June didn’t have a smart remark for that. Not that the Queen gave her much room to get a jab in. She stood at the front of the room, her hands clasped loosely behind her back, and projected a bulletproof calm.
“You’re on call when your son is kidnapped,” she said, unwavering. “You are saving someone else’s child when yours is taken from you. You see, your husband has enemies. These enemies waited until you were complacent before they loosed their arrow. Never underestimate the patience of the Parthian shot.”
It wasn’t a hypothetical scenario, Ernest realized. This was a cautionary tale they’d grown up with, the metaphorical wolf in the woods that they feared more than the ones that they heard howling at night. His gaze wandered over to Mal. He’d balled himself into an angry wad inside his navy sweatshirt, the hood pulled up. Between Mal and June, he wasn’t sure who’d had a worse reaction to the story. June’s cheeks were naturally rosy-warm, but they’d gone chalky.
“But if we have to go public to be heroes, don’t we get perks? Or protected, at least?” June asked, sharply. “I mean, maybe it’s because I wasn’t raised on the sugar-free Kool-Aid here, but I’m not seeing a strong argument for signing on with the government.”
“And what are the alternatives?”
“Apathy,” Mal answered for her. It wasn’t loud enough to carry far, his growl disappearing into the depths of his hood. “Or vigilantism.”
“Doing what we do, we must give up our identities. We must be accountable to the public we serve. They must know who we are beneath our costumes. With that information available, it is no great stretch from there to find out more— where we live, who we love, how to break us. That is retaliation.”
“Remind me again why we’re becoming heroes?” June asked with a watery laugh that wasn’t much of a laugh at all.
“Because it is what you are here for, yes? You’re training so that you are prepared for situations like the one I described. Knowledge is the only real ammunition and armor available to you. That is the essence of strategy.”
Mal raised his hand. Recognizing the stubborn clench of Mal’s jaw, Ernest almost groaned aloud. He was itching for a fight. A big one. This was bad.
“Yes?”
“So. Since we are speaking hypothetically, wouldn’t it be more ethical for public heroes to remain childless?” He drawled, crossing his arms over his chest. “If the children of public heroes are born with a target painted on the soft spot in their skull, how can their parents justify the risk?”
Mal certainly had a talent for painting a picture with his words. Ernest had completely lost his appetite. And he’d skipped lunch, too. He nervously picked at the crumbs on his desk, herding them back to the napkin. He didn’t know who had spit in Mal’s cornflakes, but he was surly. More than usual, even.
“Not every pregnancy is a planned one,” the Queen pointed out. “Even when they are planned upon, no pregnancy is without an element of risk.”
“You can’t really be comparing the risks associated with baseliner reproduction with the threats a public hero’s family faces,” Mal bit back incredulously.
“Certainly not. The situations are grossly dissimilar.”
Ernest had run out of sandwich. He didn’t have anything else to occupy himself with, so he begged Mal to quit in his head. Of all the abilities that he had, telepathic S.O.S. was not among those powers, so Mal just kept going.
“And let’s just ignore the hypothetical number of unplanned children born to public heroes. What I’m asking— what I am saying, is that these heroes endanger the lives of innocents. It’s selfishness.”
Mal was being contrary to make a point. It was a nasty one, too. That was the big difference between the verbal tussles that June and Mal got themselves into. June did it because she liked to fight with words. She enjoyed the discussion itself. Mal liked to be right. He had a singular focus, one strike in mind, and he didn’t quit until he’d driven that point in.
“C’mon, Mal. Let it go,” Ernest whispered. He wasn’t sure if he’d hear him or not, but June did. She gave him a thorough side-eye. That look said that she’d expect an explanation later on. He didn’t know if he’d be up to giving it to her. His guts already felt like they were full of cold slime and knots.
“If we must give up our names to protect the innocent public, why must we not give up the rest of our private life as well? Or do we give that up, but pretend otherwise? If your enemies murdered your child— or, if you’d prefer, the child of a hypothetical acquaintance— why would you ever have another?”
