Wake-up Call – Chapter 62 – Danny Hebert Sympathizes

"You owe me, Danny," Lisa says, glaring at me with… far less energy than I know she can gather.

Behind her, a woman who's uncomfortably attractive while still looking like my daughter's girlfriend and partner-in-not-quite-crime bites her lip in something contrite that would make most men try to at least pretend to be chivalrous.

I'm not most men.

But… Old habits die hard.

"I… I'm not sure what it is that you want me to do," I tell Lisa while shifting against the doorframe of the kitchen's door out of the house, my bad leg briefly protesting at the motion before I let it rest.

She narrows her eyes, her forehead creasing with thin lines that I'm certain will grow deeper as she ages (the me in the mirror knows that far too well), and her lips purse as the older woman raises a hesitant hand toward her before dropping it silently.

"I want you to take my mother in and protect her while I come up with something more permanent and safer than the hotel room she had the foresight to pay for before coming to Women Trafficking's central offices," she finally says.

But that's not the whole story, is it? Because you have an apartment of your own, and you could come up with another hotel that was safe enough in minutes, so this is you forcing her on me for reasons beyond the ken of non-Thinkers.

I allow my eyes to roam back to the woman wearing a maroon coat and looking at her daughter with barely disguised horror.

Ah. It's been a while since I talked to a non-Brocktonite. Joy.

"I guess in this case, 'protecting her' entails giving her a crash course on what kind of city she just stepped into?"

"I was thinking more about telling her how to manage her finances so she doesn't get swindled by somebody trying to get her to invest in a dilapidated ferry, but sure. Do that as well," she almost spits.

Ouch.

"OK, I see you aren't in the mood to—"

"Great! Mom, I'll bring your luggage later. This is Mister Daniel Hebert, the father of my fiancée and your host for the time being. Gotta run! Ta ta!"

…

"Taylor is your [what?!"] I yell at the girl jumping atop a motorcycle right as I carelessly put too much weight on my leg and wince.

My only answer is a roaring engine and a flipped middle finger.

… I think I shouldn't worry about [Lisa's] forehead getting more wrinkles.

With a sigh and an apologetic smile, I turn to the woman blinking and gaping at the departing speed maniac before I step away from the door opening.

"She does that. You get used to it," I say to the one person who should know that better than me as I gesture her in.

She takes a few tentative steps that end up with her inside my kitchen, still looking past the open door before she forces herself to look at me.

"Really?" she asks.

"No," I admit.

"Ah. That's a relief," she says.

And then she slumps on the nearest chair, folds her arms over the table in front of her, and buries her face in sleeves made of, if my memory regarding luxurious fabrics is to be trusted, cashmere.

Annette used to have a coat just like this one, except a dark green, a bit longer, with a different cut that made the lapels flare out… Which means it wasn't quite like it, except for the marvelously soft wool that was always a pleasure to run my hand over before I circled her waist and dragged her back in to—

"Do you want something to drink?" I force myself to ask.

"Do you have chamomile tea?" she answers with her voice still muffled by thick, warm sleeves.

"My daughter is a tea fiend. I should have some," I tell her, trying to have my voice come out as warm and fond.

Rather than, you know, strained and pained.

"Your daughter. My daughter's fiancée," she says as I turn toward the cupboard over the sink.

I pretend to pay careful attention to the crystal jar filled with teabags that Taylor used to insist should each have their own receptacle so the flavors and scents wouldn't mix. The old Taylor. The one that cared about these things, or, at least, was able to say she cared.

So many missed signs. So many unforgivable slips.

"Do you know what's the life expectancy of a parahuman?" I ask after I finish filling up a pot with water.

Then I almost burn myself when the gas stove takes too long to light up, and the flaring flame beneath the pot makes the hair over my fingers curl back and blacken.

Great. Can't use my kitchen without getting burned, can't bust a skinhead's skull without getting my thigh stabbed… Annette would be ashamed of me.

"What?" the woman who's not Annette and has no right to be here asks.

Ah. Right.

"Parahumans. My wife used to run with Lustrum, so we were kinda invested in the whole thing years ago. They… They don't last long."

A watched kettle never boils. I wonder if an awkward conversation may persuade it otherwise.

"What do you mean? Alexandria, Eidolon, Legend… they've been there forever…"

I repress a very heartfelt sigh and take the white porcelain teapot from over the pile of dishes we rarely use.

