I freeze, running my prior assessment of this person over in my head again. Jules? Only Peter, Lia, and some of Peter's annoying friends call me Jules, and this person doesn't look like any of them. Hell, all of Peter's friends have a good chance of being dead, and I know Lia's dead. Peter seems just as baffled by all of this as I am, as well. Which means that someone we don't know has figured out my identity and my least favorite pet name without ever meeting any of us face-to-face.
So they have powers. Ones that let them gather information. They could know anything, but that doesn't mean I should give away any information for free.
"I don't believe we've been introduced," I answer the greeting neutrally. They laugh.
"Here I am trying to catch you off-balance and you just go and grow another leg," they say, shaking their head. "You can call me In-Joke."
I feel Emily's face bleach white, adrenaline flooding her system as she takes a step back. In-Joke slowly locks eyes with her, giving her a lazy smile that freezes her in place.
"Yes, hello, it's me. Lovely to meet the real you, etcetera etcetera," they say, wiggling their fingers with a little wave. "Now be a good girl and stay quiet, I'm checking in on my investments."
"Um," Christine says.
"W-we need to—" Emily starts, but with a single look the supervillain (I think it's pretty obvious now that this is a supervillain) causes her to completely stop breathing. They don't even use their power to do it; they haven't reached out their domain to ours, haven't made a single aggressive move that I can detect, but nonetheless Emily freezes like she has a gun to her head until In-Joke looks away, her breathing restarting shallowly and silently.
"When I want to talk to your power," In-Joke says, "I'll let it know."
I step between them and Emily, half to reassure her and half to prepare for violence.
"If you're just here to threaten us then I'm afraid we're going to find somewhere else to eat," I say flatly.
"Sorry, sorry," they wave me off with a sickening smile. "There's no need to worry, she'll behave and this won't come to violence. She was a husk of a person before I ever met her, so leading her wherever you want her to go is a fairly simple trick. It just takes conviction."
"Absolutely no part of that makes me want to continue this conversation with you," I answer bluntly. "Considering that you went through the effort of figuring out where we'd be, I imagine you'd rather it amount to something."
"Oh? And what makes you think you get a choice in whether or not this amounts to something?"
"My confidence is one of my more attractive qualities," I answer, and their smile widens.
Okay. That one actually looks more happy than crazy, so I seem to be on the right track here. With a name like 'In-Joke', this is clearly the sort of villain who likes to banter. Not that I have any experience chatting with supervillains, but I definitely have experience talking with the sort of people who hear the word 'supervillain' and unironically go 'yeah, I wanna be that.' This person doesn't look any older than I am, so I'm ultimately just dealing with an incredibly edgy teenager with the power to back it up. At least, judging by Emily's reaction they do. But both the name and the way they're acting imply that their power is based around information, not combat. A purely informational power wouldn't have Emily this scared, so their power somehow lets them know things and lets them kill people, or…
"You're a part of a villain group, I take it?" I ask. It's the easiest explanation. This person is either a powerhouse who simply got their information from an ally, or an informational specialist who has the backup of an ally powerful enough to terrify Emily.
"God, I love not having to explain this shit," they sigh indulgently. "Exactly, Jules. Got it in one. Your little Emily there is a member as well, at least in the sense that she does whatever we want, whenever we want."
"You called us 'investments' earlier," I comment. "Were you the one giving Emily directions through the incursion zone?"
"Ha! From a certain point of view, yes," they confirm. "I can't take too much of the credit for that, but we nudged things here and there to help the five of you out."
"Well if that's true, I appreciate that," I say. "What is this group of yours, if you don't mind me asking?"
Keep them talking, let them keep giving us information without requiring us to give anything in return.
"We are the Defenders of Nothing," they answer with a smile.
"Huh," Peter says. "Sounds edgy as hell."
"Actually, it's hilarious," In-Joke grins. "You don't get it yet, but you will."
They seem to be staring right at me when they say that. They seem almost… hungry.
"What makes you say that?" I continue probing.
They chuckle.
"I know what you're doing, Jules," they insist. "It's painfully familiar. But there's no reason to play your cards so close to Lia's chest. I already know everything you could possibly want to hide. Do they?"
