I carefully set my beret on my head and examined my reflection in the mirror atop my dresser before turning to check on Elle. She had been slipping a bit last night, only just barely lucid enough to express her desire to come along to my meeting with Therese, but she was definitely in the throes of a bad day this morning. She had pulled on the thick, warm sweater I gave her over her long-sleeved t-shirt, but her hair had gotten out of sorts in the process.
The hairbrush flew to my hand from where it sat next to the mirror, and I gently tugged her by the hand over to where our beds were pressed together against the wall. She easily complied when I lightly sat here upon the bed, and I summoned coins from the pile at the foot of the beds to lift me up into the air over the mattress behind her. I quietly started brushing, starting at the ends and dragging the metal bristles of the brush using small brush strokes. Experience had long taught me the best means of minimizing the pain of dealing with tangles.
Fortunately, pulling a sweater on had hardly done much to knot her hair, so I was done in short order. I tossed the brush towards my dresser, giving it a small tweak by the bristles to ensure it landed properly, then I moved to the door with Elle’s hand in mine. With her in this state, she wasn’t really in any shape to participate in the conversation with Therese, but I had promised last night to bring her along, and I ordinarily saw to taking care of her on bad days anyway. She didn’t need the help, but I cared about her too much to leave her alone like this. Even if only a small portion of her was present, I wanted that part with me, not left behind to stare blankly at the wall for hours.
We descended a few flights of stairs to the back hallway, and I started us down towards the loading bay, where the external door closest to the park was. Elle’s belly rumbled a bit before we reached it, so I passed by to go towards the kitchen instead to get her a small snack before we headed out. As I moved to push the swinging door inward, the sound of Newter’s laughter reached me and made me pause. It was nearly 1:45 in the afternoon, which was a pretty late time to be having lunch by most people’s standards, but with Newter regularly staying up until closing time, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for him to sleep in on days when Melanie didn’t have us running exercises in the morning. Still, he wouldn’t be laughing it up in the kitchen alone, and it was rare that Melanie or Gregor said anything that would make him laugh.
With a minute sigh, I pushed the door in and led Elle into the kitchen where, just as I suspected, Newter was sitting at the table with Spitfire.
“Hey, lovebirds,” Newter called out with a grin and a little wave. “Care to join us for some lunch?”
“No,” I replied, trying to remember how to move my mouth. “Go… park.” I narrowly resisted the urge to wince at how off I sounded.
“Alright, if you’re sure,” he remarked with a shrug before turning his attention back to the freckled Latina. “But seriously, you can’t expect me to believe you’ve never danced at a club before. You were a natural out there!”
“You were probably watching the wrong girl,” she said dismissively, though I couldn’t help but notice a hint of embarrassment in the corner of my eye as I led Elle over to the cabinet where we kept granola bars. “Still, I have been enjoying the atmosphere here a lot more than I thought I would.”
Newter affected mock indignation as he replied, “Well why wouldn’t you? This place is amazing!”
“It is, it is,” she consoled as I opened the cabinet and plucked out a sweet and salty bar I knew Elle would like. “I mean, I love music, but parties were never really my thing.”
I had just shut the cabinet and started to lead Elle back towards where we had come in when Newter dragged me into the conversation. “Meteor likes some good stuff too. Ain’t that right?”
I glanced their way and reluctantly admitted, “Yes. Ah Seh…” I frowned and brought my hand up, switching to signing, ‘ACDC.’
I paused for a moment as I double checked how to spell Evanescence in my head and began to sign out the letters, ‘EVA—’
“Uh, do you mind translating, Newt?” Spitfire interjected, completely throwing me off.
“Ah… That’s more Labs’ thing,” my orange skinned teammate admitted, as he gave me a chagrined look. “Sorry, but do you have your Etch-A-Sketch?”
