WHO: Kassidy Weaver and Adam Malloy WHAT: Kassidy becomes a reincarnate, and it doesn’t go well. WHERE: M-Town WHEN: Wednesday, February 1, 2017; early afternoon. WARNINGS: NPC death, angst. Solid PG-13.
It was a silly thing to want to do, go to the bank where she had her account to take money out of the ATM when there was a perfectly working ATM right across the street from her apartment. Despite having enough money to incur the ATM fees, Kassidy hated wasting her money on something that was avoidable, and because of that she always trekked the extra few blocks to one of her banks whenever she had to withdraw money, no matter the amount. It was especially silly on that day when it was so cold, and she’d been fighting a headache since she’d woken up that morning. It was also something she wouldn’t be bragging to her dad about--this particular bank wasn’t in the best neighborhood, but the other ones were a further walk, and her head really hurt.
There hadn’t been much of a line, which was unusual anywhere in New York City, but could probably be attributed to the fact that it was in the middle of the day. Most people were at work, not waiting for an available ATM at a bank so close to places like M-Town. There were only two people in front of her, though; a man in his forties wearing a suit and tie while speaking in hurried whispers on his smartphone, and a girl around her own age who was equally distracted by a color matching game on her own phone. Kassidy couldn’t judge; her own phone was out and she was typing away a text message to her mother. ‘Okay I’ll come to dinner tomorrow.’
She rubbed at her nose, close to her eye, as the pain in her head took a sharper turn. For a second the room was blurry, taking on an underwater quality that made her nervous. She’d gotten bad headaches before, but never ones that altered her perception and made her dizzy. That couldn’t be normal…
Okay, don’t be scared…
The voice came out of nowhere, a female’s voice that was inside of her own head. Kassidy immediately tensed, lifting her head from her phone to make sure that it wasn’t actually the girl in line ahead of her, her heart beginning to race when it was clear that she really was hearing a voice in her head and, no, she wasn’t hallucinating. The world around her kept moving like nothing life-changing was currently happening amongst them all, which made it all the more terrifying.
I said don’t be scared! This is the opposite of not being scared!
She squeaked, garnering attention from the girl in front of her finally, but Kassidy was suddenly distracted by something much more pressing. The floor below her was quickly shrinking away as she grew taller at a rapid rate, until the building--even with its high ceilings--couldn’t contain her. As the building began to rip apart around her, she could hear panicked screams amidst the loud sounds of demolition that she was smack in the middle of. Pieces of metal, plaster, and glass rained down, and a section of the bank collapsed in on itself. In a panic, she took a step back, her foot landing with a crunch on a parked car.
Ah crap.
It was the sirens that snapped her into focus, giving her a sound to hone in on while Cassie managed to get them back to an acceptable height. By that point the scene was chaos; people were running every which way to escape, most assuming there had been some kind of bombing. It was a lot more believable that there had been a terrorist attack on a bank than the idea of a teenage girl turning giant, but even so, Kassidy did the only logical thing she could think of. She ran.
Her shoes were gone, shredded apart when she’d grown, so she’d had no choice but to run barefoot on the cold concrete. Her clothes weren’t in great shape, either, but that was a problem to be sorted out later, when her heart wasn’t threatening to rip through her chest. At first she didn’t realize where she’d gone; she’d never been in M-Town before, had never had cause to venture into the area her dad had always warned her about, but she somehow recognized it. It was a hazy memory, one she realized with a jolt wasn’t her own. Swallowing, she pushed her hair out of her face, and leaned against the brick of the nearest building to slide down into a seated position. She could only imagine what she looked like; there was blood on her hand, which meant she’d cut her head at some point in the whole fiasco, and she was covered in dirt and debris. She either looked crazy, or somebody was going to immediately figure out…
“Oh, god.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Oh god oh god oh god…”
There were some days when Adam was... fine. Not good. But he could function. He'd stopped drinking himself to sleep on the nights when he wasn't using sex as a security blanket. He'd stopped making jokes about tall buildings because it was the only way he could keep himself from taking the thought seriously. He was even doing better, some ways, than he had been before... everything. He wasn't an expert, but he thought that he and his sister had settled into being more comfortable. He'd had to remind himself not to hold on too tightly, that she probably wouldn't like it, or get it, that she might even be insulted that he wanted to hold on to her because he'd lost another little sister. One that he wasn't even related to, that was family because he loved her, not because they shared DNA. He’d broken things off with Jace and asked to be just friends before he got hurt. He’d realized that he didn’t want to be hurt. He could take a good, honest look at himself and know that he wasn't good, and find a way to deal with it, now. If this had happened, before, he'd have... he didn't know. But it wouldn't have been good.