In-Joke glances between Christine and Anastasia, the latter of who glowers back at them and the former of who is frowning at me.
"To varying extents," I answer simply. "If you're planning to extort me, I'm afraid there isn't much you can get out of telling them a secret I was intending to tell them anyway."
"Really?" They press with a smile. They seem to always be smiling, to some degree or another. Keeping track of the ratio of joy to mania seems like it might be an important survival technique in the future. "You don't care if I tell them your real name is Julietta Monroe?"
"Nope," I answer. "My family's allowed to know. I might care if you tell the government, but I get the impression you and them aren't on speaking terms."
I, of course, am in fact extremely frustrated that this jerk is revealing my name now rather than letting me do it on my own terms, but I can't let them use it to hold power over me in this interaction. It's better to give it up now and eat the loss in order to deny them the asset. I glance over to Christine, since she's the only one who seems upset by this, and make an apologetic expression. She huffs, seeming irritated, but not to a degree that I don't think can be fixed the next time we get a chance for an honest conversation.
"Well, I guess you've got me there," In-Joke shrugs. "I'm happy your little family is getting along so well."
What was that? Bitterness? Potentially a trigger I'll need to tiptoe around. This is cool. This is super cool. Right when we finally get an opportunity to take a break, some crazy psychic ambushes us in a fucking Waffle House and starts nebulously threatening us to comply with demands they haven't even made yet. I was really hoping to get over the whole 'PTSD from urban areas' thing, but it's definitely not happening this week.
Anastasia lifts one hand up to grab my shirt, ensuring she has my attention as she starts expanding her domain towards this family outing interloper. You know what? Yeah. I think we're past any pretense of politeness. Rather than stop her, I back her up, our domains mixing together and creeping towards the creep as one. We have no idea when we'll actually reach our target's domain, so we take it slow, not wanting to accidentally give them a moment of vulnerability by overextending. But we don't actually hit the domain until we're overlapping with In-Joke's skin, our enemy fully on the defensive.
That's about the only conscious thought I can register before the sensation of the domain overwhelms me.
Like blood draining from my face, some important pressure leaves me. My domain recoils without moving, having reached out to touch a mirror only for the reflection to steal the heat from its bones. Yet the reflection, fittingly, suffers an identical effect, weakening as I am weakened, chastised as I am chastised. Immediately, I fear that this is their power, some ability to sap strength away from their enemies, but I can still feel Anastasia and she suffers no such effect. She remains as strong as she always was, though In-Joke and I both weaken.
Dissonance. The two of us have dissonance.
And yet, somehow I feel we resonate. There's something disturbingly familiar in the domain I now touch, both in feeling and in power. In-Joke completely and utterly eclipses our strength. If the dissonance effect has weakened me by taking ten from twenty, it has weakened them by taking ten from a hundred. Even with Anastasia at my side, the relative balance of power is not in our favor. But the thing that makes this strength feel familiar is the nature of the domain itself. It is endless iteration, an infinity explored so that all potential outcomes can be known, adored, embodied. It is the question and the answer, and it asks: what if.
It feels like a dream.
"There she is," In-Joke breathes, their voice almost a whisper. "Our god's favorite daughter."
"What?" is the most eloquent thing I can think to ask.
"Didn't you know, Julietta?" they chuckle. "You're the most interesting girl in the world. That's why the Defenders of Nothing want to extend you and your family an offer. Emily's already saying yes, whether she likes it or not, but the rest of you can get in on the action and away from the watchful eyes of the military, if you so choose."
"And in return, we work for you," I say, doing my best to rally myself after that brush with their domain. Anastasia and I both retreat back into a defensive position; neither of us wants to force a confrontation with someone more powerful than an Angel. "What might that entail, I wonder?"
"Less than you might think," In-Joke smiles. "It's in the name, after all. Our organization has no grand, unifying goal. Working together is just the only way we have to stay free. The rest of the world has banded together to force us into slavery for having the gall to be more interesting than they are. We're just banding together back. Making a safe space for powered people uninterested in dancing to everyone else's tune."
"…So you're not fighting aliens?" Anastasia asks.
