8.5: Stay Under Glass

Radiance #8.5: Get into the car, we'll be the passenger...

Radiance is (was…okay, look, we are fixing this) a lighthearted fiction serial about one of Earth’s darker timelines. It takes place around 2014 in a world where atypical abilities have become increasingly common, with the storyline following a group of minor-league superheroes based in Washington, DC. Our protagonist is Lady Radiance, former teen sensation, aka Christabel Jones, professional ray of sunshine—or, at least, she's trying her best.

Previously, Chained Lightning and Lady Radiance successfully escaped from Archangel’s villainous underwater lair…however, from our heroes’ perspective, that was about the only success involved. This time, the inevitable fallout hits, while their friends scramble to even make sense of what’s happened.

<#8, Part Two || Directory || #9, Part One>

“It’s insulting. Why aren’t you insulted? I wouldn’t be low-risk if they’d just let me out of here. I know where Dr. Lee keeps the reagents, and I’ll bet he has powdered sodium metal.” Marissa paused to jump for the rubber-band ball she was throwing at the wall before it could go wide and bounce away. “And at least one stainless-steel funnel.”

Jacob didn’t raise his head. “I know I’ll regret asking, but why the funnel?”

“Any bored chem student can throw sodium into a beaker of water. Villainy would be direct internal application to somebody you really don’t want existing anymore.”

He pressed his face down into the arm of the couch, shutting the world out. “…Okay. I see. I’m trapped in psychic quarantine with a mad scientist.”

“Angry scientist, Jake. Very—” He heard the ball bounce off the wall again, more aggressively. “—very angry.”

Jacob wished he could summon anything like anger right now; that was probably a more appropriate reaction. He’d been angry for about five minutes when he first realized what Chris had done. Then he’d been scared for her. Then, once it became clear that he was no longer remotely qualified to do anything to help, it had all collapsed. He’d had to sit on the sidelines, watching shaky bodycam footage and catching snatches of explanations as the fight to get his twin sister back went bad and then worse. The soul-eating numbness advanced a little further every time he saw something he could have done to help if he hadn’t been so hell-bent on getting rid of his abilities. He’d just wanted to be normal. Well, here he was. Normal. Sitting in the break room, relieved of his phone and designated as the lowest priority to be addressed, because the only real risk he posed if the bad guy got him was to opsec.

They were only even in quarantine because he couldn’t move fast enough. He’d been standing at the cryostasis pod, watching Christabel’s hand float away from his—thinking that he would have done anything to trade places with her. They still had only the vaguest understanding of what was going on, just what little information Clarevoyante had managed to scrape together while they prepped for round two. Most of it, he’d thought as he looked into those dark and vacant eyes, was probably wrong. Surely your first job as a psychic supervillain was disinformation. Despite what Marissa insisted about the bloodwork, Jacob wasn’t even convinced that anyone besides Hades was involved.

Dammit, Jake, you had one job: don’t get complacent and let your sister date some psycho who’s going to hurt her.

Spacewalker, for all that he had been irritating and ultimately limiting as an alter ego, would have had a reputation on the line to keep him in between Lady Radiance and Lord Hades. Failing that, he would at least have been able to jump across the room and pull Marissa out of the way before Baz partially collapsed onto her. Or make a short jump to the decon unit instead of the too-long slog back and forth in an unfamiliar building—not Dr. Marcos’ place, but the lab of some colleague who owed him a favor, who did cryo testing and had plenty of vacation time to burn. A subsequent fingerstick test for psychic inflammation had come back positive and sent Jacob directly to quarantine, just in case. Marissa’s test had been negative, but her furious assessment was probably right: she was in here anyway because nobody wanted to deal with her right now. He’d been dealing with her since Saturday afternoon and was just about at a breaking point himself.

Jacob took a slow breath through the disgustingly old couch fabric. The second job of a psychic supervillain, probably, was turning the good guys against each other. Divide and conquer. His best bet was to sit here, say nothing, and continue being just as useless to the enemy as he was to Christa.

“I can’t believe he hasn’t gotten to us by now,” Marissa said, an edge in her voice again. “It’s been hours. Something must be going wrong. I don’t see why else we’re still here.”

Jacob opened his eyes slightly and raised his head to look at the clock behind her. “We’ve been in here for ten minutes.”

