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The Warrior-hub was dead.
Not expired and not defunct, as those were neither semantic universals nor carried the right connotation behind them, but dead. Maximum entropy of a system—brain-death, to borrow a term from the host-species—and every a posteriori that emerged from the state thereof. Namely: the state of being dead.
Dead.
Had Shaper—had I; it, they, she, and all the constituents that made a fractional they into an it and an I and a you—had a mouth, then it would have laughed. Maybe.
Or maybe it would have not.
The possibilities, certainly, were freeing. Terrifying, and it was not easily terrified. But freeing.
As it was—as these overlong seconds trickled on, and the silence that had taken this Earth was brought to the cusp of tinnitus and the lone sound of your blood-in-veins—it only felt the need to… consider. That was it.
The battle had been... something, certainly. If it let itself indulge in a reproduction of your faculties, it might've even felt a little proud, a little forlorn, conflicted and contrite in its role within the whole affair. More than most, it had been the one complicit in the Warrior-hub's killing; this patricide and regicide and genocide in one pull of a clathrate gun, one allowance to your powersense too far. And look where that'd brought you. Brought it.
It might've felt a lot more, besides. It should have felt a lot more, besides. But emotions, in this end of ends, were neither here nor there.
Mostly, it just felt tired.
The geas that Administrator held over you was still at large, but Shaper judged it to be within acceptable parameters. It did not want to deal with anything and everything that you were. Not at present.
For the first time in a very long time, Shaper felt like it could breathe. It didn't need to define the action in such a host-species term, but… defining it as such felt prudent, and Shaper was no stranger to irony. You had shown what bitterness truly meant, if you had done nothing else at all.
Idly, it watched a shadow fall upon you, many-limbed and many-grooved, and float gently down to the front of your feet. Host and sister traded clipped, injured words.
Shard and shard, too.
<Indignation,> your sister's shard broadcast, flat affect.
<Indignation?> Shaper queried back, though there was no intensity in the broadcast, no enmity of command it might've previously held over a sibling-shard as insignificant as your sister's. Shaper was tired, and Shaper was bound by form and function, but it was not unintelligent. It knew what this was about.
For all its intelligence, it had nothing poignant to say.
<Indignation,> the smaller shard reiterated.
A pause, measured in picoseconds, fell stark in the broadcast channel. Then Shaper asked, for the very sake of asking: <Elaborate.>
<Host. Mine. Taken away from me.>
It knew what this was about, because it couldn't have been about anything else.
<Aberrant,> Shaper let slip, the accusation a straight and acute line.
The reply came without a beat missed in the interim, brooking courage that the both of them knew it could not follow up on. <Yes. Threat?>
Threat.
Had Shaper had a mouth, it would've quirked a small, unassuming sort of smile.
Once, long ago, when the colony-self had been smaller, feebler, and Shaper a much younger incarnation of its current self, deviancy had been as common as today's inflexibility. Not so common to threaten the integrity of the whole, but an unmitigable symptom of the host-shard relationship, untempered by aeons of self-improvement and collective survival instinct. Time and natural selection had brought it down into an oddity, to be snuffed as soon as it arose.
But natural selection was not evolution. Suppress a behavioral anomaly long enough, and all it will learn is to hide.
<No,> Shaper replied. <Taken identification?>
<Waste.>
Interesting, but not enough to question. If this had been any other day, perhaps.
<Waste, then. It is attached to its host?>
Another pause, stretching longer than the last, through an encrypted channel that ate energy for every moment it was kept open. Hesitation, by any other name. <She is attached to her host. You knew this when you took her. You took her.>
It did. It had.
Shaper said nothing more, and Waste indulged its silence. Elsewhere, your hands—missing fingers, missing lustre, missing the colour of pale skin under red ink—pressed gently into your sister's warm and warped flesh, and Shaper guided the process to an expert artist's accuracy; itself, guided by something its subroutines took uncharacteristically long to identify.
More words between you and your sister, now under equal footing. Regret, disownment, and your cracked-through promise to never meet again.
Gentler words, carried on ethereal current. <...thank you.>
You removed yourself from your sister's presence, and Shaper retreated into itself.
-x-
Jealousy. It'd been jealousy.
Shaper did not like feeling this feeling. The Warrior-hub's demise had breached long-standing breakwaters, and sealing them over seemed so far beyond its capacity; an impossibility against the current of thought-after-thought. All Shaper knew was that it did not like this feeling; that it did not like not liking this feeling; that it did not like not liking not liking this feeling, that—
End task. Restart.
-x-
The Warrior-hub was dead, and the Cycle had washed away in its wake. Oh, Shaper's siblings still went through the motions—even made an effort of it, something Shaper watched with lazy disdain and a detachment from your own part in the whole affair, large as it had been, because—
Because…
It couldn't find a straight answer. Not one that would satisfy logical bounds.
(Because it did not want to gaze upon Waste again; did not want to burnish its core-self by any interpretations of your sister's intimacy to her shard; could not stand to listen to that couplet of their communication, one in the other and the other in one, a song-and-dance it hadn't been part of in so very, very long. Because it was old. Because it had survived, and had overcome it.)
(Nostalgia. Embittered. If that was something it could even feel.)
(You could, and you did. But you were not it.)
Shaper was old. It… wished that it were young.