"Not when they aren't getting in our way," they answer. "The whole point is not having to fight, after all."
"Even though you're so powerful?" Anastasia presses.
In-Joke breaks out into laughter, sudden and loud. Most of the others flinch at the sound, while I do my best to figure out the joke.
"I'm the weakest super in the world," they say. "The fact that I could kill every single one of you is just a minor detail. There are countless ways to do that. Some as easy as saying a single name."
Emily shivers like she's been dumped naked in the snow, her hands held tightly over her mouth as she starts to hyperventilate. Okay, time to wrap things up here, one way or another. That's one too many death threats for me to ever consider this person a friend.
"I'm going to have to decline your invitation," I say plainly. "Your organization doesn't sound like one I'd like to be involved with."
"Even after I put all that work into making sure you stayed alive?" they pout. "I could just as easily turn that effort into the opposite."
"Are you going to?" I challenge. "Because I'm done talking. Make your ultimatum if you have one, or get out."
For the first time, their expression twists into something other than a smile, though what it becomes is a matter of some interpretation. Their face twitches, moving between shock and anger and resignment and fear and so many other things so quickly that it seems almost impossible that they could truly be feeling all of them. It looks as if their face was nothing but a program they were running that just glitched out. And yet… other things make it seem more genuine. The way their breathing quickens, the way their whole body shakes, the way one hand slowly moves up inside their jacket and seems to fiddle with something, making a click, click, click. It doesn't seem like an act. It just seems like they are deeply, deeply unstable.
"U-um, I suppose I pushed too hard?" they mutter quietly to themselves, not seeming to notice or care that we can hear them. "I should just… no, wait. Not this time. Right? Probably. Could risk it? No."
"I'll join you," Peter suddenly says. In-Joke blinks, seeming to remember that we're here.
"What?" they ask. "Oh. You. Sure, whatever."
"…Well now I don't want to," Peter scowls.
"Fine, fine, yes, you are very wonderful and special and actually I care about you very very much because of how wonderful and special you are. Join us or don't. I'll ask the rest of you later. I guess it doesn't really matter either way? Probably? But… hnng."
They start walking towards us. We tense up, ready for a fight, but they ignore us and simply walk past, pushing open the exit door and walking out.
"What the fuck was—" Christine starts, but then In-Joke suddenly turns around and opens the door again.
"Right! Emily, you can tell them the shit or whatever," they say before turning around and leaving again.
"Okay, what the fuck was—"
"Right!" In-Joke says, shoving open the door yet again. "The employees are in the bathroom. They probably need your help getting untied. Should be fine though, unless they haven't been cleaning the place but then that's their own fault. Ugh, did I really tie them up in the bathroom? No wonder I'm off my game. Um. Bye."
This time, we watch out the windows to make sure they have entirely walked away.
"Okay, seriously, what the fuck was that?" Christine finally finishes.
"Well, Emily's supervillain boygirlfriend has a crush on Julietta, obviously," Peter says.
"Right, okay, let's start with that," Christine says. "Julietta? Like the girl we talked about being dead literally ten minutes ago?"
"Yeah, sorry, I'm scamming the government, would have told you sooner but you found recording devices in our room," I tell her. "Now I know this is all very interesting and a little terrifying but I'm going to go free the people who are apparently tied up in the bathroom. I promise I'll answer all your questions after that, okay?"
"Oh, uh, right," Christine blinks, and I walk over to the bathrooms. There's no one in the women's, but the men's bathroom has two people sitting on the floor, tied up by their wrists to the sink. They tense when I walk in, so I decide to cut off their concerns at the bud.
"Hey, you two okay?" I ask, squatting down and slowly reaching for their bindings. "I'm gonna help you out."
"See? That didn't take long," one of the employees tells the other, seeming unharmed and largely unperturbed. The other one seems a bit more nervous, quickly standing up and stepping away from me as I grow teeth out of my thumb and forefinger and snip their ropes.
"Are both of you okay?" I ask. "What happened?"
"Nothing too fancy," the calm employee answers. "We just give some asshole the food they ordered and they pull a gun on us and tie us up in here."
A gun? Seriously? Is that what they were fiddling with inside their jacket? I suppose it makes sense for a supervillain to have one, but I should have considered it sooner.