“Ten—” She whipped around to check. “Okay. Okay, either time is no longer real, or I’m losing my mind after all. That’s it, right? That’s why Murphy’s Law won’t stop. It’s me. I broke a test tube full of hydrogen cyanide or something, and the last three days have all just been a—a hallucination. Jake. Jake, throw this at my arm as hard as you can and see if I wake up.”

He let the rubber-band ball hit him and then roll to the floor without trying to catch it. “How much coffee have you had today?” he asked.

“What? I—none. Of course not. I’m jittery enough a-and—ugh—oh I hate this—”

Jacob put his head down again so she wouldn’t feel like he was watching her tear up. This was exactly what he’d meant: Marissa’d spent the last three days in a cycle of finding something to be angry about, lapsing into irrational weepiness, crying herself sick, and then apologizing even though they both knew it’d all start over within a couple of hours. Sometimes she went outside and called her sister at volumes even she usually didn’t reach on the phone. He’d thought things might improve when her father got into town yesterday, but she seemed to be avoiding Cotlin Sr. for some reason, so…so much for that. The only hope Jake could see was for them to get Baz straightened out so he could shake some sense into her.

Of course, he, Jacob, could be the problem. It wasn’t like he’d been any better at handling whatever was bothering Chris these last few weeks. Or at talking to Emily, who’d actually said when she broke things off before Christmas that he had no idea how to listen to women. Just one more thing he was too selfish to be counted on to do. Nice job, man. Keep on letting everybody down.

He heard the door open and looked back up. It was Dr. Cotlin—formerly The Wizard, but that was a long story—much earlier than expected. That could be very good, or very bad, but Marissa didn’t give him a chance to explain which it was. “What’s happening?” she demanded.

“Very little,” he said levelly. “I was on my way back up and thought I should stop and get you two cleared to help out. Your test didn’t show any reaction to psychic influence?”

“Yeah, I don’t know how, I don’t think the thing’s working right.” She eyed him warily, arms wrapped tightly around herself. “Dad, that wasn’t an answer.”

“In a minute.” Dr. Cotlin stepped across the room and put his fingers to her throat as if feeling for a pulse on both sides simultaneously. “And you’ve never had issues before, right? Even when working with samples?”

“No, because I understand basic lab safety. Why?”

“We’re talking about fairly advanced lab safety,” he said, shifting his grip to the back of her head with only the slightest evidence of having meant that as a joke. “I looked into that incident with the other technician being infected. By all means, you and I should both have been as well by now.”

“Well, you have all your—your physics-breaking stuff,” Marissa said, fidgeting.

“It’s not about that. Actually, it turned out that I have a small structural deviation that makes my brain incompatible with organic forms of psychic control...yes, so do you. It must be fairly heritable.” Her father let go and stepped towards Jacob. “You’ll be fine, Marissa—your immune system’s already broken down whatever you absorbed. I always said nobody could tell you what to do.”

Jacob summoned a hollow smirk as he reluctantly complied with the gesture to sit up. “Oh, so she’s just being mean to us because she wants to, then.”

“Ha! Yes, I suppose so. Good genetics, eh?”

Marissa didn’t look reassured. If anything, that was horror creeping across her increasingly pale face. “Genetics. I—oh, idiot.”

“What?” Jacob asked, turning slightly to allow Dr. Cotlin better access to an artery.

“Not you. It’s nothing. I mean, nothing to do with this.” Marissa curled up her hands against her forehead while he gasped at the feeling of having an underlying layer of skin scraped off. It didn’t seem like he was going to enjoy this. “It’s just—geez. Of course I’m relieved. You don’t even know it. But I should have done a full risk workup on myself as soon as I found out Dad’s atypical, and of all the stupid things, I didn’t.”

Jacob chuckled tightly, looking for any distraction from the urge to bolt while he still had some semblance of what felt like himself in place. “I guess that would be ironic, if you of all people had an MRI go wrong or something and ended up with superpowers.”

“What…oh. Y-yeah, I guess so,” she said, pulling her fingers back through her hair. “I’m not worried so much about me.”

Confusion was forestalled by a choking panic behind his tongue that manifested suddenly in a rolling dry heave towards his shoes. Jacob shuddered and spit until his head had cleared enough to realize again where he was. Dr. Cotlin gave him a firm but not unkind clap on the back. “That should feel better now. It’d worked its way in pretty deeply.”