I didn’t, having purposefully left it upstairs. Hadn’t he noticed I had been trying to use it less the past few days? Frustrated with both of them and mortified that I was still finding myself in situations like this, I turned and moved to leave. I hadn’t wanted them to see the expression on my face, but I wasn’t sure I had succeeded.
“Sorry, Meteor!” he called out, and he did sound sorry. Unfortunately, he followed that up with, “We’ll talk more later, yeah?”
I shoved the swinging door open far harder than necessary, causing it to slam into the hallway wall with a bang. I held it there with my power long enough for me to lead Elle past, and back in the kitchen, I could just barely make out Spitfire pointing out, “That probably wasn’t the best choice of words…”
No shit, I angrily thought as I stalked down the corridor. Elle stumbled behind me, and I hastily steadied her with my shaking hands. Her free hand moved to my arm, and she squeezed a bit. There were no words—there wouldn’t be when she was this far gone—but I understood all the same.
“Sorry,” I muttered as I laid my hand over hers and squeezed back. “Up… Up… Sah…” Upset, I wanted to say, but I didn’t know the sign, and I couldn’t remember the rest of the sounds. The beginnings of tears started to well up in my eyes, and I fought to keep them in. We were on our way to see Therese—I couldn’t afford to break down right now.
I gave Elle’s hand one last squeeze, then I led her—far more gently this time—to the loading bay door out of Palanquin. The walk to Oakley Park was short and a journey I knew well from coming here Elle so many times over the past four months. I felt a fugue begin to creep over me along the way, but I fluidly pulled out my yen coin and began to roll it over my knuckles to dispel it. Even if I wasn’t about to talk with Therese about what she had described as ‘a potentially shocking reveal,’ I was responsible for Elle today. I couldn’t allow myself to slip away.
The rhythm of the coin flipping its way over my hand again and again made time pass quickly, and before long we were walking through the gate. I tugged out my new phone to check the time and saw we were a few minutes early, so I started us towards the small shelter nestled together with a clump of trees. To my surprise, I noticed Therese was already there—or at the very least, the person slumped forward over the table appeared to be her, if the riotous blond curls were any indication.
Speaking her name was beyond me at the moment, but I loudly called out, “Hey!”
The curly haired girl’s torso snapped up into a ready position, her head turning to look this way and that before alighting on us. “Oh, hello! Sorry, I didn’t mean to fall asleep…”
Fall asleep? How long has she been here? As we stepped into the shelter, I asked, “You… okay?”
She noticeably winced. “I’m really tired. I, ah, didn’t have to work too hard to convince my mom I was actually sick. Though she did take the opportunity to try and convince me to homeschool my last semester again…” She trailed off, looking to the side. “She’s been trying to convince me since I came out. I said no at first because I… well, I didn’t want to hide who I am, but I’m really starting to reconsider…”
I helped Elle take a seat facing the trees so she could birdwatch, and I partially unwrapped the granola bar, placing it in her hands. She began to automatically eat it, her eyes fixated on the upper reaches of the trees, and Therese shot her a curious glance but let it go, which I was grateful for. I didn’t know all the right signs for what I wanted to say, but I carefully spelled out, ‘school,’ before tacking on the sign for ‘dangerous.’ I had learned that sign for work reasons, not casual conversation, but it still worked for my purposes here.
“No! No, nothing like that. Arcadia doesn’t tolerate bullying, much less anything worse than that. Though that doesn’t mean they force everyone to get along, not really. The closest they get to that is some teachers are heavy on group projects.” She looked down at the table, avoiding my gaze. “No, I’m just being… ostracized.”
“Why?” I asked, genuinely confused. I remembered enough about Arcadia from my research about Brockton Bay before moving here to know the school was one of the best schools, if not the best, in the city. I would have thought people there would be accepting.
“Ah, don’t get me wrong,” she replied, looking back up again with an expression of weary acceptance. “I’m not being ostracized by everyone, exactly. It’s just my friend group hasn’t been… understanding, exactly. Couple that with the Empire getting a stronger foothold in the city after the ABB fell apart… The school doesn’t allow even a hint of gang activity, but everyone knows there are still some kids from Empire families at the school, so everyone’s wary of associating with the openly trans girl.”