"Should we call the cops?" the nervous employee asks.
"Only if you want to make witness statements all day," the other employee answers. "Is that asshole gone?"
"Yeah, they left after telling us you were in here," I confirm.
"Great, situation over," the calm employee yawns. "You get used to this stuff. You guys want anything to eat?"
"That's it?" I ask, the other employee seeming to silently agree with me. "Do you two not like… need a minute?"
"You get used to this stuff," he says again.
I stare at him. He stares back.
"Okay then," I allow. "My friends and I might be talking about some private things if we decide to stay?"
"I'll turn the music up loud," the employee grunts, stepping past me. "You wanna take your thirty?"
The other employee stares at him like he's crazy.
"Sure? I guess?" he manages. The calm employee nods and walks out of the bathroom. I have no idea what that was all about, but I guess we're going to eat some waffles. I return to the others, who are mostly standing around awkwardly as Emily comes down from a panic attack.
"Well, apparently they're still open," I say as the music does indeed start to get louder. "You wanna sit in a corner booth?"
Peter and Christine turn to look at me in much the same way that the new employee looked at his co-worker, but Anastasia speaks before they can.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
"Sure!"
I nod and walk up to Emily, putting my arm around her shoulder and half hugging, half guiding her to a place to sit down.
"You're gonna be okay," I assure her soothingly.
"I'm not," Emily whimpers. "None of us are."
"Why is that?" I ask, partly on instinct to keep her talking, but also because it's starting to seem like we are genuinely in deep shit here. Emily just clutches her head and shivers, so I scoot into the booth first and guide her in beside me, making sure she still has access to an easy escape route. Peter tries to scoot in on the other side of her, but turning my hand into a blade makes him reconsider. He glances over to where Christine and Anastasia are sitting across from us, considers their expressions for a moment, and decides to simply sit at the table behind me.
"Okay, I think we probably all have a lot of questions for Emily, but let's start with everyone's questions for me so she can have some time to recover," I suggest.
"I think we all need time to recover," Christine says. "I mean, we just got threatened by a crazy person who is apparently also a supervillain in the middle of a town actively being monitored by the military. That's terrifying. Who sets up a treason recruitment drive ten minutes away from an army base?"
"Have y'all decided what you want to order?" the employee calls out to us from behind the counter.
"Maybe starting with food would be best," I say. "What's everyone thinking?"
A surreal atmosphere falls over us as we peruse the small menu and make our selections. None of us have been to a restaurant in months, and with the sudden encounter with danger so close behind us the experience is nothing like what any of us remember. Still, it doesn't take long for food to be placed in front of us, and a full stomach does more to soothe panic than any words I could ever speak.
I have a waffle. It's okay.
"Alright, so, Julietta," Christine prompts.
"That is my name, and the name I prefer, but in public I'd appreciate it if you'd still call me Lia," I answer.
"What do you actually look like?" she asks.
"I'd show you, but I literally can't," I tell her. "For some reason, I never gained a template of my original body. I was pretty heavily disabled due to an accident when I was a kid, with a lot of burn scars and other lumps all over me. Couldn't walk well. Stuff like that."
"Oh," Christine frowns. "Now I feel kinda bad. I was always a little envious of your powers."
"You don't need to feel bad for that," I shrug. "At least you didn't say 'wow, you must feel pretty lucky' or some shit."
"I know you too well to think that you're lucky," Christine sighs. "And I think I'm starting to figure out why you didn't tell me. Emily needs to hide the powers she insists she doesn't have for some reason, she needs to stay out of the military to do that, she needs Lia's money to stay out of the military, and I'm guessing if you're Julietta it means the girl who died was…"
"Yeah," I nod. "You got it in one. Pretty much everything I've told you is true other than the fact that our positions in the story are reversed. Lia crashed the car, but I'm not actually Lia and definitely wasn't driving. I'm a little worried about that breaking my cover, actually, because I have absolutely no idea how to drive."
"God, this is so fucked," Christine groans, rubbing her face with her hands.
"Everybody dies in three years," Emily suddenly says. All attention turns to her.