Most of the teachers didn’t know how to handle Mal’s outbursts. They picked their way carefully around the explosions, or they just plain ignored him. But the Queen wasn’t in the habit of being intimidated by anyone, especially her own son.
“You’re excused, Malek.”
“What?” His voice cracked embarrassingly on the word. “But I— ”
The Queen pointed to the door. She was angry. She didn’t let it show much, but Ernest knew her. She didn’t raise her voice, and she didn’t get mean, but when someone crossed a line with her, she made no bones about letting them know.
“That’s enough. Please remove yourself from the classroom.”
For the second time in one year, Ernest helplessly watched Mal storm away from one of the teachers, slamming the door behind him.
°
The man at the door brings the smell of gasoline and rainwater into the apartment. When he ducks inside, he tracks in feathers. Dirty black feathers, tangled up in his hair and caked to the bottoms of his muddy boots. He’s big in the way that Uncle John is big— he fills up the entire doorway, effortlessly imposing due to his sheer size.
“Hey,” the man says, smiling with his teeth, and only his teeth. “What’s for dinner, Big Bird? Anything good?”
Hanging in the kitchen doorway, Corbin stares at him for a moment, stricken. It’s worse than if he’d seen a ghost. He looks like a man seeing the ghost of someone he hadn’t realized was dead. It’s only a flicker of an expression, there and gone. By the time he finds words, he’s back to barking.
“You. Living room. Now,” Corbin commands. Pointing to the enormous man in the doorway, he snarls, “You. Kitchen. Now.”
He scowls at his father, but acquiesces. There is a warning embedded into that tone, implied repercussions to not following his rules.
“What, no hug? No welcome home, son?”
His father blurs, shifting. His shirt splits between his shoulderblades, stitches popping rapid-fire as he goes from Corbin-height to Rook-height; his sweatpants barely survive the transformation. He fists both hands in the man’s shirt, the thick new muscles in his arms standing out hard.
“I said go to the kitchen, Marshal. Don’t make me repeat myself.”
The Rook lets him go. The man— his firstborn son, the original Little Bird, Marshal Underwood— brushes invisible wrinkles out of his shirtfront.
“Well isn’t that a fine how-do-you-do,” he sniffs, looking down his nose at the Rook. Even at his tallest, he’s still several inches shorter than his bear of a son. When Corbin leaves the room, he follows.
His father flashes him the hand signal to hold his position before disappearing into the kitchen with Marshal. He scrunches himself into a corner of the couch, trying to get as far from the kitchen as possible, but he can still hear the conversation going on behind the door. There is no avoiding them. His father’s rumbling-deep voice carries, and Marshal roars like he wants the entire world to hear them.
“I assume you’ve heard.”
“Superheroes, man. They’re a bunch of gossipy biddies.” His brother’s voice booms from the kitchen, brassy. He’s the only one shouting. “Frankly, I’m getting sick of people popping out of the woodwork to ask me if I’ve heard.”
“If I had a way of getting a hold of you— ”
“Save it. You might have the rest of ‘em fooled with this whole retirement bit, but I know how good you are. If you wanted to g
et a hold of me, you could. But no. Oh, no. You chose to let my informants tell me about my new baby brother.”
He knows how the conversation will end. He knows that he’ll come home to his father alone in the kitchen, splitting ice cubes between a cold pack and a glass of whiskey while his left eye swells shut. He tries not to overhear, but he has lived this nightmare so many times since it’d been reality, he knows every single one of Marshal’s lines.
“Malek, huh?” Marshal says, managing to make his name sound like a bad word. He makes it sound strange, each syllable stressed too hard. In his mouth, it sounds foreign and weird. “Color me shocked that Amira thought that’d be a good idea. I remember her being more sensible than that.”
“Marshal,” he hears his father say, quiet and insistent. It’s a warning.
“I mean, what kind of name is Malek for a hero?” Marshal continues, like he hadn’t heard the cautionary growl. “People are gonna wonder. Americans, they like their heroes to wear white hats. And I do mean white hats.”
He sits on the couch as he’d been instructed to do, staring at the hardwood floor between his feet. He’d grumbled about the command when he first barked it, but now he’s shamefully relieved. He doesn’t want to be any closer to the kitchen.