The good ones. The ones for guests.

It's an unadorned thing. No floral motif or anything like that, just… an old teapot filled with spiderwebbed cracks that add texture to what used to be pure, immaculate white.

Annette fell in love with it as soon as she saw it. She said it had character.

Now it has four bags of chamomile tea as well.

"Those are the exception. As Hero should hint to," I say, my tone halfway between dry and gentle as I stare at the tiny bubbles still sticking to the metal bottom with only a slight quaver to signal the water is steadily heating up.

"I… What's… What's the rule, then?"

I sigh.

And yes: it's heartfelt.

"I don't remember the statistics off the top of my head, but for independents? Less than a year before they're dragged into a gang or… or try to refuse an offer they couldn't refuse."

I remember the horror when I learned about Taylor being… one of them. The horror at knowing that my daughter, my recklessly noble daughter, would never bow, that she would… that she would break before giving in.

Like so many others before her.

"And… for heroes? The ones who join—"

"It depends. It's… It's never a sure thing, because they can be the most powerful hero in the most peaceful city in all of America, and then there will be the one call a hero shouldn't refuse. And then it's time for the Simurgh, or the Nine, or—"

"They are [children]!"

The water isn't boiling. Not yet.

I may be.

So I turn to her, carefully not aggravating my leg yet again, and stare at a woman who stopped leaning her head on her arms a while ago.

Her eyes are green. Like Lisa's.

Like Taylor's. Like mine.

Annette's were brown.

"They aren't. Not… Not anymore. They've done things you and I will never be able to measure up to, and they're just getting started. They just freed this city from two parahuman gangs that had stalemated the local Protectorate for decades. They stopped the rampage of a parahuman terrorist who used [time] as a weapon. They…" My eyes sting, and I'm angry at them. At myself.

Then the water boils over behind me, and I hurry to turn around and turn off the stove.

I take a moment, leaning over it, watching the bubbles quickly disappear, the surface of the water deceptively still.

Brownian motion, Taylor once told me. The movement of suspended particles that gets faster and faster as more thermal energy is poured in, something that Einstein used to come up with the way to calculate the precise size of water molecules by measuring the erratic movement of a visible particle of [coffee] bounced by them.

She used to be so bright. So proud of knowing things.

And Annette… She… She told her about a poem by a Roman called Lucretius who spoke about the same thing, about glittering motes of dust in the air being the plaything of atoms, and…

I take the pot and carefully pour a stream of almost boiling, filled with erratic molecules, water into a teapot held over the sink in case I am as clumsy with this as I've recently been with everything else in my life.

I guess I could scald myself as well, but that's not much of an issue.

Then I no longer have any excuses and turn back to face the one woman who reminds me far too much of a girl too young to be taken seriously sitting right there and tearing my mind apart.

"Sugar? Honey?" I ask.

She shakes her head.

And so I can only turn back to take a couple of saucers and teacups with their matching silver spoons to set on the table.

Annette didn't like luxury, not really, except for things she… She kind of adopted them. Wove them into stories for Taylor to rapturously listen to. Stories about how a green coat was actually the cape an elf had once loaned a pixie, not realizing the pixie was too small to carry it. About how the silver spoons that always went out with the tea and never with the coffee were the ransom a pirate had gotten from a princess before deciding he'd rather keep her—and how said pirate soon found himself scrubbing the deck of his former ship as the princess became a far better captain than he'd ever been.

It's… I don't know how much Taylor remembers of it all. How many of those little things stuck beyond the vague feeling that she was loved and cared for once upon a time.

And I should tell her. Share these precious memories and moments.

But I'm so afraid that she has forgotten.

"Divorced?" the woman whose name I don't know beyond 'Lisa's mom' asks, clearly desperate for a change of subject.

"Widowed," I answer with the familiar pain that never quite stops. The one that used to be my excuse for things that became inexcusable.

"Ah. I'm sorry… I didn't see a ring."

I look at her. She isn't wearing one, either.

"You?" I ask, ignoring the meaningless, barely-there condolence.

She cradles her left hand, noticing my gaze.

"Not yet. He… He hurt Sarah. And I let him," she says, staring at the lazy curl of steam coming out of the teapot's sprout.

I frown.

