femaustinpowers @femaustinpowers - Tumblr Blog

every breath you take ch. 7

pairing: adrian chase x f! audiokinetic! reader

tags/warnings: currently not 18+ but it's GONNA BE NEXT CHAPTER BABY!!!, explicit violence, major injury, needles, medical equipment, surgery, death, extrajudicial murder, drug use, alcohol consumption, stalking, obsessive behaviour, reader is a freak and girlfailure, reader studies vigilante, stalkers-to-coworkers-to-teammates-to-lovers

word count: 21k + (yes. i know. this shit is 46 pages in my google doc.)

author's note: my dearest friends. truly, i canot thank you enough for your patience, your kind words, your comments and your continued interest in this fic. i took a long break away from her in the full aftermath of season two adrian woobification. however, i think i've finally healed enough to say 'fuck you' to james gunn and give life to the adrian i know and love. this chapter is the longest so far, which i hope is exciting rather than boring. and yes, my friends, the time has finally come: they're gonna fuck crazy-style next chapter.

we've waited long enough.

prev chapters: ch 1 ch 2 ch 3 ch 4 ch 5 ch 6

taglist (plus everyone who commented on the last chapter, i hope thats okay!): @sumoattack-gooddog @abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz2025 @fangirl48 @am-3-thyst @eugene-emt-roe @afternoonfairy @banshee-11 @dolluvy

|--BREAKING NEWS: LORDTECH’S ‘JUSTICE GANG’ TIPS SCALES IN BORAVIA-JARHANPUR CONFLICT, INDUCTS NEW MEMBER ‘METAMORPHO’--|

Your phone lit up on the table, right next to Haileys, as the soft ding of another news alert rang simultaneously from both devices, but the notification was superfluous. Anyone who had access to a TV with a cable connection was currently glued to it, watching as two massive meta-fights took place in Metropolis and in Jarhanpur. The coverage had been going on for hours, flip-flopping between shots of Superman racing into the clouds, the JG disarming countless Boravian troops and tipping over tanks, and what seemed to be the rapid undoing of one Lex Luthor as reporter Lois Lane broadcast his corporate crimes against humanity for the world to hear. You and Hailey had watched the entire thing play out from the comfort of your couch, both stunned into hugely uncharacteristic silence for the majority, only releasing your collectively held breath and tension when the smoke cleared in both countries; the Justice Gang had successfully prevented an advance into Jarhanpur, and Mister Terrific was now working with Superman to repair the massive seam torn into the foundation of Metropolis. Though it had already been hard enough for you to watch the destruction play out, Hailey still had family in Metropolis, and she hadn’t been able to get through to a single person’s phone while the fighting raged; cell towers were more than likely damaged or destroyed in the crossfire. Her leg bounced with anxiety and dread until the screen displayed an on-site reporter to deliver an after-action statement. “In what some officials are already calling another Superman driven miracle, authorities are reporting no confirmed civilian fatalities in Metropolis at this hour, though emergency crews are still assessing injuries and structural damage. We’ve received word from Justice Gang HQ that full satellite service should be restored city wide in the next 24 hours thanks to the hard work of their resident tech expert, Mr. Terrific.”

The barely audible tap tap tap tap of Hailey’s boot heel hitting the floor finally came to a stop, and you watched her shoulders relax and settle. Still not certainty, but comforting to say the least. You offered a reassuring smile as you placed a hand on her back, rubbing gently. “See, everyone’s gonna be just fine, I’m sure. I told you Superman would have this whole pocket dimension nonsense sorted out by the end of the day.” She gave a wry chuckle in response, leaning all the way back into the couch, body posture finally loosened. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right. It just sucks waiting for the superheroes to save the day even if you know it’ll happen eventually, y’know?”

The TV volume lowered by a few notches as you clicked away at the remote, finally rising off the couch and stretching out your creaky bones as you moved to the fridge to get some easy snacks and raid your supply of smokeables. You figured you could both use some relaxation after the last several hours. “Totally,” you called back as you loaded a plate with salami, cheese cubes and fridge-burned pre-cut vegetables. “Although I gotta be honest, I wasn’t as sure about Jarhanpur. The JG didn’t seem like the altruistic, ‘defender of the oppressed’ type. Maybe it’s the whole ‘being funded by a billionaire tech bro’ aspect, but who’s to say.” The fridge door latched shut with a satisfying thunk as you swung your leg back behind you to close it on your way out of the kitchen, plate in one hand, joint and lighter in the other. Hailey smiled up at you and scooted closer to the front edge of the couch in anticipation of digging into the low-budget charcuterie board you were hauling.

“Oh my god, like, a hundred percent! Don’t get me wrong , I’m glad Hawkgirl dropped Ghurkos’s fascist ass out of the sky, but I wouldn’t have put my money on it. Maybe the new guy has been a big influence.” Her words were punctuated by a hearty crunch as she grabbed her first big bite of celery while you sat down and fiddled with the lighter. Once you finally got the cherry of the joint burning evenly, you leaned back into your couch divot and grabbed the ashtray bucket from the table beside you, placing it beside the food as you took your first few good puffs.

“Not a bad theory. What’s his name again? Metamorphosis?” you replied, letting the smoke roll out of your mouth as you passed to Hailey and reached for a piece of salami. “Metamorpho, I think. Where the fuck did he come from, though?” The scrawl at the bottom of the TV screen proved her right almost immediately, as a close up shot of the newly minted JG member shooting a burst of nasty looking gas at a Boravian soldier played in slow motion. It seemed he hadn’t even been fitted with a branded jacket yet.

“Good question. Do you think you have to do, like, a superhero job interview?” your words were somewhat garbled through the mouthful of meat and cheese, but you quickly swallowed when Hailey passed the joint back, grinning. “Ooooh, they must, right? Like there’s gotta be some sort of process involved. You probably would have to show off all your superpowers for them… I wonder if they have to bring a resume too…” That image sent you both into a fit of hysterical giggles, likely enhanced by a whole morning and afternoon of breathless anxiety. The two of you spent the next half hour pitching your versions of the ‘intake interviews’ of all your favourite (and least favourite) meta-humans. Wonder Woman being asked to hoist a series of progressively larger cars above her head, The Flash running a modified beep test, Poison Ivy growing as many venus fly traps as possible in two minutes, the works. The idea that these cosmically blessed beings still had to be subject to the inherent humiliation of proving you were good enough for a job was a welcome comfort and distraction from the day's events.

But as you stood in the basement of Checkmate HQ, covered head to toe in sensors and wires and all sorts of science-monitoring doo-hickeys, it suddenly wasn’t as funny anymore.

The room was impossibly sterile and grey. Grey concrete floors covered in grey foam padding accented by grey walls covered in grey soundproofing material. Sickeningly bright fluorescent lights bathed the entire area from their perch in the ceiling, with coverage so thorough you didn’t seem to cast a shadow. The only reprieve from the all-consuming greyness was the massive one-way mirror that made up the entirety of one of the walls. Had you been dropped into this room a year ago, before the fucked-up-everything that had turned your life upside down and inside out, you would have likely found yourself banging relentlessly on that one-way mirror, shouting, demanding to know who was behind it and to be released from this freaky-ass padded dungeon.

In the present, though, that kind of drama was unnecessary. You may not have been able to see behind the glass, but that didn’t stop you from being able to hear a mountain of information through its double paned surface. Beyond your reflection, four distinct heartbeats thumped along, all slightly elevated, accompanied by five distinct voices prattling on as your assessors readied whatever sci-fi equipment was back there and connected to all the shit they’d stuck on you. The voice-to-heartbeat math was incredibly unsettling, and grew even more unsettling as you focused in on one in particular, the newest to you. You had heard a lot of fucked up shit tuning in to people’s vitals, organs, you name it. The sound of someone with asthma wheezing through a run was like nails on a chalkboard, the sound of someone with indigestion could sometimes turn your own stomach, but this was next level. This body produced sounds much closer to a vehicle or a clock than a human being. The whine of servos clicking, faint rhythmic hydraulics, synthetic valves moving up and down in sequence, these made up a haunting symphony that replaced the usual biological sounds you were constantly flooded with.

Bordeaux. The cyborg woman, and the first person you’d seen when you rose from unconsciousness several days prior. The brain fog was significant, a side effect of being artificially kept asleep for however long it had taken the Checkmate team to address the bullet fragments in your shoulder, but even through your fuzzy awareness, you had instantly sensed something was off as you blinked awake. She’d been seated next to you, perfectly still, hands crossed in her lap, barely breathing. No, not barely… as you groaned with pain and shifted, trying to shimmy yourself upwards to get a better view of the stranger at your sick-bed, you stopped dead in your tracks. She wasn’t breathing at all. Where normally the presence of another human being was underscored by a constant, rhythmic pattern of inhales and exhales, no air passed through her. She must have seen your eyes go wide with panic, still too disoriented to scream, because she immediately adopted a warm (and admittedly, gorgeous) smile, reaching out a hand and placing it gently overtop of one of your own. It was eerily cool.

“There’s no need to be afraid, my friend.” Her voice was smooth and tempered, the faint Latin American accent adding a touch of humanity to the disturbing lack of human vital signs. “You are safe here. You’ve just undergone a very long surgical procedure, and though it was very successful, it’s normal for your body to feel strange, weak, or disoriented for some time afterwards. Please, please, lay down. I’ll move the back of the bed up so you can see a bit better.” Before you could respond, she rose deftly from the bedside chair and moved just out of your line of sight. You were just starting to process the dull throb in your bad shoulder as the bed began to incline, bringing you to an easy semi-seated position that allowed you to look around the room for the first time. If you had to guess, it was not intended to be a medical bay, but was more than likely an office that had been quickly converted for that purpose. Thick plastic sheets blanketed every inch of the walls, ceiling, and floors, which felt a little ‘type-a-serial-killer-avoiding-cleanup’, but was probably just for sterility. Several desktop monitors had been placed as makeshift vital readouts.

One showed your heartbeat, blood pressure, O2 levels, the works; another seemed to be displaying medical imaging scans of your upper body. A side by side… maybe a before and after? This was your first opportunity to ‘see’ the damage that had been done at the altercation at the Feedback Loop. In the first image, the tissue of your shoulder was populated by at least a dozen jagged, oddly sized bullet fragments, standing out in blazing white against the navy representing your muscle, which you could see was torn and shredded in several places. You certainly weren’t a medical professional, but it also looked like you’d been somewhat lucky: you couldn’t see any visible fractures in your shoulder blades or tears in your joints and ligaments. That was almost certainly a good thing. The second image painted an even more optimistic picture. In this one, the nasty little bullet-bits were completely absent, and in their stead, well… to your untrained eye, the best comparison was like that kintsugi repair technique you remembered seeing in the Japanese ceramics hall on a field trip to the Central City Material Arts Gallery. They used melted gold to join the pieces of broken pottery, which would leave visible joinery at the seams. Functional and fashionable.

Here, in the flesh of your shoulder, there seemed to be visible seams of some kind of adhesive running through the torn sections of muscle. As the monitors cycled through various kinds of scans, shifting from the white-navy x-ray to what appeared to be a more one-to-one mid-surgery imaging, you realised the kintsugi comparison was more accurate than you’d thought: the joinery shimmered in a distinct golden hue. You cocked your head to the side, squinting, trying to get a better look, then realized you could also look down. Your chin pressed firm to your chest, you got an eyeful of your injured shoulder through some type of see-through-sterile-strip, and realized two things at once.

First, you did, indeed, get shot in the same shoulder that your burn scars travelled down, because why would the universe decide to do you a solid now?

But second, your dear ol’ Freddy Krueger patch was now adorned with veins of faint metallic-shining seams that caught the light at certain angles. It was somewhat jarring immediately, as any sudden change in your body between moments of consciousness will be, and without even realizing, you found your good hand already travelling up to graze your fingers across the top of the clear window in the adhesive cover over the site of whatever operation you’d had. Stupidly. By the time your thinking-brain clocked the potential error and pain of touching the site of a healing wound, you’d already made contact with your fingertips. There was an immediate burst of discomfort, but it wasn’t agonizing, mostly because it didn’t feel like you’d even hit your skin at all. The traces of gold in your flesh did, like you thought they might, feel cool and solid to the touch. You processed for a moment, then felt the twinge of a smile develop on your lips.

“I appreciate someone taking the time to admire my work. It’s beautiful, no? In a strange sort of way. Economos turned green when I began the tissue grafting and had to step out of the room, so you are the first person to see the results other than myself.”

You jolted a little in bed at her sudden appearance as she once again emerged into your field of vision, re-taking her seat next to you and leaning over to the mouse and keyboard connected to the monitors. She was so, so quiet when she moved, and your abilities seemed to still be partially coming online as you came back to awareness. It would take getting used to. You did note, however, that the jolt didn’t hurt nearly as much as it should have. ‘Huh. Okay, that’s definitely good news.’ With perfectly manicured hands, she clicked into the post-op imaging and expanded them so you could have a better look. It definitely was gross, you couldn’t really fault John for getting pukey, but this strange woman was right: the tissue joining was gorgeous. If nothing else, you were stunned by how well it seemed to line up every fibre of muscle in exactly the right place to its neighbour. Hesitantly, you cleared your throat, trying to remember how to speak. You started with a few mumbles, which she sat through with blessed patience. Her comforting smile never faltered, nor did the extremely slow pace of her blinking. Finally, you managed to get the words out.

“Are… are you Bordeaux? The cyborg?” As soon as you said it, you immediately felt like an asshole. What if she didn’t like when people talked about it? What if it was a sensitive issue? What if you were totally wrong and your memories of Adrian telling you about the freaky-cyborg-woman coming to take over your care had been nothing more than drug-induced hallucinations? Luckily, your paranoia was cut short by her easy laughter, which was as velvety smooth as her speaking voice.

“Ahh, I see we’re doing away with the pleasantries. I should’ve figured your…” she paused, smirking a little, but the warmth never left her deep brown eyes. “Your friend, Adrian, would’ve told you what he thinks is the most interesting thing about me right away. Yes, I’m Agent Bordeaux, former cyber-organic operative of ARGUS, current cyber-organic operative of Checkmate. But please, call me Sasha.” She punctuated her reply by extending her hand for an introductory shake. On instinct, you started to raise your own in kind, but her expression suddenly lit up as if just remembering something, and she instantly switched which hand she was offering. You raised an eyebrow at the strange gesture, but she explained.