“Sure,” Jacob said flatly, attempting a breath. He didn’t feel better at all; everything was too sharp and too bright. He could feel the blood moving in his veins, sloshing around as it rushed from organ to organ on its singular, mindless quest to keep him alive. More than anything, he could now feel Christabel’s absence like a hole in his chest. The sensation must have been there all along, overlooked, cloaked in a numbing haze of ambivalence and self-pity that was suddenly gone.

“That is gross,” Marissa said, with more feeling than usual. “How long’s that been in there? He tested negative for iR46-C months ago.”

Dr. Cotlin summoned a specimen container from some pocket dimension of his and stooped to lift a spider-legged trail of rubbery black goop from the floor between Jacob’s feet. Jacob, still collecting himself, did his best not to retch again at the sight. “I’d guess it’s from the initial incident,” the chemist said. “You recall the literature review suggested that if the influence is subtle enough to be accepted psychologically, the body may stop trying to reject it. Hence the subsidence of inflammation, and the resulting negative tests.”

Marissa groaned. “So I was right. The test doesn’t work.”

“It works,” Dr. Cotlin said mildly as he banished the container again. “It measures circulating iR46-C levels exactly as designed.”

“It doesn’t work for what I wanted it to do,” she snapped. “You’re telling me that I could have, I don’t know, psychic sleeper agents out there that I need a custom-tuned bioscan to identify? And this is on top of everything else that I’m about to find out, right? Because now that Jake’s been cleared, you can explain what’s going on.”

“I’m not the one to talk to,” he said—oddly diplomatically, Jacob thought. “I was able to strip the psychic infection out of Sebastian, and I came up right after that to take a look at your Lady Radiance.”

Marissa was already at the door, looking back. “So he’s with Lautaro?”

“No. Not yet. There’s a disused infosec lab in the basement with electromagnetic shielding, but I—…I left the door locked from the inside. Not that she’ll know,” he added to Jacob, pushing his glasses up with a sigh.

“She wouldn’t have listened anyway.” Jacob stretched as he got to his feet, testing that all the parts of his body were still talking to each other. Everything seemed to be in order. “Well…thanks for this, first of all.”

“You’re very welcome. It’s a fantastic case study, but…sorry, scientist joke. That’s beside the point. I’m happy to do what I can.” He paused, seeming to be weighing his words again. “I don’t want to say you’re all in over your heads—”

“No, no. We’re absolutely in over our heads,” Jacob said. Whatever you wanted to say about the New York Convention, it had devastated the supply of experienced heroes they could have gone to for help, even among Lady Radiance’s friends. They were honestly lucky that Marissa had connections. “I was just about to ask what you weren’t telling her.”

Dr. Cotlin nodded slowly. “There was another contaminant in Sebastian’s system, but it was metabolizing too fast for me to try to identify or remove it. I got about five seconds of lucidity out of him, and then he shut down and lost control of his powers. I had to drop out of phase to avoid completing a circuit.”

“So he didn’t tell you anything?” Jacob asked.

“One thing. He said, ‘He won’t stop trying.’”

“That’s…ominous.” Jacob crossed his arms in thought. “Do you think Baz is still a threat?”

“No, not now. I think it’s more likely that was a hangover from the psychic control. Either way, I need more information.”

He nodded, following Dr. Cotlin’s lead out of the break room. “No arguments here. What can I do to help?”

“Well, what do you know?” the older man asked.

“I don’t think there’s anything I didn’t already bring up,” Jake said, a little sheepish. “It’s been a long time since we really talked to each other. Actually, it seems like she’s been keeping her distance from everybody.”

“Mhm. That’s a bad sign.”

“Yeah…I was afraid of that.”

They went up into the cryogenics lab, where Dr. Marcos peeled off Dr. Cotlin to come and look at some test he was running. Jacob drifted over to the pod in use to look at his sister. Her eyes were still half-open, and pitch back from edge to edge, but the rest of her was bloodlessly pale. She looked dead—was dead, he supposed, by some metrics. Tendrils of hair twisted around each other as she floated in the supercooled liquid medium; it felt like a mockery of that halo of light she liked so much. He turned away, unsure what else there was to look at. The rest of the operations held no interest for him. He just didn’t want to pull that awful grief back over himself.

