Fortune's Fool

OK, Blogger is doing weird things with the formatting on this one but I think I got it working now. Just pretend all the paragraphs have indents, OK? Here it is, Fortune's Fool, my little superhero tale. Please see my previous post for the caveats.

FORTUNE’S FOOL
I came in low, skimming over the waves close enough to feel the spray on my face. I followed the sharp upsweep of the breakers beating against the spindle-like station, hovered for a moment over the deck, then gently floated down until my toes touched the concrete. I had done this times without count, but this was the first time I had done it in sneakers.

The massive, bat-like wings only I could see folded back into my body as I opened the sliding glass door and stepped into my former home, secret headquarters of the Strange Trio.

I know. Lame name for a bunch of superheroes. That’s not why I left, but it might as well have been.

The words “Why am I doing this?” had been repeating themselves in my head all day. They had harmony and counterpoint now. They were practically a Gregorian choir: Cur hic facio.

The sitting room was empty, but I could hear someone banging around in the kitchen. From the doorway I watched my old roommate Faye spreading mashed potatoes over a shepherd’s pie. I had half-turned to leave – Faye was not the first person here I wanted to talk to –when Faye lifted the casserole to carry it to the oven, saw me standing there, and dropped it with a crash.

“Mol?” Her hands were at her mouth, her eyes quivering, and all the old loathing came back just like that. “Mol? Is it really you?”

“If I were a doppelganger, would I say no?”

“But I… we all thought you were dead!”

“Yeah. That had been the whole idea.”

Faye pulled herself together enough to realize she had shepherd’s pie all over her shoes. Apparently her “latent telepathic gifts” had never manifested or I wouldn’t have been able to surprise her like that.

“Allow me,” I said, unable to resist the temptation to show off. It wasn’t an effort, it was more a relaxation of effort, letting go of some of the hold I had over my demon, but letting him out just enough to do my bidding before binding him back within my consciousness.

When I was done Faye once more held a casserole dish in her hands.

“You can’t eat that,” I warned. “My control isn’t that good. I’m sure it’s full of glass. Easier to clean up, though.”

“My god, Mol,” she said. “You’ve changed.” She gaped at me for an uncomfortably long minute before chucking the casserole in the trash. “Your visit, the timing of it, I don’t want to say ‘fortuitous’…”

“Boss Man called me. In my head. That old trick.”

“What?”

“Well, apparently he knew I wasn’t dead.”

“No, Mol, you don’t understand. The Boss is in a coma. He has been for days. Not even I could reach him!”

“It figures it was something like that,” I said. I had woken this morning with a splitting headache and a desperate need to be here, clearing an implanted impulse. It had Boss Man’s fingerprints all over it, so to speak. But there was really only one skill I had that the others couldn’t at least simulate. I knew why the Boss Man had called me. He needed to die.

“I didn’t think he was still in there,” Faye was saying. “I…” Her eyes were quivering again and I held back a sigh of impatience, but I needn’t have bothered. Being an empath, she felt it anyway. I had to get out of that kitchen.

“Maybe I should just see him and go,” I said.

“You are such an ingrate!”

“Excuse me?”

“That man did everything for you! He took you out of that asylum, made you whole again. He was like a father to you, to all of us.”

“I have no father,” I said.

“Heartless bitch.” Faye never swore. The words sounded weird just coming out of her mouth. Like it was a foreign language she had learned phonetically.

“You’re the empath, you should know,” I said and finally made my escape to the elevator. I pushed the button for sublevel 8, where the infirmary was.

How could the Boss Man ask me to do this after what he nearly did to me all those years ago? What he would have done if I hadn’t faked my death in a fight on an atoll and run away?

And how could I do it? Because I was, wasn’t I? Faye was right. He was as much of a father as I would ever know.

A strange young man was standing in the hallway outside of the infirmary watching me approach.