“A natural opportunity for a first test of your range of motion. Please, if you wouldn’t mind, could you try using your injured arm?” A perfectly reasonable request, but it still put a pit in your stomach. The reality of your predicament was starting to settle in, now that blood loss and death were not immediate and priority obstacles. You were no longer critically injured, you were now in recovery from a critical injury. This was a familiar road to you, and not one you had ever desired to go down again. A months-long hospital stay full of poking and prodding and testing and physio and always being watched but rarely listened to will do that to a person. Now, you would have to start re-learning your own capabilities. You would have to accept limitations you hadn’t had before, and all of that starts the first time a doctor asks you to try and do something. Still, delaying the attempt wouldn’t change the result, so you swallowed your pride and finally let your brain start to think about the left side of your body again for the first time since the gunshot rang out. With gritted teeth, you flexed the muscles of your upper arm, waiting for the agony to hit you like a dumptruck, for the involuntary spasming, for something awful.

Instead, your elbow, then your hand, lifted off the white sheet draped over the bed, and you placed your palm against Sasha’s with a shaky resolve. There was pain, certainly. But it had been dampened far beyond the intolerable burning from the night before, replaced with a dull ache and a feeling of fullness, maybe swelling. Uncomfortable, sure, but not torturous. You couldn’t help the grin that broke out onto your face, and your happiness was reflected by your caregiver, who beamed back at you and gave a gentle squeeze and shake before lowering you back down to the bed.

“Wonderful, absolutely wonderful. How does it feel inside? How is the pain?” The question almost flew by you unnoticed, you were too elated at the massive progress you seemed to have made since your last conscious memory. You practiced bending and unbending your elbow, wincing slightly, but nothing was unmanageable. “It feels a little uncomfortable, for sure, but it doesn’t hurt too bad. Not as bad as I thought at all. It does feel a little… too full, I guess? But that’s about it. How is this possible? I couldn’t even move my neck without screaming before. Do you guys still have me on painkillers?”

She shook her head. “Nothing hospital-grade, just a double dose of acetaminophen and ibuprofen. I wanted to get an accurate baseline of your reaction to the procedure. I had a vial of Dilaudid prepared in case you needed it, but it seems you don’t. This is fantastic news.” No arguments there. You nodded along as she continued, “As for how it’s possible, well, you are the lucky recipient of a very rare, very expensive, very proprietary medical technology.” Her gaze turned once again towards the imaging monitor, a hint of pride in her voice.

“It’s called Midas Gel. Well, officially, the Bio-Integrative Myomeric Repair Matrix, but Midas Gel rolls off the tongue better, don’t you think?”

You blinked at the screen, processing. “That’s what’s inside me?”

“In very small amounts, yes. And it’s what’s causing that ‘too full’ feeling, but you will get used to it, trust me. The material is an adaptive polymer threaded with conductive gold-microfilaments. Once introduced into damaged tissue, it maps the torn muscle fibres, anchors to viable tissue on either side of the wound, and forms a temporary lattice for the body to repair along. Think of it less as glue and more as… scaffolding. It holds the architecture of the muscle in place while encouraging the tissue to remember what shape it is supposed to be and enabling electro-signalling across the tears.”

“That sounds like some crazy sci-fi shit.”

“It is extremely crazy sci-fi shit,” Bordeaux replied amusedly, “And extremely expensive. ARGUS developed it for reconstructive intervention in assets whose injuries were too complex for conventional surgery. Its use was piloted in my own recovery, and once I proved to be a successful guinea pig, they manufactured a moderate quantity to have on hand.”

Her own recovery. Of course. You had been so focused on the strange, uncanny valley feeling of her cybernetic body that you hadn’t considered how it had come to be. Some part of you just defaulted in that she may have volunteered for enhancements, but it made perfect sense in retrospect that maybe she’d become a cyborg as a result of some horrific accident. It took a great deal of willpower to resist asking her follow up questions, but you didn’t want to risk offending her. This woman was supposedly to thank for your miraculous recovery, which earns a lot of brownie points. Instead, you zeroed in on your least favourite two-syllable organization.

“Used by ARGUS,” you repeated, still staring at the gold-thread seams glowing through the scan. “Past tense?”

Her expression sharpened by half a degree.

“Let’s say they no longer have exclusive access. I took a lot with me when I defected. One of the many benefits of having cameras embedded in your retina is an effective photographic memory.” She chuckled a bit at her own joke, and despite your fixation on the monitor, you couldn’t help but laugh along. You knew all too well the necessity of using humour to cope with body horror. Gotta laugh or you’ll cry.

“It was never designed for ordinary gunshot wounds. It was designed to keep organic tissue alive around cybernetic implants. Nerve bundles, muscle, vascular tissue; these are places where the body and machine are both very invested in rejecting one another. I don’t feel much remorse around stealing its mother-formula, seeing as I am its walking proof of concept. I consider it royalties.” Light laughter filled the room again. You’d only known Sasha for a few minutes, but you liked her already. One day, you hoped you could have a drink and get to know her. For now, though, you had some lingering curiosities. “So if it wasn’t designed for this, is there a chance it might not work long-term?” you asked, hoping the desperation you felt didn’t show in your tone.

Sasha shook her head reassuringly. “Unlikely. It wasn’t cleared for standard wound-care not because the science team didn’t think it would work, but because manufacturing it and applying it is costly, labour-intensive, and tedious. It takes an incredibly steady hand and incredibly deep pockets. You, my friend, are blessed to have a surgeon whose hands cannot shake,” she placed a hand on her own chest, “and a very troubled young man who, as far as I’ve been told, spent many years hoarding stashes of confiscated blood-money that has now been put to good use in funding this entire organization.” That caught you completely off guard. Surely she couldn’t mean… “Adrian?! Like, the Adrian I know? Adrian who drives a 2001 Sebring?!?”

“Mmm-hmm. He is, on paper, our chief financial officer. I had my doubts initially, but what he lacks in social aptitude he more than makes up for in an aptitude for numbers. He authorized any and every expense towards your recovery. You’ve been unconscious for nearly a week while Economos and I synthesized the gel.”

You felt a simultaneous colliding tidal wave of emotions: on the one hand, shock. The idea that Adrian was actually incredibly wealthy did not jive with any of your observations about him, from attitude to fashion sense. On the other hand, the image of him meticulously stacking bands of cash he’d liberated from drug dealers and human traffickers was undeniably enough to get you a little hot under the collar. And on the (third?) hand, hearing he was willing to do anything to help you, brought back the butterflies you remembered feeling when you’d traced your fingers up his tank-top clad chest, which was apparently not last night like you’d assumed. A week of unconsciousness, an experimental tissue repair surgery… you were suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude and disbelief. So many things could have gone wrong, but didn’t, and only because of the dedicated work of these people who you’d never even met before under the guidance of the man you’d barely started to be honest with. Tears welled up in your eyes despite your best efforts to fight them.

“Thank you so, so, so much, Sasha. Truly. I just- wow. I can’t tell you how appreciative I am. You’re a miracle worker. If being, like, a secret agent doesn't work out, you’d make one hell of a doctor.” A deep smile spread across her face, and she reached out once more to grip your hand as she spoke. “Ah, stop. First, because I cannot physically blush anymore, and secondly, you shouldn’t thank me just yet. Now that you are awake, well…” and suddenly you lost her normally stable eyeline, her voice trailing off. On instinct, you tried to tune yourself into the heartbeat frequency, muscle-memory kicking in when someone started being suspicious or not forthcoming. Frustratingly, you were reminded you would get no useful information. The click-click-whirr of her mechanical cardiac rhythm was as steady as ever, even if her expression seemed dour. Your eyebrows crinkled as concern set in. “What? Now that I’m awake, what? Is everything okay?”

“Of course, yes, I don’t mean to frighten you. It is only out of sympathy for the storm of foolishness and resentment you will have to step into, now. There has been a lot of… conversation while you were asleep.”

You winced.

“I assume conversation is a nice way of putting it?”

“You assume correctly. Harcourt, have you met her yet?”

“Not formally. I heard her yelling at Adrian though.”

“Well, then, you can imagine the shape of it. She was hesitant about letting you stay in the first place, let alone investing this much time and this many resources into developing an asset that remains purely theoretical. She worries-”

“Developing an asset? Like, as in giving me medical care?”

“Her words, not mine. She worries, supposedly, because you haven't gone through any sort of official in-clearance process. Chase failed to inform us that he was developing any sort of relationship with a known meta, let alone one we’ve been tracking.”

A moment of gut-wrenching terror reared its head in your stomach. Tracking. It’s enough to make you actively suppress a shiver in your spine. A second, quieter fear followed on its heels: if Checkmate had been tracking you, who else had? Sionis’s people had found you at the Feedback Loop, which meant your cute little rooftop routine had not been nearly as invisible as you liked to pretend. For all you knew, there were still men in black masks asking questions about whether the sound witch had bled out in an alley or crawled away. You swallowed both down with all your might. ‘These guys aren’t ARGUS. These are Adrian’s friends. And you kicked those goons’ asses. You’re gonna be fine.’ you forced yourself to think through a series of calming mantras and try to play off the half-second social blue screen you just displayed.

“Aww, you guys have been tracking me?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I personally admire much of the work you’ve done, but you are an anarchistic actor whose motivations, intentions, and functionality remain a mystery to us. Chase argued strongly on your behalf, though, and is certain not only that you pose no threat to the organization, but that your abilities would be beneficial here. I’m not sure if Harcourt would have taken his word for it, but Leota vouched that in the short time she interacted with you while conscious, you seemed to be a trustworthy woman. Luckily, her word holds weight here. She is an excellent judge of character.”

‘Trustworthy. Right. That perfectly describes my salacious stalking, web of lies, nighttime double shift criminal lifestyle.’ You considered how an impartial jury might evaluate your character over the last year of your life, and found yourself eager to trust Leota, too. But regardless of if you believed in the words that supposedly earned you the right to stay, they’d been said, some decision had been reached. You were here, alive, with golden-techno-gel in your shoulder and, the more you thought about it, a strong desire to see Adrian again. Surely, he’d want to know the second you were awake. Maybe. Hopefully. The sound of you clearing your throat broke your contemplative silence.

“Right, okay… so now what then? Am I allowed to, like, leave the room and stuff? Can I talk to-”

“Adrian? No, I’m afraid not. The compromise Harcourt insisted on was no-contact between you both until you can be properly assessed. I think she’s worried he would try to smuggle you out of the building or tell you what to say and do.”

Your heart sank a little as you took in her response. The disappointment must have read cleanly on your face, because her own expression gained a sympathetic touch.

“However, I’m about to go alert the team that you are awake and feeling well. He will be glad to hear it, I’m sure. High-energy is his standard operating mode, but it has been a nightmare to share a room with him while you’ve been knocked out.”

That assurance did bring a wry grin back to you. Maybe you couldn’t see him just yet, but he would know you were gonna be okay.

“Thank you… and please tell him thanks from me, too.”

She nodded with a glimmer of amusement in her eyes. It seemed like on some level she was perplexed and entertained by the prospect that her unusual-bordering-on-antisocial coworker had possibly developed some kind of romantic thing. With that comfort in mind, your attention turned to the other practical concern she’d brought up that left you with questions.

“So, what do you mean by properly assessed?”

The response was a deep, sharp inhale followed by a sigh as her fingers drifted to her temples and started to rub.

“Think of it as a particularly involved job interview.”

“Involved?”

“Let’s just say Economos and Harcourt have had too many hours to think up nonsense and too many square feet in the basement to execute it with. You’ll see what I mean, trust me.”

And oh boy, did you see now.

And what you saw, primarily, was a creature, staring back at you in that one-way mirror, made of what felt like several million wires sticking out from under every seam of the provided (you guessed it, sterile grey) PT-gear you’d been told to wear. You thought you knew what it was like to be hooked up to a bunch of tech after your last hospital stint, but this was on an entirely different level. The sensation of dozens of adhesive-coated sensors affixed on practically every bit of you was just barely tolerable, but the ones on your neck, shoulder, and torso were having trouble sticking all the way thanks to the crops of uneven-textured scarring, and those little assholes were starting to sweat and rub in maddening fashion. The polyester-blend of the tank top and basketball shorts Sasha had given you was itchy, your lips were chapped, the lights were not only too bright, but, to your absolute cherry-on-top delight, they were loud beyond belief. You suspected the constant frantic buzz of the bulbs would be audible even to someone without your powerset, but for you, it was like a handful of blenders going at once, meaning you needed to devote a section of brainpower to tuning it out manually.

So things were off to a fantastic start.

It had been roughly 24 hours since you woke up, a chunk of ‘recovery’ time that Bordeaux had apparently not been willing to waver on, despite your protests. You wanted desperately to get this dog and pony show over with, to get some freedom back, to see Adrian and thank him properly for advocating for you, but she demanded you have a nap, eat a few square meals, take a shower. It was excruciating, but some part of you knew she was right. But now, here in the assessment room, the waiting made you feel more and more like a caged animal by the second. You weren’t nervous, per se, certainly not nervous about ‘failing’ whatever they were about to have you do. Being watched was not a foreign sensation to you, being on stage was like being at home, and this was a stage, of sorts. It was being isolated from your audience that freaked you out. No longer cocooned by a semi-permeable blanket of spotlight in shadow, the warm glow of it absent from your skin, it felt profoundly wrong. On top of that, the knowledge that the audience had a week to talk about you, form opinions, assumptions, expectations, while you were helplessly slumbering away didn’t sit easily. Now would be your chance to properly establish yourself for the first time.

You shook off the daze that had kept you transfixed by your own reflection, standing up a little straighter and closing your eyes. You couldn’t see your audience, but as your body stabilized, so too did your control over your abilities, and by now, they felt fully online. Your lungs gathered a deep breath as you turned your focus to untangling the muted sounds from behind the glass. It was seemingly supposed to be soundproof, which certainly added a barrier of difficulty, but ‘soundproof’ to you was more of a suggestion and an annoyance than an actual obstacle. With a little concentration, you quickly plugged in to the wall of soundwaves emanating from the observation room hiding on the other side once more. ‘4 heartbeats, 5 voices… who’s here?’ The vibrations were a little muted, which meant combing through your options took a little longer than usual, but nothing could stop you, at this point, from recognizing the one you were hoping to hear the most.

Ka-thump. Ka-thump. Ka-thump.

Adrian was right there, probably less than 10 feet away. His unmistakable murmurous rhythm shouting out at you like a homing beacon. You found yourself grinning without thinking about it. God, you couldn’t even see him, but just hearing that familiar drumline was enough to put some pleasant butterflies in your stomach. For several greedy moments, you simply indulged in tuning everything else out and letting yourself breathe in time with the rhythm, tapping along with a hand on your thigh. A wave of calm washed over you, until finally you brought yourself back to reality. It was time to investigate the rest of the data.

