Chapter Fourteen: Superhero Side Effects

It's not her mother's fault, and it's certainly not Monet's fault, but Percy hates the superhero shtick.

She loved it as a kid. Kept a stash of Image comics under her bed that she traded for on the school blacktop. Image stuff, all big burly men and lithe little women, gore and blood, violence and...violence. She'd duck under the sheets with a flashlight and read late into the night, careful to keep her fingers off the line work.

Monet never said a mean word, never made fun of her, but when Monet pawed through the stash, Percy made out the faintest grin on her girlfriend's face.

"Kai's into detective pulps. I like the cheesy stuff. Max..." She trailed off for a moment, glancing out at the ocean."...also liked the cheesy stuff, but the bad guys. Never thought you'd be the one into the big dudes and blood explosions." She laid her head against Percy's shoulder and smiled, and Percy could only press her hand on Monet's, thousands of words gnawing at her insides, ones she chose to keep bottled.

Hours later, she piled up the comics on her bed and tore them into dozens of little pieces. But it was only a momentary relief. She sat in the cozy quilts, surrounded by the shreds of her childhood, breathing so quick and shaky that pain welled up from the very pit of her chest. So she scrounged her desk drawers for a wheel of tape and pasted them back together.

But she hates it, hates the thing that took her mother away from her. Hates the thing that hurt Monet. Hates what changed Max. Hates that, for everything she is, smart, athletic, and a person, she's the superhero's daughter. The superhero's girlfriend. Percy isn't smart, she's small; not athletic, weak; not a person, a defenseless thing. Her mother makes her take MMA classes now, makes her weight train, tries to teach her everything she knows.

And she hates it.

She doesn't want to learn how to fight. She doesn't want to learn how to hold a gun and shoot it.

She's been crying. She wants to stay in the hospital, but she doesn't want to be seen crying. She's hungry and tired and her phone only has 4% battery, but she clamors into a stall and presses her head to her knees, waiting for the tears to quell. After several minutes, they do, leaving her face stained, her head aching, and her hands quivering. When she looks down, her phone is down to 2% battery and her head is pounding something nasty. She rolls it back on her aching shoulders and stares at the lights morphing on the ceiling, wishing more than she ever has before that she could shoot lasers out of her eyes, or leap tall buildings in a single bound, or heal things. She wishes she could save people. And she knows, knows more than she ever has before, that she can't. Drowning in a cell of white porcelain and tile, her face cupped in her hands. Her shoulders jerk and rattle with dry sobs. Tiny heaving noises she hardly notices she's making.

And then she removes her hands from her face to check her phone battery. 1%. That, she takes in with a quick glance, but something makes her breath catch.

There's a shadow moving across the floor.

The bathroom was supposed to be empty, but she can hear the clack of pacing feet. She can make out the polished toes of black shoes moving back and forth across the bathroom, first in front of her stall and then across the bathroom's length. Click-clack. Percy's heart is caught in her throat. Her hand hovers feet above her phone. The thing drains battery like a Hummer drains gas. It'll be dead soon, but she doesn't want to reach down and touch it, lest someone notice her hand.

The feet stop in front of her stall. They know she's here, she thinks with a gulp. Her purse is on the floor.

This won't be the first time Percy's been in a dangerous situation, nor will it be the last. Still, she can feel her pulse slamming in her temples and throbbing in her fingertips. The polished shoes turn away from the stall door, resuming their pacing on the tile. Clack. Clack.

Percy snatches her purse off the floor. The floor rattles, and before she can wrestle her phone out between her sewing kit, compact, and wallet, a hand wrenches her wrist. Before she processes what's happening, she's yanked against the stall door. The edge nicks her face and opens a gash across her cheekbone. And all the things her mother implied but wouldn't say, that Percy is weak, that Percy is defenseless, that without one superhero or another, she can't save herself, they all hit her so hard another sharp sob wells up from the back of her throat. She's sent sprawling, yanking at her own hand. But the grip is to tight and her aggressor is too strong. They sink their fingertips so deeply into her skin that it swells, and the bones beneath begin to creak. Percy tries to scream, but what comes out is a gasp for air as she dragged out of the stall and released onto the floor under the sink basin. She glances up at the barrel of a gun.

"Stand up." A woman's voice, booming but low. Percy can only make out the hood thrown up that layers her features in shadow. "Scream and I'll shoot."

Percy doesn't know whether to roll her eyes or cry. This was inevitable. She tries to imagine what Mo' or her mother would do. Kick away the gun maybe, or run. But there are no windows in the restroom. Just the flickering fluorescent lights and the door, which suddenly seem very far away.