“Hi!” he said, putting out a hand in a gesture I’m sure he intended to be friendly but I found aggressive in the extreme. I don’t touch people. It’s generally assumed this is because of my superpower, but really I just don’t like it. Realizing I wasn’t going to take his hand, he wiped his hands on his jeans and thrust it back in his pocket. “You must be Darkfire.”

“God, no.” Worse than the Strange Trio. “It’s just Mol.”

“I’m Gary then,” he said, thrusting that hand out again. I stepped back and his cheeks flushed. “Oh, sorry. Faye told me once… I just forgot.”

“Did Faye tell you I was here?”

“Yes, but I also saw you come in on radar. Or at least I figured it was you. You’re not wearing your… but I guess you wouldn’t be, would you?”

“My uniform is at the bottom of the ocean. I always assumed I had a microchip implanted somewhere too, but I wasn’t about to start digging around for it.”

“Oh, that’s a good idea! Brian lost his helmet in this fight once and he disappeared on all my scopes. But with an embedded chip…”

“Gary?” I interrupted.

“Yeah?”

“Who are you?”

“Oh! I supposed you wouldn’t know. I’m your replacement in the Trio. Boss Man found me after you left.”

“What do you do?”

“I invent stuff. I have a Super Suit. It’s armor-plated with guns and rockets and it flies!” I thought he was going to wet himself just talking about it. I managed a smile that I hoped didn’t look too forced.

“Where’s Brian?” I asked.

“He’s in there with the Boss Man,” Gary said.

“Go get Faye. She’s going to want to be here when I do this,” I said.

“Do what?”

“Just go get Faye.”

Boss Man was in the room that was the ICU of our little infirmary. I had spent a few days here once myself, recovering from injuries from one of our save-the-world fights. Brian had nodded off in a chair pulled up to the bedside. He looked bad, drawn and pale, almost as bad as the Boss Man himself.

Or so I thought until I got a good look at the Boss Man. The robust, meaty Italian I had known was just skin and bones now, and the skin hung in loose folds. All of his thick, steel-gray hair had gone.

I stood over him, my fingertips trailing over the sheets, not quite touching his spindly arm. “I don’t think I can do this,” I said, barely more than a whisper but enough to wake Brian.

“Mol? Is it you?” he asked, still half-asleep by the sound of his voice.

“That seems to be the question of the day. Yes, it is I.”

“The Boss Man called you.”

“Yes.”

Brian nodded and turned his face away. I looked down at the Boss Man, giving Brian the moment he needed.

“What happened? A fight?”

“No,” he said, getting up from the chair and moving to the far side of the room. “Some sort of degenerative neurological thing. Even the Boss Man didn’t really know. He ran lots of tests, even consulted with real doctors, but they all came up blank. His theory was that his own mental powers were turning in on themselves.”

“How long has he been like this?”

“More than a month. I tried…” His voice hitched. “Don’t tell Faye, but I tried to overdose him with morphine last week. It didn’t work, obviously. I couldn’t bear to just pull his…” He broke off again.

“Well, that’s why I’m here, isn’t it? To use the power he always hated.”

“What are you talking about?”

Before I could answer Gary returned with Faye. Her eyes were red but she was stoically calm.

“The gang’s all here,” I said with a sigh. “No point in delaying the inevitable.”

I took one of the Boss Man’s cold bony hands in mine then leaned over him to kiss his still lips.

I braced myself against the sensation that would surely follow. But it was as useless as bracing yourself against a coming tidal wave. Nothing you could do was going to keep yourself from being swept hundreds of feet inland if you were lucky, out to sea if you were unlucky.

The Boss Man’s soul washed over me, nothing like water. I wasn’t big enough to contain it, if you see what I mean. I heard myself cry out as I fell back. I tried for the chair Brian had left at the bedside but missed, landing hard on the cold floor.

Then he was gone. But he had left something behind. That had never happened before. But being that he had been the most advanced telepath on the planet, I should not have been surprised. He had focused all his consciousness on a single thought so that when his soul had passed through me to the next place, the thought had been left behind.