His and Marissa’s phones had been left charging on a spare counter, and Christabel’s, distinctive in its sparkly pink case, sat alongside them. The battery had died days ago and in the chaos he’d never plugged it in, but somebody else had thought of that for him. Jacob powered it on and unlocked it (their birthday as the PIN—come on, Chris), triggering a cascade of missed notifications. One on top caught his eye.

iMessage: Leila Regent

Did you ever get to talk to Liam? Please call me back.

The banner said there were three other unread messages from Leila. Jacob tapped through to look at the rest of the conversation, pausing his scroll to the top when he saw the photo of a handwritten address, sent the day before before Christa’s disappearance. He vaguely remembered checking these texts before and discounting them as unimportant, just as he’d discounted so much else. There must have been a reason he wasn’t supposed to pay attention.

Christabel sent an image

Leila: I couldn’t say. I haven’t seen Liam’s writing in a long time, and it complicates things if he used his powers to create it.

Christabel: That’s true, I just thought it was worth a shot. Thanks for looking.

Leila: Of course. But you do believe it was truly him this time?

Christabel: Yes. It had to be.

Leila: Then we might be getting close.

Christabel: I hope so!

Leila: Are you going to go?

Leila: Please be careful.

Leila: I just called to check in. Let me know what’s going on, okay?

Leila: Did you ever get to talk to Liam? Please call me back.

He looked up the address, double-checked his own texts with Clare, RJ, and Baz, and then went back and read the entire text chain. They didn’t come out and say much clearly, but he thought he had the idea.

It wasn’t ten o’clock yet, and from the message timestamps, Leila would normally still be up. Still, it took her a few rings to pick up the phone. The voice that answered his call was feminine but sharp; he couldn’t tell if she was concerned, annoyed, or relieved by the call. “Christabel?”

“No. This is her brother, Jacob.”

There was a staticky pause while, he guessed, she waited to see if he would explain. “Is she all right?”

“No,” Jake said bluntly, looking across the room at the cryo pod. “But we’ll get there. I have some questions for you first.”

“I understand. Go ahead—I have answers.”

💀💀💀

Top five most painful life experiences…

Baz didn’t have it in him to recall the specifics or the order. That thought was more of a mental note that getting shot through the guts had just fallen off the bottom of the list. This one was probably going on the top, assuming he survived it.

The brief recognition of himself as a person flickered away, and he let his face smash into the cold floor. There was no consciousness, no past, no future—just his bones, melting. Now there was the taste of blood on his tongue, now imaginary colors scrawling fractals across the inside of his eyelids. Pain obscured everything else. Trapped outside of time, there was no way to know how long it kept going.

The differentiation between his own body and the rest of the world crept back only slowly as the hurt receded. For a minute there he’d been prepared to believe that he had four arms, before his nerves registered that they were only getting full sensation from two of them. His still screaming brain, overwhelmed by a jumble of foreign heartbeats and neural impulses and artificial currents and fields intruding on his senses, returned no ready identification for the other two. The power of thought had to emerge again first, and then, even more gradually, the edges of self-awareness.

A few lines of pressure cloaked in a weak electromagnetic field moved in tandem across the hotter side of his face, and it triggered just enough recognition to make him attempt speech. You shouldn’t be in here.

He must have succeeded, at least in part; the reply came back as muffled vibrations through his shoulder. “Don’t care. Tell me how to fix this.”

He didn’t want to think about any such thing. Now that he knew the world existed again, he wanted to sink into the engulfing darkness tugging on his soul and let it all go. He’d suffered enough. Clawing his way back to life was too much to add. Besides, although he couldn’t remember why, he needed to let this kill him. It was the cheat code. There was something terrible looming that couldn’t happen if he were dead.

“Sebastian.” Something pushed lightly against his arm. “Come on. You can’t pass out on me now. Nobody else knows what happened down there, and I need you.”

The information that Sebastian meant him was helpful for orientation but, again, generally unwelcome. He had to breathe shakily through the tension of some primordial horror trying and failing to tie a knot under his diaphragm before reluctantly accepting that whatever mission he’d been on was not yet complete. The rails running through his subconscious mind were very clear on one thing: Objective first. Dying second.

His thoughts and memories stumbled over each other like drunken cats as he pushed through a new wave of pain to look for context. Half turning his head past his shoulder, he forced his eyes open for a second to blink at the woman sitting over him. “Shoulda known,” he mumbled, rolling heavily onto his back.

“What’s that?” Marissa asked. He could hear the frown in her voice.