“Goddammit Marshal, you think I don’t know that?” His father snaps, his volume swelling to meet Marshal’s frustration. Marshal will get the argument that he wants, the fight, one way or another.
He wants to close his eyes and plug his ears. Block it out. They’re loud. So unbearably loud.
“They won’t even have to take a peek under his cowl,” his brother goes on, baiting with hooks. “His name on a public roster’s enough to knock the nails in his coffin. Do you even know if he’s— ”
There’s a screech of chair legs and the unmistakable crack of the back of a skull hitting something solid.
“You think long and hard about how you plan to finish that sentence, boy. Because I don’t think that you want to ask me if I doubt my wife’s word.”
“Your wife?” Marshal repeats, his wet boots squealing on the linoleum. “Wake the hell up, Dad! She left you! She left you years ago! And hey, maybe this is just me talking crazy here, but I’m wondering why she didn’t find the time in the last decade to tell us that she had another fucking kid!”
The words have weight. He can feel them push down on him, making him hunch over with his elbows on his knees. He hadn’t asked for the name and the secrets and everything else. No one remembers that, though.
“Am I happy about that? Of course I’m not fucking happy about it! But if ‘Mira had her reasons for not telling me, she had her reasons.”
“That’s rich, coming from you.”
“If you’d just...” The heat leaves his father’s voice. He doesn’t sound angry anymore. Just hurt. “...goddammit, I’m getting entirely too old to be doing this dance with you.”
Marshal’s laughter grates on his ears. He isn’t done fighting. Not yet. It’ll take days to fix the damage, he knows. The table will be flattened, and the walls in the kitchen will need patching in three separate places. The Rook would need more than plaster and spackle to make it right. If it were easy to put back together, he wouldn’t spend the rest of the night in the kitchen, staring blankly at the mess with a drink in his hand.
“Hey, what d’you know. Something we can finally agree on, old man. So, circling back. I guess you’re right— it’s not like he’s the first bastard in the Underwood line. Seems like most of us are.”
And that’s when the last of the Rook’s patience dries up. That is how the real fight starts. That is when he finally ducks his chin and covers his head with both hands, desperate to block out the swearing and the yelling. That is when the Lark flies in and saves him.
Ellie never comes soon enough in his dreams, but she always comes.
“Psst. Hey.”
He recognizes her from the pictures in his mother’s study. That was how he’d met all of his family members, initially. The Queen had taught him their history through smiles frozen in Polaroids, the artifacts of a life that had ended before his birth. Ellie had been younger in those pictures— her blonde hair shorter, her face rounder, her smile bigger— but there is no mistaking Elouise Lark. She has a dowager’s hump beneath her raincoat, the shape of her wings tucked in but never truly hidden.
“Sorry about just letting myself in, but I could hear Big Bird and Son going at it from down the hall. I thought you might need rescuing,” Ellie whispers, gently wrapping her hand around his wrist and pulling his fist away from his ear. He tenses up on instinct, but her fingers are cool and smooth and soft. She is no threat to him.
“I need no such thing,” he informs her, chin raised.
She just smiles wryly. Later, he’ll learn that it is her Underwood Bull smile. She is well-versed in the lies that his father and brother tell themselves and others in order to appease their egos. He can’t lie to her any better than he can lie to the Queen, but she at least allows him to pretend.
“You hungry?”
He nods numbly. He isn’t sure that he feels much of anything, but his stomach always welcomes food. If he leaves with her, he has a valid excuse for retreating. He can leave. With her, he can escape.
“C’mon,” Ellie says, tugging on his wrist. “Grab your jacket. Let’s get some grub.”
“Jacket?” He echoes, because he doesn’t own one. He’d never needed one before. A light sweatshirt had been heavy enough for Foundation’s minimal weather variation.
“Yeah, it’s raining cats and dogs out there.”
His blank look must say it all. She takes off her coat and hands it to him, saying, “Here, you can borrow mine. I’m used to the rain.”