Some days, he wanted to scream at everybody that it wasn't fair that they'd all started to pick up and move on already while people were dead, and not coming back. She'd promised him that she wouldn't die, if he promised not to jump off any buildings. She'd promised, and she was gone, and what the fuck was he supposed to do with that now? Without that keeping his feet off the ledge? It had just been a stupid bargain. There wasn't anything holding either of them to it, even without a virus getting in the way, but maybe Adam had held onto that promise a little too tightly sometimes, too. On the bad days. So, yeah, maybe Adam wasn't moving on, no matter how much he thought he was trying.
This wasn't the best day that Adam'd had, recently, but it wasn't the worst, either. It was starting to all kind of... level out, he thought. The lows getting higher, a little at a time. Until they got somewhere around... normal. Whatever normal was going to be now, for a while. It was a normal that could still joke around with his friends. That could still get out of bed to do his job, no matter how much he didn't want to some days. That was pretty normal though, right? A lot of people didn't want to get out of bed to go do their job, people who were fine. Or maybe he was lying to himself again, who the fuck knew? Ric wasn't much help, that way. After all, Ric was where he'd gotten the building idea from in the first place. It wasn't like he could say anything. All he could do was be there as a reminder that sometimes, things did get better. That if you just waited it out, a hot, flamboyant guy you were in love with would swoop in and plant a kiss on you that changed your life.
Actually, that wasn't a bad reminder to have, even if Adam really wasn't interested in Shatterstar turning up. Maybe he was making assumptions about what the guy'd be like, but he wasn't interested in an open relationship. Thanks.
Still. Not a bad day. And sometimes, Adam thought, that was the most that you could hope for. Especially when you used it as a good excuse to treat yourself to a fancy coffee, instead of messing with X-Factor's office coffee maker.
He was walking back to the office with his overpriced gingerbread latte when something—someone—ripped the top off of one of the buildings near M-Town. Colby, that was the first thing he thought, it was Colby, except it couldn't be Colby. Colby was dead, even if she'd promised him that she wouldn't, that she'd... it couldn't be Colby. But it was definitely a reincarnate. Had to be. Especially since he saw a head sticking out of it, for a second, before that head vanished. Shrinking back down to size, he thought. Someone was shrinking back down to size, and it couldn't be Colby. It might have been... there were other reincarnates it could've been. Adam told himself that, but he was still dropping his coffee and taking off in the general direction of the collapsing building. No matter who it was, they were going to need help. They were going to need someone on their side.
It wasn't completely coincidence, that he ran straight into a girl sitting against a wall, looking like she'd been through hell. He'd sort of... taken a look at the collapsed building, and then made a guess that, no matter who the person that had suddenly grown to gigantic proportions might have been, the person in their head might've had the sense to steer them toward M-Town. If they were going with the path of least resistance, they'd be going exactly the way that Adam started checking out, on his way through to the scene of the destruction... and he didn't have to be a great detective to figure out that this? This was probably a pretty obvious connection to what had just happened.
Adam dropped to one knee beside her, bracing himself on a hand as he looked toward the direction the girl must have come from. There probably wouldn't be anyone following her. Definitely not into M-Town. But it was better to be too cautious about it than to not be cautious enough. "Hey. Uh." He hadn't exactly thought about what he was going to say, and he wasn't the best with people who were freaking out. Damn it, why wasn't Connor here? He was a caretaker, he had to be... maybe not great at this, but at least better than Adam. "You're okay. It's safe here."
Kassidy couldn’t stop focusing on one very important fact: she shouldn’t have been able to do that. She was normal. Blissfully, sometimes boringly, normal. She wasn’t supposed to have superpowers, or a voice in her head trying to calm her down after she became a freaking giant and destroyed a building. Her head once again turned towards where she’d run from, where sirens were without a doubt heading towards, and she cringed as guilt squeezed at her gut. Surely people were hurt, maybe even dead, from what she had done.