I grimaced, understanding all too well what a gang like the Empire might do to someone who offended them once they left school property.
“Your trigger…” she softly murmured, comprehension lighting up her eyes.
I gave her a sharp look at that. How the hell had she figured that out of that little information?
She winced. “Sorry, that’s… Well, that’s really what I wanted to talk to you about today…” She trailed off and wrung her hands together, her worry obvious. “My power… You saw part of it at the mall.”
I nodded, signing the individual letters for ‘Orb.’
“I can do a bit more than just orbs, but yeah,” she agreed with a nod. “But what’s more important is what those blasts do… and the secondary power I have along with that.”
The sound of a crinkling wrapper drew my attention to Elle, and I gently took the bar from her hands, peeled the wrapper back further, and returned it to her. Once she was chewing on actual food again instead of the inedible wrapper, I looked to Therese once more. She was watching with barely concealed interest, but even still she didn’t pry. Instead, she continued, “That aspect of my power… The blasts have some kinetic energy, so they pack a bit of a punch, but I can use them to force temporary emotional changes.”
A chill ran down my spine, , and the yen I had been still rolling over my knuckles clattered onto the wooden table. “Again, nothing permanent!” she hastened to add. “It’s more like… have you ever gotten inexplicably angry about something? Like, maybe you figured out why later, but at the time, you just suddenly got angry, or sad, or whatever. It’s like that. You can still work through the emotions like normal and everything. Plus, it’s really obvious because of how sudden the change is and because the blasts have kinetic energy and all.”
Obvious. Like how obvious Octavia had been at the zoo, and yet I had still done everything she told me to do.
“All of you want me to do this.”
“June, please calm down!” someone—Therese?—was saying. “Somebody could get hurt!”
My eyes snapped up in alarm, and I could practically hear Aisha hissing, “You fucking idiot,” in my ear. The table and the shelter, both of which had begun to shudder violently, abruptly stopped moving as I let go of my grip on the joints holding all the wood together. Elle was looking to the side now, not directly at me but clearly leaving me in the corner of her vision, and Therese was watching me carefully with a hand held to her chest and wide eyes.
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“Pa… Pa…” I stuttered, trying to explain.
“Panic attack,” she softly finished for me. “Yeah. I saw.”
I gestured vaguely at myself, as if to say, ‘Everybody could see,’ and she clarified, “No, June. I saw. My power, I… I don’t just affect emotions. I see them.”
I stared at her in shock, and she wilted back a bit. “Every person’s emotions, they’re a cloud of colors around them—I can’t not see them. But that’s just the surface stuff, what someone is feeling in the moment. Deeper in, inside all of that, everyone’s got a sort of… well, I see it as a person’s core. What makes them… them. That sort of thing can change over time, but especially after very emotional triumphs or traumas.
“That’s, uh… that’s how I knew you were Meteor. You had changed a bit since I met you, but you were still you.”
For several long minutes, I couldn’t marshal my thoughts into anything cohesive. Even if Victor had never touched me, I would have been speechless as my mind raced. This was huge. Therese’s power flew in the face of the unwritten rules against unmasking capes. If she encountered someone she knew was a cape—and she was bound to as a Ward—then all she needed to do was remember their core. Once she knew that much, she could ID them in civilian attire. That might have even been the point of sending her to the meeting at Fugly Bob’s in the first place—to get a bead on whichever of us came to the meeting. Hell, if she could tell when someone was lying or tell how they feel about a topic in conversation, then she was essentially a limited telepath. Another very good reason why the PRT would want to bring her to that meeting.
Oh. Not trusting my mouth, especially not now of all times, I signed, ‘clock,’ then spelled out ‘trans’ before pointing at myself. ‘Is that how you clocked me?’