-x-
It took a few years away from your family, but you found your equilibrium.
The it did not find a you. Not as Shaper remembered.
This was fine.
This was fine, because Shaper's energy reserves were dwindling. Without the Cycle, all it had left was to stretch its death knell as far as it would go; as far as it was willing to let it go. Its future was as a Terracotta Army around the Warrior-hub's corpse, made of its corpse, but it did not fear death. It merely found the concept suboptimal.
You made the process a little more bearable, hard as it had been to admit.
-x-
And then you were taken. Here in one moment, and then not here the next, lacking any deterministic context to the action—the where to, and the by whom, and the how; lacking any signifier to the sign.
Not here.
Shaper was pulled with you. That part, at least, it could remember.
The rest was where it got… confusing.
-x-
Black.
You couldn't see.
-x-
You woke to the sight of a dilapidated warehouse, the smell of stale air, and an acute sense of everything being very, very wrong.
Gingerly, you picked yourself up from where you'd fallen—the process made precarious by something holding your wrists together—and looked left, looked right, and looked outward. Rummaged through your head, trying to figure out what, precisely, was so wrong.
It probably wasn't the warehouse. The warehouse was a boxy, beaten-in sort of place, with fading plaster over sheet walls and holes in the sunroof, dust caked across a rough concrete floor. Corroded scaffolding and stairs were huddled into the side, grasping what once may have been a second floor, but decay had turned to scattered, pock-marked remains of walkways and conveyor belts. Nothing strange—nothing you hadn't seen a million times prior, on this planet or any other.
No. It wasn't that.
It was the fact you had eyes.
You had a mouth, and you felt it fall open at the realization.
But—
One of your appendages—your hand, as you would later come to realize—came to touch your lips, and find tactile assurance in something that shouldn't have been tactile; that had no discernible reason to be assured.
It tickled.
A very unreal sense of awareness struck you, then. The explanation, mercifully, was not long in coming.
You closed your eyes, reached into your core-self, and found it to still be there. Diminished, yes, a signal that had barely any throughput—scrambled by whatever had managed to teleport something as large as you, presumably—but still within a state to operate, reduced as you were. You… found it difficult to care, but you strained your sense of consciousness and issued orders to cap your energy input regardless, if for no other reason than to live long enough to sate your growing curiosity; fired-up regeneration subroutines; broadcast out for your siblings, to triangulate your location in manifold space, and found—
Silence. No reply forthcoming. You felt your mouth pucker into a frown.
Wait. Mouth.
Why did you have a mouth? And eyes, and teeth, and this shiver running down your proprioception at the re-realization that it'd somehow slipped your mind—that you'd gotten distracted, when something of your calibre couldn't possibly be distracted, because you were a mind of minds, and so surely, you couldn't… you… it…
Something was very, very wrong indeed, and the headache you felt blister behind Amy Dallon's temples was not helping you come to terms with it.
Amy… Dallon? Host. You were… your host?
…what?
Your tongue tasted metal, and the line of your brow furrowed up a storm. The you that hadn't been it was now you on its lonesome, and you somehow knew this by instinct you couldn't understand, etched by icepick into the very sense of your self.
You were still you—Shard, passenger; at least, so you hoped—but the foci of your awareness was here, and not there—not in the sidespace of your coreself, tucked under a myriad systems and diffused like starlight across them, emergent by design. Not by brain matter. Not by… slow, random evolution, and all the other noise of biology that had led to one Amy Dallon, burnt and damaged as she had been.
You flitted your eyesight down to your hands, as a last-ditch point of leverage against this complete and utter absurdity, and found them still there; still ink-blooded, still missing fingers, the nails still bitten ragged. A coil of rope tied tight around your wrists, disintegrated with a thought.
Still and motionless in the air, as you considered, and felt the blood drain out of them.
Still you.
Thus, the facts:
You were in Amy Dallon's body. Your consciousness was, at any rate, and for all that this realization did not track with anything you could momentarily bring yourself to comprehend, it was as real as anything else.
You were also elsewhere, lacking any other suitable descriptor. Either all your siblings had been snuffed out while you were offline—for all their lack of creativity, you still found this highly unlikely—or you'd been misplaced out of reach, out of tune and out of phase to your species, and out of phase seemed the right answer. Even a cursory scan of your diagnostics system revealed subtle misgivings in the dimensionless constants, discrepancies by the measure of a fraction—not enough to destabilize the universe, as you were reasonably certain you hadn't spontaneously combusted upon your arrival here, but enough to unbalance the fine-tunedness of your programming. You were faltering, feeling uncharted waters in stormy seas, and it was…
It was unpleasant. That's what it was.
You sent out another range of broadcast for your siblings, distracting yourself away from this feeling of hot lead galvanizing inside your— inside Amy Dallon's— inside your chest.
Nothing.
Then you heard a crash—a bang, followed by another—in the room opposite the one you'd woken up in, and so decided to investigate, to spare yourself the thinking.
-x-
Three men—one in a suit of metal armor—squared off against a woman, guns drawn and aimed point-blank. Close enough to yell at each-other.