Widening your listening scope again, you felt two more, slightly less familiar heartbeats. John and Lee, if you had to guess. The third wasn’t as well-known to you, but it was strong and steady. By process of elimination, you figured it must belong to Harcourt, the woman you’d never even seen yet but whose opinion of you was apparently important. Luckily, at that moment, their voices piped up to confirm your suspicions.

“How’s the readout signal, John? Are we getting any interference so far?”

The same timbre, all sharp angles and full-throated confidence that you’d heard berate Adrian in the other room the night he’d brought you in, this time lowered to a more casual volume. That was her, alright.

“It’s strong right now. I’m getting consistent metrics from all 48 sensors, including stable baseline vitals.”

“And Sasha, you’re sure she’s medically cleared? I wanna give her a fair shake. We could always use more time to set up testing parameters.”

Huh. That was out of left field. It was always hard to apply your bio-lie-detector skills to someone you hadn't interacted with much, but a standard pass on her own body cues betrayed nothing but sincerity in her questioning. The image you’d built of this woman in your head hadn’t included the possibility she might be capable of real human empathy, so that was a comforting surprise.

“She’s in fighting shape. Obviously, the longer we give the gel to settle and do its work, the better, but she is begrudgingly well enough for anything we’ll do today. It may just cause some discomfort, but I warned her about that. She insisted on not waiting any longer to show us what she can do.”

Adrian, who’d been remarkably and uncharacteristically silent thus far, finally piped up, heartbeat slightly accelerated. “Well, yeah, duh, of course she wants to get it over with. You guys won’t even let her talk to m- I mean, talk to anyone, or do anything. She probably feels like a rat in one of those fucked up labratories where they do experiments on rats.” His frantic energy was accentuated by the rapid bouncing of his leg, tapping the heel of his boot on the floor over and over again. Leota chimed in next.

“Hey, Adrian, no one’s doing any experiments on her. You’ve seen every test John has whipped up, and they’re all safe, right? It shouldn’t take too long. And if you’re right, she’s gonna blow us all away and then you’ll be free to go congratulate her. Right, Emilia?” You thought back to the night you’d been brought in, and were fairly sure that was the first name Lee had previously used for Harcourt. Her voice gained a sharpness to its tone as she directed the last question, not of hostility, but more like trying to convey her wish for backup.

“Right. I’m not trying to torture your girlfriend, Chase, I’m just trying to see if she can bring something useful to the table and if she’s willing to.”

“First off, like I said before, she’s not officially my girlfriend. Yet. I’m working on it, but it’s hard when she’s unconscious and I’m not allowed to even be in the same room as her,”

That brought a wide, dopey grin to your face automatically. God, you were working on it too.

“And second, she’ll be willing. I haven’t had a chance to give her the whole black-ops-off-the-books-meta-friendly-superhero/spy agency pitch, but I know she’s gonna dig it. And then she’ll join up, and we can upgrade her kit and maybe we can finally start patrolling together and-”

“Guys,” Adrian’s adorable rambling was cut off by Economos, who cleared his throat and got the room’s attention. “Is she, uhh, is she looking, like, directly at Adrian right now, or am I going crazy?”

You suddenly became intensely aware of the fact that as you’d been listening in, you’d haplessly wandered closer and closer to the mirror, and while focusing on the sound of your favourite voice in the world, you’d unwittingly angled yourself right where you knew he must be in physical space, even though you couldn’t truly see him. Every heartbeat, save for Sasha's ever-steady synthetic one, skipped a beat or two when he pointed it out, and Adrian’s picked up its pace and stayed there.

“What? No, that’s not possible, this is a one-way mirror and we soundproofed the whole room.” You could practically hear the confused scowl in Harcourt’s voice as she responded, which made you chuckle under your breath. To your delight, your own snicker was mirrored and overshadowed by the boisterous laughter from where Adrian was positioned. Man, was it a nice laugh. Maybe not by conventional standards, but it made your blood run hot and your cheeks flush to hear it again.

“I fucking told you guys she’d still be able to hear us! Ha! And you were all like ‘it's one and a half feet of reinforced tempered glass, Adrian’ and I was all like ‘she’s been stalking me by listening to my vital signs from across city blocks and you think some glass is gonna stop her? Fat fucking chance!” Now that the jig was seemingly up, you didn’t stop yourself from giving a classic ‘aw, shucks’ hand gesture of dismissive gratitude. You wished you could see into the other room where you knew his eyes would have just lit up to accompany the gasp he let out. “See?! What’d I tell you? Babe! Hi! I can see you, but you can’t see me! Which is funny, cause I know you can hear me right now, but I can’t hear you! Oh, and in that case, can you just give me a thumbs up or thumbs down on calling you that? I know we haven’t formally discussed your take on pet names yet but I felt like we were having a pretty good first date before the whole you-getting-shot thing, and it seemed like we were going in that direction-”

“Okay, Chase, you made your point. I guess she can fuckin’ hear us already.” You barely listened to Harcourt cut him off, and instead walked the last two steps until you were practically touching the mirror, and then stuck both thumbs way up, shaking them back and forth slightly for emphasis as you beamed a smile in what you hoped was right in his direction and shouted “Hi Adrian! You can definitely call me that!”

Ka-thump-ka-thump-ka-thump-ka-thump-ka---

‘Ohhh yeah, he got the message.’ You beamed to yourself, but you wouldn’t have time to revel in it. All of a sudden, the rippling crackles of an intercom coming to life burst forth from the ceiling above the mirror. Upon closer examination, one of the tiles was in fact a cleverly integrated speaker, its disguise only betrayed by a smattering of teeny-tiny holes across its surface. An instant later, electrical feedback roared in your eardrums, having just been focused on turning up the sensitivity of sounds coming from that direction. Your fists balled up, fingers clenched like vises into your palms as you winced hard away from the source, taking a sharp inhale as you re-adjusted your balance until things felt normal again.

You heard the legs of a chair scraping harshly across the floor through the intercom, and Adrian’s voice rang out at the same time, “What was that?! What button did you just press?! Is she-” still shaking the residual static from your head, you held your hands up and shook them in a ‘hold on’ motion. “No, hey, it’s all good, I’m fine. Just listening too hard when the speaker turned on.” The metallic squeeeaak of him retaking his seat relaxed you, and, having had a few moments, you felt settled enough back into a regular hearing range. Then, Harcourt cleared her throat and began.

“Okay, good afternoon…” she trailed off slightly, then let out the type of sigh that always accompanies an eye roll, “RiffRaff?Jesus, what is it with you costume-types and your nicknames?” That observation, while cruel, was accurate enough to elicit a chuckle from you. Leota’s voice chimed in next. “I dunno, it’s definitely not the worst we’ve heard. In a world of Kite Mans, Polka-Dot Mans, Elongated Mans, Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Mans, RiffRaff feels pretty solid. It’s better than, like, Sound-Girl. Plus, it’s alliterative!” Before you could pipe up to thank her for getting it, Adrian had caught the conversation and ran away with it like a dog being thrown a frisbee.

“Ooh! Ooh! And don’t forget Dogwelder, Defenestrator, Lump, Super Chief, Egg Fu, Shaggy Man,-”

“Alright, yes, point taken.” Harcourt’s tone suggested she was pinching the bridge of her nose in agonized annoyance. That made you smile a little again. She continued, “I’m Agent Harcourt. It’s good to finally meet you face to- uh, mirror. I’ll be running this assessment of your meta-abilities. This will be non-invasive and hopefully straightforward. The goal is to get an idea of how well you’ve recovered, and of potential useful applications for your abilities in the field. Now, it’s my understanding that you’ve already been doing some pro bono work, which, I want to make clear, I don’t care about. Ethically and legally, that is. Practically, I care on the level of how you might bring the skills you’ve been using on your own and put them to better use as part of a team, with structure and oversight.”

Barf fucking city. ‘Structure and oversight’ were probably some of your least favourite words. You did your best not to display your mild disgust on your face, and to take a deep breath. ‘This is fine. These guys aren’t, like, the government. Adrian is one of them. This could just be a group of fellow, like-minded vigilantes. Relax. Superhero audition. Objectively cool. You’re cool.’ Mediocre self talk completed, you realised it had been a few more seconds than is normal for a person to pause after speaking unless they were expecting a response. You blinked to awareness.

“Right! Yeah. Uh, good to meet you, too. Thank you for, like, letting Sasha put this gold goo in my shoulder. Preciate that.” The slight two-finger salute you gave towards the glass to accentuate the laidback, sincere tone you were aiming for probably did not sell itself, and you were suddenly grateful you couldn't see any of their faces. Whatever, you were about to, hopefully, knock some shit around for them, and that would more than make up for it. From behind the mirror, you heard Sasha’s voice hum slightly in regard, then Emilia over the intercom again.

“You are welcome. Let’s hope it was a good use of resources. If these very detailed diary entries are anything to go off of-”

“Field journal entries, thank you very much.” Adrian interrupted.

“Field journals don’t include this many squiggly hearts and anime sparkles, Chase.”

‘Wrong,’ you thought instantly, an authority from personal experience.

“I think you mean explosions. I can’t draw sound waves, duh. They’re symbolic.” Adrian defended.

“I- christ, okay. Fine. Point being, if Adrian isn’t embellishing, I believe you could be an incredible asset, RiffRaff.” As much as the word asset rubbed you the wrong way, there was something about Emilia that, in the short time you’d interacted with her, made you think that was probably her best attempt at an olive branch at the beginning of what was already an uncomfortable and exposing process. She seemed sincere, if a little dry. Your expression softened a touch and cleared your throat.

“Thank you, um, I think so, or, I hope so, too. Yeah, no, think so. I can… I can do all kinds of… stuff.” Your hand instinctually found its way to your forehead, partially covering your eyes as you tried to swallow your awkwardness down. ‘Fuck, what is wrong with me right now? Literally chill the fuck out, dude.’ One more deep inhale, exhale, and you shook your body out from head to toe like you did when you were having a bad bout of rare stage fright in the wings. The kind that makes you feel like you’re gonna either faint or piss your pants. Neither were acceptable options at any performance, but certainly not this one. ‘Hey, that’s all it is. I’m performing.’ Speaking from your chest now, you took another swing.

“Okay, let’s get this show on the road!”

“Great. First of all, I’d like you to tell me how many-”

Harcourt was cut off again, this time, by the sound of a large metal door swinging open wildly and with great force, behind the mirror. Without even thinking, you were already tuned back in closely to the sounds coming from the observation room. The disruption of the door was quickly one-two’ed by a jolt from several of the people inside, hearts thumping harder for a few beats in surprise, and Emilia cursing under her breath.

“Hey, hey, hey! Sorry I’m late for the super-spy job interview. Yo, holy shit, you guys have for real been building some James-Bond-ass shit down here? This is tight! Oh, here, I brought some Krispy Kremes to celebrate recruiting our first new-era Checkmate metahuman.” The man’s voice was full-chested, bassy, but upbeat. And weirdly familiar. You could have sworn you’d heard it before, but where? He started going again before you could fully flip through your mental rolodex and figure it out.

“Woah. Holy shit, dude. Is that her?” The crisp smack of a solid high five broke through, then Adrian’s voice, full of joy.

“You fucking know it is, dude! And you didn’t believe me when I told you a major league smokeshow was stalking me, but boom. Now she’s in our basement. High five me again?”

“I’m actually willing to go back on my previously established rule of not back to back high fiving, Vig. I didn’t know you had this in you. For real. Gimme some skin, man!”

Another smack blended with both of their laughter. Well, there you go, rolodex not necessary. Peacemaker, Christopher Smith, Vigilante’s sometime-partner and Adrian’s apparent best friend had arrived to great fanfare, another clown in the circus gathered to watch you try out for the big top. However, you were still stuck on major league smokeshow, suppressing the urge to giggle and failing to suppress the reflex to blush. You waved at your own reflection, trying for the direction it seemed like he’d just walked in from. If this guy was important to Adrian, you wanted to make a good impression. No, a great impression. You were gonna knock these bitches’ socks off.

“Only 23 minutes late today, Chris. That’s gotta be your new personal best.” Emilia interjected, trying to get the train back on the track. “Take a seat, I’ve been trying to get this started for a while.” You heard the sound of knuckles cracking, the crack of when someone stretches them at arms length, palms face out, then the thud and scrape of a large body plopping down in a chair. Bobbing slightly side to side to try and take some pressure off the soles of your feet after standing there for so long, you shook out your hands again in anticipation.

“RiffRaff, since you’ve already demonstrated passive auditory penetration-”

Adrian and Chris snickered in unison, and then, in near perfect synchronization, interjected “HA! You said penetration- yo! JINX!”

Cue another high five.

This time you actually did have to put a hand on your knee, keel over and laugh, trying not to look at the mirror as you did. You saw why Adrian got along with him so well. Emilia was less amused.

“Chase, Smith, so help me god, I will send you both outside if you don’t shut the fuck up. Is that what you want, Adrian? You wanna wait outside in the hallway for your girlfriend? Or do you wanna sit and watch quietly?” Her tone was razor thin, exasperated, to the point of having you instantly correct your posture even though you weren’t the one being yelled at. There was an extremely pregnant pause, and you could tell Leota and Chris started holding their breath. Finally, Adrian cut the tension.

“...I feel like you’re still confused? We’re not officially boyfriend-girlfriend because-”

“Sasha, pick him up and take him outside.”

“I’d like to sit and watch quietly, please.”

“That’s what I thought. Okay, since we’ve already established you can hear us all right now, let’s start with that. Take a couple steps back to the center marker.”

You quickly scurried backwards until you found your feet over a small (slightly darker grey) X on the floor, then halted, pointed to the spot, and held up a confirmatory OK sign. It didn’t seem wise to fuck around right now.

“Yeah, right about there. Can you still hear everyone in this room?”

Good question. You closed your eyes and focused hard on the waves emanating from the room that was, though divided from you, just a few metres away. They unfolded into a clear auditory image: five people of varying body sizes all broadcasting their various bio-signals, and one human shaped entity who sounded like a luxury car engine and fourteen clocks inside a bag of jello. The glass they were separating you with was thick, but it felt about as effective to you as trying to muffle the sound of an alarm clock by putting a kind of shitty blanket over it would be for someone with normal hearing. Opening your eyes, you nodded and said, “Yep, six total, right?”