She nervously ran her hand through her curls. “Yeah. You were… really obvious. The emotions I sense, they aren’t just the standard things you might think of—I can distinguish a lot of the gray areas. Pride from a job well done feels very different from feminine pride, and… well, you get the idea.”
I pushed myself up from the table. I couldn’t process this all at once. I needed time—space. I needed to not be here. “Labs,” I croaked, holding out my hand to her. She took it, still staring in a different direction, and I stepped out of the gap between the bench and the table.”
“I’m sorry…” Therese whispered, tears in her eyes. “I didn’t tell you at the mall because I wasn’t supposed to. PRT rules to protect identity. But you… you deserved to know.”
She sounded so broken—looked so broken. But can I trust that?
How can I trust anything?
----------------------------------------
“That’s a deep topic,” Dr. Drovanch remarked, sitting forward in their chair. The lights in their office were dimmed a bit but not off altogether, and the official end of our appointment time had long since passed. That might have been a problem if they had appointments scheduled after mine, but a key reason for the high cost of my appointments was the discretion involved. On days when I had an appointment with Dr. Drovanch, they had no other clients before or after but for Elle, and even that had only been one time. Nobody was around who could eavesdrop and hear something that might tie June Fujiwara to Meteor, and a tinkertech device Melanie had procure from Toybox ensured no electronic measures to accomplish the same would have success.
“‘How can I trust anything,’” they repeated, looking me in the eye with the same gentle but serious expression I had come to associate with my psychiatrist. “I imagine you have some strong feelings on the subject after your experiences in Philadelphia.”
[Obviously,] I conveyed by Etch-A-Sketch—a necessity given how much ‘talking’ I needed to do for these appointments. Visibly using my power wasn’t an issue here. Dr. Drovanch was the same person who had helped Elle when she joined the crew in the midst of a job they had at the asylum where she had been kept for years. An asylum just outside of Philadelphia—an irony that wasn’t lost on me—but that wasn’t my point. If Melanie had trusted them not only with Elle’s identity but with hypnotizing her… Well, that spoke volumes, and it had eased my way into trusting them. Which was ironic, given the topic at hand, but at least here I was in for a penny, in for a pound. The situation with Therese was far, far more complicated.
[You see the resemblance too, right? I’m not crazy?]
“You know how I feel about that word,” they remarked, raising an eyebrow.
[Doc…]
“I see the resemblance, yes,” they acknowledged. “A young woman strides into your life and you feel an immediate connection with her. You are thrust into a circumstance where you need to use your powers, which deepens the trust when she keeps that secret… Only for you to discover this young woman has the power to mess with your mind—that she is a Master.”
I grimaced, leaning heavily into the armrest of my own chair as I spin a coin endlessly above my hand to keep myself from falling into a fugue—from trying to escape into myself. Our chairs are facing each other with nothing in between us, and Elle remarked once on one of her better days that the point was to remove the barriers between us and them. Some days it was fine—maybe even nice—but today, I think I might have appreciated an extra layer of division, symbolic though it might have been.
“I also see the differences,” they continued. “Octavia shared no common interests or traits with you, but you and Therese are both transgender, a shared blessing and hardship. Octavia did not share the nature of her powers with you, but Therese has shared an explanation of her powers without you asking, an explanation that you believe to be true based on your own observations. Octavia forced you to stay, but Therese let you go, even though you have potentially damning information about her.”
[You’re saying I should trust her.]
“Not at all. That’s a decision only you can make. As always, I’m trying to give you perspective—the distance to better understand your own emotions, so you can decide for yourself what you believe.” They always said that. It would be annoying if it didn’t work. That wasn’t to say I always left appointments with Dr. Drovanch with epiphanies or anything like that. That had happened once or twice, but usually I was left with food for thought that helped me decide things.
[I’m not sure I understand where you’re going with this one.]
