As it turned out, my dad was correct in his speculation. His father was indeed dead. Gone.
The death date listed was a mere six years ago, rather than the several decades past when it ought to have been transcribed.
Swallowing the rest of the information in Shadow's file came no easier. At the outset, it left me feeling vaguely ill, and not because I had any connection to the man outside of shared blood leading a linear path through the generations, no doubt allowing me to inherit my own powers. No, I felt none of that familiarity. He was little more than a stranger to me, so the unease churning in my belly was identical to the sinking sensation when reading about any other purported injustice. I dreaded having to share the information with my own father, who no doubt would feel the loss deeply.
If the things I read about what happened to Shadow were true, and if they had happened to my own father, no remote island would be far enough, no secret bunker hidden well enough, and no wall thick enough to keep me from enacting my own justice on those responsible.
A small part of me considered as much, toyed with the idea with far more realistic consideration than was strictly wise. What had I to lose? I already resigned myself to a life on the fringes of society for society's own sake, and was one small mistake away from being branded an outlaw outright. Stealing top secret information from the Guild likely would have earned me a criminal charge and several years in prison by itself. If they discovered I somehow aligned myself with Shade on top of all that, my life was effectively over.
Perhaps going all in, giving my dad that one final gift of revenge, would be worth it.
I shook off the thought - the events of the previous evening were all too fresh in mind to ruminate over clearheaded, anyway. The father I knew wouldn't wish for me to do anything. He was all about forgiveness and moving on and making peace with the world; pretty notions that held little stock in reality, and he raised me to be that way, too. Or he tried. Because where I once imagined we were cut from the same cloth, I felt as though mine had been dyed dark somewhere along the way. I carried with me a wellspring of rage that saw no bottom, and indeed it only seemed to grow. I inherited no such anger from him. It was something I found all my own, grown in secret and as a result of the countless events that he could not shield me from.
I reached for the second file, Nightshade's file, and found it to be far too light. Too thin.
I ripped apart the surrounding area, denial fueling the belief that it must have fallen out somewhere. When we arrived last night, before I hid it beneath the pile of clothes to go forth on my quest for medicine and other worthy provisions, I was certain the file had been full.
That had been the only time my stolen loot had been out of my sight since I pilfered it from the Elder's Quarter, and only one individual had been alone with it long enough to spirit it away.
I ground my teeth and approached his slumbering form. He slept atop the sleeping bag again, his skin too warm to find comfort otherwise. All the better for me. It made retrieving my stolen file all the easier.
A hand closed around my outstretched wrist millimeters away from contact, so fast I didn't see him move. Without opening his eyes, or otherwise hinting at his awakened state, he asked, "What are you doing?" through barely parting lips.
I tried to wrench my hand away - and failed. "Give me my file!"
That got him to let his eyelashes flutter languidly open. "You're mad at me. Why?"
Words almost failed me at the nerve of him to not immediately know. Almost failed, but not quite. "You stole my file!"
"Not yours," he corrected. "Mine. It had my name on it, did it not?"
Unable to take it anymore, I slipped his grasp and made another grab for the rolled up parchment tucked into his inner coat lining. Atticus rolled to his feet, and I followed, stumbling much less gracefully to mine. He deftly avoided each and every one of my attempts to frisk him, light on his feet. What he couldn't avoid, he stopped in it's tracks. Larger hands closed over my own, folding them into fists and stilling them from further assault, so I utilized my knees as a distraction, intending to force him to release me, only it didn't work out as planned.
He twisted my whole body until somehow he ended up behind me with my arms forced into a cross over my chest, positioning himself safely out of kneeing range.
"Why are you fighting me?" he said, a low, tired sigh.
"Give it back!"
I kicked back into his shins, and the startled hiss of breath against the shell of my ear let me know not only that it landed, but that it hurt, and I was very, very vindictively pleased to hear that, until his own leg hooked around my ankles. I dropped like a ton of bricks faced down atop the cushioned mat and sleeping bag Atticus had been sleeping atop of minutes prior. Despite the added padding, air fled my lungs in one sudden burst. When I tried to get up, I found I couldn't.
"I stole that file, fair and square," I snapped, straining my neck to glare at him, even as he kept his palm planted firmly on my back keeping me down.
"And I stole it from you. Fair. And. Square." He came across as frustratingly calm. It made me want to become a nuisance, to break through his eternal veneer of outward indifference.
"Why do you need it?" I demanded. "It's about you! I doubt there's anything in there you don't already know!"
"I don't need it," he admitted, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "I just don't want you to have it. If you want to know something, you need only ask, and, presuming I'm feeling charitable, I might even tell you."
Unable to think of a proper retort to his very valid criticism, I opted to do the mature thing and muttered a string of unflattering things under my breath, only stopping upon eventually remembering that I, too, had a valid rebuttal, gleaned only recently from Shadow's file. "You stole my grandfather's powers. That should give me some right to information."
His hold faltered. "Your grandfather?"
His weight between my shoulder blades vanished and I found myself being flipped onto my back, a pressure still holding my legs in placeHe examined my face, his expression for once open, searching.