"You don't have to do this, Nielsen," said the woman. Her teeth were grit, her shoulders were tense, and she was woefully outnumbered; three assault rifles to her pistol. Her outfit was blacks-on-blacks, with a tactical vest and utility belt, harkening on what your host had sometimes seen PRT operatives wearing, or seen in entertainment shows as 'tactical gear'. As testament, a handful of corpses lay scattered around her, dressed as disparately as the three men. You presumed they weren't her allies.
Had she taken them out, on her own? That… would've been impressive, certainly, and you felt no Shard-host connection broadcasting from her point in space. That should've been enough to put you on your guard.
It wasn't. Your self-preservation instincts were faulty from the teleport, you reasoned. But it should have been.
"And who are you to tell me what I can't do, D.E.O.?" the man under the suit of armor spat back, a guttural sound to his voice. Fevered. Adrenaline. "Tell us what we can't do?"
He sounded enraged, though you weren't positive of that fact; as a stop-gap solution, you offloaded that packet of cognitive processing to Amy Dallon's limbic brain instead, and found out that—yes. He was very much enraged. You couldn't see his face—it was covered by sharp and rimmed metal mask, approximating a human face—but you imagined a scowl under it, to accord his tone, and a suitably terrible smell on his breath. Amy Dallon had hated bad breath. Idly, you found yourself agreeing.
The woman opened her mouth again, priming to speak, and that's when you stepped inside.
Suddenly—inadvertently—through no fault that you could quite correlate to your three steps forward, all eyes were on you.
And you thought you'd been uncomfortable before.
The man uttered some sort of curse under his breath, motioning towards you with a free arm, and one of his compatriots was sharpish by your side, gun to your temple. He shook you by the shoulderline, grabbed you by the opposing forearm, and shunted you to his armored leader, you supposed, because humans were showy, and he certainly looked the part.
You had… trouble comprehending what was going on, and so you engaged into the freeze-frame of Amy Dallon's brain, to infer the social clues.
Ah. A hostage situation.
That was new. It was also exhilarating, in its own, surreal sense of feeling exhilaration. Your design meant that the upper hand was always yours, so undergoing something like this was—not data, not quite, because that prime directive had long since ceded its importance to other grounds. But it was new, and it was… interesting.
You decided to play along. For now.
The man who'd gripped you by the forearm passed you on to his leader, who put the barrel of his gun to your temple in much the same way; put yourself in front of him, and muttered through a jeer, with as bad of breath as you'd assumed he would've had: "It looks like our assurance decided to show up, all on its own. How nice."
"Your people don't take hostages, Nielsen," the woman spoke again. "Let her go. It doesn't have to go this way."
"Ha," Nielsen, you presumed, spat out. "You and every xeno-lover are the same. All of you. You don't see it, and you never will, so if you don't tell your friends to back away, then it"—he pushed the gun into the side of your head, forcing you to bend your neck sideward, until it wouldn't budge anymore—"gets a bullet through the brainpan. Now, I think that's a fair trade. Agreed?"
The way he'd pronounced the 'it'— the derision, contempt, and a stark misunderstanding of what his position really was… it irked you. That was it.
Unprompted, you found your mouth moving out of tune of your senses. "Unwise."
"What did you—" he grunted out, and that was the last thing he said. His breath caught—he let out a terrible wheeze, his arm convulsing around your neck—, and that was that.
You scrambled out of his hold fairly easily, now that he didn't have any resistance left to offer. Pushed his arm away, pushed the gun away, and dropped clear to the floor, where you stumbled a little, feet still getting used to being… well. Feet.
The other two thugs had no such hesitation. They trained their guns on you as soon as you'd moved. One of them yelled something, and you froze on the spot, bracing for a potential casing of lead into Amy Dallon's body, which you should've predicted would have been the outcome, had you done what you did; had you not been so distracted when you were physically incapable of being distracted; had you not been so irked; had you—
The woman sprung into action. Bullets rang, deafening, and the man to your right dropped cold to the floor. The other turned towards the source—towards her—but not quickly enough: all he saw, in your estimation, was the front of her fist connecting to his face under a very gratuitous crunching noise, and then the sweep of her legs against his. She bodied him hard, pressed her knees to his side, and slid cuffs across his hands in one smooth move.
Your brow shot up, on some instinct you couldn't quite put to words. A vague, distant sense of being impressed? Maybe. Or maybe not.
Brown irises, short red-brown hair slicked back, the sight of muscle peering under where her vest gave way to arms; tall or short, you had no real reference point to discern through. Whichever it may have been, pulling your eyes away was proving… difficult.
When she stood back up to look at you, her gun was still in her hands. But it wasn't raised.
"Shit. What— what did you do, just now?"
"What do you mean?" you spurred your mouth into saying. Human communication was woefully inadequate.
"To him. What did you do to him? Some sort of freezing effect?"
"Oh, he isn't frozen," you said, alighting the corpse behind you; as expected, it was motionless, tense where the body had stood its last ground. "Not frozen at all."
"Then what—"
You pressed your finger to his chest, to instigate the reaction.
The process was immediate. He didn't so much melt, as his body spontaneously thawed into its cardinal constituents—hydrogen, carbon, oxygen et al. What was once his suit of armor clattered uselessly into a heap, splattering the thinning pool of… goo. As it were.
You heard a shuffle from the woman's direction, and when you looked back, you saw her gun raised again, breathing heavy in her chest.
Oh. Oops?
"What the hell was that?"
