Chapter Twenty Four: Liar Revealed

Gatsby does a double flip off the kitchen counter, bounces up and down on the springy couch, and tumbles onto the floor in the span of six seconds, give or take. Angel 'eek's like he's seen a rat, but Gats ignores him. This will likely be the last time Gatsby ever uses his powers, so he uses them. He'll miss always landing on his feet. He'll miss having weapons grafted into his fingertips.

But the feeling of being ripped apart from the inside? Not so much.

"Well," he says, tossing a wink to his roommate who's frozen with a sponge dripping foamy soap in hand. "Where's the applause?"

"One of these days you're gonna crack your skull open." Angel scowls over the dirty dishes stacked in the sink, and Gats can't help but laugh. Everything is beautiful now. The way the sun sits in bars on the counters, the way Angel's hair falls, shiny and freshly combed over his shoulders, the smell of his roommate's Yankee candle, even though the scent of "freshly cut roses" clings to every molecule of fresh air and drowns it.

It's all beautiful because Gats gets to live without unraveling. It's all beautiful because he's going to live to see it.

"I'm so happy!" Gatsby tosses himself over the counter, nearly missing his roommate's shoulder by an inch. He lands on his toes, grabs Angel by the arm and twirls him so they're looking eye to eye. Angel rolls his. With a feline smirk, Gatsby pulls his old friend down by his shirt collar and smacks a kiss on his forehead.

"Cheese 'n Crackers," Angel says, shaking his head like he's used to being kissed by one of his 'bros and this is a daily occurrence. It's not and it hasn't been for a while.

"You can cuss now, you're a big boy." Gatsby hooks his fingers into his belt-loops and hitches his pants to his waist, giving the old friend the biggest smirk he can muster.

"Well, I don't want to."

Gats lets go of Angel's collar and kisses a soapy hand instead.

"Christ." Angel recoils, already giving up on his conviction, but he lets Gatsby keep his hand. There's the shadow of a smile on his face, the fullness of the cheeks and the glitter in his black and purple eyes. Like two painted pebbles. "What's gotten into you, little guy? You okay?"

But Gats can hear the unspoken words. 'You haven't acted like this, you haven't acted happy, since the day you got the terrible superpowers.'

After that, it had been all wailing. All monologues of woe, amateur tattoos, and new drinking habits. It had been all locking himself in the bathroom and sobbing, it had been all ending up across state-lines with no recollection of how he got there, it had been all broken hearts and ended relationships, all their superhero friend locking him in an Angel's room so he wouldn't go out and accidentally die, which was mostly illegal and wholly necessary (the locking up part, not the death).

One of the stumps on top of his head flicks. "You'll see. When I get back."

"That's terrifying, coming from you." The smile is gone. "Gatsby? Do we need to talk about this? Do I need to do something?"

Gatsby blinks up at his roommate. Angelos Fibbs fits the definition of a softie by most regards. He spends most of his day singing babies to sleep, and when he's at home, he's making dinner, lighting candles, and listening to whispering violins while sketching frozen lakes and howling wolves. By the easy way he plays therapist to his friends, you would never see the supervillain in him, would never know the deadly thing that lay behind the eyes. You wouldn't see the way a sword handle fits in his fist, you wouldn't see how comfortable, how competent, he is in battle, surrounded by blood and gore. You couldn't, because to the world, he's only a young man who can paint a mean landscape and cook a mean casserole.

"I'll call you." Gatsby shrugs, backing out of the kitchen, knowing already that he's said too much. If only Angel knew where he was headed...he shudders at the thought. "In the meantime, good luck with the cookin', good lookin'!" Another quick wink, fast smirk, and he's out of there, out of the apartment, padding into the cold unforgiving kiss of sunlight.

Ready to be human again.

***

Max.