There were bits of shattered tile poking into the back of his head, and Sebastian turned further to rest it on her knee. “’S what I always liked about you. Always some reason I’m not allowed to give up yet.” She didn’t answer beyond a choked gasp that could have been either irritation or amusement. Wanting vaguely to make her laugh, he pushed a little more. She liked that. “What is it this time?”

Marissa moved a hand uncertainly to brush the debris out of his hair. It occurred to him that he shouldn’t be able to follow her so closely with his eyes still shut; some previously unused processing layer was translating subtle fluctuations in her bioelectric field into muscle movements, like when he’d learned to map a circuit by touch. No wonder he could barely think. He’d probably lose his mind soon if he didn’t figure out how to turn this off.

“I’m pregnant,” she said, her voice tight. “So—you’re right. No giving up for you.”

Any emotional response was buried under a searing pain through his forehead that left him curling into her body. When it passed, and he could move again, enough had settled in his mind that there didn’t seem to be much to say. Point made. There was a very, very low bar to be better at this than his own father had been, but staying alive was a nonnegotiable part of clearing it. He owed Marissa that much.

Sebastian pushed her arm aside gently—it was a relief to find that he still could do anything gently—and found an anchor point to drag himself up, against the protest of every joint he had, so he could sit against the wall. It took a minute to pull himself together again after that, and a minute more to force his eyes open so he could try to get his bearings. An emergency lamp on a shelf provided the only light, suggesting that during his blackout he’d blown out everything in the general vicinity with wires. A lot of the room was smashed up, too, and the door knocked off its hinges. Marissa was still sitting next to him, her image shimmering in several distinct but overlapping layers that made his head swim.

Seriously, man. You have to figure out how to turn that off.

“Can you hear me?” she said uneasily, reaching up to put a hand on his chest as he let his eyes close again.

“Can now.” Baz exhaled hard. “You really shouldn’t be in here.”

“Don’t worry about me. Anyway, everybody else’s off fussing over Christa. Somebody had to think about you.” Marissa was running her fingers across the torn fabric, but any other motions were being drowned out by the sudden noise of firing synapses and involuntary contractions in smooth muscles. He tried something that felt like zooming out and hit a layer, finally, where all he could sense was her proximity. “Just tell me what they did,” she said. “There has to be something I can do to fix this. Just…just start with that.”

Deflecting seemed like the only safe option. “Nothing you can do,” he said, trying not to grimace against the flare of lightning crackling beneath his skin. “I got through the worst already. It’s—I’m fine, alright. Just goin’ to hurt a little.”

“Liar.”

“Yeah. Had to try.” Sebastian tested his vision again and found it was bearable this time, at least in mechanical terms. He didn’t really want to see Marissa glaring at him while struggling to hold back tears. “It was your new formula, or something close to it. I dunno exactly if he tweaked it, it could have just been the dosage that went so hard.”

For a minute, she looked stricken, which was what he’d been afraid of. Then she steeled herself and continued. “How much?”

He shook his head. “A lot. Four, five…something. All IV infusion. I was in and out for a couple of days, I think, and pretty doped up.”

“Okay.” She raised the side of her cold hand to his forehead. “Yeah, I wondered. You felt different, like your skeletal structure was shifting, and muscle density and all, and…okay. Fixes. It might just be addressing pathologies at this point. With how high your temperature is, we’re probably going to have to straighten out your metabolic processes again. Hopefully you can keep the healing factor, but that’s still a lot of stress, so Lautaro’s going to want to check your organ function before he lets you have painkillers.”

“I made it this far,” Sebastian said with a loose shrug.

“Sure, tough guy. It’s all about you.” Marissa pushed back her sleeve and took a moment to check his pulse against her watch. “You said ‘he’. Who was this?”

“That’s, uh—complicated.”

“It wasn’t Hades?”

“No. I mean, he was there, but I don’t think he wanted to be there any more than I did.” He twisted his other wrist back and forth slowly as he tried to process the feeling of his veins catching fire without showing how much it hurt. “I-I can—nnh. Give me a minute.”

She let his hand drop warily, watching some change that must have just come over his face. “You all right?”

“No,” he admitted. “You should…”

“Yeah. I’m going.” Marissa blew a quick kiss and fizzled away into the cloud of signals overtaking his consciousness around the edges. Sebastian tilted his head back and then let himself slide sideways under an invisible weight, hopefully less violently this time.

