Characters: Willow Wren, Ethan Kim, Peter Parker, Ned Leeds
Prompt/Tag:
“cross that. don’t answer that.”
“you know who to call.”
Summary: Ethan tries to reach out to Willow at school
Timeline: January 2015
Song: Creve Coeur - Ethan Jewell
A/N: aldkjflksjdf the fact that they’re both named Ethan
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I was just so tired, but I couldn't stop now. I still hadn’t been able to cry, and now I was afraid that I’d never be able to. I think the others, Peter and Ned and Jessica, maybe know that something is going on, but I think they think I’m still grieving or trying to process what happened (I don’t need to process what happened). It’s been more than a month.
“You know who to call,” Peter told me one morning as we depart for class. “If you need anything.”
“Of course,” I said, wondering why I was still here, in school, still pretending like everything was normal and fine. “I’ll see you at lunch.”
“See ya!” Ned said, and I faked a smile.
I walked to homeroom, half-watching the student news, and remembering the math quiz I was supposed to have that afternoon. It had snowed the night before and the hallway was filled with wet puddles and brown slush as boots and shoes squeaked across the linoleum.
“Hi,” I said to Ethan as I sat down, pulling out my books to place on my desk and hiding my phone behind the stack.
“Hey. What’s up?” he said.
“Nothing,” I sighed. “Another day in paradise.” How am I supposed to act like things are normal? Nothing was ever normal for me, and now that I know they wired my brain that way that—
“Hahaha ok…. are you all right?” Ethan asked. “I mean, like…you look…” His face went red as he struggled for the right words.
“I’m just really tired. Exhausted.” I looked at my reflection in my phone screen. “Why, do I look…never mind don’t answer that.”
“Bad night’s sleep?”
“Something like that.” I got into another random fight last night. Something stupid, something I shouldn’t have even been involved in, but I couldn’t help it. I’m just so angry all the time.
“You should try melatonin, that’s what I use.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” No matter what I did, it seemed like things just kept getting worse, and I was slowly falling into a hole that would be harder and harder to dig my way out of when I hit rock bottom. I’m supposed to feel better with time, but the more time goes on, the worse I feel and the more I learn about myself. I found out who I am, and I hate her. What do I do with that? “Do you ever feel like whatever decision you make is the wrong one?” I asked Ethan.
He thought for a moment. “I mean, I guess sometimes. Like sometimes we have broadcasts on the student news that just completely wrong and no matter what I do it just gets worse and worse.”
“Yeah.”
“If you ever want to talk, I’m here.”
“I’m good.” Marty was the first person I even came close to allowing in like that, and we saw how that turned out. His dad was right.
I sat with the boys at lunch, went to decathlon after school, and then Jessica’s. I wondered what would happen if I just turned myself in as Pip said. I can’t do that. I need to find the book first. That needs to be destroyed. And Dr. Dawn Turner needs to be brought to justice.
When I fell asleep that night, staring at the blue fabric of the tent roof, and listening to the hum of the space heater, I wondered how it all could have fallen apart so fast. How did I lose everything so quickly? I wondered who killed Marty, who specifically pulled the trigger. The wind had slowed down in the past week—the more numb I got, the less the air swirled outside the tent. I wondered if Marty was scared when they killed him—if he knew what was coming or if it all happened before he could blink. I silently thanked him again for the USB and tried to thank the friends who were still around, even as that number slowly dwindled.
Summary: Willow returns to school after winter break
Timeline: January 2016
Song: Rejoice - Julien Baker
A/N: it’s mentul illnuss innit, luv?
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I still felt half-asleep when we returned to school after winter break. I hadn’t talked to Kate the whole break, and Peter and Ned hadn’t heard from her either. The three of us met, as usual, in the lobby of MSST, but I just felt so disconnected, as Peter and Ned discussed their break and I nodded along. I had been to Peter’s a few times, just for movie nights with him and Ned, but it didn’t feel the same. They asked me what happened with Kate, and I didn’t have a good answer.
How did I fuck all this up so badly?
I didn’t feel like the same person anymore. After the revelation Marty’s USB drive brought, I wasn’t even sure who I was anymore. Who is Willow? Who was October?
I got to homeroom and slid into my seat, putting my head down on the desk, praying the school day would end quickly so I could go back to base, maybe sleep a little, and pick another HYDRA agent. I’m so bored. I’m—
“Hey,” someone said, and I looked up to see Ethan Kim settling into the desk next to me. “How was your break?”
I sat up and sighed. “Uh… below average?”
He looked like he wanted to ask more, but he stared down at his notebook, pushing his pencil tip into the binder holes. “Oh. Sorry to hear that. Did you do anything fun?” When he looked back at me, I read the concern in his eyes, the way he actually cared what I said, and it made me feel worse.
