Super•Villainess

Chapter II: Atticus

 "Your father wants me in a morgue," I stated flatly.

"True." Fate replied, not looking up once from stuffing a green and black drawstring backpack. He packed light: a burner phone, a bound wad of cash, a first aid kit, and, of all things, a novel. No I.D. No cards with identifying information of any kind, in case they were caught - or worse. "And?"

I folded my arms over my chest, certain he was acting deliberately obtuse. "And, consequently, you might imagine why it is perhaps not a good idea for him to see me, masked or unmasked."

Shouldering the pack, Fate deigned to hit me with a bored, passing glance. In the privacy of his Guildhall accommodations, his own facemask was tucked below his scarred chin, revealing more scars cutting up his cheekbones and through one brunet eyebrow. The burns had been the worst part, begotten from the same accident that killed his mother and nearly killed Lily, too, leaving her believing herself the only survivor to that crash for the better part of a decade.

Before an unknown Super adorned in emerald and black broke her apart so thoroughly even her advanced healing hadn't been able to put her back together, Lily had devoted substantial time to chipping away at that scar tissue, with promising results. She'd been getting better every day, more attentive to fine detail. Unfortunately, she never got the chance to mend him completely. She never would.

Not unless I harness Pendulum's power and set everything right.

"I agreed that my father wants you in a morgue, not that he would like to personally put you there," Fate said.

"That distinction fails to put me at ease."

Fate made a low, dismissive note in the back of his throat to signal the end to that line of conversation. In truth, he preferred the company of books over people, and seemed to find most dialogue largely tedious. Being the Constable's shadow for so long clearly had consequences on one's sociability, it seemed.

"Let's go," he said.

"I'm serious-"

"You'd prefer I don't say goodbye?" Fate arched a challenging brow. "You should say your farewells to your family, too. Just in case. You know better than I the difficult task ahead of us."

Clenching my jaw against all the things I wanted to and couldn't say, I strode forward to clamp a hand over Fate's shoulder and let the shadows take hold.

No, I wouldn't be saying goodbye to my family for the exact reasons that he was. Both of us had permanently damaged our respective households with our lengthy disappearing acts and dealt with that added weight to our psyche in opposing ways. Whereas I carved out a fragment of my week to keep my parents superficially in the loop - our dinners - Fate returned home once in a blue moon to inform his father anytime a perceived dangerous task fell into his lap, in case he should never return, but I never, never told the sheltered Jay and Evangelina Courten of my various misdeeds. I was half-convinced they wouldn't believe me, as deep as they were in their denial of my past.

Their son? A villain turned vigilante? Surely not. That sort of mischief was only for the poors as far as they were concerned.

Their deliberate obstinance would have been humorous, had it not been so frustrating at times.

That wasn't to say our experiences - Fate's and mine - were at all similar. He recalled every second of his time away, even if he hadn't, at the time, remembered the life he had prior to his accident. I, in contrast, remembered almost none of it. It had felt to me like a horrid nightmare, one that felt unending whilst in its throes, but passed in a blink after finally waking up.