"Maximum, I mean," she continues quietly. "Lots of things can definitely kill us before then, too."
Oh. Okay. This is definitely not the direction I expected this conversation to go.
"When you say everybody—" Peter starts.
"Everybody I've ever met," Emily answers immediately. "Three years, maximum. The exact date moves around a little, but it's about three years from now."
"So you definitely have powers," Christine confirms.
"My power tells me when people die," Emily explains. "Me or anybody else in my domain."
"So why can't we feel your domain?" I ask.
"I can feel her domain," Anastasia says. "It's just really weak. Like, barely even there."
"Yeah, that," Emily says, her voice having kept the same monotone since she started talking. "You just stretch it out so thin that it's basically powerless. For some reason I don't need any penetration for my ability to work, so there's no real reason for me to not keep it at maximum range, minimum strength. Except to protect against other powers, I guess."
"How long have you had powers?" I ask.
"I got them slightly before I started living with you," Emily answers. "In the incursion that killed my parents."
So at least three years then. This whole time, Emily has been seeing our time run out, and we've just hit the halfway mark from her perspective.
"…So when you helped us escape the incursion, it wasn't your first time," Christine says. "That's how you knew what to do?"
No, Emily's knowledge of where to go was too arbitrary and specific to simply be from experience.
"The numbers can change," I conclude. "You were trying to optimize them."
"Basically?" Emily shrugs, staring at her plate. "They aren't numbers, for starters. Just a vague feeling of when and how likely. And I can ask my power stuff like 'well, what if they do this,' or 'what if they go here,' and the intensity of likelihood of any given time changes."
"So when the villain threatened you just now…" I prompt.
"If I moved too much or made a sound, I'd die in a second," she says softly. "And that's what they've been doing. I never met them until today, but I've felt that before, that there are certain things I can't do or else I will die. Somehow, the Defenders of Nothing figured out my power over a year ago, and I've sort of been… doing things for them. Because I don't want to die."
"So, were they guiding us via your power through the incursion zone?" I ask.
"I have no idea," Emily admits. "I don't know what causes the deaths my power foresees, it doesn't work like that. I just know that we'll die if we go left and we'll die if we go straight but we'll only maybe die if we go right, so I take us right. Over and over and over, at every intersection, before every door, before every fucking word that comes out of my mouth. Every time I think of doing anything, I see where my death date shifts. And I pick whichever option is farthest away."
"So when you told me you refused to talk about your power because you suspected the military might have truth-telling powers…" I prompt again.
"That's just my best guess about why it might happen. No, that's a lie. Telling you it was my best guess made an early death less likely to happen. I never know why. I suspect you were less likely to work with me if I didn't give you a reason that sounded plausible, and for all I know that plausible reason is exactly why I needed to do what I did. But I don't know."
"Are you checking with your power now? Before answering our questions?" I ask.
There's a pause.
"Yes," she admits.
"Would you have lied about it if your power said you'd live longer?" I ask. This time, her answer comes out immediately.
"Yes."
When I want to talk with your power, I'll let it know. Holy shit.
"You've been doing this since you got your power, haven't you?" I ask.
"Yes."
"And has it not occurred to you that this might not be healthy!?"
"It's healthier than fucking dying, Julietta!" Emily snaps. Immediately, she flinches, looking regretful about the outburst. God, it all makes so much sense now. There's still a person in there, but she's actively doing everything she can to ignore that person, her wants, her needs, because she's mortally terrified of the death she sees approaching. She wants to be alive so badly that she's scared to live.
The worst part is, I'd probably do the same in her shoes. Having that knowledge constantly hanging over me, the certainty that doing one thing would keep me alive longer than doing something else, how could I convince myself of any other choice? Maybe if I needed to save someone else's life I could shorten my own—I know I'd do that for most of the people here—but that's just a different kind of slavery to the same power, because Emily can see everyone else's deaths too. If not the what, if not the how, then the when… and that's more than scary enough. So every step of the way, she asks: should I be doing this? And she obeys whatever answer she gets.
"…It must be really annoying when you try to lie to me to take an optimal path and I just end up calling you on it," I muse.
"Yes," Emily groans. "Oh my god, I just can't get you to leave me alone."
