Super•Villainess

IV: Atticus

"You seem... dazed," Fate observed in the hours following me shadowing us halfway across the world into the country of Pendulum's retreat. I could tell Fate didn't care about me personally enough to be concerned. To him, it was just a practical observation. "I told you we should have flown. Ren could have chartered us a plane."

    "Yes, and how subtle that arrival would have been," I replied dully, watching the countryside blur by through a wide window nearly the length of our cabin.

    My powers could only ferry me to shadows I'd touched in the past, so I took us to a villa my family had holidayed at by the coast when I was a child. From there, we snuck aboard a train to our current seats in a private luxury compartment, where a healthy dose of Fate's luck kept any ticket-counter's from remembering to come our way. As an added precaution, I jammed the door locks shut with ice, preventing  entry, should his luck at some point run dry.

    "Flicker could have teleported us," Fate pointed out. "Easily. Give him a picture and a general direction and he could have taken us to our first target's front door step in moments. Instead, you decided it would be prudent to expend an astronomical quantity of  your power - at great risk to everyone around you - and force me to stowaway for an unpleasant night-trip down the countryside."

    A pond flashed by, only discernible in the dark by the full moon's reflection bleeding across a glassy surface.

    "He might overlook your presence outside of a prison cell and pretend you aren't the 'villain' who killed the Constable due to his own complicity in Ren's coup, but he's not open-minded enough to accept my tenuous ongoing relationship with the central Guild after my sordid past," I replied. "There's a reason Ren doesn't keep him in his confidence. Flicker, although not as corrupt as many of the other former Guild Elders, would be far more interested in detaining me than aiding and abetting this little escapade."

    Fate followed my gaze out the window, one hand tucked under his chin, and an open book balancing upside down on his knee. Every once and awhile, his eyes flicked back to the novel, betraying his greater interest in finishing his chapter over continuing our conversation.

    He had been the one to open this dialogue, though. I was more than happy to leave things as they were, allowing us to lapse back into only somewhat tense silence.. It was he who fancied this intervention in the first place.

    Eventually, he sighed, world-weary, "It does no one any good to accelerate your condition unnecessarily. I don't know why you insist on it. Even if we couldn't charter a plane or enlist Flicker, there were still a dozen other options at our disposal. It does not thrill me to be bound at the hip to a ticking time-bomb for the foreseeable future, let alone one who only feels alive when playing with fire and gasoline."

    "Those alternatives required time, a resource of which I am extremely poor."

    In profile, I watched Fate's mouth twist down disdainfully into a barely noticeable grimace. For him, that was practically the spiritual equivalent of yelling obscenities at my face.

    "That doesn't make any sense," he retorted, clearly regretting initiating the topic. "To save ourselves a few days, you potentially shaved off weeks from your self-control."

    "We don't know that."

    "You don't maybe," he said, with a side-eye and the heavy implication that he, for one, knew better. That dry tone, the passive-aggressive action, it was all Lily, not that he noticed. "If you keep wasting yourself over every mild inconvenience, how do you expect to control Pendulum's power if you get it?" One by one, thin fingers tucked beneath his chin curled into a fist and dropped to his side as he straightened, facing me headlong. "You can't expect to turn back all that time, to control Pendulum's ability better than the legendary Super himself, especially in your current state. What's your real plan?"