"Okay, the thing that I really like about cooking is that it's art. And it's science. There's this basic, y'know, primal part of it, 'hey I can't eat this thing because if I eat it raw I'll die,' and then we blended art into it. Like, finding joy in the small stuff, y'know? We could've stopped at making food safe to eat, but we evolved past that, to enjoy what we...."

I've listened to Gideon talk for hours. That seems to be his favorite thing to do. He's standing over the stove and watching his chili simmer, he stares at the bubbles congealing on the inside of the lid, and he just talks. Galloping sentences, pressing into misshapen paragraphs, clumping into hours worth of words, words, words, words...

I'm stretched out on the floor, shielding my cellphone screen, waiting for a reply from Felix Blackwell, when I hear someone bang on the door. I jump. Over and over, the sound rings out, like a moth batting lead wings.

Like instinct, Gideon grabs the gun that he in no way legally owns out of a kitchen drawer and points it.

"Hey?" The voice on the other side of the door is unmistakably young, a teen's. "Is this the powerhar—"

I can't have my identity foiled by the fact that I didn't bother to specify in an email a) a time and b) for my "victim" not to loudly announce the very illegal, very not-Gideon-suitable we're doing. In about a second, I have the door wrenched open and my hand pressed up against his face. He's about my height, paler that porecelain, his eyes now a handsome blue that make me wonder if the inhuman ones I saw the night of the party was all something I imagined in a drunken stupor. All his hair's tucked into his Yankee's cap. I wonder if I imagined the twitching growths on his head, too.

"Don't be stupid," I say, putting a little growl into my voice. Turns out acting intimidating without my mask is a bit harder than acting like being a boy next door. "Don't talk about what we're here for." And I pull him in by his plain tee shirt, fist wound up in the thin fabric. I can feel his heartbeat against my knuckles. He doesn't fight me. Just regards me coolly, like he'd expected this.

"Mind if I use the bedroom?" I ask Gideon. "You can put the gun down."

"Oh. Yeah, of course." Gideon clicks the safety back on and tosses it back into the drawer. He smiles. "A friend? Do you want to try my chili?"

I'm still hauling Felix by his shirt, his feet dangling off the ground. He smiles back at Gideon, apparently completely at ease with being manhandled by a stranger. I wonder what the hell he's been through, and more so, what the hell he must be packing. "That would be great—"

"No, he's not going to stay that long." I drag him into the bedroom, toss him onto the bed the way a non-super would toss a trashbag onto the curb, and open the closet. Did I do a great job of hiding my tools? A purple shoe box duct-taped shut? Maybe not as much as I'd like to imagine.

He sits up, this little easy smirk spread on his pale face. "Do you have superpowers?"

"Shh!" There's a big knife involved, several tubes, different gauge needles that go in different places, and a silver liquid that gets injected into a vein when you don't have a machine involved. I'm only done it once, and I'm not sure if I know what I'm doing. "Do you want me to do it or not?" What is it with me getting surrounded by boys who talk too much? "Do you have any weapons?"

"No." He's still squinting at me. "You know, I asked you if you had superpowers. You seem like the type."

"Huh?" I half-heartedly touch his waist, because my suspicions of him packing heat are a little dashed by his stupid smirk. I know the type. He's a cocky bastard.

There's a hint of an accent on his voice, the faster he talks the thicker it sits on his words. He shrugs. "Only a super could hate superpowers as much as you do—"

"Shh!" I roll up his sleeve, reach over to the night table where Gideon keeps the hand sanitizer. I fit the biggest needle onto a syringe. "Why do you talk so—"

"Having superpowers is hell." He starts soft, but the words rush out of him, faster and faster.  "And my friends, they have these powers and they guard them even though they tear their lives apart. With the one, she has to be a superhero. It's not really a choice. She has the abilty to save people so she does, because if she didn't she couldn't sleep at night. And the other is hunted down by super-villains, fights this dark power inside him. Like the little devil on his shoulder became his powers. It's insanity, it's a curse."

The bedroom door flies open. My super-speed's getting a real check today. I swipe all the materials into the shoebox and kick it under the bed, my heart thrumming in my throat.

