days, you would tell me to take a turn because you thought there might be a cool lake or forest just down that road and you missed the open air so much. Half the time, it’d turn out to be a mall parking lot. That’s what I get for having a Rand McNally from 2003.
I bought new maps. I was hoping that we
It’s back to the open road for me, I guess. You asked me to leave and, for once, I’m going to do what someone asks of me.
III
SMOKE
03-01-2017, morningwafffles, text post
Thanks for all the love you’ve been filling my in-box with the past few days! I was pretty nervous about posting this most recent chapter and it’s been SUCH a relief to see it go over well.
A lot of you have been surprised by the twist I threw in there and some of you are mad at me. And I get it. I advertised the story as something that it didn’t end up being. But I’ve removed the Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers tag from AO3 so that new readers don’t pick up a tin of tuna only to find out it’s beans. For those of you that are already in deep (I mean, god, I’ve already written 80,000 words, I would understand if you didn’t want to give up now—I hope you don’t!), I promise you, all the rest of the tags that have been there since the beginning are true. There will still be a Happy Ending. I’m not interested in telling storie
s that don’t have a happy ending.
Now, you might be wondering, why the sudden change? Why introduce Bucky being the Winter Soldier when the whole story hasn’t been about that? Have I been planning this twist since the beginning? A question to which my response is just a very long laugh. You guys know I’m a pantser through and through. This is why I love writing fanfic and why my original work tends to be short-form poetry, emphasis on short. With someone else’s words, I can wing it, see how the story organically develops and always have canon to fall back on (or, more often, viciously rip apart).
So, no, I didn’t know that I was going to bring all the superhero stuff into it from the beginning. But you guys know I love angst (in my stories at least—in my real life … well, that’s a post for another day. Actually that’s a post for never and probably something I should talk about with a licensed professional instead) and I thought it might be interesting if we—and Steve—learned that Bucky had this big secret the whole time. Should he be pissed? Should he be relieved that he finally has an answer for why Bucky sometimes gets cagey and withdrawn? Does he choose to stay with him even after his understanding of his partner and, frankly, his entire perception of the world has completely shifted? Does he just accept the fact that Bucky has a whole network of former assassins and superpowered people in his life? Because I think it would be reasonable if he totally freaked out. I think it would be reasonable if he got mad and wanted to break things off because he’d just had his world thrown totally upside down and feels like he doesn’t even know the person that he’s been falling in love with. That’s going to rattle anyone!!
Anyway. I’m not here to defend my own creative decisions as correct or better than where someone else might have taken the story but I just … I thought it would be interesting to explore. Trust me, I want them to end up happy together as much as you do, and I’m going to do my damnedest to get us there. I’m just not sure … how yet.
That’s life though, right? You get thrown a curveball and you hope that you’ll be able to catch it, but sometimes it just smacks you in the face. The most important thing is that you don’t let it knock you out.
Some Faraway Place Page 24