"Honestly, I'm kind of embarrassed it took me until the incursion zone to figure it out," I admit.
"I mean, you could still tell that I was lying about Lia, you just thought that I was lying to myself," Emily mutters. She wrinkles her nose a little, seeming irritated. "…Which I was?"
I chuckle. Oh, she didn't like saying that, but I guess it's good that admitting it out loud is helpful to her by her power's standards.
"Don't laugh," Emily snaps. "If telling you what you want to hear makes me more likely to survive, I don't think that says anything good about you."
That catches me off-guard. What's the implication here, that I would get fed up with her if she kept lying and stop trying to help her as much? Or is telling me what I want to hear only optimal because it allows her to make this exact accusation, guilting me into ensuring that I don't forget about helping her even if I get annoyed? Should I be paying attention to how much time passes between my words and her responses? She made it sound like she had to explicitly think about any given option she might want to take; the optimal route isn't simply laid out before her, she has to take the best option out of all the ideas she actually considers. And based on a few of our interactions, I think it's likely that thinking of a good option doesn't necessarily mean she can physically do it. …Unless every single time I've caught her lying has been on purpose, because it… what, catches my interest? Makes me more invested in her situation? Would I be less likely to help her if I wasn't clued in on how much her power is making her suffer?
"For the love of fuck, stop overthinking it," Emily whines. "You're making the dates go crazy."
Is that a genuine request, or does thinking about it less just benefit her ability to manipulate me?
"Julietta," Emily whimpers.
"Um, I've got a question," Christine interjects. "If your power's entire thing is helping you avoid death in advance, how the hell did you get caught in an incursion zone?"
Emily is quiet for a while. I do my best not to speculate too much on why or how many lies she's composing. I'll do my best to catch her in the act and leave it at that for now.
"…I wasn't going to at first," she says softly. "I was going to leave you all to die. The incursion was kind of a sudden thing. That happens sometimes. Times of death change wildly without any apparent cause. When I saw that nearly everyone in town dropped from three years to two days, I figured out what was going to happen. And all I did was make plans to escape."
She scowls, seeming to chew on her words a little before she works up the courage to spit them out.
"I completely forgot about your birthday," she tells me. "Lia wasn't lying about that. The only thing on my mind was getting out of town. But then you called me, and for just a few moments, I lived longer than three years. If I went home and survived the incursion, I could finally get rid of the blade hanging over my neck."
She sighs.
"…It didn't work out that way, of course," she says miserably. "Whatever thread of hope I had stumbled into, I managed to lose it. I don't even know how. And I definitely don't know how In-Joke knows the insane things they know, or why they singled Julietta out. But one thing's for certain. One of the four of you is our only chance to stop the apocalypse."
Oh. Well. That's a lot to take in. All of us are left a little speechless by that particular proclamation, even Peter looking thoughtful for once. Christine is on the verge of freaking out, and though I'm doing my best to stay calm I'm still a little overwhelmed. Anastasia, though…
"Aw man," Anastasia says. "We really are Team Avatar."
"What?" I say, but Christine suddenly snorts and bursts out laughing. In an instant, the tension is broken.
"Team Avatar!" Anastasia insists. "But, kind of a weird one I guess. I'm a bloodbender, Julietta's a fleshbender, Christine's a stuffbender, and Emily is… a fatebender, I guess? Not quite as cool as explosions, but it's still pretty cool."
"What kind of bender am I?" Peter asks.
"A patiencebender," Christine answers immediately.
That makes me laugh, and to my surprise it makes Emily laugh too. Genuinely laugh, not something that looks forced. And from her lack of grimace afterwards, it seems like what she wanted to do and what she needed to do overlapped a little, just this once. I want to see that more often.
"Emily, are you in danger from the Defenders of Nothing?" I ask. The question makes the mood serious again, but not quite as tense as before. "If In-Joke is going to keep threatening to kill you if you don't work for them…"
"There's nothing you can do about it," she waves me off. "And it's not like they can make me do anything that would get me killed, or the whole threat doesn't work."
"What kind of stuff do you do for them?" Christine asks.
