Super•Villainous

Epilogue

"Not how I'd start if I only had one minute to get my point across, but I remember. Go on.'

A muscle in his cheek twitched, the only indicator of his displeasure at my response. "Perhaps it would be better if I showed you." To Windless, he instructed with all the authority of his recently won position, "See him in, please."

Everything worked out so well for Ren, better than just about anybody. It made me think of someone whose situation was the opposite.  It made me wonder about Ezra - the boy no longer a master of wind. Maybe one day I'd pity him and all he'd lost, but that day was far off, because he tried to make me lose something far worse than a mere power.

The door creaked open, bursting through the dark swell of my thoughts, and in walked a stranger, perhaps an inch or two taller than myself, and heavily scarred. They ran up his neck, over the left side of his face, and down beneath the neckline of his simple gray shirt. He refused to look our way, as though he'd rather be any place else.

Ren appeared smug, a knowing glint in his eyes that I rather disliked, which only served to inflate my trepidation. "Lily," he said, "you might not recognize Fate with or without his extensive garb, so allow me to reacquaint you."

At the mention of Fate, Atticus leapt out of bed and shoved me and Leigh none-too-gently behind him, wobbling slightly, no doubt flashing back to the moment where Fate pointed a gun to his chest and fired.

"Relax, kid," Ren admonished lazily, not lifting a finger from his wide stance at the foot of the bed, nor otherwise indicating the show of animosity troubled him. "We're all friends here... and family. Fate wouldn't hurt his own sister, not after all the trouble he's gone through to keep her alive."

My first emotion following that statement was one of general surprise and intrigue at the news of Mr Courten's apparent affair, because of course Ren had to be referring to Leigh. My father wouldn't do such a thing - he was no cheater - but I held no similar confidence in Leigh's father.

Then, in a show of alarming synchronicity, both Courten siblings swore - Leigh slightly more vulgar - and Atticus spun me around in front of him to analyze my face, occasionally peering over my shoulder for comparison.

"For someone who successfully deduced not only that I was hiding a power, but also what exactly that power was, you are remarkably dense," Ren observed. "Lily, you might remember your brother, Charles Burdett. You have him to thank for... well, just about everything."

I wriggled out of Atticus's grasp get myself a a second look and Charlie finally turned to face me full on, unable to avoid doing so any longer. Waving one scarred hand, barely a fluttering of fingers before it dropped back to his side, he said quietly, "Hello. You've grown."

*~*~*

At first, I refused to believe it. The idea that my brother was running around, willfully allowing me and our dad to believe he was dead went against everything I thought I knew about him. I screamed at everyone in the room to get out. Only Atticus's convincing kept me from enforcing that demand, because he saw what I didn't want to, what I too would have seen had I cared to seek out the unwelcome truth.

Leigh helped calm me down by oh-so-kindly informing me that I was acting psychotic. Their combined forces gave Ren enough time to fill in the details. The person they said was my brother - and I, against my greater will was beginning to believe it, too - stayed strangely mute throughout the exchange, allowing Ren to plead his case for him. I supposed Ren would know everything, nosy cretin that he was. Allergic to minding his own business, that man.

It turned out that the luckiest person in the world could never have perished in a crash the likes of which Charlie caused. Burns ravaged most of his body, and since he did not possess my special healing, his burns, which would have killed anyone else through infection alone, slowly transitioned into scars that he opted to cover with his Guild uniform. Rem informed me that the Guild tended to keep track of catastrophic phenomena that revealed no outward cause in their search for both villainy and unregistered thaumaturges, and our plane crash popped up on their radar immediately, especially given the low survivability of the crash that nonetheless produced two survivors. The Supers attending the scene detected our vitals at the outset and pulled our bodies free of the wreckage before the normal rescue teams even arrived, but kept the information quiet. It explained why, when recounting the story of my retrieval, my father often remarked that it took them days to find me.