She startled at the man’s voice, turning towards him with wide eyes. “I didn’t mean to--I didn’t even know I could--” She stammered, and then shut up as soon as her vision settled enough to take in exactly who she was speaking to. The dark hair, the set jaw, the startling eyes. She knew him. More accurately, the female in her head knew him. Kassidy shouldn’t have known him; she was certain she’d never met him in her life, not even in passing on the street by accident or anything. But the girl in her head--Cassie?--was so sure that her eyes narrowed as she studied him.
“Adam?” She sounded unsure, confused even, and wanted at first to take it back. Of course his name wouldn’t be Adam. How stupid was it of her to think that she would know his name before he’d even had a chance to introduce himself. She wasn’t psychic, just traumatised. That was it. That was what was going on. She thought she knew him because she was trying to distract herself from what was happening, and the fact that what she had just done, whether it was an accident or not, was major. Would they know it was her?
“Sorry,” She whispered, feeling herself starting to panic again. If she could disappear, she wouldn’t be caught, but that was an even dumber thought than the idea that she knew this stranger. Until she realized with a jolt that she actually was disappearing--or, well, shrinking. She was definitely getting smaller, and as soon as she realized it she yelped, closing her hands on some gravel as though holding onto the ground would stop it. Cassie, at least, had the insight to stop the shrinking, and even had the smarts to return them to their normal size.
“Holy shit…”
Adam could admit that he could be really dumb sometimes. A lot, if you were asking his friends about it, which he wasn't going to recommend to anyone. It was still kind of strange, having friends that he was close enough to for them to have collected any embarrassing stories about him at all. Hey, look at him, learning to be a real boy, complete with friends that he wanted to murder sometimes. Yeah, he'd done plenty of dumb shit, but mostly? Mostly, Adam was way smarter than he looked, if you were just checking out all the muscles and the fact that his social skills could leave a lot to be desired.
There weren't many reasons for this girl to know who he was. Actually, there was only one that made sense.
She couldn't be one of Connor's clones, after all. He didn't think she was some kind of telepath, or that she'd picked his name up out of his head. That meant that she knew his name some other way. Or that someone else knew his name, and they were passing it along to her. Adam wasn't sure on how all of that worked, being reincarnates. When a reincarnate passed from one person to... the next. He hadn't asked. He hadn't wanted to know, not even when he'd been convincing himself that it was better for Ric to be ripped away from him, to go on to someone who would appreciate him.
Then she started shrinking, and he knew. He fucking knew, had already known who she had to be, who it had to have been that had told her his name, who was responsible for the building.
He crouched, tense, poised, almost glad that the shrinking, and the time it took her to get back in control, for someone to get back in control, meant that he had time to think, to... figure out how the hell he was supposed to react to this. He'd known that it was possible, that maybe it wouldn't take long to come back. The people that wanted to be superheroes, they didn't wait around long. That was what made them into... them. The kinds of people that ran headlong into danger without stopping to think about what it was going to do to them. To people who loved them.
"Yeah." His voice was soft. Pained. "It's me. Hey, Cassie." He'd never really spoken to Cassie. Ric knew who she was, which meant Adam knew who she was, but it wasn't like they'd been friends. He'd been there when she died. That was the first time they'd met. It was Colby he'd known, but... Cassie would know him just as well as Colby. She could remember just as much.
Kassidy couldn’t quite pick out which part of this experience so far was the worst. It would be easy to say that the unexpected powers were the most traumatizing, all things considered, but the memories that weren’t hers were sometimes...painful. Some were Cassie’s, undeniably hers, but some were somebody else’s. Not all of them. Not enough to make things less confusing and disjointed, but enough for her to understand something intensely awful; superheroes died. A lot. And this man next to her who was kind enough to help? He was loved by the other girl.
“So she’s real then?” It was a stupid question that she already knew the answer to. It had taken her a bit to meander through the rest of her thoughts to try and focus on this one, instead of wandering to the newly acquired memories like her brain seemed to want to. But… There probably wasn’t a single person in America who didn’t know about the existence of reincarnates these days. They were all over the news these days, whether they were dying or causing deaths. She hadn’t thought about the possibility of becoming one herself; she’d stayed ignorant in her little bubble. But that had to be what this was, because people who weren’t reincarnates--well, some of them still had voices, but she doubted their voices came with size-changing abilities that were clearly dangerous in inexperienced people like herself.