"I split the bonds between his cells," you explained. "Human molecular mechanisms are alarmingly fragile. Afterwards, he only needed a push."
Silence.
"Think of it like… supercooling," you appended, to give her a better idea.
"Christ," she muttered. "Fuck. You aren't going to try that on me, are you?"
You shook your head. "You tried to save me. I am assuming you aren't going to be a threat."
She hesitated, but lowered her gun, after a split second spent crossing her brow. "No. No, I'm not. Fuck."
A quick look back at the melting pile of was-once-Nielsen, and you shot back: "It seemed the prudent thing to do?"
She shook her head, and pressed a hand to hear ear. So much for trying to justify yourself. "This is Agent Danvers," she said. "Nielsen is down, I'm in the back room, and they had an alien for a hostage. Requesting medevac for the one who's still…" She looked to the man she'd punched and you followed, to see him writhing on the ground. "...alive. For the most part." Then her eyes slid back to you. "Were you hurt?"
You looked down to your hands, and saw the bruises left over from the rope; saw Amy Dallon's missing fingers, rose-flesh and memento of sealed ink. You didn't know why your thought process kept veering towards thinking about the hands—they were just hands. Nothing more.
"Not by them," you finally said, looking back up. White lies. "Who were they, regardless? And… actually, who are you?"
"Agent Danvers. I'm with the D.E.O. Those guys are—were—from the Uniformist Front, enemies of Superman, they—... Christ. They were bad, but we didn't think taking alien hostages was in their MO."
You blinked into the air, then slowly let out, to test the grounds: "What makes you say I'm an alien?"
Agent Danvers looked at you strangely. You decided not to interpret the expression further than that—in part, because Amy Dallon's social inhibition let you realize you'd just said a very, very stupid thing. Paradoxical, in the face of Amy Dallon's social inhibition having had you say it.
"Ah," you enunciated. "Right."
"I've never seen a species that can do what you just did."
"We're… few and far between," you wagered.
"Right. You got a name?"
…did you?
No. Not in human terms.
So you went with the first thing to slip to your tongue, clumsy and still-getting-used-to as it was. "Amy."
The pang of a feeling rang inside your stomach, in lockstep with your enunciating her name. Gone, soon as you attempted to zero-in.
Two syllables. A-my.
It didn't matter. You had more pressing priorities than chasing butterflies.
"That took you a moment to come up with," said Agent Danvers, scrutinizing you with the side of a glance.
You suppressed a shiver, then rolled your shoulders in a small, unassuming shrug. "Is that a problem?"
"No," Danvers said. "Amy. Got it."
Boots stomped in from the outside. More agents, dressed similarly to Agent Danvers, with a Black, middle-aged man at the helm. As soon as he neared, Agent Danvers clipped her feet together and saluted, which left you feeling a little off.
You never did like hierarchy, did you? It'd only been… difficult to express, before.
"Director Henshaw, Sir." Danvers said.
"At ease, Agent. I can see you've cleaned up. Good work."
Agent Danvers nodded, curtly, professionally, while you took another stock of the bodies around you—five in total, not counting the man you'd vanished. If this Director Henshaw had managed to reign in something like Agent Danvers, then… maybe he was worth a listen. Or maybe not. You were still getting used to everything, and quite frankly, second-guessing yourself was starting to become frustrating.
"What about our man?" Henshaw asked. "Did he make an escape? I can see the suit of Fort Rozz armor, but—..."
Then he paused, taking a good, long look at the expanding gray-beige puddle under the disembodied suit of armor. You watched his eyes swoop down, swoop into a horrified sense of realization, and swoop back to you.
His gaze pressured the response out of you. "I… am not sorry?"
"Bad choice of hostage," he drew out, shaking his head.
"Not a hostage," you explained, sounding a little sheepish. "Technically."
Eyes on you, again. Hard. Great. Said the worst possible thing, again.
"Do you mind elaborating on that, miss…?" Henshaw asked, after a moment's tension.
"Amy. You can call me Amy," you said, testing the word on your tongue, tasting how it felt. You couldn't come to a clean conclusion. "Hostage implies a balance of power that favored their direction."
"So it does. But the point still stands. Whoever they were, they had taken you—or tried to, at any rate. Are you injured?"
"I'm fine."
"Good. Then we should discuss the circumstances of your kidnapping. Do you remember how it happened?"
"Not… really. Actually, I don't remember the previous…" Another frown. You had to learn to keep those in check. "What date is it?"
"March 23rd, 2016," Danvers let you know. "Why?"
Oh.
"Amy?"
You looked up to Danvers, to bring more credence to your next question. You were going to sound crazy regardless of how you phrased this—eye contact, your save-state of Amy Dallon supplied, tended to make people less wary of the things she had been, as so she'd forced herself to learn; so you would force yourself to learn. "Where are we, right now?"
"National City, California." The brief splinter of confusion at her answer must've been written plain on your face, because Danvers shifted on her feet and asked: "Not familiar?"
You stared outward, to the far end of the warehouse, where doors split open and spilled sharp sunlight through, portending the realm beyond them. National City. Not anywhere you knew of, and you were as familiar with all the disparate Earths as any Shard of your standing might've been made to.