"Would you stop moving me around like I'm a doll?" I said at the midway point between annoyed and pissed to all hell.
"You're not the Constable's granddaughter," he murmured mostly to himself, oblivious to the way I was contemplating breaking his perfect nose.
"You stole his powers, too?" I asked, momentarily surprised out of my irritation.
In the flicking gas lamp light providing meager illumination to the space around us, one by one every loose item in the enclosed space, from clothes, to food, to the debris rose off the ground with shaky tremors and began swirling kaleidoscopically around us. Planets encircling their sun.
"The Constable's powers are mine and mine alone, now. No one has seen him use his telekinesis in years, have they? He's powerless. A pathetic man putting on a grandiose facade by pretending he is something that he is not."
I'd wanted to faze him. I'd wanted a peak beneath the mask, but the genuine bitterness in his tone took me aback.
"How?" I whispered, not even attempting to buck him off my thighs anymore. "Mimics don't steal powers. They imitate them. Everyone knows that."
Abruptly, the objects spinning around our gravity fell, like the strings of toys on a baby's mobile being cut.
Atticus shrugged, rising to his feet and offering me a hand up, which I took. "My powers are not so easily understood. I have touched dozens of Thaumaturges and retained their gifts for mere hours, and yet I have permanently taken the abilities of only three: the Constable, an ice-user named Frost, and," he looked at me, askance, "Shadow. Your grandfather, I presume?"
I nodded. "How? How do you do it? Could you steal my healing, if you wanted to?"
He shuddered. "No. I don't think I could permanently take that from you, even if I wanted to, and, before you ask, I do not want to. There is a steep cost to such an unnatural concentration of powers as is in me. Another power would be... catastrophic."
"Why?" I pressed, though I had strong suspicions already.
He smiled ruefully, then turned away. "Come on. Let's pack up. We can talk on the road - or, rather, along the tracks. I'm better physically, but fate is playing it's tricks once again today. I can't transport us right now." Seeing my intent to interrupt, he quickly added, "Later. I'll explain, but later. You said it yourself last night. The Guild can easily gain access to our location. We can't stay, and we'll both be better off getting as far away from here as possible in the interim."
Although I suspected that excuse could've been a ploy to escape a difficult conversation, he was correct, nonetheless. As he packed everything away into a large hikers pack, I set about erasing our presence as best I could.
"I like to be prepared," he explained after he first hopped down onto the tracks and offered me a hand down after him. I wasn't sure why he bothered. He easily could have floated us both down with his telekinesis. Still, I accepted his help, even if I did not need it. "I set up several nondescript locations with basic necessities in case I needed to disappear fast. I'd hoped I was being over-cautious, and I never imagined I'd have company, or else I would have brought a second sleeping bag, and clothes that actually fit you."
"I'd be far more concerned if you had clothes that specifically fit me lying around. It would imply you planned to abduct me again," I said, without any bite, showing any hard feelings were mostly assuaged by his most recent rescue. "I take it you only have access to one of these extra permanent powers at a time. How does that work?"
"I don't know," he replied, and we set off into the yawning dark of the tunnel. "It's only since recently that I've had any semblance of control over them at all." In obvious deflection, he said, "Don't you want to know more about Shadow?"
"Eventually. No rush. I imagine we have a long shared path ahead of us, so I have plenty of time to get answers." A sudden thought struck, far more frightening than I could have previously anticipated. "Unless you plan to leave me behind when you're able to shadowshift again. I wouldn't blame you, really. I'm baggage. I can't help in a combat situation. I'll only drag you down, like I did at the Guildhall."
Even so, I hoped he'd stay. He could easily survive without me, but I didn't think I could survive on my own without him.
He surprised me with a chuckle that held a hint of irony. "I can never leave you. Even if I hated you and your every heartbeat caused me pain, I could never abandon you, except to death."
I blinked. "That seems a little dramatic. If your concern is about needing a constant source of healing from fighting Supers all day, you could always just - retire. You don't need to fight them. Leave. Find a nice beach somewhere and live the rest of your days working on your tan."
"It's not that simple."
"So you're not mad?" I asked. "At me."
The question came out of nowhere, shocking even myself. It made me sound small. Insecure. The answer shouldn't have even mattered to me, but it did.
Atticus arched a dark brow. "Should I be?"
"Yes." My response was immediate. "I ruined everything. If it wasn't for me, you'd still be able to be with your family. I," I laughed suddenly at the intrusive wonder that this could be yet another catastrophe resulting from my brother's curse, "I ruin everything I touch."
Then it was again his turn to laugh, not as self-deprecating as my own, and far softer. "You're telling that to an actual, internationally famous, supervillain. There are very few things I haven't had a hand in ruining at this point, my family included. That's not on you, Lily. Nothing good awaits me at the end of my road. Only death. I have made it so."
"Death awaits everyone," I said, exasperated. "You're not special."
He smiled then, fond and humoring and a little bit sad, and I wondered what else he had yet to tell me.