“Spot on. Okay, using your right hand, physically gesture to each individual you can sense based on where you think they’re positioned in the room, and tell me what you can infer about them based on what you can hear.”

You took a long, deep breath, and held your left hand firm at your side, balled tightly into a fist, as if you were grasping and muffling every frequency of passive, unimportant noise from elsewhere in the room, dialed in solely on the sound coming from the mirror ahead. The world went dark as you closed your eyes again, not allowing your brain to get distracted by visual input. ‘Okay, left to right, easy peasy, girl.’ The wires stuck to your right arm swayed slightly as you pointed it towards the first, bassiest heartbeat, which almost certainly belonged to John (aka Economos, as you gathered). Its steady, slow pace emanated from a slightly lower plane than some of the others, indicating he was sitting down. Focusing on his bio-signals also revealed an undercurrent of nasty gurgling and bubbling in his abdomen. Telltale sign of indigestion. Sasha was right about his weak stomach. Every breath he pulled into his lungs was punctuated by a high, rattling wheeze, not like an asthmatic, but what you had come to learn was common for frequent smokers. You were deeply familiar with that wheeze, having shamefully heard it on the tail of your own inhalations before you mastered tuning your own sounds out 24/7. But in much the same way that your go-to method of addressing strange noises in a vehicle was to turn the music up louder, the philosophy of ‘if I can’t hear it, it’s not my problem’ kept you from trimming your own vices. Sometimes the promise of a joint when you got home covered in scrapes and bruises was all that kept you on your feet. His, however, was notably more pronounced. Probably cigarettes, probably everyday for decades.

“Alright, that’s John. He’s in a seated position, in front of-”

You paused, widening the audio field slightly and filtering for electrical frequencies.

“Four computer monitors. He’s got an extremely unsettled stomach, which I assume is stress-induced based on the way he keeps fiddling with the fabric of his shirt-hem. Also, he has a slight wheeze when he inhales that's typical of heavy smokers. No judgement though.”

No response came from the overhead speaker for several moments, leaving you standing awkwardly as you tried to evaluate if they wanted you to keep going.

“Uhhhh… he also has the slowest baseline rhythm of everyone I can sense. His heart is likely the biggest, physically, and so it beats slower. Is… is that good? Like, should I move on?”

Harcourt’s voice crackled back to life on the speaker. “That’s plenty. Who’s next?”

Relief washed over you. So far so good. You resettled into your focused state and tuned back in, moving over from John’s area to the individual next to him. This was a set of signals that was completely fresh to you, belonging to a man you’d not met face-to-face yet, but had known of for some time as a C-List Cape with a penchant for red white and blue. Now that he was in the adjacent room, you could clearly hear the effect of those ridiculously exaggerated muscles: his heartbeat was strong, like the chambers themselves were straining against the rigid, bulked out walls of pectoral muscle they found themselves surrounded by. Its ‘upbeats’, as you had come to call them, were so much louder than the downbeats that they nearly drowned them out. His blood rushed around his body with an unusual urgency due to their strength. He was drumming the palm of his hand against his knee, but, wait… no, not quite the palm of his hand. This wasn’t the sound of flesh on fabric, there was something else acting as a barrier…

You squinted, eyebrows twitching slightly, as your fist unclenched and reclenched while you sifted through the vibrations available to you until it became clearer. The interference you heard was a barely there squeak squeak as his fingers tapped up and down. Like…

“Rubber gloves?” Your internal monologue became external as you tried to picture your hypothesis, then recalled that yes, Peacemaker’s dumbass costume was completed with a pair of blue rubber gloves.

“Come again?” replied Harcourt over the intercom.

“Peacemaker. He’s next to John, also sitting, and he’s wearing his rubber gloves, which leads me to believe he must be in costume, which is probably why I can’t hear his temple pulse as clearly. He’s got that metal helmet on, right?” One of your eyebrows quirked upwards slightly as you inquired, the excitement of the guessing game getting to you. Before a response could come, you sensed the aforementioned temple pulse suddenly get much stronger, as if someone had removed a thick metal barrier from between it and you. Because someone just had.

“Okay, he just took off the helmet, I’m pretty sure. Heartbeat is ridiculously loud and strong, like his heart is cramped by all the muscles in his chest. Does he use steroids? Some steroid users-”

“Let me just say for the record I am one HUNDRED PERCENT natty, okay? I don’t eat all those raw eggs and bull testes to be accused of doping, thank you very mu-” Chris’s voice was cut out by the sound of someone shoving him away from the microphone, then him grumpily dropping back down into his seat. Emilia cleared her throat and took over again. “Excuse him, he’s still mastering the concept of sitting still. Who’s up next?”

Your laughter reverberated off the echo-ey walls of the assessment room. God, this was kind of fun, actually. And as you turned your attention to the very familiar body next to Peacemaker, your expression settled into a deep grin. Without thinking of it, your hand position shifted from a classic four-finger direction gesture to a single, direct point, right to the dead center of where you knew Adrian’s chest was, to the ribcage that housed your most favourite instrument in the world. In that fraction of a second, you already sensed its familiar drumbeat accelerate, then double over again as you briefly switched to finger-flutter wave while closing your eyes and focusing in.

“This is Adrian Chase,” you began, self-indulgently savouring all four syllables and the adrenaline spike you knew he would get from you saying his whole name. “He has a tachycardic third-beat murmur originating in the left ventricle. He’s currently trying to manually slow down his breathing, so he’s not getting a complete inhalation each time. As I’m talking, his heartbeat is getting marginally faster and faster.” Blood rushed to your cheeks at that observation, but you swallowed down your butterflies and continued.

“His right boot heel is hitting the ground while he bounces his leg, and I can hear…” A beat passed as you zoned in on the pockets of his right pant leg. “His flip phone, two swiss army knives, some spare change, and-” you strained again, trying to make sense of the final, foreign object. It was smooth, round, maybe plastic? But it had a metal flip-gear mechanism in the centre… got it. “And a yo-yo in his pockets. Wait, I didn’t know you knew how to yo-yo!”

Your eyes opened as your concentration on the task at hand fell away, now engrossed in this new line of questioning. On some level, you weren’t sure you’d ever shake the obsessive drive to collect every piece of information on him you could. ‘Likes to yo-yo’ was definitely not on your stalker corkboard back home. There was a slightly longer pause than you expected before finally, Emilia chimed in once more.

“-said SIT THE FUCK DOWN. This button is a NO-TOUCHING ZONE. Jesus. Okay, RiffRaff, Adrian would like me to pass on that he is currently learning to yo yo, and I would mostly just like to pass on, but let’s keep going.”

The minutes dissolved imperceptibly as you fell into the process again. One by one, you described each Checkmate team member observing you from the assessment room, calling out useful inferences here and there, utility only dwindling when you got to Bordeaux (though you were able to identify that her central engine, aka her heart, was located more centrally in her torso than normal, to which she joked that you would know exactly where to shoot her if need be. Harcourt did not think it was as funny as you did.) Then, they had you move ten paces further back as they all shuffled their physical positions and had you re-identify them, then once more after having lowered another plane of glass behind the initial one-way mirror. This definitely increased the difficulty of the task. Notably diminishing the level of detail you could ascertain, but you still managed to pinpoint the new locations of the team with a good deal of effort.

Next, Harcourt had everyone stand up and move around the room while talking continuously. Your job was to latch on to one persons voice, then mirror their physical path with your own body, moving around the assessment room at the same pace and direction as your chosen target. You chose Adrian (to no one's surprise), and your months of employing almost exactly this skill, peeling his voice out of a chorus of others, keeping up with him as he moved across the city, made this task feel like kindergarten shape matching. Harcourt insisted you try it with someone else after a few rounds, and this proved slightly trickier at first. Filtering Adrian’s distinct, bell-clear voice out was a lot harder than filtering it in, you learned, but ten or so minutes later, you’d successfully demonstrated vocal isolation and through-wall target mapping on all six of them. ‘Wins wins wins. Keep it up, babe.’

“Alright, we’re going to pivot to a more intensive version of the audio isolation. On my cue, Economos is going to activate a series of surround sound speakers. Our goal is to replicate an immersive, rich soundscape with a variety of distracting, overlapping sounds. Your job will be to identify the important one and point it out to us. You’ll need to find which speaker it’s playing out of and touch it. Make sense?” Harcourt’s tone betrayed a degree of trepidation that wasn’t present before. Not worry, not quite, but a hint of something close to concern.

You cocked your head to the side, eyebrows knit inquisitively. “Pretty much. But what do you mean by ‘most important’?” A dozen potential answers flashed through your train of thought. Important as in a baby crying? The wick of a stick of dynamite sizzling? A leaky faucet under a bathroom sink? Important can mean a lot.

“It would be too easy if I told you. This assessment isn’t just to measure your meta abilities, but also your field sensibilities. What do you think is most important?”

“Thank you, Confucius. I will search for the answer within myself.” You punctuated your remark with a half-curtsy, then almost tripped yourself on all the wires dangling off of you. “By the way, not sure how accurate of a read on my ‘field sensibilities’ you’re gonna get considering I’m wearing the entire circuitry aisle of Home Depot, but you guys are the professionals, not me.”

It was impossible for you to hear Emilia’s eyes rolling, but you would have put money on it based on the sound of her voice. “Are you ready to start? You’ll have twenty seconds to absorb the environment, then another twenty to identify the sound we’re looking for.”

Your knuckles cracked as you extended your arms in front of your chest, fingers entwined, stretching out your arms and shoulders, then shook it all out with a determined smile.

“Bring it on.”

‘Immersive soundscape’ did not even begin to describe it. It turned out the main overhead intercom speaker was not just cleverly disguised among identical looking panels of wall and ceiling. It became abundantly clear that every single panel was, in fact, a speaker. It wasn’t exactly the same as truly being in a live soundscape, but for a digital replication, it was uncanny. You were instantly flooded with omnidirectional noise: people chattering, well, yelling really, above a booming undercurrent of bass. Musical, heavy, club bass. Glasses clinked and liquor sloshed as it was poured into fresh ones, what sounded like a hundred pairs of feet shuffled, stumbled, and grooved across the imagined 3D landscape.

Instinctually, you winced downwards, biting your lip hard as your head began to pound with the trademark incessant ringing of sensory overload. ‘Way to go, dumbass, of course, let’s not turn down the sensitivity when you’re about to be bombarded with bullshit from all angles! Lock the fuck in!’ Shaking your head to clarity through the critical internal monologue, you marshalled your concentration inwards. ‘Box breathing. An essential skill for any budding vigilante to learn.’ Adrian’s reassurances in the Vigilante-Mobile echoed in your head as you forced yourself to calm down. ‘Breathe in, hold, breathe out.’ Twenty seconds to absorb, twenty seconds to isolate.

You extended a hand into the open air and imagined running your fingers over the tapestry of sound, each wavelength a different fibre in the rug. What was important to you? That was the million dollar question. In the nauseating tidal wave of noise that is a nightclub, what stood out to you most now was no longer the music. It was the people underneath it. Carefully sifting through the channels until you found what you wanted, the tapestry you visualized morphed into an EQ slider deck. Grasp firm on the vocal frequency channel, you inhaled sharply and commanded the remainder to pull down. Distortion warbled around the room as, in a matter of seconds, every type of audio cue besides the talking faded to irrelevance, thinned to the point of nothing. A disjointed chorus of dialogue wrapped around you like a cocoon.

“...Can I get a double rum and coke…”

“...LOVE this song!!!...”

“...fuck, my heel broke, guys I need…”

“...lines in the bathroom, I swear to God!...”

“...DJ and I used to be roommates…”

“...have an ATM?...”

Then, voice just above a whisper:

“It’s all on the USB. Addresses, access routes, drop points…”

Bingo. No one brings a USB full of ‘drop points’ to the club without deeply shady reasoning. You raised your other hand, almost like a sailor checking the speed and direction of the wind, and felt around in the ocean of vibrations to try and identify a source. Your eyes darted open as it locked into place, and with the snap of your fingers, you completely isolated that one line of dialogue. It was a man’s voice, slightly nasal, with a gravel that suggested severe degradation of the throat tissue. Classic, corny sleazeball villain voice. Unsure how much time you had left, you took several bounding steps towards the speaker in the left corner of the room that emitted the conversation and placed a hand on it, whipping your head back around to look at the mirror for approval.

The intercom buzzed to life again. “Well, you did find the needle in a haystack, but you did it by burning down all the hay. How do you think it would play out in a real op if you sucked all the noise out of the room?”

Immediately, you felt your chest start to glow hot with frustration. She was right, of course, but it still stung. You weren’t a spy, not a trained operative, and you were doing your fucking best. Your mouth opened on instinct to fire back, but something compelled you to think twice.

Good first impressions.

“I- You know what, okay. Sure. Point taken. Can I try again?” You hoped your tone came across measured, but it probably teetered the edge of sharpness. It was taking all you had not to roll your eyes.

“Yep, let’s reset to scenario two. Ready, John?” Economos must have given her a nod, because she continued. “Okay, for this round, don’t alter the soundscape in a way that would alert other people involved. Same time frame, same task. Ready, RiffRaff?”

Gritted teeth, you threw up a tightly clenched thumbs up. This time, you pre-emptively lowered the sensitivity before the speakers blared into activity.

The room once again shifted drastically, at once full of artificial life. Gone was the nightclub, replaced by something colder, wider, and meaner. A subway platform bloomed around you in sound alone: the distant metallic shriek of train wheels carving sparks off the track, the hollow whoosh of stale underground air being pushed through tunnels, the layered murmur of commuters talking over one another without really listening. Rubber soles slapped against tile. A rolling suitcase clacked unevenly over the platform edge. Somewhere to your left, a busker’s out-of-tune guitar fought bravely and terribly against the warbling automated voice announcing a delay on the southbound line. Coins dropped into a paper cup. A child whined. Someone coughed wetly into their sleeve. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead with the exact same migraine-inducing pitch as the ones in the room you were actually standing in, a remarkable testament to their attention to detail. Then came the train itself, still unseen but approaching fast, a low thunder swelling beneath the platform until every other sound began to tremble around it.

You let the sound hit you this time. That was the hard part. No flinching, no grabbing, no slamming every unwanted frequency down into the floor. You let the bass of the train thunder crawl up your legs. Let the shouting of commuters scrape across your teeth. Let the cacophony breathe around you.

Then, carefully, you began to push back.

