Chapter Text
“You holding up alright?”
Stella’s coddling used to drive me insane. Most of the others kept their distance, not knowing how to treat me, the teenage girl who came and went and spat in the face of all known medical science. It was usually a mix of uncomfortable hero worship and jealousy, especially the doctors. I steered clear of the physicians’ lounge and used the nurses’ lockers.
I could have gladly never learned any of their names if their nametags hadn't waved them in front of my face. Stella and I became vaguely acquainted, reluctantly on my part, and when our times lined up, we would walk out to the parking lot together as she let me in on all the staff gossip.
The past weeks of crisis response shifts had changed that. No one was in the mood to swap stories about who was sneaking into Dr. Simmons’s office in Cardiology to do “you-know-what,” as Stella would put it, trying to spare my innocent ears the lurid details. Point in fact, no one had the time to do sneaking of any kind at all.
“I’m fine,” I muttered.
Word had gotten around about what I’d gone through, but to her credit, she hadn’t freaked out like I was worried she would—she was still at about her baseline level of smothering.
“Oh, sweetie, I know you are. And you said real-life words to me during the late shift! No teaching trainees the Panacea Grunting Code anymore?”
“That’s so not a thing!”
“Short grunt for don’t bother me, long grunt for get out of the room…” She closed the trunk of her car and squeezed my shoulder.
“You make me sound like one of those asshole doctors who treat nurses like crap,” I said, half-whining.
“Don’t worry,” she said, tapping her RN lanyard with a chewed fingernail. “You’re one of us. That’s why we tease you. Just take care of yourself and rest, okay? Rest! If I’d gone through what you did, I’d call out for weeks, not come back and work doubles!”
I shook my head. Hypocrite. Stella had almost lost her husband and son when the ABB was doing forced recruitment, around when all of this had started. She’d come to work the next day. Maybe that explained her relative tact when I’d returned to the hospital. She’d done the same, after all. What else was there to do?
She gave me a weak smile, as if she knew what I was thinking. “You don’t need a ride home?” she asked, even though I never accepted.
“My mom’s coming to pick me up,” I said. I wasn’t allowed to go places alone anymore. I wasn’t sure if I was being protected or monitored, but either way, it was infuriating.
She pursed her lips. “At least she’s not letting you work so late anymore. Just don’t keep everything so bottled up, okay?”
“I’m not,” I lied.
As she drove away, I sat on the curb and waited for Carol—for Mom. I restlessly played with the edge of my hood. And for the millionth time, I idly rubbed the casts I’d devised. My left thumb brushed over four separate hollow, thimble-like molds, each one shaped and clamped over my missing fingertips.
The gaps inside were small now, nearly gone.
They were almost done growing back.
~ ~ ~
As the car crawled through the broken streets that separated the hospital from home, it began to rain. The city that had survived Leviathan might have never wanted to see such weather again, but the changing of the seasons was merciless. Summer months in Brockton Bay featured a mercurial onslaught of humid heat waves, sudden showers, and evening thunderstorms.
I sat quietly in the passenger seat of the car, preoccupying myself with watching raindrops pooling in the folds of the crash wrap, listening to the stop-start hum of the engine as it advanced through traffic.
“How are things at the hospital?”
I startled. Fine, I almost responded, instinctively. Instead, I said, “Not as bad today. Lots of easier things. But there was a patient with a gangrenous leg. That one took a while.”
I couldn’t keep the shame from my voice. Again, I curled my palm and rubbed the tips of my left hand.
Carol hummed. Higher blood pressure, inflammatory markers, imbalanced immune profile: obvious signs of chronic sleep deprivation. “How are things at the office?” I asked, hesitant, still looking away, red taillights of a few other cars casting blurry lines through the wet plastic.
“Endless days of reformatting papers from decades ago,” she said. Her circulation slowed, calmed. I knew the work grounded her.
We relapsed into silence. She put the left blinker on, waiting to turn onto the street that led to our neighborhood. From there, we’d escape the worst of the roads. “And things went well with your class?”
I nodded, ignoring my bubbling hysteria. The pretend normalcy of it was almost more insane than anything else: my mom, picking me up from my part-time job, in her car, asking about school. Normal teenage things. “Yeah. Not too bad. I’m way behind, obviously, but it’s whatever.”
By class, she meant one of the annoying online courses that the PRT had set up for Wards. They’d been put on hold when the Nine came, but it seemed like they wanted most things to go right back to business as usual afterwards. Probably to project to the rest of the world that Brockton Bay could still be a functioning city. With New Wave pretty much disbanded in all but name, Vicky had been taking a few of them, as a sort-of prospective recruit. And now Carol and Mark and other adults had all decided that I had to be part of it, too. I, of course, hadn’t been consulted.