"Don't do it!" Gideon's leaned on the doorframe, his eyes big in his tawny face. "Power-harvesters will slit your throat. They hate supers just for being supers. There has to be a better way for managing your powers."

The walls are paper-thin, I forget.

Felix Blackwell snaps his head toward me, an eyebrow arched. 'I'll punch you into next Tuesday' I mouth. But he doesn't look afraid, he just shrugs again at me, red rising to his face. "Oh? Really? Manage them?" He tosses his ball cap on to the floor, exposing white hair that whisps up, soft like tufts of cotton ball fluff. And sticking straight up, the triangular growths I saw at the party. "My DNA is unraveling! I'm dying!"

Gideon steps into the bedroom, and my heart slams against my chest. This is what I set out to do, this is my mission, make the supers human again. Let this person live a normal life. That's why I'm in Starlight in the first place. And I can't let Gideon get in the way of that. "I can heal you."

"No," I say. "Gideon, don't. That's not what he's here for."

Felix's face softens, the red fading into a soft shade of pink. "Heal? Are you a...."

"I am. Yeah. I understand you, what's your name?"

"Gatsby, don't go by my government name." Felix. Makes sense he wouldn't want it.

"Ah." Gideon smiles, kindly. Could tack that 'kindly' on to everything he does, because he does everything kindly, really. Talking, listening, healing. "I get it. Having superpowers sucks, but like they're a gift, you know?"

"No, they're not," I say. I think of my dad sitting at the table, writing in his notebook about how our "kind" needed to be destroyed. It's never a gift for people to want you to be destroyed, I figure. "Gideon, we're cursed."

He frowns at me and shifts his eyes to my target. He's not talking to me anymore. "Would you like me to try?"

Gatsby jumps to his feet, dipping his head respectfully. "Yes, of course, I—"

"NO!" I grab him by his elbow and yank him so hard he stumbles against me. He yelps, and I know I'm bruising him, but I don't care. "You're a freak, Felix. He can't heal you. No one can heal you until you get rid of the fucking curse from the source."

Gideon's mouth falls open. Gatsby squirms against me. "Hey, fuckwad! You can't—" But he stops, the coherent words descend into sharp, catty sounds. His eyes dilate, the blue expands over the white, his irises becoming slim black slits. Something sharp slices into my ribs and I drop the teen (thing?). He hits the ground, clutching his head. Gideon rushes forward.

"No, don't help him." I'm shaking; can't help it. I've tried to disguise my intentions to Gideon, tried to seem friendly, but the facade is slipping. Every time I push him money, every time I slink away to hurt the people he likely thinks of as his community, it slips just a little bit more. But this time, I fucked up for good. I grab the panicking, scrabbling mass by his throat and yank him against me, resting his chin on my elbow. "Don't touch him."

Gideon presses back against the doorframe, his eyes darting to the shrine on his desk. It's more elaborate than it was when I arrived, big rose bushes budding silky pink flowers, candles always aflame. He eyes the figure of the saint of death, his hand reaching for his chest to make the sign of the cross, but he never does. The fingers just sit there, frozen. "Max, what's going on? What are you doing? Do you want him to get power-harvested?" His voice trembles.

I'm a super. I can break the small thing in my hands, I can crack Gideon's graceful, fragile form and watch him shatter like painted glass on the cinnamon carpet. The world is mine to yank wide open and gut like a pearl oyster.

My heart's a tremmor in my chest. I want the Martha Stewart pots and pans. I want the picket fence and the nice cars and a collie dog and a girl or boy who won't leave me when they find out I'm a monster. And it's not like Gideon can fight me back, not exactly.

"I guess it's time for me to tell you the truth." There's little knives in my ribs, and I don't care. I press the hostage up against me so tightly he doesn't breathe, he wheezes. And I watch as all the color drains from Gideon's face. "I didn't come here to protect you, I-I came here to destroy you."