Patron R2: Luck be Damned, pt.3

Eir felt ice cold at Barry's warning. She wasn't ready to face Piper, even like this. Emotions bubbled beneath her surface, rendering logical thought pointless.

"Hello everyone!" called a familiar friendly voice, Piper striding forward. She was still dressed with the usual fashion of a newsboy, though a black mask obscured her face. "Am I too late for the party? My date took forever to get ready!"

She towed a handcart with a bandaged woman in a hospital gown half falling out of it. Eir didn't recognize the stranger, but the other Patron candidate did.

"Anna!" His gun shifted to this new target, competition completely forgotten in genuine fear. "What have you done to her!?"

"So far? Just put her to sleep. That talent of hers is rather troublesome." Piper frowned, apparently oblivious to the weapon aimed at her. "The real question is, what will I do to her? Eir, tell him."

All eyes went to Eir. Her face went pale, the blood draining away to power the racing of her heart. "Piper," Eir began in a flat voice, "ees a bio-manipulator. She has ze ability to control any aspect of a living object she touches. She can keell zat woman before I could even cross ze room."

Motion near the door caught Eir's eye and she nodded to indicate Barry as she continued, "Ze last time I saw her, Piper put a hole een his heart, only letting him live so zat she could get avay vhile I vas a hero."

Piper tsked. "All true, but really, you have no flair right now, Valkyrja. Here I am, declaring myself as a new supervillain, Bioshock, and you treat it like a boardroom lecture."

This new information sank in to the people in the room. The first to react was the one with the most personal stake. "Let my sister go, you bastard!" the Adapter yelled, "She's got nothing to do with this."

Playing with a strand of the unconscious woman's flyaway hair, Piper smiled sweetly, "She is here because you are here, Mr. Malcolm Cooper. Drop your guns and kick them towards me.."

"No!" the Adapter, no, the hostage's brother Mal, fired, unable to bear any more threats though his hands shook.

The bullet clipped Piper's cheeks, leaving a small trail of bullet behind it. The wound closed as they watched.

"Don't test me!" The venom in Piper's voice cut through Mal's objections like a hot knife through butter. Under her hands, Anna whimpered in invisible pain. Teeth clenched to grinding, the man chucked his weapons towards the open floor.

Eir winced, but her eyes never left her former only friend and the hostage that true villain held at her mercy. Out of the corner of her eye, she could tell that Barry shared her memory of Piper's powers being used on him with just a touch to near lethal results.

A flick of her wrist and Eir dismissed her spear, standing up straighter to her full towering height. "Vat ees eet zat you vant, Piper? No, Bioshock. Zat ees who you are now, no?"

Piper's grin flashed in the flickering light of the remaining flood lights, never reaching her eyes. "Honestly, I want to speak with Alex."

"Now?" The startled reply escaped Eir's lips before she could think.

"Well, he was always the more sensible one, but you haven't exactly been making it easy to talk to him," Piper's eyes rolled and her hand tightened against Anna's bare skin. "Besides," the villain continued lightly, "maybe witnesses is what you need to set you free. Things haven't been right for a while now. You don't react as you are supposed to."

Eir stared at her mad friend, so alien now to her in the light of the truth but still so painfully dear. Piper had been her only refuge in a hostile world. Around them and their personal drama gathered a host of witnesses now. Mal and his sister. Barry. Even Lady Luck and however many of those poor mobsters survived.

Anger and sorrow twisted in her gut like a vice but her words held no inflection at all when Eir finally spoke, "How am I supposed to react to you tricking me into murdering my family?"

The confession hung on the air, chipping away at whatever control Eir still pretended to hold and setting her free at the same time. Everyone stared. Barry's startled distrust hurt the most.

"Wait," Mal said, breaking his strained silence as his negotiator proved herself unworthy, "You're in league with this madwoman?!"