Not enough to change the room, but just enough to change the air directly touching you. A faint pressure bloomed outward from your chest, no wider than arm’s reach, soft and round and fragile as a soap bubble. The moment each soundwave crossed it, you compelled it to split into pieces: bass, broken glass, shoes, breath, metal on metal, the treble of guitar strings, the thump of several dozen heartbeats. Not gone. Not muted. Just sorted as it tried to enter your immediate awareness, like you’d stopped adjusting the house mix and finally figured out how to adjust your in-ear monitor. Harcourt would still hear her full simulation untouched, but you could sift through the layers as you pleased.

Now for the tricky part.

Voices were the right avenue last time, so you started there. Mostly mindless chatter, grumbling about delays, about the weather, about the smell. You were thankful they hadn’t gone with the full 4D cinema experience and pumped in metro-station-piss-odor for realism. Seconds passed. Finally, you found something interesting: a woman’s voice, faintly crying. Nothing close to a full-out sob, but weeping into a muffle of some sort. Her hands, maybe? Was she alright? Maybe this was some sort of human trafficking situation and she was being led somewhere against her will. Your eyes squeezed shut tight as you tried to glean more context, but nothing and no one sounded alarming in her immediate fictional vicinity. ‘Red herring?’ you thought to yourself, not wanting to waste time if the crying lady was just there to throw you off. ‘Okay, so what else is important? C’mon girl, think, why would a secret agent be on a subway platform? What am I here to stop?’

You allowed the different frequencies to filter in rapid fire, one after another, like a rolodex of audio data. Rubber soles on ceramic tiles, fleshy fingers on smooth glass phone screens, metal subway wheels on metal tracks, metal pins sliding into their retaining tunnels-

Behind you and to your right. Eyes still closed, you spun around so fast you ripped a few of your sensors clean off of their adjoining wires, but you scarcely noticed. The unmistakable click click slide click of a handgun being assembled was nearly complete. For one ugly half-second, it wasn’t a speaker hidden in a padded basement wall. It was an alley. It was blood dripping on your favourite high heels. It was one of Sionis’s lackeys raising a gun while the other tried to breathe through the pain you’d left ringing behind his eyes. Lost in the heat of the memory, your body reacted before your brain could catch up, fingers locked in tension as you used the momentum of the spin to ‘scoop up’ the thundering tremor of the train platform and condense it into a thick, concussive wave of force. You let out something between a groan and a scream of effort as you sent it careening towards the ‘gun’ in question, a booming roar echoing across the walls as it erupted from your hands. Your injured shoulder protested at the force of the motion, dull ache throbbing more sharply as you extended yourself. You ignored it.

If it had been the glock of a would be shooter you just blasted, it would have erupted into dozens of metal fragments clattering to the floor, and probably broken the bones of the hand that held it. Instead, it ruptured a sizable hole in the panel the replicated noise had originated from, exposing wires which sparked briefly as they were rended from their connections. It hit you in a flash that you’d just destroyed some of their equipment in your fervor, the soundscape falling away as it powered down.

You slowly turned on your heels back in the direction of the mirror, expression sheepish, deciding to get a word in before you could hear the verdict on your second attempt.

“Soooo, I know that was also not entirely covert, but-”

“Yo, did she just fucking blow up the wall? I thought you said this chick had super hearing. What the fuck was that?” Chris’s exuberant reaction cut off your attempted apology before it could even begin, voice full of astonishment.

“Yes, dude! We’ve had security cam footage of her doing this for months! Did you not read the meta-file I prepped? I got a canva subscription for it and everything.” Leota responded, tone carrying the disappointment of a teacher whose substitute didn’t bother to read the day’s lesson plan.

“Economos,” Harcourt jumped in, voice sharp enough to slice clean through their banter. “Numbers.”

Numbers?

You froze with both hands half-raised, waiting for the inevitable lecture about property damage, excessive force, irresponsible output, blah blah blah, but the observation room appeared to have already moved on without you. Behind the glass, you could hear John scramble closer to his monitors, chair wheels squeaking against tile as his fingers began clacking across a keyboard. You could also hear the familiar ka-thump ka-thump ka-thump of a very excited Adrian.

“Uh- yeah. Okay. Peak output registered at…” His voice trailed off into a low whistle. “Jesus. Initial amplification window was under point-eight seconds. Maybe point-seven-two? Hard to say, a few of the sensors on her left forearm disconnected during the spin.”

“Don’t worry,” Harcourt said. “I noticed.”

“Right. Sure. But even with the incomplete readout, the remaining nodes caught the pressure spike. Localized concussive event, highly directional. She pulled from the simulated low-frequency track… the train noise, I think? And then compressed it into a kinetic burst.”

“Kinetic? How much force exactly?”

“Estimated impact force at the panel face was somewhere between nine-point-six annnnd….” You hear some click clacking on the keyboard. “Twelve kilonewtons, focused into a cone about twenty centimetres wide. Kinetic transfer looks like four-ish kilojoules, maybe a little higher if the broken sensor data underreported. Peak localized overpressure hit fifty kilopascals for, like, a blink.”

“Okay…how many sticks of dynamite is that?”

John made a pained, guttural noise. “Don’t- ugh… I can’t even start to explain how that’s not how this works at all.”

“Economos. I can’t conceptualize a fucking kilojoule”

“Fine!” His voice dropped several volume registers until you could hear him muttering to himself, calculating under his breath. “Energy-wise, about a gram of TNT equivalent. So, like, one two-hundredth of a stick of dynamite, give or take.”

Somewhere off to John’s side, Chris snorted. “That sounds weak as shit.”

You bit down hard on your tongue, trying to stay chill and reasonable. That blast was a shove on the full spectrum of instances you’d used your abilities that way. The tremor you directed at your assailants at the Feedback Loop had felt significantly stronger than the one you’d performed moments ago. In fact, you could still feel the tangible body memory, the feeling of your bones vibrating as the energy had surged through and then out of you.

“It’s not really weak, though, it’s focused. Dynamite throws force everywhere. She compressed a train’s worth of low-frequency noise into a cone the size of a dinner plate and punched it straight through a reinforced panel. If that had been a gun, it would be dime sized shrapnel and the hand holding it would be a stump.”

“Aw, man!” Lee suddenly piped up, exuberant, “One of my cousins lost his hand holding a firecracker when we were younger! Everyone called him Stump, which was definitely meant to be mean at first, but he totally owned it. He went as Captain Hook so many Halloween’s in a row.”

That opened up a truly unending list of follow up questions in your head, but you barely heard the end of Leota’s no-hand-cousin story, because just as John had wrapped up his explanation, you were distracted by the sound of Adrian swallowing. Hard. His heart thumped erratically, inhales way too sharp. The breathing patterns of someone actively trying to calm down. Your eyes fell to the floor and you did your best to play off the giggles that were bubbling up.

Emilia continued her line of questioning, unaware of the 21-Gun/Organ-Salute he was performing next to her. “Environmental displacement?”

“Barely any outside the impact path. That’s the interesting part. The panel’s fucked, obviously, but the floor pads barely registered blowback. The output wasn’t just loud, it was shaped.”

Your eyebrows climbed halfway up your forehead.

“Okay, so, like” you interjected, uncharacteristically quiet. “So we’re not that mad about the wall?”

“Oh, I’m still mad about the wall.” Harcourt replied. “But I can be mad about the wall and impressed by the data at the same time. ”

Adrian’s mile-a-minute heartbeat threatened to overtake your focus again, as did the ever-accelerating tap tap tap of his bouncing leg and foot. You heard him take in breath as if he was about to speak, then hold it for a few seconds like he thought better of it… and then release it all at once as the words tumbled out of him at terminal velocity.

“Holy SHIT dude, that was so fucking cool! Economos, did you get an instant replay?! OOH! Or a slow motion instant replay?!?!” God, how you wished you could see the big, cheesy grin you knew was accompanying his excitement. You raised and lowered one wrist in an ‘aw, shucks’ gesture, but were also curious, somewhere in the back of your mind, if there was a slo-mo instant replay you could get ahold of. Trying to be a stealthy creature of the night didn’t leave you with that much vanity footage. As your adrenaline sank back down, you found yourself reaching to rub soothingly at your injured shoulder where you’d strained it slightly. The feeling was deeply foreign, the Midas Gel expanding and contracting with your damaged muscle fibers. It would take getting used to, that’s for sure.

“We don’t have video footage rolling right now, but I could, like, send you a copy of the readout graph? It’s just, like, numbers though. Not exactly good spank bank material.” John responded through a chuckle.

Chris’s laughter boomed into the observation room, punctuated by the sound of him hitting his lap with his rubber-clad palms. “Trust me, man, it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing in Vig’s spank bank by a mile.” Leota joined in as he snickered at his own joke, but Adrian was seemingly unfazed.

“No, it wouldn’t be. Send it to my profesh-email, though.”

Harcourt made a sound of incredulity over the intercom. “Why the fuck would he send it to the CFO inbox?!”

“I’m out of storage in my gmail inbox! I’m subscribed to, like, twenty different ‘zines and a whole bunch of aquarium mailing lists-”

“You know what, I don’t know why I asked, I don’t care. Everyone sit back down.” While the chatter had been ongoing, you were in the process of trying to pick up the discarded wires from that dangled off the central hub attached to your waist like a fanny pack, and reconnect them to their respective sensors. It was going less than ideally. Bordeaux must have noticed, though, and before you even realized you couldn’t hear her mechanical processes behind the glass anymore, she emerged from a concealed panel in the wall beside you with a box of fresh adhesive pads.

“Let me help you with these.” Her timbre was its usual velvet smooth, instantly bringing you back down to earth as the remainder of your assessors squabbled and tried to get set back up for whatever the next part of the test would bring. You dutifully held out the arm with the missing sensors, wincing slightly and hoping she wouldn't notice.

She noticed, of course, eyes darting up to your face and then back down to your arm with inhuman speed and precision, eyebrow raised in concern.

Harcourt must have finally gotten the room wrangled, because she flickered in over the intercom. “Sasha? What’re we looking at?”

A brief pause followed, filled only by the tiny, unsettling rhythm of Bordeaux’s internal mechanisms.

“Shoulder strain elevated, but not catastrophic,” Sasha said, gently lifting your arm up and down. Her eyes seemed glossed over with a slightly luminescent blue glare, which, after a moment of staring, you realised was not a reflection of light bouncing off of them, but rather light coming from the surface of the eyeballs themselves. It clicked that she was probably scanning you in some capacity. “The Midas lattice held. She compensated mostly through the right side and core rotation. Messy, but instinctively protective of the repaired tissue. I would prefer she not repeat that exact movement six more times, but she has not undone my work.”

“Alright. Good work.” Harcourt replied, tone inscrutable.

“Can you define good?” you called out.

“Good means you identified the threat, maintained cover as long as needed, and neutralized the weapon before the hypothetical shooter could finish assembling it.”

Your mouth opened, then closed.

“Oh.” Your eyes trailed Sasha as she adhered the last of the replacement sensors to your skin, then quickly slipped out of that same access panel and out of sight.

“Don’t look so surprised. You did the assignment. You just cost us a six thousand dollar dynamic audio panel, but it’s fine. I’m sure our humble Chief Financial Officer can find it in his deep, deep pockets to forgive you.”

Your smile was barely cracked when Adrian shouted at the microphone, “That’s me, babe! Don’t worry, I don’t have to forgive you anyway cause that would imply I was mad to begin with. Which I’m not, to be clear.”

“Clear as crystal, babe.” You hadn’t meant to tack on the pet name, but it seemed to appear in your throat of its own accord. On some level, your nervous system was shocked to find that you did not instantly explode at the expression of earnest affection. Much to your pleasant surprise, rather than a wave of embarrassment or despair, it felt… good. Nice, even, to say it. A small, public declaration of his place in your web. The kind of normal couple bullshit you never thought you would permit yourself in your dumpster fire existence, exchanged with the object of your ongoing obsessions. You were still reeling at hearing him say it to you, twice now. Let’s just say the glow it inspired in your chest far surpassed the schoolgirl whimsy you felt when you’d mimicked his voice in your apartment. This was the real deal. And if the eager pounding of his own heart in response was any indication, he appreciated it too. To your delight, the intercom was still on, and he spoke again. This didn’t seem directed at you, though.

“Did we figure out how she works, though?! Like in her body. What’s happening in there? How does she- fuckin’-” He punctuated the question with a very earnest, boyish series of mouth-explosions. You were thrilled imagining the accompanying hand gestures.

“I wasn’t gonna phrase it that way, but yeah. What do we know biologically?” Harcourt asked.

“She’s not generating all of that force from scratch,” John responded, still typing. He had that tone in his voice that could only be generated when someone was staring at a screen in front of them. “That’s the insane part. She’s harvesting existing low-frequency vibration, phase-locking to it somehow, and amplifying it through her own body.”

“Through her body?” Harcourt repeated.

“Yeah. The sensors caught synchronized tremors through the ribs, diaphragm, right shoulder, forearm, even the finger joints. Tiny movements, but all lined up. Like her skeleton turned into a tuning fork and her muscles concentrated the waveform until she released it.”

Blue screen. Freeze. Reset. It was so strange, bordering on unnerving, to hear someone describe the biological process of using your abilities. It was so subconscious, so not on your plane of awareness, that it was jarring to have it laid out so plainly. A tuning fork. You were just on the cusp on asking him to define ‘phase locking’, but Harcourt was apparently satisfied with what explanation he was given. She directed her tone back to you.

“All right. Audio isolation and threat prioritization confirmed. Since you’ve volunteered a demonstration of offensive output, we’ll move on to destructive application.”

A grin crept across your face as you processed her words. Destructive application.

“Do you mean I get to blow shit up now? On purpose?”

You never knew a sigh transmitted via intercom could carry so much exhaustion.

“Yes, you get to blow shit up now.”

There was no way for you to truly mark the passage of time in that basement, but it felt like you spent nearly an hour being gifted a variety of different items to send flying across the room. TVs. Rifles. Cell phones. Coffee mugs. After a while, a part of you was starting to wonder if they were maybe just grabbing whatever they could find and wanted to get rid of and tossing it in there with you for shits and giggles. You weren't complaining, though. This environment had no risk of being caught by the cops, no threat of bodily harm from an assailant, no victims you might scare, no important property, no ones’ home you might damage. For the first time, you felt absolute license to crank your metaphorical amp up to eleven. Not to mention, you felt a slight chip on your shoulder that made you determined to show off some kind of blast that Chris wouldn’t classify as ‘weak as shit.’ No holds were barred.