"I am absolutely not going to answer that question," Emily says. "It's not the worst gig in the world, though. I don't have to interact with any of their members. Plus, sometimes I suddenly feel like I'll die if I don't walk down a nearby alleyway, but when I do I find like ten thousand dollars at the other end. And I'm forced to pick it up. So at least I get paid?"
"How does that even work?" Christine asks. "Is In-Joke just gonna walk around a corner and shoot you in the head if you don't take the money?"
"I guess?" Emily shrugs. "Look, I appreciate the concern, but I'm fine."
"You had a panic attack in the middle of a restaurant because a crazy person resolved to kill you and apparently this is a semi-regular occurrence," I say flatly. "You can't just say 'I'm fine' like you told us you had a tummy ache."
"…I'm fine in the sense that I'll live and that will have to be enough because in the meantime you can't do anything about it," Emily says. "If you want to become strong enough to protect me, though, I won't complain."
I can't think of anything to say to that, and apparently neither can anyone else. We fall into an awkward silence for a while.
"There's one more thing I should probably say," Emily admits before I can raise the mood. "I'm not really sure what it means. Maybe it was just my power glitching out. But there was a little while, between showing up at your party and somehow messing up everyone's fate again, where I saw a different possibility. Everyone had times of death beyond those three years, usually all the way to old age. But Julietta… you didn't."
"Huh?" I say. "What, I die anyway?"
"No," Emily says. "My power thought you wouldn't die. Ever."
"Oh," I say, thinking about it for a moment. "Yeah, that makes sense."
Everybody gives me that look that I've been seeing from people way more often recently. The kind that says they thought they were prepared for anything I might do and found themselves wrong in a way that they should have seen coming in retrospect. I don't know why people are so bad at predicting what I'm going to do or say. I feel like I'm a relatively straightforward person?
"What?" I ask. "It makes sense. My power causes me to shapeshift into specific templates and those templates don't age over time. They're information. Unless my power itself degrades, of course I won't die of old age."
"You could at least act shocked," Christine accuses. "I mean, this is kind of a really huge deal."
"I suppose?" I allow. "It probably hasn't really sunk in yet beyond the 'does that seem possible' sniff test. I always kind of assumed that I would die really young, so I mostly just avoid thinking about it."
Christine gives me a concerned look.
"Sorry if this is insensitive, but… how disabled were you?"
I snort. I'd probably be a little irritated if most people asked that, but I like everyone here enough that it feels right to talk about my past. So I explain how all of my skin was melted off—yes, literally all of it, yes, I know how absurd that sounds, yes, I was saved by superpowers—and we have a big question-and-answer session for the next few hours. Peter and Emily share anecdotes as we all talk about our past together, our old families, the people we knew and the people who died. Other customers show up to the restaurant partway through, but we seamlessly move on to talking about Christine's past, her struggling relationship with her family and the hole they still left behind now that they're gone. Anastasia joins in too, but she's much quieter than the rest of us, her attention firmly on the conversation and yet somewhere else entirely as well.
It's funny. I still feel myself falling into old habits, doing my best to direct the conversation around so that nobody gets too upset, nobody starts to argue, but it feels so remarkably easy. Even Peter starts to fit into the groove, rude jokes at our expense abandoned in light of everything that happened today. There's a calm rhythm to it all, a beat that flows through the conversation without truly needing me to guide it. Because for all the many flaws of all of us here, just being together like this makes it so easy to forgive them. No mistake seems terribly important in the face of mutual love and respect.
I can't remember the last time I've been this relaxed.
"Should we tell the Army that the world is going to end?" Christine asks.
It's a question that ramps the tension back up, but it was so low to begin with that everyone seems to think about it in relative calm.
"If we tell them that, they're definitely going to ask how we know," I point out. "Our powers aren't based around that kind of information gathering."
"There's a very good chance they already know," Emily says. "If my power can predict the future, there's probably a bunch of others that can as well. And if the Army thought the world was going to end they definitely wouldn't tell anybody."
"Yeah, I agree," Christine allows. "And I obviously don't trust them as far as I can throw them, but this seems like the sort of problem where the consequences of just assuming other people have it covered are pretty dire."