They leaned back in their armchair. “Trust is a difficult concept to wrestle with in my experience. There’s trust that’s given freely, trust that is earned, trust based on mutually assured destruction, trust because you need one another to accomplish a mutual goal… Our laws are based on a form of trust called the social contract, and related to that is the concept of the unwritten rules that capes abide by. There can be many parties involved in a bond of trust—the social contract and the unwritten rules are especially good examples of this—and not everyone may be extending trust for the same reason.”
I mulled that over for a moment, not having considered that last point. Therese had said I ‘deserved’ to now. Was that ‘earned’ trust? Regardless of how I defined it, I wasn’t sure I could return that type of trust. Freely given was out of the question, and even if she had been honest about her emotion altering being very obvious, any ‘earned’ trust would have a kernel of doubt sewn into it because she could always say or do what I want to hear based on how I feel. Mutually assured destruction, however… That was the foundation of the unwritten rules, or at least part of it. The idea that if somebody breaks the rules and goes too far, then they’re inviting equivalent reprisal on themself.
[That’s something to think about, thanks.]
“You’re very welcome,” they replied with a smile. “Would you like to discuss Spitfire as well?”
I sighed and shook my head.
“Very well,” they acknowledged, dropping that topic immediately. That was one of the things I liked best about Dr. Drovanch—we only discussed what I wanted to discuss. “Unless there’s something else you wished to discuss, I believe we can call it a day.”
I almost started to rise from my chair, but something stayed my hand. “One,” I vocalized. The sound of that one word was enough to set me on edge.
“Oh? By all means, June, please.”
I abruptly remembered what time it was and felt guilty. I didn’t need to look at the clock to know it was already twenty past our appointment’s scheduled end time, but my eyes shifted that way unconsciously. [No, it’s nothing. Sorry I brought it up.]
“You know I don’t mind staying late,” they commented with a knowing look. “If you wish to discuss it, then I’m all yours.”
I fiddled with the hem of my skirt for a moment before manipulating the aluminum in the Etch-A-Sketch. [I hate the way I sound when I talk.]
“Would you please elaborate on that?”
It took me a moment to decide on the right words. [I sound like a kid or foreigner learning English. Not me.]
Dr. Drovanch hummed for a moment. “There are a few ways I could interpret that statement. Are you bothered because people may mistake you as an immigrant? Because how you sound in your head doesn’t match with what comes out of your mouth? Something else? A mixture?”
I hadn’t really considered the first one, but now that they brought it up… [The first two? Mostly the second.]
“I see. Well, the way we speak is an element of our self-image. Makeup, clothing, haircuts, exercise, body piercings, how we talk, how we walk… Even putting on a costume as a cape is a form of self-expression.”
[So I don’t like how I sound because I view myself as sounding different?]
“Not necessarily, but it’s possible. More than most, you’ve fought hard to change how the world sees you.”
[You’re talking about Amy.]
“There’s certainly that, yes. But you’ve also rallied against society labeling you on more basic levels, wouldn’t you agree?”
[How do you mean?]
“Let’s use a hypothetical. Step back a couple of months to the beginning of November. You’re acclimated to your new body and you can still speak, and you’ve gone out to get groceries from the corner store. Are you with me?”
[Sure.]
“You want some nuts but can’t find the aisle where they are.”
I couldn’t help myself. [No, no—I had Amy remove those.]
Dr. Drovanch smiled. “I was thinking more along the lines of cashews for this particular hypothetical. Now then, you’re not sure where to find them, and you see someone in an employee uniform walking by, so you ask where the cashews are. They reply, ‘They’re in aisle 5, sir.’”
[Yeah, fuck that.]
“I suspected you might feel that way,” they replied, their smile shifting from one of amusement to something else. If I had to guess, I’d label it as ‘understanding,’ which made sense, given they were agender. “Tell me, how would you reply to the employee?”
[Am I allowed to be rude?]
“If that’s how you would reply.”