She rubbed the moisture from her eyes and took in a deep, shaky breath. It was a good first step, a baby step maybe but a step, and she used that small amount of positivity to will herself to move. She couldn’t stay there in the alley, freezing cold and looking worse than homeless. She had to do something. Go back and help? No, she couldn’t chance it. What if her weird new powers kicked in again and she made things worse? She could try to go home, but she’d likely attract attention in her current state that she couldn’t handle. Not to mention, she realized as she finally pulled herself to her feet and got an actual good look around, she had no idea which direction home was. Cassie had brought her here, and other than it being in a part of M-Town, she had no idea where they were.
“She says I can trust you. And...she’s sorry. And I’m sorry, too. I think I hurt a lot of people.”
"She's real." Adam wasn't sure how reassuring that was going to be to this stranger, right then, but hey, at least she wasn't crazy. At least the voice in her head was an actual person, and not some kind of breakdown. Not that reincarnates couldn't come with those, as a special bonus. Not that they couldn't be the cause of them, or at least a contributing factor... and this girl, she wasn't Colby, but part of Colby was part of her. That made her someone to him. That made it his responsibility, at least a little, to make sure that she turned out alright. That she was taken care of. That she knew she had places to turn, if it all got to be too much.
Besides... Cassie was telling this girl to trust him. And the sorry, that could only have come from Colby. A message she'd left with Cassie, maybe. Something to pass on to him, if Cassie ever saw him again. It settled in his chest, a dull ache that made his eyes sting. He wanted to tell her that she didn't need to apologize, that it wasn't her fault, but he fucking couldn't, could he? Cassie couldn't pass on any messages for him. Colby was gone. She wasn't coming back for him to give shit about apologizing for something that wasn't her fault, that she hadn't asked for any more than he'd asked to live through it. The best he could do... the most he could do, now, was to take care of this girl. To take care of what Colby had left him. He was going to be complete shit at it, he already knew that, but he had to do his best.
The rest of it, though. The rest of what the stranger had said. That hit him hard, even without Colby, or Cassie, in the picture. That could have been him talking. If he'd fucking talked about it.
Adam didn't want to talk about it, but he couldn't let her be him. He couldn't let her carry that around alone. He sighed, shrugged his coat off and draped it around her shoulders. She had to be freezing. That growing and shrinking trick, it wasn't friendly to any clothes but a suit specially made for it, and this girl didn't have that. There wasn't anything he could do about the shoes, but he could at least make sure she stayed a little warm.
Settling down beside her, Adam took a deep breath and then let go of his last secret, even if it was only for an audience of one. It always started with one. It never stopped there. Maybe this one would feel good to get rid of, too, eventually.
"When I got Ric... Rictor..." Adam didn't know how much this girl knew. He didn't even know her name. Just that she wasn't Colby. "He's a mutant. He can make the earth move. When I got him, I was on a ship, off the coast of Japan. I lost control of his powers." Just like this girl had, when she'd gotten Cassie... or, at least, he assumed that was how the timing of it worked out. "There was an earthquake. A big one. And a tsunami. People died." Over fifteen thousand people had died, because Adam had panicked. Maybe it would've happened anyway, but he'd never know, would he? He'd never know if he just bumped up the timeline, or if it would never have happened without him. "I hated myself for a long time." He still hated himself, some days, but he wasn't going to tell her that. That wasn't what he wanted her to get out of it. "But hating myself, that didn't undo it. It didn't fix anything. I ended up hurting a lot more people, because I couldn't let go of it. Not the same way, but..." Adam shrugged, ducked his head. "It was an accident. You can't undo it. You just have to... learn to live with it. Forgive yourself." He was a hypocrite, yeah. This was why he didn't do the heart-to-hearts.
Colby had said he was pretty good at them. He'd thought he'd just been good at them for her.