The last thread of hope restraining him, the potential for Eir and Bioshock to eliminate each other, broke, leaving only murderous anger. Anna wouldn't get hurt because of Mal again. His fingers flexed. His guns might be halfway across the room now, but his rage grew claws fast enough. He launched himself at Piper with inhuman speed reinforced by oddly bent legs.

Everything moved at once. Mal racked claws across Piper's chest as she dodged, leaving deep gouges instead of ripping out her throat. Anna began to gurgle and thrash, arms rigid and fingers in tense claws as her body began to turn itself inside out under Piper's power. And in the middle of it all, Eir landed, ripping the two amoral Supers apart with brute force.

"Bioshock," the valkyrie hissed, "fix your patient and return her to her brother. Afterwards, I swear I vill geeve you Alex."

"Eir, no! You can't-"

Eir cut across Barry's shocked worry with the same tight voice, her storm grey eyes never leaving Piper's.. "Barry. Vatch out for Alex. He trusts you and I... von't be able to help him."

Piper began to laugh, shaking off Eir's grasp as the superhero released her. "The word of a hero. Alright then, you have a deal!"

She touched Anna, oblivious to the seizure she had caused in the woman or the blood trickling down her own flesh. Mal tried to lunge towards her again, only to be thwarted by Eir's unrelenting hold.

Anna's convulsions stopped immediately. Piper pushed the empath's body to knit itself up properly, her eyes seeing all the secret wounds to that vibrant life pattern. Burns faded to healthy flesh and cuts sewed themselves closed as Anna's eyes rolled up in her head and the woman passed out.

A heartbeat passed and then two, three. A handful of breaths later and Piper stepped away. "There. Better than new," she nodded with satisfaction before dismissing her former victim as unimportant, "Your turn, Eir."

Releasing Mal, who rushed forward to gather his sister in protective arms, the Valkyrja Eir moved away from the others with a fey smile on her lips, a step short of hysteric. Throwing her arms wide, her gaze fell on Barry, her current lover.

Regret twisted her handsome features as she whispered to him, "I'm sorry."

Then she rose into the air in a swirl of pink mist while the whole room stared, surprise turning to almost horrified shock as the majestic valkyrie melted away to leave behind a redhead teenage boy who appeared in a shower of pink gems.

Alex's feet touched the ground lightly and then the rest of his body kept going as he crumbled into a shaking mess on the floor.

----------------------------------

What the hell? Mal just stared. Surely he'd be used to the idea that appearances were deceiving, being a shifter himself, but that... was messed up. One hell of a secret identity though.

The boy replacing the terrifying and confident Valkyrja Eir sat on the floor, eyes wide and blank in a different sort of shock. The only person apparently unsurprised by the transformation, Bioshock, moved forward to gather him in her arms with a comforting cooing.

"Alex," the creepy psychopath whispered lovingly, "What's wrong, dear? Why are you so sad?"

If the whacked-out kid replied, Mal missed it as Anna stirred in his arms. "Anna," Mal spoke with soft urgency, barely restraining himself from shaking her awake, "Sis!"

"What... Mal...?" Anna opened her eyes, momentarily disoriented, and then came completely awake at once as memory returned. Her fingers wound around the stained white of Mal's shirt, clinging for her sake or his as her eyes fell on villain who had so nearly killed her this time. "I'm not dead?"

"How do you feel?" Mal asked in return.

She started to respond and then paused, confused. "I feel... fine. I can even hear out of my left ear..." Something distracted her and she turned her attention back to the center of the room. "My god," she whispered to herself, "I thought the psycho's emotions were a mess..."

Mal knew his sister well enough to see her heart go out to Alex as the boy pushed away Bioshock with the weight of permanency. He also knew it was a bad idea to get involved at all. This wasn't their fight. It would get them killed if things went wrong and wouldn't get him any closer to being Patron. It was bad enough that Natale seemed to just want him and his dead now. He needed to get Anna and his mother to safety and soon.

"Leave it," he hissed at her, not letting go, "Let's just grab the other supervillain and go. I'm not going to risk you in the middle of a Super fight, not again. You're my sister, Coop!"