And now I was crying. God. But I could still blame him, couldn’t I? He should have told me.

Faye was in full waterworks mode now, providing the perfect cover for me to slip away. I took the elevator up to the Boss Man’s private quarters and headed to his study where he kept his computer with his personal files. I had only been here once before, but nothing had changed in five years. Not even the password on the computer.

I read his notes on my file for a second time, but the context was different now. It didn’t say what I thought it had said. He hadn’t been trying to take my demon from me, to leave me bereft as a “normal girl”. The “cure” he had spoken of was not going to strip me of my powers, it was going to give me better control over my powers.

“He wasn’t as sure of it as it sounds there,” Brian said from behind me. I hadn’t even heard him come in the room. “If he had been, he would have sent us to find you. I mean, it seems he knew all along that you weren’t dead.”

“He talked to you about me?”

“Once or twice. He said you have an extra gland in your brain that gives you your powers, but it’s pressing on other parts of your brain, affecting their behavior. You perceive mental images as real ones. He compared it to someone with night terrors. Their dreams are getting funneled through the memory part of the brain as if they had actually happened in a way that doesn’t happen in a normal brain, whatever that is.”

“What does that mean?”

“Your ‘demon’ is just your way of perceiving your powers. You’re not actually possessed by an alien entity. It’s all just you.”

“And he was going to take that perception away.”

“He was going to try to. Then you would perceive your powers as just powers, like mine or Faye’s. Without the guilt or sense of impending doom.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say. I had lived with this being inside of me for as far back as I could remember. It had controlled me, with violent results, until I was twelve. Until Boss Man had found me and taken me away. He had helped me take the control away from my demon. Now it turns out he had never believed it was a demon.

“I can follow his research. If you like, I could try…”

“No,” I said, switching the computer off. “What difference would it make? I would perceive it as a chemical thing from some mystery gland? That may be reality for you science types, but I kind of prefer the demon myself.”

Brian went with me back up to top level. I could tell he had something he wanted to say, but I very much didn’t want him to say it. We had made it all the way to the sliding glass door before he finally spoke.

“You could stay,” he said, all in a rush.

“I don’t think so.”

“We could use you on the team, especially now that Boss Man is gone.”

“What about Gary?”

“We could be the Strange Quartet.”

“Ugh. No!” I reached for the handle of the door when rain began to fall with a suddenness that only happens in the tropics.

“Now it looks like you have to stay,” Brian said. Something on my face must have given away my suspicions, because he added, “Don’t look at me. I don’t control the weather.”

“And gadget boy downstairs? Did he make a weather control machine?”

“Of course not. Maybe in a couple years, though. That boy is sharp.”

“Say good-bye to Faye for me. I don’t think I could bear to.”

“Sure. Now that you’re no longer dead, maybe you could stop by from time to time?”

“Maybe,” I agreed then stepped out into the downpour, letting my demon wings stretch wide and lift me into the air. I tried to picture it as just a gland in my brain, but to my eyes those wings were still real in all their leathery glory.

On my way back to the mainland, sometime after the rain had stopped, I passed the tiny atoll where I had had my “fatal” battle with the super villain Odric the Odd. I didn’t land, didn’t spare it more than a passing glance.

But back on that atoll was the memory of a girl no more than sixteen, anger coursing through her like liquid heat. Control over her demon was nearly nonexistent. The second-rate villain had been dispatched in record time, his unconscious body lying near the water’s edge. The girl was alone, Brian and Faye miles away chasing down Odric’s villain cohorts. This was the only opportunity to escape. But there was the little matter of tracers. The girl took off her helmet and belt then the rest of her clothes just to be sure. She sunk them all to the bottom of the sea with the strongest push her demon-power could muster. Then, naked as Ishtar going to hell to save her lover/son, she had flown, appropriately enough, off into the sunset.