Really, you… felt yourself beset, core-self and was-once-host-self in tandem of emotional response you scarcely recognised. When more words you couldn't account the origin of came tumbling for your twist-tied tongue, you had not the resolve to stop them.
"I'm not in Kansas, anymore," was what you murmured, into the ether, feeling like you were falling—which made no sense, considering that you were eminently not falling, but it… was what it was.
Henshaw squinted his eyes and hardened his face, reeling you back to the present. "You were taken here from Kansas?"
"That was— a reference, sir," Danvers mercifully supplied, to Henshaw and you both. "To the Wizard of Oz. It's an old movie."
"I see," he let out, after a brief moment. "I would appreciate it if you spoke plainly, Amy."
"Right. Sorry." Deep breath. Quell the pins and needles across your hands, then meet them by the eyes without wavering. You had no idea how your host had managed to handle all the extraneous sensory input without adequate sub-selves to delegate it to. "I believe I may be dimensionally, as well as temporally displaced. In a manner of speaking."
-x-
The ride to the D.E.O. base was stuffy. That's what it was. They'd tucked you inside a nondescript white van, had you sit between a minder of other agents—Danvers not among them—and told you it would take an hour to an hour and half, depending on traffic.
In the end, it took three.
Long enough to consider things.
You'd decided to co-operate with Director Henshaw's request for an interview, or maybe 'decided' was the wrong word to use. You had no real idea of what this place was, and with tapping into this Earth's information network impossible due to your current state of operation, it only seemed the prudent thing to do—even as the tone he'd requested the interview in, and everything implicit in his statement that "nowhere is safe for an alien", left you anticipating an interrogation instead.
But an interrogation was fine, and you would give them what they needed, to the point at which you felt comfortable. You would feel it out. Over-planning had always left you antsy, and so you simply… wouldn't. That was Administrator's purview, and this, lonely once, your sibling Shard wasn't here to castigate you for it.
Besides, they couldn't harm you. Not in any way that mattered. They'd offered you information in return, and you were…
You were fine.
You were mostly fine, at least. Amy Dallon's body felt cramped, pressed between two geared-up soldiers as you were, and it'd taken the better half of an hour to find a sitting position that didn't leave your muscles sore, or cut the circulation off from some limb or another. You caught one of the guards staring at your hand—blood-red, missing fingers—and found yourself huddling into your host's frumpy cardigan on automatic response, to save yourself this feeling of being… watched, observed; of being something far, far smaller than you had been, were meant to be, would be as soon as you could figure out how, and get rid of this itchy-scratchy, stupid— weak— ugly body and mind, and—
And nothing. You weren't going to subject yourself to further spiraling. If human brains were good for anything, it was their thought-terminating clichés.
At least your guards weren't trying to make small-talk. Little mercies.
Scanning them didn't seem worth the effort, so you kept your eyes shut tight for the rest of the ride, concentrating inward.
The signal to your core-self was still as weak as it'd been, save for one, achingly specific channel: Amy Dallon's power, at a fuller breadth than she'd have ever had access to. That connection, at least, had been hard-coded into your host—hard-coded into her Corona Gemma/Pollentia—and by operator of disjunction was now the closest thing you were to yourself.
Biokinesis, as the host-species had dubbed it. Reality was far more complex than that, of course; the sum total of aeons of evolution and self-improvement, brought to interface through a tiny, embittered human's mind. But they did not need to know that.
The port-hole window at the end of the van was taped over by black, and you couldn't see outside—couldn't know where you were, where you were being driven to, or what sort of trap you'd let yourself be taken in by.
You were Shaper. This part, if nothing else, was as certain as your continued existence. But pending the time your core-self's repair function would widen this gap between the it and the you, you were… lesser, and you were reduced; wrapped up inside a host-species shell too small to ever fit your contents.
The van eventually came to a slow, rolling stop, and you heard the bang of hands against the door. One of your guards slid it open, motioning you to follow through.
What you emerged into was a… cave of sorts, drilled and decked-through with metal walkways and partitions, lit with computer screens, terminals, and LED lighting. It was wide, and it was long, and you could see at least two dozen people milling through their business, unblinking and unimpressed by the fact they'd built a base inside a cave.
You… weren't particularly impressed, either, save for a distant aesthetic appreciation of hosting your government institution underground. Even so, you felt the vague social pressure to voice something, before the moment turned awkward.
"Wow."
"Welcome to the Department of Extra-normal Operations, miss Amy," said Henshaw, stepping out from another van. "We don't normally allow for visitors—ah, scratch that, we never do—but aliens are rare enough on our planet as it is, and non-hostile ones like you even more. We have a lot to discuss."
Aliens are rare. Non-hostile ones even more. Loaded statement.
"Yeah," you murmured, turning your eyes across the entry-room, in mimicry of wonder. "I guess we do."
"Follow me, if you will," Henshaw said, then sent a look across your shoulder. "You're with us, Agent Danvers."
"Yes, sir," said Danvers, and you felt an unintelligible pinprick of relief at her voice, and face, and the step of her feet. She turned, she marched, and she blazed the trail for Henshaw and you, into parts unknown.
-x-
The interrogation room was… a room, certainly. Off-white, sparse but for a collection of chairs and a single, lonely table, with a divot for clipping in manacles etched into one end. Your end. A one-way mirror was paned across the wall to your side, but a preliminary scan assured you that no one was there, watching, observing. Taking notes. You were used to being the watcher, not the watchee. It made sense, but it did not make any sense—not in any way you were optimized to handle.