“Don’t give me that look,” I said, putting my head back down.
“Oh… okay… sorry? What look?” Ethan stuttered, and when I didn’t answer, he went back to poking his notebook with his pencil. “Alright, I’ll leave you alone.”
God, what’s wrong with me? Every time I shut my eyes, it was a new image. Marty dead in the apartment. The Russian family. Heidi Rye falling over the balcony. That couple I killed Christmas morning and felt nothing when it happened. I should have felt something. Why can’t I feel anything? I’m so tired. I’m so, so tired.
I titled my head in my arms and glanced back up at Ethan. “Sorry. How was your break?”
He seemed surprised and smiled a little. “Oh. It was all right. I went skiing with my parents, so that was fun. Celebrated Christmas with my grandparents in Connecticut.”
“Sounds nice,” I said, clenching my fists under my crossed arms. “Um… do you have any siblings?”
“No,” he said. “Just me.”
“Right on.”
“You?”
I read the clock at the front of the room. Still a few minutes before class started. “I have eleven. Well… maybe twelve.” Let’s see what he says to that.
“Wait, what?” Ethan asked, his voice barely above a whisper in the homeroom chatter. “Do they all live at that apartment? Like…”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “We all live in different places.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“That still must be cool though,” Ethan said. “It’s like a whole bunch of people who are forced to be friends with you.”
I almost laughed. “Yeah. Exactly.” For some reason, I was moments away from exploding again, my spine itself feeling like there was a current flowing through it, and my hands filled with pins and static. “Can you make sure I get marked present?” I asked. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
I practically ran down the hall, towards the auditorium, somewhere empty and quiet. Papers fluttered on bulletin boards, and just as I shut the auditorium door behind me, the wind shot out, ripping through the auditorium, shaking the seats, my hair twisting in the vortex. The light rig rattled against the beams and I sat down in the aisle, trying to get it to stop, somehow get control back.
Just as the wind began to settle, I hear someone approaching the auditorium doors and I stood up quickly. When the door opened, the air was still, and I saw Principal Morita standing in the hallway. “What are you doing here?”
“Um…”
“My office, please.”
And that’s how I spent my first afternoon after winter break in detention, watching one of those fucking Captain America videos on the roll-in television, a video I was no stranger to. “So, you got detention. You screwed up.” I mouthed along with the words as I scratched my name into the desk and the video droned on and Captain America’s smug face stared out of the grainy screen. “You know what you did was wrong, but the question is: how are you going to make things right? Maybe you were trying to be cool.”
How many of these did they make this guy make? Does he seriously enjoy making them?
I thought back to Ethan in homeroom this morning and felt bad all over again for blowing him off. He reached out to me a lot, and back before everything happened, I used to say hi to him every morning before class. But, c’mon. How am I going to make things right? I don’t know, create hurricane-force winds in my homeroom instead? Would that work? What does Principal Morita expect me to do? Of course, he doesn’t know and he’ll never know, but still. What the hell am I supposed to do?
“But take it from a guy who’s been frozen for sixty-five years, the only way to really be cool is to follow the rules. We all know what’s right and we all know what’s wrong.”
I turned back to scratching my name in the desk, before realizing that I would get in trouble for vandalism and started crossing my name out instead, scratching a deep gorge across the letters, dragging my pencil back and forth across the desk. The teacher didn’t seem to care if we did homework or not, as long as we weren’t on our phones, and even though I could use the homework time, I just sat there, continuing to scratch at the desk.
“Next time those turkeys try to convince you of something you know is wrong, just think to yourself what would Captain America do?”
I think about Marty. Why did he feel the need to go digging on his own? Why didn’t he tell me? I knew why, though. Marty was stubborn, he liked his secrets almost as much as I did. He liked the investigation, the hunt, that’s why he loved scamming people online so much. But why did it have to be Marty? If he had told me… I could have warned him. I could have stopped this. And even with Peter and Ned still here, nothing was the same without Kate or Marty.
Characters: Willow Wren, Ethan Kim, Gooblin, Pip, Pingu, Burr, Spark, Danny, Manny, Dew, Fanisimo, France, Sabbath
Prompt/Tag:
“You’ve got to be more careful.”
“You can’t keep ignoring this.”
Summary: Willow hacks the fourth ex-Facility scientist but doesn’t confront them
Timeline: November 2015
Song: 4am - Bastille
A/N: i love them all they’re so stupid
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I sat in my room, video chatting with the other Lab Rats as we briefed each other on the last few weeks. I found myself leaving out parts, like the fact that instead of just going through the files we had and leaking one scientist’s information at a time, I was confronting them in person. Which is why I won’t be doing that anymore. That incident at the library was way too close.