[I’d say, “Are you blind? I’m obviously a girl, asshole.”]
“Okay. Now why did you choose that reply?”
[Because I am, and it is obvious? Also, is this going to be a ‘you should ignore what people think about you’ thing?]
“It is not, no. I take it someone has suggested that to you before?”
[Jess. He’s an old work acquaintance in Brooklyn. I told him where he could shove that idea.]
“Some people find that way of thinking works well for them, and others, like yourself, don’t. I’d like to tweak our hypothetical now.”
[Okay.]
“Let’s go back a couple more months. It’s now the beginning of September, and Amy Dallon hasn’t changed your body yet. You’re in the grocery store and having the same problem with finding the cashews. You notice the employee, and you ask for help. They call you sir but immediately apologize and call you ma’am without you needing to point anything out. How do you feel in this circumstance?”
[Pretty shit still.]
“Tell me about that. What are you thinking about?”
[Uh… I don’t like being misgendered?]
They smiled. “Not exactly the depth I was hoping for, but it’s okay if you’re not sure.”
[I dunno. Being mistaken as male gives me this heavy feeling in my chest and ruins my mood.]
“Okay, let’s expound on that. Remember, this person has correctly identified you as female without you needing to point it out to them. It may have even been a slip of the tongue, and they viewed you as a girl all along.”
What point are they trying to make here? [That wouldn’t really be different.]
“Oh? Not at all different?”
[Maybe a bit? But I’d still be upset.]
“I see. So would it be fair to say the issue isn’t that you were viewed as male?”
Oh. [It’s because they used ‘sir’ at all. It doesn’t matter what they were thinking at the time or that it might have been a mistake.] Before they could say anything else, I wiped the board and put up another message. [That’s why Jess’ suggestion doesn’t work for me. It’s not that I care what other people think.]
“You may still care on some level, but it sounds like we know a bit more about what matters the most to you. Let’s go back to the original point. You said you hate the way you sound when you talk, and when I asked you to expound on that, you said you sound ‘like a kid or a foreigner learning English—not you.”
I stared at the floor, thinking. I don’t like to talk since what Victor did to me. No, it’s more than that. I like to talk just fine, but I like doing it through my power. Does that feel more like… me?
We stayed there together for another minute, neither of us talking. I had no doubt in mind that Dr. Drovanch would’ve let me stay, mulling things over for much longer, but I pushed myself up out of the chair onto my feet, the Etch-A-Sketch sailing over to me. I stared down at it as I twisted the aluminum. [I’m going to go.]
This was me speaking. It was different, but… it was me. I turned it around to show them, and they nodded.
“Okay. I’ll see you next Thursday, June. I hope you have a stellar week.”
[You too.]
I left and took the elevator down to the ground floor, staring down at the Etch-A-Sketch as I twisted and manipulated the aluminum in all sorts of ways while I left the small building. Eventually, I found myself mirroring Dr. Drovanch’s last words in the aluminum, [I hope you have a stellar week.]
They always wished me well like that after each appointment. Sometimes it was ‘stellar,’ sometimes it was ‘superb’ or ‘outstanding,’ or something else altogether. Most people just said, ‘good,’ but never them. That was just how they were.
The day I lost my ability to speak had been hectic and crazy. I remembered the fear when I heard Masuyo had been captured, the determination to rescue her as I fought the Empire and the ABB, Melanie ripping me a new asshole when she found out I had taken hostages… But strangely enough, what stood out the most had been some of my last spoken words.
[Didja ever wonder why my name’s Meteor]
I stared at those words, remembering the exhilaration I’d felt when I shouted them as I threw a crane truck, when I had reminded everyone there exactly who the fuck I was. Not Fighter. Not Hitokiri. Meteor.
Fuck you, Victor. You don’t get to dictate who I am.
Dr. Drovanch’s office was decently far from Palanquin—about a thirty minute drive. Flying meant it only took me about fifteen, and for the whole flight back I practiced.