Kassidy took his jacket gratefully, pulling it tightly around herself. It was a wonderful reprieve from the cold, and she sighed out a ‘thank you’ to him before going quiet again. It was much easier to listen to him speak than to talk herself, even though she had a million questions. Somehow, she thought, bombarding him with all of those questions at once was likely to lose her the only person who had stopped to help her since the incident. The incident. What a strangely clinical way to refer to an event that not only changed her life, but hurt--
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, holding the crisp air in her lungs for a beat before slowly exhaling again. Doing that every once in a while, taking a deep breath and forcing herself to slow things down, it helped. Not much, it didn’t remove the aching guilt from her gut or the ever-present fear from her chest, but it kept her from panicking, and not panicking meant not changing size, and she decided she was just as afraid of the shrinking as she was the growing (was there a point where she was so small she wouldn’t shrink anymore?).
She looked at him again when he started talking, nodding when he mentioned Rictor. She didn’t know him, of course she didn’t, but again she felt that strange pang of familiarity that wasn’t her own. She was guessing Cassie knew him, or knew of him, which would make sense since she knew who Adam was. She very clearly didn’t know this story, though, because the surprise in the back of her head wasn’t all hers, either. Her eyebrows furrowed together, and a frown pulled at her lips. Living with what he was telling her? That had to be hard. It sounded impossible. But he was sitting there, talking to her about it, and that was the point, wasn’t it? That it sucked, and he felt bad, but he found a way to keep on living.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” She gave him a hint of a smile, a silent ‘thank you’ for the talk. It didn’t make it so the guilt disappeared, she didn’t think that was going away for a while, but it made the guilt a little bit less crushing. Like she was sharing the weight of it with another person. It wasn’t her fault, and maybe, eventually, she would believe that. “How long did it take you to stop feeling guilty? Because right now I feel like this whole thing is just sitting on my chest.”
That definitely wasn't a question that Adam didn't want to answer, because the answer was that he still felt guilty, and he wasn't sure that it was ever going to go away. Not even now that he'd gotten it off his chest and told somebody about it. There was a difference, just in terms of people who had died, between what she'd done and what he'd done. He had plenty of reasons to still let himself feel guilty about it, even thought he was telling her not to. It was completely different, smashing a building compared to destroying a city, but when the point he was making was that you couldn't torture yourself over something that had been an accident? He probably wasn't going to get away with telling her that.
"It's different for everyone." Adam thought that was probably a safe answer. "You've got a good support system, you just haven't met it yet." He hoped that she had some support that she did already know, because... the only people he could think of were ones that had known Colby, and it was probably going to be just as weird for the rest of her friends as it was for him. There'd be a caretaker soon, though, someone that could help her out. As long as she wasn't a dumbass like Adam, and didn't hold it all in for years before she even considered letting someone else help, she was going to be just fine.
They weren't going to solve anything sitting on the street, though, especially not when she had to still be a little cold. "C'mon. My sister's probably got some clothes you can borrow, back at the office." If Connor was there, maybe he could even speed up the process on getting her connected with whoever might end up as her caretaker. After he finished giving Adam shit about picking up another stray girl. Adam didn't think there was any way of getting out of that one.
"We can talk more there." Adam used the wall to push himself back up to his feet, then held a hand out to help her up. He'd offer to carry her, but that'd probably be crossing the line. And what was he supposed to say? 'Don't worry, it's not creepy if I'm gay'? "Is there anyone you can call, that might be able to meet us somewhere, after?" Because Adam wasn't going to let this girl out of his sight until he was sure that she was going somewhere safe, with someone safe, who knew the whole story about what'd happened so that they wouldn't just let her bottle it all up. "A friend? Family?" Yeah, he was prying a little. Fuck off, he figured he'd earned the right.
That sounded like the truth and a cop-out answer all at once, and for a moment Kassidy toyed with the idea of ribbing him about it. It was definitely the answer of an adult who wanted you to do something they themselves hadn’t been able to master themselves--like forgiving themselves for something accidentally terrible. She refrained, however, realizing she didn’t have joking rights with a guy who was helping her when he didn’t need to, and who didn’t even know her name yet. They definitely weren’t at the level of friendship where teasing was okay.
“Do you do this a lot?” She asked as she took his hand, pulling herself to her feet. The concrete wasn’t going to be a friend to her feet, but she’d manage, especially if it meant getting out of the cold. It went against everything she’d been taught growing up, going off with this stranger to his “office.” Her father would flip out if he knew. Then again, he’d probably be more distracted with the rest of the stuff. No, she’d add this to the list of stuff from today that she wouldn’t be telling dear old dad. “Because you’re kind’ve good at the whole helping talk people down from the ledge thing. Kinda seems like you’ve had practice.”