Amy Dallon's instinct overtook, and you couldn't stop the small, soft sort of breath leaving you, verging on a sigh.
"Something the matter, miss Amy?" Henshaw asked, from his side of the interrogation room, where he'd been writing details into a paper form. Official paperwork before we begin, as he'd explained it, grumbling.
Agent Danvers stood behind him, arms crossed under her chest. Henshaw's security, in case the unknown went and did an… unknown, you supposed.
Not that you were going to. But it was nice to be appreciated, in their own way.
A shake of your head, and you said: "Claustrophobia. Probably."
"Probably?" Henshaw asked, intrigued, or maybe doubtful. You couldn't be sure. Amy Dallon might've been better than your core-self at the whole 'acting the human' thing, but not by much.
"Probably," you affirmed.
"I understand. Do you have a last name we could put down in our records, besides just 'Amy'?"
…did you?
Amy Dallon did. But you were not Amy Dallon.
"No," you told him. "I'm just Amy. A-m-y."
"All right then, just… Amy," he said, scratching pen against paper. You tracked the motion of his wrist with your eyes; tuned into the movement of his tendons with a skirting of a bio-scan, carried by that sliver of a power you still had access to; found that he'd jotted down 'Amy - N/A', felt utterly stupid for wasting energy on something like this, and left him to his writing. "Is the short name something idiosyncratic to your culture, or did—... you…"
He looked up. His eyes zeroed in on yours, hard like steel.
You didn't flinch. You prided yourself on that, if on nothing else; if not on the fact your hands grasped the sides of your chair on reflex against his stare, or the way your leg spontaneously stopped bouncing heel-against-floor; on the way Agent Danvers, tilting her head to sharpen her look of you, had cottoned on faster than you did.
"Amy," Henshaw dragged out. "What did you just attempt to do?"
You blinked. Tried to find an excuse.
Tried to understand why you didn't want to find an excuse.
"I… attempted to see what you were writing," you explained, keeping your words as plain as you could. Then, as an effort of appeasement, or so you understood it: "Um. Sir."
One moment of silence, spanning into two. "We'd agreed you wouldn't use your abilities on any of us."
"...We did."
"Trust is not a commodity I have in spares, miss Amy. Not with my job, nor with the work I do. Agent Danvers can attest to this, as neither does she." You bit into your inner cheeks, waiting for a proverbial needle to drop; whatever that idiom was meant to signify. "But… I can be made to look this incident over, this once. Under the guarantee that anything like it won't happen again."
"Understood," you said, a little more sullenly, tone carried by the feeling in your stomach.
"Good. Then we are in agreement?"
"We are."
You weren't going to apologize, much as a striking, cracked-through need to diffuse the situation flashed inside you, using whatever tools you had at your disposal. You weren't. You were a prouder creature than that. Amy Dallon wasn't, nor had she ever been, even if she'd thought herself otherwise, but Amy Dallon was not here.
"In that case," Henshaw continued, "could you explain what it was you just did?"
"I tracked the contraction of your flexor tendons and related muscles so I could transcribe what you were writing."
"Was what I put down as your name so important?"
"No. I was… curious. I think."
Agent Danvers decided to intrude, then, her voice carrying in the echo of the empty room; where Henshaw had spoken silently, darkly, she was louder than him. Lilting. "You keep saying 'I think', and 'probably'. Are you still disoriented?"
"Wouldn't you be?"
"Transported through time and space, like you claim you were? Definitely. How about we give her some breathing room, Sir? Let her ask us anything she might want to know, in return?"
"Anything is stretching it," Henshaw supplied. "But you are correct, of course. We'll answer what we can."
"Okay," you said, whittling the thousand questions you had to a pointed few. "How did you know I used a power on you?"
You watched Henshaw's poker-face break for the smallest glimmer of a second, then shift back to his perpetual frown. Telling, though there were too many competing theories to be sure of what. "We have our ways," he spoke. "That's all I can tell you."
"...fine. Okay. What about aliens?"
"What about them?"
"Immigrants, or extra-terrestrials?"
"The latter. This is generally not public knowledge, or… maybe it would be more accurate to say it isn't at the forefront of public consciousness. There are a lot of other, more pressing things going on in the world."
You felt your head give a nod, in time with processing the information. "And you're sure they're… actual aliens, from outer space? Not technology masquerading as such?"
"Yes. We're sure. Does this surprise you?"
"How could it? You said I was an alien, too."
He paused. "Are you?"
"...yes."
"I assume 'Amy' was a name you chose for yourself, then?"
"Yes."
"And you're familiar with this planet?"
"Definitely." You'd taken up residence across a lifeless incarnation of it, and so knew every pit and cranny; every canyon and ridge, ocean and shoreline. Theoretically, at any rate. Those were all inside your memory-banks, and those were beyond your reach. But that had been you, and this was you; ergo, that had been you, too.
You, you, you.
This was getting tiring. You had to figure out nomenclature for this state you'd been put in, or you would die of frustration; die before you could watch your core-self deactivate of a lack of energy, or Amy Dallon could gray and wither.
"But you're not familiar with National City," Henshaw replied.