The woman cocks the weapon, making a resounding clicking noise. Percy hopes there are cameras, and then realizes there probably aren't any, it being the women's bathroom and all. Blood dribbles into her open palm, and wiping it on the back of her pants, she stumbles to her feet.

The woman's several feet taller than her, a faded gray jacket tied around her hips she's unknotting very slowly. "Turn around," she says.

Percy hesitates for a moment, with her jaw ground and her fists clenched at her sides. More than ever, she wants to become someone else. More than ever, she feels hopelessly small. And more than ever, she feels like she's drowning in her own silence. So many things she wants to say and can't. Her head is starting to pound, and her eyes are beginning to well with a dry sort of pain. She's shed all the tears left in her, and all she can do is breathe in slow, deep gulps to calm an aching heart beating far too quickly.

She turns toward the mirrors. She was right about the absence of cameras. Not a single one in a corner, only white, white walls as far as she can see. All she can do is shrug her hands up in the air to make the kidnapping look as conspicuous as she can make it, in case someone walks in on it. But she has the sinking feeling that won't happen. Because things always take a grimmer tint when your girlfriend's dying and you're being kidnapped in the bathroom and now blood is dripping on the floor and your face probably needs stitches.

The gun is pressed to her back, the jacket thrown over it. Percy only catches glimpses in the mirrors, a band of a black barrel, the lump the wrinkled jacket makes over the gun. She tries to get a sense of the face under the hoodie, but all she can really tell is that it's angular, pale, and wholly unfamiliar.

"Act natural," the woman says, and all Percy can feel is the jut of the weapon as it pushes up her back and rests between her shoulder blades. She lowers her hands and stuffs them in her pockets, wishing for the first time in her life she was a little less organized. Maybe then she'd have left a fragment of metal, or a twisted paperclip, or a...something. Sewing kit's in her purse. Not that an embroidery needle wins against a gun. But it's nice, sometimes, to fantasize.

The woman spends a minute adjusting her stance and her jacket to make herself look more natural. Though the position is still slightly awkward, she manages to look like her hand is pressed to the small of Percy's back like her mother used to do. Someone finally barges into bathroom, a woman in a chunky sweater with a phone pressed to her ear. Percy's heart soars, and then it sinks as she plops her purse onto the counter and rummages through it without so much as a glance tossed in her direction. Her captor murmurs under her breath, and a sharp prod from the gun later, Percy is smiling wide and laughing loud in a way she's practiced so much, it rings natural to her own ear. She leaves the bathroom, the gun always prodding and poking her down this corridor or that one. She's chuckling, talking. "Have you ever laid awake at night, listening to the rain? It really is a lovely sound. Not that it should be, just buckets of water being dripped on the roof in a thousand little drops." Her mouth is making words, voicing thoughts faster than she can think them. Absolute blubbering nonsense. The corridors are becoming emptier, the shadows more sullen. This is it, she thinks. She's going to take me away and I'll never see anyone I love again, because Monet will be dead, and Mom won't have the powers to save me, and Chip will have withdrawn so far from the world he won't even notice I'm gone. So she talks faster. Laughs louder. Tears are brimming from her eyes despite the dry, aching pain and her parched mouth. Warm blood and coolish tears blend down the side of her face.

Percy finally reaches a door. Three glass panels that whisk in the sunlight. The warmth soaks through Percy, and for a single second she falters. She stops acting. She thinks of the gun at her back and the gun that was at Monet's. She thinks of what stepping through that door means. She holds up a single, still hand and watches the sunlight glitter on her pale fingertips.

"Are you Max's replacement?" Percy asks.

"Something like that." On the window, the woman's smile plays out. But it's strained and twitching at the edges. "Go on." Another nudge from the gun, the cold barrel searing through Percy's shirt.

"There's no point in doing this." Sweat beads on either of Percy's temples. How long until someone finds her? It was different, holding Monet's hand, falling together. There was courage then, the sense that they were standing on a sinking ship. Percy wouldn't leave her. But this, this is different. Her hands are clammy and when she needs to conjure up a convincing speech now more than ever, she can only find silence.

"We'll see about that." A shrug on the captor's part, vaguely human. "Two steps ahead." Another glimpse of that twitchy smile. Then one last push of the gun.

Percy steps forward and pushes the door open. Woozy from blood loss and sullen with grief for Monet's fate, for her friends' fates, for her own, Persephone Jameson steps out into the sunlight and quietly disappears.