“Maybe your sister can help you catch up.”
I hummed noncommittally.
“Dad was doing well this morning,” I commented, carefully, after a few more turns of the car.
Her heartbeat picked up. A sharp, silent inhale, catching words in her mouth. She paused, before saying, “I thought so too.”
“We can keep working tonight,” I said, my voice soft. “If he’s feeling up to it.”
She pulled into the driveway and shut off the engine. Neither of us hurried to get out of the car. Rain continued to dot the plastic sheet that served as our makeshift windshield.
Finally, she said, “Don’t push yourself too hard.”
At that, something bitter, like bile, threatened to escape my mouth. I swallowed it. “Okay. Yeah.”
How are you, Mom? How are you, Amy? Are you okay? Are you doing alright?
Questions we never asked each other. Instead, we danced around them, the way doctors, unable to find the source of the illness, looked for symptoms here and there, poked and prodded and took scans of everything else. How is work? How is class? How is Vicky? How is Dad?
Maybe, with enough of these questions, we’d know the answers to the other ones. Maybe not. Either way, it had become our little ritual.
~ ~ ~
Holding my journal above my head, I went through everything I knew, step by step, hoping that something new would come to me, praying that I hadn’t forgotten something I had written down before. I hadn’t, but the prospect of losing more was scary enough that I kept checking every night anyway.
It started with the bank. I remembered having the recurring thought: that was where everything had started to go wrong. My problems from before that moment now felt so far away, so inconsequential, like a different person’s. I couldn't be sure that things I’d forgotten from before then weren't just due to time and distance.
I worked my way through the pages, all the way up to Bonesaw. Breaking my code to heal Dad. It all felt so stupid. My code was pretty much a non-issue now.
Running away from home. Long nights hopping between shelters, praying Bonesaw wouldn’t find me again. And then Mannequin attacking me with the knife, the word CHANGE inscribed on the blade. I didn't tell anyone, but I carried it with me wherever I went, hiding it in my desk drawer when I got home. The unending horror of Siberian’s test. I didn't like it, but I knew I’d be dead twice over without Skitter.
Riding with her on one of Bitch’s dogs, chasing after Siberian. There had been something about the Undersiders wanting me to join them: a comically stupid idea, I thought. But I’d still done something to help them, made a giant beetle that worked with Skitter’s power. Most of this page was filled with question marks and possibly out of order, as my grasp on the timeline of events grew fuzzy and eventually faded into nothing.
The Wards had filled me in about the Undersiders. Skitter had taken over some territory near the Docks, helping the people recover. To nefarious ends, according to the PRT. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d said to me; how she’d wanted to be a hero, once.
The last clear memory I had from that day was of burying my head between her armored shoulder blades, holding on for dear life as we went to help the rest of her team. I dreamt about her constantly: dreams where Skitter told me that I had failed and decided to punish me by directing bugs to eat me alive, and somehow worse, the ones where I found her writhing on the ground, or dying, rigid, hair slick with blood. One night, I had woken up with my arms outstretched, as if I’d been trying to heal the girl in my sleep.
From what other people had told me, I’d done things afterwards that I no longer remembered. Apparently Bonesaw had created and released a plague, which, based on a note Jack Slash had left behind, the heroes credited me with convincing her to undo, and leave the city with the rest of the Nine.
I didn’t want to believe it. No one, including me, knew what Faustian bargain I could have made; all sorts of tests and protocols performed on me afterwards had aroused no alarm.
This worried everybody. They’d wanted me, after all. It nauseated me to think about it.
It had to be some mistake, or some final lie on the Nine’s part to torment me, sow distrust. What could I have possibly done? Why had I succeeded in driving them out, where everyone else had failed?
No matter how hard I tried to remember, the next memory I had was of waking up in my own bed, where I was lying now. I’d left a gap in the recollection journal that I had started at the doctor's recommendation. A blank page in case I remembered anything else. It looked back at me, blank as ever.
When I’d woken up at home, the first thing I saw was Carol, sitting next to me, in my desk chair. She told me that Mark was with Vicky, who was recovering in the PRT medical wing. Crawler had nearly killed her, but she’d survived and was recovering. It was unexpected—I would have thought Mark would be the one watching over me while Carol worried over Vicky.
I’d gotten the story from Clockblocker, who’d gotten it from Weld, who heard it from someone who heard it from Legend, who had been the one to discover me and Victoria, lying in the street after the plague had cleared. They found the Nine’s note of concession there. Vicky had been barely conscious, muscle tissue necrotized. All blood and bone and grievous injury.
He’d found her there, hunched over me, holding me.