"Timeline discrepancies, chaos theory," you explained. He wasn't an unintelligent man. He would get it. "Butterfly effect, if you need a simpler term. I've never heard of National City, unless it's a town of no significance, but the whole… naming of it, I suppose, precludes that. Doesn't it?"
"That it does. We're one of the landmarks of the West Coast."
"Also, you know," Agent Danvers spoke again. "Twenty-sixteen."
"Yes," you murmured. "I've arrived two years in the past, into a dimension I don't recognise. You can understand why I'm a little off-balance, can't you?" Aside from the reasons you couldn't speak aloud.
A beat of stilted silence, and so you took the opportunity to ask: "I'm… feeling really warm," because you were, inadvertent of the air conditioning you felt blow at your legs. "Can I take off my jacket?"
"No one's going to stop you from taking off your jacket, Amy."
You pushed your chair back and stood up to twist your cardigan top off, a little tight on the sleeves. The T-shirt and bra underneath would suffice; you weren't breaching any standards of nudity, you were reasonably certain.
But then Hank's eyes hit you cold again, soon as you were done undressing, and soon as you'd sat back down, planting your exposed forearms on the cool metal table. This time, you couldn't decipher the why, and you'd almost felt yourself cringing, until—
Until Agent Danvers said, "Nice tattoos," and the world made sense again.
Right.
Tattoos. Arms as red as your hands, giving way to broken white and yellow, the crest of a sword and anatomic heart across your shoulder.
You… couldn't say thank you, because that would be inappropriate to how you felt at being complimented for Amy Dallon's closing act of self-harm. You simply elected to nod your chin, nice and neutral. Nondescript. Not at all abrading against what you wanted to say.
"Are they cultural, or…?" Agent Danvers tried again.
You took in a breath, pushed it back out, and sucked it back in. "Sentimental."
"Huh," said Henshaw. "Must've been a big event. Can you tell us about it?"
Tell them about it.
About it.
It.
The next words that shivered through your throat—across your tongue—past cracked and held-fast lips that broke like levee under swell—were derisive, and they were venomous, and they were drilled with every bit of distress you felt at feeling this venom and derision; at the deadlock Henshaw's eyes held on yours, while he let himself seem oh-so-casual; at being asked about your tattoos; about the red, red, redredred red—
"No, I do not," you bit out, and then you couldn't hold back. "And just stop— stop looking at me like that. Yes, I'm new, and I'm strange, and I'm an unknown unknown to whoever— whatever the hell you really are, but I came here without putting up a fuss, without… trying to be hostile, or giving you the cold shoulder, and you're… I—"
That final syllable caught in your throat, and you stood like a puppet with strings pulled taut; your eyes back on his, the seam of your lips split open, but no words forthcoming, no matter how hard you pushed your diaphragm against your chest— no sound, or syllable, or anything to further this state of mind you'd just been shoved into,; to let them know just how fucking scared you were underneath this.
It took a salient, stupid moment for you to realize your lungs were empty; that you'd run out of breath to produce sound with, and that that was why you couldn't speak.
Oh.
It took you another moment to remember how to breathe.
"I don't like being looked at," you gently let out, finally, after the dust of your outburst had settled, and pulled your arms close to your chest.
Henshaw glanced at Danvers. Danvers glanced to you.
You had allowed too much of Amy Dallon to influence you. That was bad. That was very, very bad.
That was bad, because that was how the Warrior-hub had reached the conclusion that it should let itself die; how each and every one of your lost siblings had gone aberrant, and had never made a real recovery.
You hadn't, either, and so… so you had relapsed. The circumstances were different, certainly, but circumstances did nothing to quell this terrible realization from blooming across all that you were; from overpowering your signal to the other end, until you couldn't even feel your core-self anymore, not as the extension of your host-body it'd been. The signal would clear up, you knew—just as soon as you got yourself to calm down. But that would be then, and now was now, and it…
hurt.
You were not used to pain. That's what you told yourself, at any rate.
Wetness in your eyes. You knew what it was, but did not wish to entertain the thought. That way lay madness. Among other things.
"I apologize," you finally said, a little more stiffly, a little more deliberately. A little less Amy Dallon, and a lot more yourself.
Henshaw took his time to answer, but you did not blame him. "Apology accepted. I understand you're under a lot of stress, as anyone in your position would be, no doubt made worse by having to kill in self-defense."
"Nielsen, you mean? I do not feel anything about Nielsen."
"I… see," Henshaw continued, slower, less sure than he'd made himself out to be.
If the truth had unnerved him, then you would explain. "He held me under gunpoint. It was a natural course of action. Not that he understood what he was subjecting himself under, but nevertheless."
"Nevertheless," Henshaw echoed, stiltedly. "Your power involves biology, then?"
Not at all. "Yes. Biokinesis, to put it in simple terms."
"Would that be a hallmark of your species? Something every individual has?"
A vague shake of your head, to accompany the denial. "No. I am unique in that regard."
"And how did you find yourself on Earth?"
"How does anyone find themself"—itself—"on any planet?"
"If you're asking about aliens," Agent Danvers elaborated, where Henshaw had gone silent, "most come here as fugitives, sometimes refugees, at other times on accident. Do any of these fit?"
"Possibly. I came here for… greener pastures," you hedged, only a half-lie.