The first few rounds were sheer brute enthusiasm, the acoustically powered equivalent of kicking doors open just because you could. You would open your mouth to ‘scream’, but the waves would instantly warp and bend into your command, never reaching anyone’s ears in their original form. Instead, they were welded into increasingly more technical weapons. A stack of ceramic dinner plates became white shrapnel with a flick of your wrist. A padlock snapped clean off a length of chain without so much as rattling the stand it hung from. A row of empty glass bottles shattered one by one in perfect sequence, left to right, like you were playing the world’s sickest and most wasteful xylophone. Once the joy of it overtook you, and you stopped trying to impress your invisible judges with volume alone, the tests got more interesting. You dented the centre of a metal target without disturbing the paper cup balanced on top of it. You knocked the cap off a marker from across the room. When you split a playing card down the middle while it was clipped upright in a little stand, you caught Adrian making what could only be described as a smothered whimper. Every success made the next one feel easier, cleaner, less like you were actually still screaming with your whole body and more like tightening a guitar string, feeling the kinetic feedback of tension and reverberation becoming directed sound.

Then, confirming Sasha’s earlier warnings about how much time there’d been to cook up nonsense, Harcourt had Economos roll something in that looked like a decommissioned bank safe welded to a steel platform. Your direction was to try and deliver your most forceful impact possible. No precision this time. No finesse, no careful little aperture, just kinetic energy. You considered in your head what you needed to make that happen, what had been at your disposal when you’d managed your best feats of strength.

“Uh, sure. Can I have a little ambient noise, though? The fluorescents are loud, but not quite as full as a real place would be.” It was still so freaky making requests to a mirror. God, this whole dog and pony show was ridiculous.

After a few seconds, the intercom broadcasted Emilia’s response. “Sure. John’s just gonna pump a bunch of different frequencies through the speakers at once. Take what you need.” Just as she finished, the room shifted in a way you'd never felt. No normal place would ever feel this way. The sound tapestry was not an even soup of all different frequencies, it had base ingredients and flourishes and little plucked strings that were barely present but still peeking through. This felt like you were up to your knees in a warm bath of… sound. Just sound. Like the hum of 1000 different generators, each a slightly different pitch, but all evenly mixed. It made you a little nauseous for a moment until you closed your eyes and un-set your jaw from where it had locked up in response.

You planted your feet, inhaled until your ribs protested, and pulled every low vibration in the room down into the pit of your chest. It felt like a thousand massage guns were taped to your ribcage, like a cat the size of a moose purring on you. For one terrifying second, your whole skeleton hummed. Then, with all your might, you threw both hands forward and let the blast go. The safe didn’t fly back so much as cave in on itself, its front plate buckling inward with a thunderclap that punched the air out of your lungs and ripped every slightly loose wire on your body clean off. You stumbled rearwards, catching yourself on your back foot.

Behind the glass, John made a gobsmacked choking sound.

“Okay- uhhh- yeah. So. That answers the environmental-input question,” He stuttered, voice pitching upward as his fingers flew across the keyboard. “Providing mixed-frequency ambient noise increased total output by… fuck me, almost four hundred percent compared to her quiet-room baseline.”

“Don’t give me a fuckin’ percentage. What was the actual output?” Harcourt asked.

“Peak transfer came in at one-point-three megajoules. Maybe one-point-four, depending on how much the platform absorbed before the safe buckled.”

A pause.

“John.”

“Right. Sorry. That’s more than a full stick of dynamite. Not by, like, a cute amount either. Maybe one-and-a-half sticks, energy-wise. But again, dynamite throws force everywhere. She dumped most of it forward into a single impact plane, which is why the safe looks like it got hit by an invisible truck.”

Adrian and Chris let out a delighted, full-synchronized “Holy shit.” followed by what you could only assume was the sound of a fist bump.

“Directional coherence was way worse than the smaller blasts,” John continued. “Only about fifty-eight percent. So, less surgical, more ‘big, fuck-you shockwave.’ But the raw output is by far the highest we’ve seen.”

The palms of your hands still felt tingly with what could only be compared to static electricity, but somehow deeper. Regrettably, as you stood there taking in the comic book-y numbers of praise, you felt a deep throb from your bad shoulder and couldn't restrain the wince again. That last one was definitely ill-advised. You knew you’d pay for it later, but forced yourself to swallow it for now. ‘Not till this is done.’

Sasha emerged once more from the hideaway to help you re-affix the sensors while the others reset the room and the digital systems, and you succeeded in quashing your desire to protest. You didn’t, however, successfully hide your pained expression when she lifted your bad arm to place another layer of adhesive. Her eyes snapped to yours, carrying a crystal clear ‘Don’t be an idiot.’ message that you accepted with a thin half-smile. Blessedly, though, she didn’t launch into a full lecture about not pushing yourself. Instead, she turned in the direction of the mirror as she snapped in the last few electrodes to their central hub in the fanny pack and said, “Is the kinetic output portion concluded? I wouldn’t advise much more of this kind of exertion until she has more time to heal.”

Before you could speak up and offer to continue, Adrian responded over the intercom. “Wait, are you okay, babe? You’re not hurt, right? Well like obviously I know you are hurt, but, like, are you extra hurt right now? I’ll shut this whole thing down right now if you want. You need some Advil? Icy-Hot? Maybe I should just go in there and check on her really quick-”

Advil did sound nice. A joint would be even better. Getting to actually be in the same room as him, though, that would be the best. You didn’t have time to answer, unfortunately, because Emilia did it for you.

“No, Chase. No contact until we’re done. Sit back down.” He made a pitiful sound somewhere between a whine and a growl, then slumped back on his chair, by the sound of it. Harcourt directed herself back to Bordeaux as she did up the zipper on the fanny pack and placed her hands on her hips, still awaiting an answer to her question.

“And it should be alright, Sasha. This part’s done, there’s only a few more metrics we want to test and they should both be low impact. RiffRaff, you wanna keep going, or do you need a break?” Something about the way she said break had an unmistakable edge of judgement, in such a way that you were simultaneously sure she would allow you to take one if you asked and that she would think less of you for it. ‘Fuck that.’

“No, I’m fine. Let’s keep it moving!” Sasha tossed you one more warning glance as you responded before she slipped back out of the room, leaving you alone and freshly wired once again. The polyester clothes had left you covered in sweat, your feet were starting to ache, you itched in a thousand unglamorous places you you couldn’t WAIT to rip all these stupid fucking adhesive sensors off at the earliest opportunity. But patience would be your virtue. You had to prove you could be levelheaded and stress tolerant, had to prove you had been a worthwhile investment. As humiliating as it was, you couldn’t deny the feeling of profound indebtedness to everyone behind the glass for whatever part they played in saving your life and preserving the function of your arm. Forget not being able to be a vigilante, you could have lost your guitar playing, again, after just having found the will to pick it up again. Hell, you could have lost the ability to roll a blunt after a hard day. This was unpleasant, sure, but nothing compared to what could’ve awaited you without their help. You gritted your teeth and vigorously wiped the sweat off your brow, refocusing.

“Okay, for this section, we’re trying to get an idea of your capacity to reproduce specific sounds. Can you control the pitch of a given sound burst, or just moderate its volume?” Harcourt asked earnestly over the intercom, completely oblivious to how revealing the nature of the question was.

‘Oh. These guys don’t have a clue.’

Could you change the pitch of something? It almost made you laugh, but luckily, you strangled it into a goofy smile, hand over your mouth, eyes averted. Not smooth, but what could you expect? You’d been practicing your mimicry more and more over the last few months, refining the technique down to an art. It was easier the more relaxed you could get: in the privacy of your apartment, you’d gotten reliably good at parroting the voices of the people on TV, of your neighbours fighting through the wall, hell, even the distinctive bark of the rottweiler that lived behind the chain link fence across the street. During your patrols, when you had to keep your head on a swivel and watch all your footfalls to prevent tumbling off a multi-story rooftop, it was a little trickier to get it exactly right, but you could just about manage. You’d already had some success at eavesdropping on two people talking, then later mimicking the tone/timbre of one of their voices to lure out the other to a pre-determined area. A fake car alarm almost always got someone to whip around and face it, leaving their back open. First responder sirens made most crowds disseminate and scatter.

‘Can I change the fucking pitch of something?!’

‘Deep breath. Calm.This is fun, actually. Now you get to surprise them. And maybe show off a little.’ This would be the closest to a real performance you would get. They clearly didn’t have enough info on you to predetermine how to structure this part of the evaluation, so you would likely get to freestyle somewhat. You cleared your throat, adjusting your expression to be slightly less unbalanced, and finally responded to the initial question.

“Um, yes. Very much so. I can mimic sounds pretty easily if they’re common and I’ve heard them a lot.” There were a thousand other qualifiers rushing around your brain you were desperate to add, but you tactfully paused, waiting to see if Harcourt would prompt you for more detail.

“Sorry, you said mimic? To what level? ”

Bingo.

“So, it’s kind of like a two factor equation,” you started, “First factor is familiarity. If it’s a sound I’ve heard a million times, I basically already have the recipe memorized. Car alarms, phone notifications, keys, doorbells, footsteps, doors opening and closing. More recently: gun safeties clicking off. All that everyday background bullshit. My brain knows, like...what pieces are supposed to be there, so I can usually grab whatever’s available in the… room mix,?I guess? And bend it into the right shape.”

“Bend? Metaphorically? Or is there a physical feedback to it?”

“There’s a lot of physical feedback. Vibration, mostly, but I mean I guess that makes sense cause that’s, um… that’s what soundwaves are.” Smooth as ever. Actually, now you were thankful you couldn’t see behind the glass.

“But yeah, it’s like I’m reaching into the ambient soup of noise and pushing, pulling, rolling, whatever. It doesn’t like, ‘come out’ of my hands though. It just happens where I- where I want it to happen, I guess.”

“The ambient soup?”

“I don’t know, I’m still workshopping a good name for it. But yeah, like, the baseline sound already sitting in the air before I fuck with it. The raw material. I don’t usually make things from absolutely nothing unless I have to, because that takes way more effort and usually means using my own voice or body as the starting point. It’s easier if there’s already something close nearby.”

John’s keyboard clicked rapidly behind the glass. “So, available waveform environment affects output efficiency.”

“Yes. Sure. What he said.” You waved a hand in the vague direction of his monitors. “Second factor is how close the ingredients are to the target sound. Like, if I want to mimic keys rattling, and there are coins clinking in someone’s pocket nearby, easy. Same bright metallic attack, same prickly little high-frequency sparkle. I just have to tighten it up, add the right rhythm, make it sound smaller and more…’key-shaped’. But if all I have is fluorescent buzzing and somebody breathing, making convincing keys would be a lot harder. Still possible, but it feels like trying to blend a gradient with whiteboard markers instead of oil pastels. You’ve really gotta work for it instead of it working for you.”

Adrian interjected again. “”Wait, is she explaining how it works? Fuuuuccck, c’mon, I wanna hear this too! It’s like the one section of my field journals that’s not fleshed out. Ooh! Babe, can you, like, charades me the explanation, too?!”

You had just barely started to count out how many words were gonna be in your charades answer so you could hold it out to start the process, but Harcourt nipped that in the bud.

“No one’s doing fucking charades right now. Am I the only one here who’s a little curious to actually see her mimic something?”

A pause, which Adrian broke after a breath and a half.

“Well, technically we wouldn’t see her do anything but open and close her mouth and wiggle her fingers around. The fucking sick part you actually need to be able to hear her for, but oh wait! Only you and Economos get to listen to her in your stupid little headphones and he’s not even wearing his on both ears! It’s so not fucking fair-” The words catapulted out of him like rapid-fire bullets, nearly keeping up with his rapid, agitated heartbeat until Lee stepped in.

“Adrian, take a breath.” Her delivery was grounding, but not patronizing. You heard her demonstrate by drawing in a deep inhale, then slowly letting it out, which he then mirrored. “Okay. Ems, do you feel like maybe we don’t one hundred percent need to keep the soundproofing up for this part? I understand why we wanted that cushion for when she was blasting shit around, but it’s been nearly an hour and a half. One, at this point, I think we’d know if she was some kind of threat, and two, this is like, the longest I’ve ever seen Adrian sit anywhere close to still, and he just wants to listen to his girl make some fuckin’ cool noises. Besides, haven’t we confirmed at this point that she can hear us anyway?! RiffRaff, hey, if you can hear me right now, point to the ceiling.”

You pointed to the ceiling.

“Thanks girl, you can put your hand down now. But see what I mean? What are we really accomplishing by keeping the soundproof glass up at this point? Also, can’t lie, I wanna hear this too. Right, Chris?” Her tone inflected upwards in the exact way it does when someone is dragging someone in for conversational backup at a time they were otherwise distracted. You shifted your sensitivity and attention closer to where you remembered Peacemaker was sitting and heard the unmistakable sound of someone quickly typing on a smartphone. Then, he seemingly dialed into what was happening.

“Oh, uhhh, yeah. Same. Vig tells me she does a killer impression of the classic eighties shattering glass noise. Would love to catch that.” Well, Vig wasn’t wrong. That one was one of your favourites, and you’d practiced it enough you’d gotten reliable at molding even with less than ideal materials. You’d be eager to demonstrate, if they wanted. Emilia let out something between a sigh and a hum of consideration, seemingly weighing her options. You held your breath in anticipation, then clocked Adrian doing the same. A second passed. A thousand years passed. Finally, she broke the marginal silence.

“Fine. But Chase, so help me god, if there are any more interruptions because of this, that’s it. I won’t even have Sasha throw you out, I’ll do it myself. Is that clear?”

His pulse pounded, breath sharp and eager. “Yep! Yep, okay, got it. Sitting down quietly now.” The moment his ass hit the chair again, you heard his toe tapping wildly against the floor. God, he was really trying his best, wasn’t he?

Emilia continued. “Okay, John, bring down the tempered glass, take us to just the single one-way reflective pane.” A few button clicks later, and you heard a heavy woosh thump as the ridiculously thick and heavy barriers slid down and away, presumably into resting places in the floor. The moment they were gone, your entire perception shifted. It was like taking off wool earmuffs when you come inside out of a winter storm and can suddenly hear everything in much finer detail. You were getting such clear signals off of your observers that you felt you could practically see them, despite the continued presence of the glass. You heard Adrian nervously smooth his sweaty hands over the fabric of his shirt, and you could tell it was made of soft cotton. You heard the servos whirring behind Sasha’s eyes. Most importantly, you could hear it all without active exertion of effort or focus, just your regular passively wide net. Perfect. Now you’d be able to devote much greater attention to your replications. You grinned wide, then shouted to the whole room for the first time.

