Superheroes, Super Problems

*16* The Return

My breath wasn't caught when I realized my body was stiffened. My eyes didn't water when I experienced the pain in my wrists or the laceration in my leg. My heart didn't race because I was hooked up to IV's and monitors. The sight of three people were the cause of all that just by sitting there.

Originally, my eye lids cracked open and I was able to see Sage sitting halfway on Thayer's lap, talking silently while Declan paced standing up with his arms crossed and he was chewing on his thumb nervously. This observation only lasted about three seconds when I fully opened my eyes and then Declan glanced with a double-take. That's when the beeping of the heart monitor went berserk. Immediately, Sage rushed to my side and stroked my hair and tried shushing me, even though I couldn't hear myself make a sound. I looked over at Thayer and his dark eyes were telling me to calm down. Declan, however, stopped in his tracks towards me in order to meet the nurse and police officer who rushed in.

"She's fine. She'll be fine," he tried to convince them and I noticed that Thayer had gone invisible in the chair and Declan urged to usher the professionals out of the room as my monitor beeped less frequently. However, Declan also left the room with them. I looked back over to where Thayer was sitting and he was reappeared. He sat thoughtfully as he always did, dressed in dark jeans and a t-shirt like he used to wear. If it wasn't for the gotee look and the cropped hair, I'd say he looked like his regular, handsome self.

I looked up into Sage's blue eyes. They were no longer covered in a mask of some sort of shadows that shielded her identity. She wore regular eyeliner and mascara and she was still as beautiful as ever—as if rescuing me and scaling a building didn't cause her to break a sweat. But it made me angry that it had been a year and even though so much had changed, the two of them looked relatively the same.

"What the hell is going on?" I tried to yell and found my throat to be tender. But I didn't care.

"Well Dagger—"

I groaned in protest at the recollection of the Dagger situation. At the back of my mind I wanted to ask if he was even alive, but at the front of my mind, I remembered very clearly the sight of his lifeless body. But I wasn't asking about the situation. I wanted to know why—how my sister and her fiancé were even alive.

"Fine," Sage sighed, knowing what I was getting at. She looked back at Thayer like she always did when she couldn't find the right words. Only now, he urged her with a nod to be honest with me. "The night of the Explosion, we were both hit—"

"Obviously, except I landed up here and you two decided—"

"Will you shut up?" Sage snapped at me with the attitude-filled calm voice any sister could recognize. "I love you, Am, but you're so damn annoying. Let me finish."

"Hey," Thayer warned at her and she shot him a look in response as they always did when Sage was impulsive about something Thayer had thought through. "We didn't plan on this happening, okay? But if you want us to explain then you have to listen."

"Trust me, I want to listen, but it's kind of hard when I don't know whether to hate you for leaving me or be grateful you're back or—"

"Then just hear us out," Thayer suggested as I felt a warm tear slide down my face. It made me wonder how much medication was soaring through my bloodstream if I couldn't feel it actually leave my eye.

I listened as they explained everything from the moment the Explosion happened. As I knew, the Explosion's radiation wasn't what caused the accident. The aftershock causing riffs in the infrastructure and therefore driving ability of traffickers was what caused the physical accident. Upon healing, we were exposed to the radiation, but that took a while to settle in. Since I was in a coma, I had missed whatever hospital or funeral arrangements they had. Since the whole city was affected by the Explosion, emergency care was backed up, so by the time they got to a hospital, Thayer's new abilities had set in and he didn't know who to tell or how to use them. All he knew was that he was invisible and he needed to find me and Sage.