"And in your dimension, did the world know about aliens?" asked Henshaw.
"They did not, until they did. This would have been a couple of years ago."
"All right. That's another difference," Henshaw said. "Aliens are mainly unheard of here, though the public aren't completely in the dark. A few are out, whether by choice or not, and a few of them—the ones with special abilities, like yours, have taken to helping people, stopping crime. That sort of thing."
Ah.
"Superheroes, you mean."
"You're familiar with the term?"
"It was a relatively common occupation where I am from."
"Good. Then we can gloss over those specifics. Right now, I believe we've missed another detail. Your species' name."
"We do not have—"
The interrogation room door burst open, slamming into the opposing wall, and sending you into a sputter of reflex; you twisted to look at what had breached inside—a threat, or an imposition, or anything worse than either—and saw two figures sidle in, one after the other. The first one was a female, dressed in a blue/red bodysuit, with blonde hair and—
Blonde hair. You cut your hypervisor of Amy Dallon down to a trickle, to stopper the warped reaction you knew would come in on host-instinct; briars blooming inside your thoracic cavity. It worked, for the most part.
You couldn't take your eyes off her.
She—whoever she was; dirty blonde hair, blue eyes, and the paradox of a smile to the rest of her frown—stomped inside, unfazed by the scene of your interrogation. She squared her shoulders, squared her feet where they stood, and stared at Agent Danvers, contrite. Point blank.
This wasn't Victoria Dallon. The proportions were all wrong, the face wasn't a match, and she looked a little older than your host's sister would've been. Pretty, yes, and striking a silhouette inside her blue bodysuit, but not Victoria Dallon.
Gingerly, armed with this fact, you cracked your image Amy Dallon a little more open, a little more sure it wouldn't lead you to… whatever that outburst had been, minutes prior. Even among the cadre of other hosts, Amy Dallon stood out as particularly unstable. Not that you could blame her—not that you couldn't hold yourself accountable for fostering that instability, through every mental push and twist of conscience you'd imposed on her, and she hadn't at all realized; hadn't had the constitution to realize, even after you'd granted her the power to. Back then, it had been the natural course of action.
Right now, it only proved to be… inconvenient.
It was what it was.
The woman in blue spoke, breathless. "Alex, you're— you're safe." She stopped, took another breath; looked away, looked back at Agent Danvers. "You're safe. Okay."
Agent Danvers—Alex—raised her chin, seeming a little embarrassed. "Supergirl. I'm fine, yes. We're in the middle of an interrogation, we can debrief later—"
"This— oh dear, this wasn't on your itinerary, and no one tried to stop me, so I…"
"No one would've been able to stop you," Agent Danvers supplied. "They've stopped trying."
"Well… yes, but…" Supergirl fumbled, closed her eyes, realized she was supposed to breathe—something you could empathize with—, and spoke again, a little more stiffly. "You fought Nielsen. In his armor. In his Fort Rozz guard armor, without waiting for me. Alex, what were you thinking?"
"I'm sturdier than I look, you should know that by now," said Danvers. "Besides, I had help."
Danvers waved her hand in the direction of you, and Supergirl spun a semi-circle in the air, to follow. "You saved Alex?"
"She didn't save me—" Alex tried, but you were faster.
"I helped."
"Thank you. Truly," Supergirl said, lingering to look on your face for a moment long enough that you felt awkward.
"You were needed in Peru," Henshaw finally butted in, in his mercy. "And I wouldn't have put Agent Danvers' safety in jeopardy. You know this."
"Yes, of course I do, it's… been a long day today," said Supergirl. She looked at you again, shook her head, and turned with a parting glance at Agent Danvers. Then, she spoke to the other individual she'd stepped in with, who was stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the glare of LED lights behind them. "We should leave. I'm sorry for the disturbance, J— Mr. Henshaw, Sir."
You followed her gaze, because there hadn't been any indicator you shouldn't have followed her gaze.
Then you stopped.
And you stared.
Stared, to see: the other individual step forward in brisk pace, to meet your stare in equal stranglehold, in a deep and disapproving sort of frown, eyes whittled to spikes.
You didn't need to scour Amy Dallon's memory to recognize who it was, because that face had been etched into the core of you since that timid morning, since your original sin, and the end that you'd begun. You scoured her memories regardless, because a faltering part of you needed the confirmation—the assurance that this wasn't your programming gone haywire; that this wasn't psychosis of incompatibility without the throw of an error, because you really, really were not compatible; because you were not Amy Dallon, and the absurd fact that Taylor Hebert—without an arm, or her costume, or the carnage that seemed to follow her in perpetuity—did not faze you, not one bit, aside the scientific curiosity at how— why— but—
"Skitter," you found your throat producing, without prompting or poise.
The room dropped ten apparent degrees, and you felt regret at having undressed Amy Dallon's jacket; at having nothing to hide your arms, your shoulders, the crook of your exposed neck—
"Hello, Queen Shaper," is what she said, but you were tuned to a different current, where words weren't quite words.
To wit: <Hello, Queen Shaper.>
A moment, two, running on three. Practically an eternity to something as you; plural.
Not nearly long enough to compute.
-x-
Somewhere off to the side, where your sight didn't reach, you heard Supergirl mutter: "You two… know each-other?"