“Hey, everyone else who couldn’t hear me before! This is, uh, this is what I sound like! And hey, Adrian.” Your tone was embarrassingly saccharine and flirtatious, but you didn’t care. You finally had confirmation that he could actually receive the sound of your voice, and you knew firsthand how important that was. Everyone else could cringe, whatever, as long as he melted, your objective was achieved.

His breath stuttered a few times, heart fluttering, and his teeth clamped together hard, like it was the only way he knew how to keep himself quiet. It seemed he was taking Harcourt’s threats seriously; the stakes were too high now that he could actually observe you with two senses instead of one. You couldn’t lie, you were slightly jealous.

“Alright, let’s get this back on track.” Harcourt began, clearly not wanting to waste another precious moment of assessment time on this romantic nonsense. “You were describing what makes the mimicry easier or harder. The ingredients in the soup, right? Tell us more.”

Your grin had fully settled in, now. “Sure. It’s a lot more than just pitch. It’s texture. Timbre. Attack, decay, resonance, harmonics, overtones, all the weird little details that make one sound different from another even if they’re technically hitting the same note. A door closing isn’t just a thud. It’s the weight of the door, the material, the air getting pushed out of the way, the latch catching at the end. And, like, the eighties glass breaking sound effect has that sharp initial crack, then all those tiny little glittery pieces falling after. A dog bark has the chesty part, the throat part, the way the shape of its mouth folds the waves as they get sent out, all the dangly little mammal bits. Gross, but you get what I mean.”

“Yes, unfortunately.” She responded. “So if you can do animals, what about other people?”

Ah. Well. You’d arrived at the potentially freaky part.

“So voices are actually…” You trailed off, suddenly extra aware of how much attention was on you. Behind the glass, Adrian’s heartbeat picked up again with interest. “Voices are actually pretty easy, mechanically speaking. Once I’ve heard someone talk for a bit, anyway. People like to think their voices are these totally unique acoustic miracles, and emotionally, sure, whatever, very special, very romantic.” Silently, you prayed that your attempt at nonchalance had come through in your tone.

“But on the spectrum of every audible sound in the world, most human speech lives in the same little neighbourhood. Same basic, wet machinery. Air from the lungs, vibration from the vocal cords, shaped by the throat and mouth and tongue and nose. I can pretty much just say the words I want the target to say, then do some live adjustments. It was one of the first things I mastered, actually.” It was your heart’s turn to skip a beat. The memory of that first night, when you’d come home feverish with what you still hadn’t accepted was lust at the time, and sat cross-legged on your bed tweaking your own voice until it sounded just like his. Some of the muscles in your core clenched reflexively at the thought. You swallowed, took another deep, studying breath, then pressed on.

“The real technical part is making it sound like a specific person. That’s where the little details matter. Where the voice sits. How much air leaks around the words. Which consonants click. Which vowels flatten. Whether there’s rasp, nasal resonance, vocal fry, a lisp, a weird laugh, hint of an accent, whatever. Once I have that map, I can usually get pretty close.”

“How long does it take you to get a solid map?” Harcourt responded, with a tone of directed curiosity.

You could see where this was going.

“Five minutes is enough for something passable. An hour is great. If I’ve heard that person talk multiple times, on multiple occasions? Pretty much unclockable.” Your words rested in the room with the full weight they ought to have. There was no response from beyond the glass while your observers presumably settled and did the math, all reaching the same conclusion. All except Adrian, given away by the slight sound of his top teeth sliding along his bottom teeth. Smirking. If he had really been following you on nearly all your patrols for the last many months, he would have already seen you employ this technique countless times. You couldn’t help but smirk back, though: hearing you do a random sleazeball’s voice wouldn’t hold a candle to the alternative.

Time to offer the alternative.

“Do you want a demonstration? I know you’re all thinking it.”

This time, there was no hesitation beyond the glass, simply a chorus of ‘yeah’s, ‘of course’s, and ‘duh’s all uttered simultaneously. You chuckled slightly and started to wiggle and stretch out your fingers. Though a part of you was, of course, tempted to jump right into Adrian’s strange, beautiful timbre, performer’s instinct insisted that you never start with your number one hit. You gotta work the crowd up to it. “Why don’t I start with you, Agent Harcourt?”

She swallowed and clenched a fist by her side, but didn’t say anything aloud to betray potential nervousness. Meanwhile, in your head, you summoned up some clipped audio memories of her speaking to you over the last hour, carefully weighing the profile of her speech. Her tone was more nasal than most, but the delivery seemed to come very deliberately from the chest, resonating in the back of the throat from the blend. A slight midwestern accent, mostly smothered, but given away by the raised ‘A’s in certain words. Her consonants were full, never clipped, each facet enunciated crisply. Everything about the structure of her voice was about tension and control. You suspected she probably sounded quite different if she ever got drunk, assuming that was something she did. Anyway, not the point. You steadied yourself with a full, deep breath, then parted your lips and started to speak.

“My nAme,” The first sounds that escaped you were warbled and sounded distinctly wrong, like someone speaking into a vocoder that wasn’t fully programmed yet. That was normal, the first time you did a new voice, as you played with tweaks here and there to get your baseline close to the map in your mind. By the third word, you’d found your footing. You opened your mouth, but it was Emilia Harcourt’s voice that spoke. “Is Agent Harcourt. John, quick, are we sure this is the single scratchiest pair of gym clothes we can give this girl? Okay, good. This is a serious black ops organization, and we need to simulate field stress as realistically as possible. That’s why I built this sterile white observation room with speakers in the walls and ceilings, just like in real life. I like my numbers given in explosion metrics. I hate joy and whimsy. I’m obviously from the american midwest but I try really hard to suppress it into a neutral accent-”

“Woah, jesus fuck! Stop. Stop that right now.” The real Harcourt cut you off over the intercom, the expression in her just-mimicked voice shaky and off put. It was probably strange, hearing your own voice come out of a stranger’s throat, and she was the first person you’d demonstrated the ability for to their face. A smile crept onto your lips, unwittingly, as you took a moderate level of sick enjoyment in now finally having taken a little bit of power back in the situation. She had you in this basement, hooked to all these wires, but you had still managed to profoundly unsettle her. From the observation room, reactions rippled through the assembled crowd.

“Holy fucking shit! Trippy as fuck, that sounded just like you, Emilia.” Chris offered quickly and without reproach. “Yeah, pretty much,” Leota agreed, “Except you would never admit to hating joy and whimsy out loud.” That got a laugh from the general crowd, save for Harcourt herself, who was still silent post her interjection. You could tell John was staring at one of his computer screens with his mouth slightly ajar, obviously deep in concentration as he clicked away at his keyboard. “It wasn’t a perfect frequency match, and obviously it’s tough to compare cause I don’t have an audio file of you saying those exact words in that exact order, but look at this.” The sound of Emilia shuffling closer to where John must have been gesturing echoed out at you. “I clipped a chunk of the last time you said my name, and the word ‘metrics’, then I overlayed them with her recreation. The voice ID algorithm Sasha nabbed from ARGUS security protocols matched them as being from the same speaker with 97.8% confidence.”

The motor servo’s behind Bordeux’s eyes shifted slightly as she registered his statement. “That would exceed the confidence threshold the system requires to admit entry. Incredible.”

Adrian was breathing like he’d just run a marathon, interrupted when he broke into jubilant laughter in response to Sasha’s confirmation. “HA HA! Ha! God, do you guys see what I mean yet?! She could break into ARGUS HQ right now if she wanted-”

“She could fool a third of their full security bio-metrics, technically.” Harcourt corrected, speaking up for the first time since her initial revulsion towards your impression of her.

“Right, and the rest of us could fool no thirds. Fuck, that was so hot.” His leg was still bouncing rapidly as he opined, and you felt blood rushing to your cheeks, suddenly much warmer than before. Instinctually, you reached up and tussled your hair slightly, a likely unproductive gesture considering your post-surgery shower had been taken both in haste (your fault) and with products that were not yours (not your fault). Whatever. Clearly he didn’t care. Suddenly, you heard the squeaky wheels of Adrian’s rolling chair approaching the glass from his side, closing the distance between you as much as possible as he shouted out again.

“Dude, please please please please pleeeeeeasseeee do me next!!! Super pretty please with a cherry-”

“Nah, dude, didn’t you hear? Em’s not gonna let you guys do each other until after this whole thing is done!” Chris interrupted him, words undercut with gradually increasing bemused laughter. This whole imposed-separation trope was clearly working for at least one person in the room. It was not working for Adrian, though, who let out the exact scoff that always accompanies an eye roll.

“Dude, you’re so gross. One, I obviously meant ‘do me’ like ‘do my voice’ not like ‘fuck me’. Two, I’m not gonna have sex with her immediately after this. I’m gonna, like, talk to her first. And I need to go to the bathroom-”

Harcourt started to shout over them, but you didn’t catch a word. Your head was buzzing, palms clammy, throat suddenly dry. It felt like all the blood in your body had either rushed up to your cheeks or down to settle near your hips. Your own heart pounded so loudly you had to adjust your passive filtration of your own body signals. Fuck. This was torturous. You never wanted a ‘skip-cutscene’ button so badly in your life. Nine months. Nine fucking months, long enough to make a whole person, nine months you’d been slowly working your way closer and closer into his orbit, first Vigilante’s, then, Adrian’s. And just like the supermassive black hole of sheer intensity and enthusiasm he was, your slow, methodical approach had been ripped over the event horizon so fast you didn’t fully realize it was happening until here and now.

You’d been on a very successful first date, shooting aside. You could still remember the feeling of his hand on your thigh in the passenger seat of the Vigilante-Mobile, the callouses of his fingers pressed into you, could remember the feeling of the warmth of his chest as he’d effortlessly hoisted you into his arms. It was no surprise to you that you wanted him that way, carnally, physically, biblically, however you wanted to phrase it. You’d known that for longer than maybe you’d been willing to admit. But until his confession in the car, his admittance that he’d been watching you as long as you’d been watching him, you’d been worried there was a fundamental imbalance of power and information that made it feel unethical to unleash the full magnitude of your freakery towards him.

You had no such worries, now.

Nine months, you had waited, watched, and wanted. So help you God, you would endure the remaining minutes.

The slow-motion lovestruck bubble you were caught in finally dissipated as you calmed your racing heart and re-focused your eyes, which you realized you hadn’t been blinking for several moments. Quickly, you discovered that it had not just been a lovestruck bubble you were encased in; as you recentred, you suddenly heard the sound of you being addressed from the observation room and realized you’d accidentally mute-bubbled yourself again while in the full throes of the Adrian Vortex.. ‘You stupid, gorgeous, ridiculous idiot. Stop being so fucking cute!!! I’m trying to lock in!!!’

“-she hear me? RiffRaff? What’s going-” Came Harcourt's now unmuted questioning. You shook your head and blinked a few times in quick succession, getting your bearings.

“Sorry, yes, I’m fine, that was my bad. I just got a little, um, distracted, for a second. Accidentally mute-bubbled myself. No sound in or out. I wasn’t ignoring you guys on purpose, I promise.” You cut her off to explain yourself abashedly, rubbing the back of your neck with your good hand.

“Ah, got it. We knew about those, right?” She paused as if looking to her colleagues for confirmation, then seemingly got it. “Right, yeah. That’s gonna be the next thing we test when we’re done with this section-”

Adrian broke into a pained groan. “Ugggggggghhhh whaaaat???? Fuck, there’s more after this?” His words carried the melody of an almost childish denial, the classic whine of when you tell a kid there’s another errand to be run before going home, or there’s two more hours left in the road trip. It was adorable. To you, at least.

“You’re the one who told us about the silencing fields, Chase. It’s the last thing on the agenda today. Think you can keep it in your pants for like, thirty more minutes? I’m seriously asking. Again, you can always go wait in the hall.”

“Yeah, fuck, okay, I guess. Sor-ry for being impatient, but like come onnn!!! She’s been asleep for a fucking week, and you guys wouldn’t even let me be in her room while she-”

“Adrian,” Sasha interjected. “You were not allowed in the room because you kept talking about your intentions to put some of your own blood in her IV bag. I can’t emphasize strongly enough how bad of an idea that would have been.”

“Or so you assume. I’m sorry, do I have a metagene healing factor or not?! It would have healed her faster. You guys are enemies of progress.” You could only imagine the petulant pout that he must have been sporting, but you could hear his arms crossing over his chest clear as day. You hardly had time to absorb the idea that he’d wanted to do a superhero blood transfusion, too focused on how he sounded as tortured as you were, and you wished there was something you could do to-

‘Oh. Duh.’

Your lips parted again, but this time, your entire posture changed, too. Feet spread slightly wider, one hand planted on your hip, head cocked just a touch. Reaching inside yourself for his voice was easy at this point, practiced. After all, it was your favourite voice in the entire world. It was so, so very musical in nature, every sentence like a stone rolling up, over, and then down a series of peaks and valleys. He had a tendency to uptalk near the end of sentences more than the average person. His resonance was almost supernaturally clear, bell-like, but a sturdy brass bell, not glass or crystal. It was highly, highly expressive, you never had to wonder what he was feeling underneath the words. He used the entirety of his pitch register regularly, whereas most people stayed within a narrow band for casual conversation. Then, of course, there was a certain, slightly unhinged je ne sais quoi that iced the delicious cake. Part of it was his tendency to emphasize the ‘wrong’ words or syllables in a phrase, however, the fundamental, special, ‘Adrian-ness’ of his tone was indescribable.

But not irreplicable.

“Awww, guys, I don’t wanna wait another half hour in this boring ass room! I regularly spend hours at a time freezing my ass off on the rooftops of Evergreen while I keep a weather-eye out for criminal misdeeds, but this is unbearablllleee!” You whined in perfect replica of his distinct vocal fingerprint. By the end of your statement, you had nearly broken out in giggles, cracking yourself up. More than anything, you wished you could see his face while you’d done it.

For a moment, you were worried you might have actually killed him. His heart stopped for a flash, then came back with an erratic vengeance. The noise he was choking down the back of his throat was lurid and pathetic, and he failed to prevent some of it from leaking out through his nose. ‘Whimper’ did not do it justice. It was far more primitive than that, and its rhythm wasn’t steady enough. Wickedly, as you listened close, it transformed into his brand of giggles, walking that fine line of childish whimsy and very not-childish viscerality.