She followed him closely, doing her best to keep up even though her steps needed to be more careful. Even looking around as they walked, she had no idea where they were going. The stories she heard about M-Town didn’t include businesses that would have offices, and Adam could easily be lying to her, but she couldn’t help trusting him. It was easier than trying to go at this alone, even if the whole thing was weird. She paused to read the sign on the door of the building, raising a brow. X-Factor Investigations. Intriguing title.
“My uncle,” She finally answered his question. “He’ll take this better than my parents. I’m um. Kassidy, by the way, my friends call me Kass...ie…” She paused, her nose scrunching up. “That’s going to be super weird now.”
Jokes about ledges probably weren't first meeting material, especially when it'd mean having to explain the joke to her. Jokes were always less funny when they were explained, but jokes about your reincarnate having a history of trying to jump off ledges? That just made you sound like a real asshole. And yeah, Adam was a real asshole, but he'd been doing pretty good at covering that up so far, this time. She actually thought that he sounded like he did it a lot. He just huffed out a laugh and smiled at her, and let her decide that for herself. It seemed... easier that way. She'd probably figure it out eventually. Or Cassie would tell her. Whichever.
Adam opened the door to X-Factor, held it for her. "Honey, I'm home!" Nobody responded, so he shrugged. "Guess you don't have to meet my friends. Lucky." Now that, she'd probably figure was a joke. If he didn't want to spend time with them, he wouldn't be calling them his friends, after all. Well. Then again. Look at his ex-girlfriend. He hadn't wanted to spend time with her, he'd just wanted to be able to say that he had a girlfriend. Back when he was still closeted and completely miserable most of the time, instead of just part of it.
Just to be polite, he shot a quick text to his sister, to let her knew that he was borrowing something from her closet, instead of letting her wonder where it had disappeared to. Not that it wouldn't be funny, if he did.
Crap. He shouldn't have let her know that he was taking her clothes.
"Pro tip. Being a reincarnate is always super weird. You just learn to..." Adam started to say live with, but that wasn't right, anymore, was it? "You learn to love the weird. It's worth it." No matter how many awful things happened. No matter how shitty the world was for reincarnates, it was worth it. Huh. Ric was going to be rubbing this one in for days. Mostly to cover the fact that he was actually kind of touched that Adam had said it. Not that Adam wouldn't know, anyway. "Here, I'll grab you some of my sister's stuff, and you can call your uncle, have him meet us somewhere." He'd leave the where up to her. It wasn't like he knew where her uncle liked to hang out.
Kassidy decided then and there that she liked this Adam guy. She could already feel the “I told you so” coming from Cassie, that feeling in the back of her skull that she wasn’t entirely used to yet. Cassie had told her repeatedly that he was someone she could trust, and while she followed her instructions because she had no idea what else to do at first, it was clear now that the superhero in her head had been right. Adam could be trusted, and above that, he seemed like a really nice guy. It still wasn’t enough for her to convince her parents that she hadn’t been completely out of her mind when she’d followed a total stranger to his office in the middle of M-Town, but it was enough to convince herself that this whole situation couldn’t be entirely terrible if it meant she was going to meet helpful people like him.
She smiled and nodded at him when he told her to call her uncle, watching as he disappeared further into the building to search out clothes for her. Instead of calling her uncle immediately, however, she took some time to take in her surroundings. It was something she could have done while on the phone, looking around the room she was currently in, but it gave her an excuse and bought her some time while she thought of the best words to use when explaining what had happened to Julius. She knew he would take it better than her parents because he took everything better than them, but that didn’t mean he’d take it well, exactly.
The name plate on the desk in front of her read “Connor Bone,” a name that was about as familiar to her as Adam’s had been. Cassie recognized it, but thankfully remained relatively quiet, sensing that it was a moment that Kassidy needed silence to think. The desk itself was cluttered. Folders covered it at various angles, with post-it notes scrawled with near-illegible handwriting. The computer screen was dusty, but the phone itself was clean. That was the part of his desk that she needed anyway.
She took a deep breath, lifted the receiver, and finally dialed the number.