She stared him, startled by the genuine passion in his voice and the actual honesty of his words. Mal used that hesitation to his ends, pulling her away towards an exit as he looked for their captured target.

Lady Luck was nowhere to be seen.

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"Vhy am I so sad?" Alex choked back a laugh. Thoughts tumbled around his head, jagged-edged truths he had stayed as Eir to deny. "You deed zis to me, Piper. All of zees..."

"What?" Confusion wrote itself across her features, underlying her inability to understand his pain. "No, I was helping you. Your family was holding you back and hurting you. With them around, you'd never be free to be the hero you were meant to be. So I helped you get rid of them. I brought you here. I kept you from turning yourself in and showed you the Patron position. I became a villain so that I could do all the things needed to clear your path to glory."

With every word she said, Alex realized how little he had come to know this side of Piper. And how well he understood it. A path to Hell paved with good intentions. Piper didn't fear or hate or regret. She was never sad. Alex had envied that about her in the depths of his neglect and self-hate, but now...

Now he saw how empty Piper was, his love for her the mere vanity of a flattering mirror.

"Zis has never been about ze glory," Alex chose his words carefully even as the ground crumbled beneath his mental feet, "I vish to become ze Patron- no, I vish to help others, hero or not, because people are suffering and zere are zings een my power to change zat."

His thin hands trembled as he lifted them to her shoulders, also bony with the maltreatment of the poorer class through the rough fabric of her shirt. Long-suppressed tears rose to the corner of his stormy eyes as Alex pushed Piper and her warm comforting embrace away from him.

As he released her, Alex felt the snapping of all ties to his past. All the good. All the bad. It was gone from him with her, bound up in that fragile and powerful body of a girl. There was nothing left inside his soul but a blank slate won with torment.

His puppet strings cut, Alex couldn't muster the will to care about himself or anything at all.

A hand grabbed his shoulder, hauling him away from the shocked Bioshock, a little too fast, a little too forceful. Met with no resistance, Barry continued to pull on Alex, stumbling walk turning into an off-kilter run into the fat drops of the thunderstorm outside the blasted warehouse.

The tactile sensation of water pouring down his over-sensitive skin, washing away tears and sweat, woke Alex to his surroundings again. He allowed Barry to guide him away from his duty, from his Patron's task, into the lee of dock shed beside the rolling muddy river.

There, Barry let him go and stood at the distance of a stranger.

Even like this, Alex remembered the sensation of making love to this man with a different body. Where Eir felt lust or even love, Alex only had respect and he shivered against the warm rain. Perhaps Barry really was a stranger; Alex had certainly revealed little of his true double existence to the man.

Barry broke the silence first. "Alex... Who- What are you? And Eir?"

So many answers came to mind. His mother had treated Eir as a separate person, the daughter she had always wanted in place of her son. To his grandmother, Alex remained a disappointment, merely less so as Eir. Wasted potential in either form. Piper had treated Alex as the brains behind Eir's heroics.

A useless boy. A half-trained engineer. A wannabe hero. The last in a legacy of Supers. Two halves that did not make a whole.

"...The same person," Alex answered at last, as much to himself as to Barry, forcing himself to face what he had so long denied, "Eir and I... are the same person. I'm a Super. That form is my power."

Barry looked at Alex through narrowed eyes, head canted as if searching for the lie behind those words. Finding only harsh numb truth, hurt horror flickered through his average features.

"Eir- Alex, I can't-" Unconsciously, his female form's lover edged away.

Alex just nodded, releasing Barry from the betrayal that Alex's omissions caused. "I know. Trust me, I know... It's okay. Go."

If Barry had looked back, had hesitated, maybe the abandonment wouldn't have felt so complete. Instead, the military man fled from the thought of his twisted male lover. Back to whatever life he'd had before Alex. Free from all of this. The retreating form disappeared into the curtain of heavy summer rain.

Sincerely, Alex wished Barry Briggs the best of luck. Then he turned, heedless of the wind and water, and walked alone into the heart of Diesel City.