Still, confronting them had yielded some interesting results, such as the one-worded memory I had regained, and the theory that a book had been involved with our project. Pingu and I had told them about Subject Zero, but none of us remembered her and there were no leads on her besides the few random references in the files Fanisimo had uncovered.
“Okay, guys, I need us to all put our one braincell to work on this one,” I said. “Think really hard. Does anyone remember a book? Or—” I rolled up my sleeve “—this word?” We can’t keep ignoring this.
“For the thousandth time, no,” said Manny. “Look, they’d take us into the Blue Lab or whatever and that’s it. I remember nothing from there.”
“There’s twelve of us,” I said. “I mean, out of all of us we should be able to piece something together, right?”
“There was a test…a… what’s the word…” Sabbath said suddenly. “A… process? They had a name for it. I heard it once and I remember thinking that’s what’s wrong with us, that’s why I don’t remember. It was around the time we escaped, so there was no reset to wipe those memories.”
“So, what’s the name of the process?” Burr asked.
“Well, I don’t remember,” said Sabbath. “That’s the point. I just remembering knowing.”
“Anything?” I asked. “A letter, the way it sounds…?”
“It began with F,” said Sabbath. “Like flower or frost…”
“Poll the audience?” I asked the others, checking the time. “I have to go in a few minutes.” Ethan would be over soon.
“Fuck? That’s an F word,” France says. “Or… hey… me. France.”
“Think about this logically,” said Fanisimo. “HYDRA’s naming of things was like a whole department. It would have to have meaning. Think things that might relate. German names, or…”
“Beethoven,” said Pingu. “That’s German.”
“That doesn’t begin with F,” said Gooblin.
“He’s Austrian, isn’t he?” Pip asked.
“God, we’re braindead,” Dew said. “Uh… frost-y? That’s the thing they have a Wendy’s. And like maybe it has something to do with the cold?”
“I had Wendy’s for the first time last week,” Spark interjected. “That shit’s good.”
“These words seem too easy,” said Danny. “Too… what’s the word… not formal enough. You know?”
“Colloquial,” Burr supplied.
“I’d know it when I hear it,” said Sabbath. The conversation drifted to a 4am call that some of the boys were trying to get together, and Burr berating Danny and Manny for exposing their powers in Vegas as part of a magic set. Special effects could explain the display, but some of the Lab Rats were still on edge about it.
“You’ve got to be more careful,” she said. “Stop posting those videos on Youtube.”
“Dew posted on Youtube,” tattled Manny.
I heard our apartment buzzer ring and when I checked my phone, I saw Ethan had texted me.
Ethan: Here!
I hurried to clean up my mess of a desk and leaned back into the camera view for a moment. “Got to go,” I said. “Let’s talk soon. Keep spitballing words. If we got the name of whatever they did to us, well, it’s a start. Also books. Get on that.” I heard one of the other Lab Rats say something along the lines of ew homework as I disconnected. I was slightly jealous of a few of them because it seemed that they had moved on from the Facility faster than I had, especially considering they left after me. Pingu seemed to be doing well with her family in D.C., Gooblin had started some writing project, a group of the boys were still doing tricks in Vegas, Dew had just launched the music video we had helped him film, and on and on and on. It seemed like I was one of the only ones really fixated on getting back the memories we lost and figuring out what really happened. I needed that to move on.
The others were content to just forget, and I really couldn’t blame them.
After checking myself in the bathroom mirror, I nearly tripped over my backpack in the entryway as ran over to buzz Ethan in and let him up. I surveyed the apartment while I waited, making sure everything looked normal. Of course it would look normal. Why wouldn’t it?
In the final minutes before Ethan got upstairs, I double-checked the leak on the fourth Facility scientist I had planned and activated a VPN just before I hit send. Seconds later, Ethan was knocking on our apartment door and I slammed my laptop shut as I let him in. “Hey, dude.”
“Hi,” he said, waving in the awkward way he always did, which I had become accustomed to in the last few months. “Ready to make some babies?” He gave a nervous laugh. “Sorry… that was stupid I meant like do the baby project with the Punnett squares and stuff. Don’t know why I thought that would be funny…”
I laughed, despite myself. “You’re good. Let’s go sit.”
As Ethan and I worked through our biology homework and I tried to figure out how bat wings would play into our fake child’s genes (not that I would tell Ethan), I spent the other work time discreetly monitoring the file leak and the aftermath. The Lab Rat group chat finalized plans for a virtual sleepover and discussion session the following night. Even though we annoyed each other tremendously, I was still excited about the call.
I still had other things on my mind, though. I wanted to confront this scientist, Taddeo Moser, and ask him my questions but I knew it was too risky. This can work just as well.
But this fourth leak wasn’t nearly as satisfying. I found myself wanting a piece of the action. I need to look them in the eye.