"Sarah?" I ask.

"Lisa. Sarah… That's her real name—her birth name. It's… That she doesn't even want that? That she would go so far to cut any…"

She drifts off, her eyes still on the billowy pillar, her hand still massaging a finger without adornments.

"When I lost my wife…" I start for no actual reason. No reason other than a pretty woman being hurt and me being stupid and chivalrous. "I was in pain. I… Taylor lost her mother, but I lost the love of my life. So I let that pain take over. I let it comfort me, because feeling it? It was the closest thing I had to not letting go, to keeping a piece of Annette near me, even if it only was the rage, the frustration at her absence.

"I never stopped doing that. Stabbing myself with every little reminder of the woman that no longer was there, holding onto any jagged, cutting piece of memory that made me bleed. And I became so engrossed in it, in my pain, in the pain that was her only remaining… That was all I had left of her… Except it wasn't. Not really.

"Because I had our daughter.

"And I failed her. I failed her each and every day with my selfish pain, my… my own absence that only added to the grief of her no-longer-there mother. I failed her as she kept being hurt until she stopped trusting me, and decided to hide her pain from me.

"From me, but not from Lisa."

I stare at the teapot. The white porcelain with dark, hair-thin, almost diffuse cracks spread all over it, the ones my wife thought gave it character, the ones she told my daughter were there because sometimes old things get hurt, but that's no reason not to care for them and help them heal.

I have cracks. Too many of them.

I remember Lisa's thin creases on her still-young brow. Mine stopped being like that long ago.

Her mother, sitting to my left, looks at me.

And I don't feel like being looked at by deep green eyes, so I lean my head back over the backrest of this old, rickety chair that creaks enough to have a character of its own.

"I think that's why she and Lisa… Why they are together. Because Lisa [sees]. Because Taylor can't hide her pain from her, nor her wounds, and so she doesn't have to… she can allow herself to be cared for.

"It's selfish of me, you know? But I realized I failed her and… And I still want what's best for her, even if she can only find that with another person. Even if she's young, and reckless, and painfully brave. And I would rather keep her here, by my side, away from a world set on killing my little girl, but that would hurt her even worse than I already have, and…"

I stare at the ceiling. At what once was white paint and is now splotched with all the things a kitchen's ceiling can get marred by after years without a fresh coat of paint.

It isn't character. It's decay.

"You're letting her be… what? A hero? After everything you've told me?" the woman who was Sarah's mother yet obviously doesn't know Lisa asks.

I close my eyes, refusing to see.

I have quite a bit of practice, after all.

"No. I'm letting her… live. And I'd do anything to protect her, as long as that doesn't hurt her anymore."

There's a bit more silence and darkness, something I've grown even more accustomed to since Taylor left. Since I made her leave.

For her own good. And for my selfish peace of mind.

Then the silence is broken by the sound of a thin stream of water being poured first into one cup, then into another.

"I think I dislike you," she says.

"Thank you," I answer.

And then I open my eyes and sit back up like a polite man about to share a cup of tea with a guest.

On the other side of the table, the ghost of my wife gently smiles like she wouldn't have.

And Lisa's mother keeps frowning like…

Like deep green eyes filled with disapproval at a world that isn't what she wants it to be.

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This work is a repost of my most popular fic on QQ (https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/wake-up-call-worm.15638/), where it can be found up to date except for the latest two chapters that are currently only available on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Agrippa?fan_landing=true)—as an added perk, both those sites have italicized and bolded text. I'll be posting the chapters here twice weekly, on Wednesday and Friday, until we're caught up. Unless something drastic happens, it will be updated at a daily rate until it catches up to the currently written 88 chapters (or my brain is consumed by the overwhelming amounts of snark, whichever happens first).

Speaking of Italics, this story's original format relied on conveying Power's intrusions into Lisa's inner monologue through the use of italics. I'm using square brackets ([]) to portray that same effect, but the work is more than 300k words at the moment, so I have to resort to the use of macros to make that light edit and the process may not be perfect. My apologies in advance

Also, I'd like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon: Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, Xalgeon, and aj0413. If you feel like maybe giving me a hand and helping me keep writing snarky, useless lesbians, consider joining them or buying one of my books on https://www.amazon.com/stores/Terry-Lavere/author/B0BL7LSX2S. Thank you for reading!