Supernova

Chapter One Hundred and Nine - Birds of a Feather

Elias came by later that same day. I didn't recognize him, because I heard the front door open. Heard it. It was an awkward, struggled action, and his footsteps were slow and audible too. I was shocked to see him in response to those sounds, and even more shocked to see him leaning over on a cane.

The whole room fell silent and looked over at him. I was on my feet immediately, up out of the warmth and heading over, offering him something better to lean on. He raised his free hand to everyone else though, waving.

"Hello everyone," he said. "I bring no malicious intent, I promise."

"Come here," I told him, taking the cane, propping him up on myself.

"Honestly, Nova," he said, with only slight hesitation. "I can manage with the cane."

"It's fine," I said.

I'm sure he could. He'd made it here from the infirmary. But it was quite embarrassing for me to watch him struggle like this, to know it was me who'd done it to him.

I brought him over and sat him onto a clear spot on the couch, propping a pillow up behind his back before I did. He hissed with discomfort even so, but assured me it was fine, no big thing, and eventually settled in.

It was Momo who spoke first.

"Elias," she said. "How are you?"

"Physically, I've seen better days," he admitted with a smile. "Mentally, on the other hand, never better."

There were some more pleasantries, but there was an air of unknown, of awkwardness to it that we hadn't had before. It seemed like everyone else had the same questions I did, and we were all just dancing around them. Eventually, it felt like I was suffocating, and if everyone else was too polite to ask, and Elias wasn't offering, I was going to be the one to ask.

"So, what happened?" I asked him.

"The brain reset, I presume?" he asked, as if reading my mind. He'd regained this ability, apparently. I nodded once, fighting down the still engrained urge to smack him. He smiled and raised a weak hand to shakily point at the back of his neck. "Well, you see, I chipped myself."

My stomach dropped. One hundred stories. An entire mountainside of free fall. And then the rest of the story came out, ten times more horrifying than I could have imagined.

He'd chipped himself years ago. Before he'd ever chipped me, even. He'd started tinkering with machinery to keep track of his partners' vital signs when he first started at The Academy, all of whom had operated as his first guinea pigs. None of them had any adverse effects from the chips, he assured us, and for some reason, perhaps against my better judgement, I believed him. Once he figured it out, he built one for himself and implanted it into the back of his neck in an effort to track his own body's happenings and quirk behaviour, in a glimpse of hope in controlling it before Cassie Stronghold or recalibration had ever become a thought, let alone an option.

Through this, he found that his body started operating slightly differently after every holiday and tweaked the hardware to keep track of his brain activity. Elias worded it that he started looking into neurology, which I knew to mean he became an expert in brain functioning in an afternoon or two, and found that his brain was indeed changing every time he went home. It didn't scare him, because he'd been shed of the ability to fear his mother or anything she did with her quirk or business, but he didn't want her to have more control over his body than he did, so he became interested in finding out how he might switch things back when she did this.

What he found, from analyzing the data of the chip, was that his brain changed most drastically in response to two events. Going home for the holidays, and prolonged time spent with Demon.