He tries not to stare at her wings, but they fascinate him. There is no mistaking them for the fluffy strap-on wings that come standard with an angel costume. Her feathers are variegated golden yellow and brown, as sun-speckled as her namesake. They don’t lay flat and lifeless against her back. Ellie’s wings are limbs, as expressive as any other part of her body. She has a body language that is all her own, shared vocabulary gleaned from avian languages.
When she glances sideways at the closed kitchen door, her wings fluff nervously. The folded wingtips that brush the small of her back flick and rearrange themselves.
He allows her to hold his hand as she drags him downstairs, mostly because he worries that if she doesn’t hold onto him, he’ll get mired down in the gutter-feathers. That, and her hand is exceptionally soft. He’d almost forgotten. Here, Ellie doesn’t have any calluses. Not yet.
“So, uh.” Ellie turns toward him, the tip of one of her primaries brushing his cheek. It’s a damp whisper of a touch, literally feather-light, but it is warm. Her wings are clean. She isn’t like the rooks. “It’s Malek, right?”
Turning his face upward, he can feel the individual drops hitting his skin. It’s cold, but not unpleasant. He knows the name of the sharp, clean scent in the air— petrichor— but until that moment, he hadn’t known what rain itself felt like. He hadn’t known that cats and dogs had anything to do with rain. He hadn’t known that he needed a jacket. He hadn’t known that he needed a white hat to be a public hero. His secondhand knowledge has never felt insufficient before.
“No.” He shivers, hard. A fat droplet rolls down his face, dripping from his chin. “Mal. It’s just Mal.”
°
The gurgling rattle of the choked gutter deepened into a hum as Mal struggled up through the woolly depths of his dream. It took him a few seconds to sort out what was going on. He’d slept hard, so he was groggy and uncomfortable. His undershirt was limned against his skin with sweat, already turning cold. It took him a few seconds, but he realized that the vibrating rattle he was hearing was a purr.
It was back. The animal had found him.
For weeks, Mal had been sleeping with one eye open. It’d become a necessity, because he had a stalker. He’d trained himself to wake up as soon as he f
elt the nimble-footed intruder approaching. When he was deep in the grip of a nightmare, it was more difficult to pull away on command. If he’d been any less exhausted, the animal wouldn’t have been able to get within six feet of him. Unfortunately, his persistent insomnia left him sluggish, so the cat had once again been in his face when he startled awake.
He was braced for the warm, rough swipe of the cat’s tongue, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant. The smelly animal had been trying to groom him, Mal realized, disgusted. He vigorously wiped the last traces of feline saliva off of his neck. What a filthy habit. It was like the cat was marking him, or softening him up to aid digestion when it inevitably tried to eat him. It stared at him with large golden eyes.
He growled at it. The cat’s pupils contracted from huge black pools to slivers. It growled back, leaping off him and skittering away through the underbrush. The chase was on, once again.
“You had better flee, you terrible creature!” Mal yelled, untangling himself from his blanket and taking off after the cat.
There was no dissuading it, it seemed. The second time he’d woken up to its ugly furry face within inches of his own, he’d shouted at it until it’d retreated. The third time, he’d thrown a shoe at it— which the cat had attacked and dragged away, never to return. He’d sacrificed a shoe and a blanket to it, and still the animal followed him. It would have been one thing if he slept the same place every night, but he didn’t. He would have been impressed with its tracking skills, had he not been so unnerved. Mal didn’t know what it wanted, or how to get it to leave him alone.
He hoped that his first nemesis wasn’t a feral cat. He wasn’t prepared to take his moniker that literally.
Mal’s hope was that if he chased it away every time he woke up with it sleeping on him, it’d recognize that he wanted to be left alone. He was beginning to fear that it was misinterpreting the chase as a game. It had greater maneuverability in the scrubby foliage off the main trails, but it never left his sight completely. He ran after it until it got bored and treed itself, perching on pine branches that were too slender to hold Mal’s weight. He had no issues with heights or climbing, but falling meant risking broken bones. Broken bones were a nuisance, and he didn’t want to be late to train with Zipporah due to the time it’d take his body to fix itself.
The Posterchildren: Origins Page 17