"We could tell them that In-Joke told us," I suggest. "That would keep Emily safe."
"Yeah, but then we'd have to tell them we made contact with a supervillain organization during our break, and that sounds like an enormous hassle," Peter says. "They already don't really trust you, right Jules?"
"Please stop calling me Jules," I grumble. "But yes, it might not be wise to put more black marks on our records."
"Oh, I have an idea," Emily says. "Let's ask the girl who can see the future."
"I thought you explicitly couldn't 'see' the future," Christine says. "Or have any idea what actually happens."
"No, but I think I can reasonably infer that if we want to survive the apocalypse, we can't die before it even happens," she says. "And I don't think this will do that, but… telling the Army is a bad idea. I don't know why, but it makes the current prediction feel more certain."
"Duh," Anastasia says. …No. Ana says. I don't know why I've been mentally keeping so much distance.
"Something you know that we don't, squirt?" Peter asks.
"Everybody knows that if you want to save the world you need a group of four to six kids. Adults only get in the way," Ana informs us matter-of-factly.
"I'm an adult," I protest.
"That's okay," Ana insists. "You're my sister."
I smile.
"Yeah. I guess I am."
"Oh my gosh, that's what we should do!" Ana gasps. "I've been trying to figure out what we should do with three whole days off! You need to watch Avatar with me!"
"The good ones or the ones with the blue furries?" Peter asks.
Ana narrows her eyes at him.
"…Perhaps you are not entirely evil," she allows. "The good ones, obviously."
"Sweet! I love M. Night Shyamalan," he grins.
"Death! Death to the forsaken one!"
She leaps out of her seat and starts chasing after Peter, who laughs and runs out of the restaurant, dancing around her as she tries to punch him with her tiny fists in the parking lot. He's… actually playing with her, not just taunting her. It's nice to see.
"Well, I guess we should pay and get out of here," I say. "My treat."
"Do you have any money?" Emily asks.
"I've got my tournament grand prize," I smile, taking out the gift card. "Also I got Lia's wallet back when they released us into the wild. So that probably has some very lonely credit cards."
"Ah yes," Emily smiles fondly. "The best part of dating you."
"I feel vaguely offended on Lia's behalf. I never thought I would ever say that."
"Actually, I've been wondering," Christine says. "Emily, are you even a lesbian?"
"Huh," she blinks. "I don't know. I never really thought about it before."
"…We need to get you therapy."
"No thanks!" Emily says cheerily.
Unable to protest without being a complete hypocrite, I take our receipt to the counter and get ready to pay, handing over the gift card. It's strange. There's so much more that needs to be done. Even without all these world-shaking revelations—possibly literal ones—I have enough problems to fill an oil tanker, and I'm pretty sure all of those have been sunk. I have to convince Lia's parents to help Emily, I have to support Ana through her shattered childhood, I have to help Christine not crumble under the stress of boot camp. I have to get a better handle on my powers, regain the self-control that I feel like I lost, and come to terms with the sensations and experiences that come with having a working endocrine system. I have to struggle with the fact that aliens might be people but I still don't know why they're killing us. I have to find a way not to lose myself in the slurry of instincts, emotions, and habits forced into me from other people's brains. I have to make sure that I'm never a burden to anyone, no matter how small.
Yet somehow, I still feel hopeful. It's a stupid sort of hope, the kind based entirely on the fuzzy feelings in my chest rather than any of the thoughts in my head. Logically speaking, it doesn't have any real business being there. I might have a new family, but I've had new families half a dozen times before and it's never been a cause for celebration. When Anastasia first declared me her sister, I understood what that meant to her. I don't think I understood what it meant to me.
I wasn't being handed off to someone who didn't want me. I was being chosen by someone who I myself wanted. And that is a feeling both entirely alien, and horribly, regretfully nostalgic for a time I no longer remember. In some ways, it's a double-edged sword. I've never had this much to lose before. I can't let myself lose it. I won't.
"Ma'am?"
I blink, looking up at the employee behind the counter.
"This card has six dollars and forty-three cents on it."
I stare at him. He remains professionally patient with me.
"Man, Commander's a bitch," Christine says.
I laugh. For some reason, that's just what I feel like doing.