“Quick, someone tell me what colour he is right now!” You called out to your observers in your own voice, selfishly hoping one of them would indulge you. Luckily, there were other unprofessional-professionals in the room with him. “Ha! Somewhere between a coke can and a firetruck, I’d say?” Chris tossed back, seemingly happy to expose his buddy even further. You planned to offer him a fist bump of gratitude later as it sharpened your imaginary vision of him.

Hearing him laugh again, but specifically this subtype so steeped in admiration, overwhelm, and arousal, one you hadn’t quite heard before, was enough to make you nearly forget the context you were performing in. You had one purpose, one mission, and that was to make Adrian come completely undone. Clearing your throat, you prepared to throw your words in his vocal blender again. But first, a self indulgence. Let him hear his own undoing. If you had to stare at a mirror this whole time, he could stand to listen to one.

“HA HA HA HA HA HA HAH!” His odd and addictive laughter poured out of you like a dubiously ethical waterfall. It was, humility aside, a near-perfect imitation. After all, it was the very first thing you ever started practicing to mimic. The sound you’d practiced more than any other, in all its perfectly too-loud, too much glory. Unlike all his other speech, which was remarkably sing-song, his laugh was almost always kept within the same one or two semitones, sort of like how most people would do a deliberately ‘fake’ laugh. Its delectable twist was in its complete sincerity, though, like it was simply exploding out of him rather than being delivered. You continued as the last bit of it echoed around you. “I’m Adrian Chase, aka Vigilante, aka the most jacked busboy Evergreen has ever had the privilege of watching clear away their dishes. I love crows and DND and targeted acts of extreme violence and one time I listened to ‘Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!’ by The Vengaboys thirteen times in a row in my adorable little wired earbuds, which I use because bluetooth is so easy to hack into-”

Chaos erupted from the observation room. Leota, John, and Chris seemed almost breathless with laughter by sentence two. Sasha was barely repressing hers, failing not too long after. By the time Harcourt cut you off, even her rigid, uptight facade had started to crack, and she had to try multiple times to actually say real intelligible words in between bouts of chuckling. Good, good, great, even, you were happy to have entertained, but their reactions were secondary to you. You dialed into Adrian.

Who may have been undergoing a genuine Cardiac Event.

He had progressed to what could only be described as a Tier 4 Cackle. You could sense his lungs completely deflate at the tail end of each trail of uproarious laughter, and then the massive inhales taken to replenish his air before wheezing it all out again. The sound of it betrayed motion, waves briefly softened as they bounced off of something soft, something just below him, like he was raising and lowering over and over again… he was doubled over. That was it. He was falling over in his chair, hand on one knee for balance, radiating delight and beguilement. The distinct metal clink clink of his glasses coming off his face and then being folded briefly made you think you might have even pulled tears from his eyes.

Sheer euphoria. The benevolently vampiric nature of the performer’s contract was finally being fulfilled on your end; you had amused them for nearly two hours, and now, you were finally able to feast on the energy they gave back. Your grin sunk in deep, waves of goosebumps rippling up and down your back, before you closed your eyes and offered a grandiose bow, hand-sweeping and all.

After that, the mimicry assessment lost any remaining veneer of professionalism and devolved into something much closer to taking requests at the world’s strangest open mic. For the next twenty minutes, you became a human soundboard with as many wires poking out of you as the real thing. John and Emilia did their best to keep things practical, making you reproduce the tactically useful staples: car alarms, doorbells, keys in locks, windows sliding open, boots on gravel, boots on metal stairs, the click of a deadbolt, the chirp of a security system being armed and disarmed, three different phone notifications, a distant siren, a close siren, and the nauseatingly specific sound of someone racking a shotgun in a narrow hallway. But even they permitted themselves a few indulgences. John, trying very hard to sound like he was asking for purely diagnostic reasons, requested a perfect Windows error noise, then couldn’t contain a celebratory slap of the table when you nailed it on the first try. Harcourt asked for Chris’s voice saying, “I have listened carefully to your thoughtful briefing, understand the assignment, and will follow basic instructions,” which Chris objected to on the grounds that it was “a decent impression, but the content was essentially science fiction.” Leota, unsurprisingly, wanted to know if you could autotune someone live, so you spent a few glorious minutes giving her speaking voice a bright, ridiculous T-Pain shimmer while she laughed hard enough to wheeze. Chris requested half a dozen celebrities, including himself, again, and noted that the second time around, you had captured the gravel of his voice even better. The eighties glass-shattering noise received the standing ovation it deserved. Sasha’s request came last, delivered with the calm seriousness of a woman asking for something very normal: Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator. When everyone paused, presumably to look at her, she merely folded her motorized hands and explained that she had developed a certain appreciation for the films as a fellow cybernetically enhanced person. You liked her more every minute.

The silencing assessment, by comparison, was almost meditative. No explosions, no more of your absolutely impeccable Miss Piggy impression, just the strange, delicate work of deciding where sound was allowed to exist. Harcourt and Economos tested the mute bubbles the way people tested blast radiuses in disaster movies: distance markers on the floor, decibel readouts on John’s monitors, increasingly annoying test tones pumped through the speakers while you tried to carve little pockets of absence into the room. A one-foot bubble was easy. Three feet took focus, but you could hold it while moving. Six feet made your temples throb. Anything bigger than that started to wobble at the edges, sound leaking in through little weak spots like water under a badly sealed door. Keeping sound out was easier than keeping sound in; muffling the room around yourself felt like closing a fist, but trapping noise inside a bubble without letting it bleed outward required a weird, constant pressure that made your jaw ache. They had you mute a dropped wrench, then your own footsteps, then a clanging alarm, then your voice. They had you speak inside a silent field while Sasha stood just outside it, watching your mouth move and hearing nothing. Finally, they had you try to contain Chris yelling as loudly as he could from the observation room, which you managed for almost eight full seconds before the bubble buckled under the sheer acoustic force of his God-given All-American lungs, thus confirming you could in fact produce a bubble outside of your visual range, as long as you could hear where the sound was supposed to be.

By the time Harcourt seemed satisfied, your whole body felt like it had been wrung out and hung over a balcony to dry. The performance high had ebbed into something heavier, sweat cooling under the scratchy grey tank top while the sensor adhesive tugged at your scars every time you shifted your weight. Your shoulder ached, not sharply enough to scare you, but with the deep, swollen warning of tissue that had been asked to do too much too soon. Still, the room felt different than it had when you walked in. Less like a padded dungeon. More like a stage that had taken a lot of you, but not without giving something back. You had mapped your assessors through glass, found threats in artificial chaos, blown some shit up, stolen voices, banished sound, and made Adrian laugh harder than you’d ever heard before. Oh, and gotten confirmation that he wanted to jump your bones at the earliest opportunity. Not that you were still thinking about that. Not that you had not stopped thinking about it since he said it.

Anyway.

Whatever Harcourt thought of you now, whatever word she wanted to use, asset, risk, investment, problem, you didn’t care anymore. You had given them one hell of a show. There was no doubt in your mind that you’d firmly established who you were in the minds of these not-quite-strangers, and not just who you were as a metagene having crime fighter, but as a person. A woman who was not afraid of attention, who did not buckle under pressure, who somehow seemed to match the freak of their own resident oddball.

“RiffRaff,” Harcourt said, voice crackling through the intercom one final time, “thank you for your cooperation. I know this was probably strenuous, exposing, and maybe, I will admit, slightly over the top. I also know most people would have taken several days off after the operation you just had. Sasha will berate me for this later, but I want it to be known, I respect that you didn’t want to wait. Knowing whether or not the pain you’re feeling can be pushed through is part of what makes someone a good soldier-”

“Emilia, the agreed upon terminology is operative, as per our latest meeting on deconstructing our state-affiliated language. Pardon her, RiffRaff, she’s still getting used to being a free agent, as am I, often.” Sasha corrected, tone warm.

Harcourt sighed, but in resignation, not resistance. “Yeah, right, a good operative. Anyway, you’ll still need to do a proper sit down interview with a few of us tomorrow morning, we’ve got a few gaps in our timeline we need you to fill, but I think we can all agree that we’ve done enough for today. And so, provisionally, I’d like to welcome you-”

“YOU’RE A FUCKING CHECKMATE OPERATIVE NOW, BABE!!! FUCK YEAH!!!” Adrian had restrained himself for a few seconds too many, it seemed, and finally broke it by shouting out above Harcourt. His joy was palpable. A beat went by, and he cleared his throat. “I mean, like, if you want to. Obviously. But I promise, it’s a really sick gig, and I’m in charge of the money so really when you think about it, I am ultimately in charge of everything, and also I’ve already been working on some upgrades to your suit-”

You couldn’t help but smile as he went on and on, waxing rhapsodically about all the good reasons you should join up. This clearly mattered so, so much to him. You cleared your throat again, gently cutting him off.

“I’m gonna need a proper rundown on your guy’s mission statement, code of conduct, and obviously the healthcare package,” you began, smirking down at your gold-infused shoulder, “But let me say this, provisionally. I wanna join the band. It seems like you guys are in dire need of a lead singer.”

The words had barely left you before Adrian erupted from his seat, exploding into a series of triumphant hoots and hollers. If you had to guess based on the whooshing of his sleeves, he was pumping his fists up and down the same way he sometimes did after nailing a long-distance shot between a drug dealer’s eyes. The rest of the team provided a much more socially appropriate undercurrent of celebratory expressions, the last of which you caught was Chris saying “-TOLD you the donuts weren’t premature. Hell yeah, new blood!!! Let’s fucking GO!!”

A band. A team. Structure. All the things you’d been scared to admit you needed, scared to face the prospect that they might be lost to you forever. There was a high mountain to climb, certainly, before you could fully put your trust in these people. No denying that. But whatever strange, fascinated tug had yanked you towards Adrian that cold night on the fire escape burned bright in you still, here, in the basement of an independent intelligence agency run by rejects. You were willing to at least give them a chance to earn that trust, you decided.

Harcourt chimed in again as the cheers dwindled. “I’m glad to hear it.” Someone, her or John, probably, flicked a control switch, and the door that you’d used to enter the assessment room slid open behind you, leading into the same corridor as the room where you’d had your post-op recovery.

“And before you ask,” Harcourt added, “yes, we’re monitoring Sionis’ channels. No confirmed movement on you since Chase brought you in, but I’m not stupid enough to assume that means they’re done.”

Your stomach tightened despite yourself. “Right. Cool. Love that.”

She carried on, not letting the moment linger. “There’s a locker room out that door and to the left with a shower, some lotion, and a fresh outfit. Your clothes, actually.”

You raised an eyebrow in confusion. “Like, my date-night dress? Isn’t it sort of… um… covered in copious amounts of blood?”

“Don’t worry babe, I saved it! I had all week to work on getting the stains out. Leota helped a little.” Adrian responded, beaming.

“His original plan was to just dye the whole thing red, which he says would work with your ‘branding’, but with some elbow grease and a bucket of Tide Pens, we got her back.” Leota clarified. Harcourt continued, “But no, don’t worry, I’m not gonna have you put on a fuckin’ cocktail dress after all this shit. They’re pyjamas from your apartment. Adrian… tactically acquired them yesterday.”

He was in your apartment. He was in your apartment. Oh, you were so going to kill him later. After a sufficient period of making out, but then, 100% dead. Before you could even ask how he accomplished that, he answered of his own accord.

“You had your door keys in your purse! And I promise, I barely snooped at all. Like only a little. And nothing weird. Mostly. I did get you a fresh pair of underwear but I SWEAR I just opened the drawer closed my eyes and stuck my hand in there and grabbed the first one I could feel-”

“OKAY, thanks, babe. Yep. That’s actually, that’s actually all I need to know.” You called back. In truth, you were only really put off by the intrusion because it meant you wouldn’t get to show him your place for the first time. The thought to get you your own clothes to get comfortable in post-trials was actually incredibly sweet, and you couldn’t deny, it sounded pretty fucking good right now.

“Once you’re showered and changed, Adrian can take you back to yours to get some rest. You’ve earned it.” Harcourt concluded, and shortly after, you heard the sound of a door in the assessment room opening and bodies shuffling out one after another until only one remained.

Who else but Adrian.

You blew a kiss at the mirror, winked, then spun around on your heels and made for the locker room with haste, biting your lip the whole way there. All this, and actively flirting with him still gave you butterflies.

The locker room was modest but well equipped. On a bench, as promised, was a pair of your favourite pyjamas, loose-fitting, soft black cotton beckoning angelically. Beside them was a fluffy towel, some generic toiletries, some shower flip flops, and a plastic tub crudely labeled with sharpie ‘FOR SENSORS/WIRES’. Fucking finally. You didn’t need any more of an invitation to get these polka dots from hell off of your skin, yanking at them several at a time, sighing in relief at each satisfying pop when the adhesive detached. Your body ached, especially your shoulder, and you knew you’d likely pay even more dearly in the morning, but you couldn’t really bring yourself to care. The smile you wore seemed immovable, and you hummed to yourself as you went through the motions of undressing and returning to your own body unimpeded by anything else. ‘Best Song Ever’ was still somehow stuck in your head from the brief blast you’d gotten in the Vigilante-Mobile, so it provided the soundtrack to your movements around the locker room.

The steam of the hot shower water rising off the cold tile floor as you turned the nozzle on was almost enough to make you cry tears of relief. God, you couldn’t imagine anything you needed more right now than a hot shower. You stuck a hand out into the falling stream to assess the temperature, and-

Ka-thump. Ka-thump. Ka-thump.

Somewhere down the hall.

Ka-thump. Ka-thump. Ka-thump. Ka-thump.

Footsteps. The unmistakable footsteps of worn, leather, orthopedics. Closer now. In fact, right outside the locker room entrance.

You could, as it turned out, imagine something you needed more than a hot shower. The glass door of the shower squeaked closed, and you wrapped the towel around yourself in classic towel-dress fashion as you stepped towards its arrival.

His breathing was so loud, you wondered if you even needed super-hearing to catch it through the locker room door. You heard him reach out a hand for the handle, but you beat him to it, swinging it open with an uncorked ferocity. Finally, finally, seeing him again, right there, an arms reach away.

And so you reached, quick as a flash, and dug your fingers into the collar of his pale blue t-shirt, then used it as a handle to yank him inside, kicking the door closed behind him. You’d never seen his pupils so dilated or his cheeks so flushed. His mouth was hung open in a lopsided, dopey grin. His eyes flickered as he raced to take in what was happening, to take you in, starting with your face and then not managing to suppress a glance down and back up.

“So,” you began, hand still locked onto his chest. “You went to the bathroom already, right? Let’s get talking, then.”

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