All right.

Just don’t die…

💀💀💀

This time, what pains lingered afterwards were duller and cleared away more quickly. Baz was able to get to his feet—a little clumsily, because his bones did seem to have moved around—and sharpen a still-unfamiliar sixth sense until he could tease apart the geomagnetic field, the wiring in the building above him, and a small cluster of human bioelectric signatures that seemed to be roughly at the basement level. There was also a pretty bad rat problem next door.

Honestly, not a bad draw in the superpower lottery. He imagined he could easily have too much fun with this one.

Locating the stairwell and opening its heavy fire door revealed Marissa slumped on the stairs, looking utterly worn down, and Jacob standing at the bottom and chatting to her animatedly. When he heard the door open, Jake turned and looked back at Sebastian in surprise. Then to Marissa, questioning, and then back. “Dude. Uh, can I make a super saiyan joke, or would that be insensitive?”

“It’s three in the morning,” Marissa said, pressing her face into her hands. “Everything you say is insensitive right now.”

Baz decided it was probably best to sidestep the question. “You’re awfully chipper,” he said. “Christa’s better?”

Jake took a drink from the absurdly large gas-station soda cup that was probably just as responsible for his attitude adjustment. “No. Whatever she’s got going on is apparently too complex for Dr. Cotlin to fix. But she’s not worse, and they have a plan, and I have a lead.”

“What kind of lead?”

“Leila Regent,” Jake said, like that should mean something. “Or that’s what she calls herself. I’m not sure how much I trust what she says, but she and Christa have been working together for a while, and supposedly she has experience breaking psychic controls like this. She’s coming down from New York tomorrow…well, today.”

“Ah. That’s good, then.” He came in and nudged Marissa to move over, which she did reluctantly and still without looking at him. At least she didn’t flinch away when he put an arm behind her. “What kind of plan?”

She sighed. “I still have to find a specialist to confirm, but it looks like there was a retrovirus mixed in with the psychic infection this time—specifically targeted to Christa, so it didn’t affect you. It was already rewriting her powers at the genetic level when you got her here. The cryo process requires draining the body of blood and replacing it with a hyper-oxygenated substitute anyway, so I pulled her old blood samples and we’re growing an uncontaminated batch from the stem cells. It might take some time, but it’s safer than trying to filter what got pumped out, and if we’re lucky it’ll get her immune system to reconsider which set of instructions is supposed to be there.”

Some pieces of what he remembered from his time underground slotted together: Archangel was responsible for the initial mutation Christa had, so it figured that he would be able to tweak it pretty easily. And Lord Hades was a logical vector, normally the single easiest way to get past her defenses—though if Archangel hadn’t found some cleaner way to do it earlier in her captivity, Hades probably also hadn’t been cooperating. He was a pawn, too, wasn’t he? But with how much range, really, and inclined in which direction? How much did they have wrong?

“Hey. You there?” Marissa said.

“Just thinkin’.” He shook his head. “Growin’ blood. You know, you scare me sometimes.”

“She scares you?” Jake said, waving a hand vaguely across his own face. “Seriously, is that permanent?”

Sebastian copied the gesture and found that his hair was standing straight up, and there was a blue glow bouncing off his hand as it passed in front of his eyes. Guessing, he mentally tuned out of the radar and saw the light fade away with it. “Apparently not,” he said, doing his best to press his hair back down. “Did that fix it?”

Jacob pulled a face. “I mean, I guess—”

“Don’t pick on him,” Marissa snapped.

“All right, touchy. You pick on him, then.” He squeezed past them on his way up the stairs. “I’ll go see if the doc’s awake enough to get an observation room put together. He said he wants you checked before you report out.”

The after-action report. Ugh. So much that he’d rather not try to explain, but would have to. He raised a hand to his face as another door swung shut on a higher floor, unsure if he wanted to find a mirror right now or not. “What’s the damage?”

“Nothing. You look fine, the swelling from the facial remodeling’s basically gone. Just not exactly…it’s just different. I mean, you look like yourself, just all—pretty. Symmetrical and stuff. Even your scars are faded.” Marissa pulled his hand out of the way and reached up to hold his face gingerly, turning it this way and that with the pressure of her fingertips against his jawline. Conflict lined her drawn, blotchy face. “Smile for me? No, with teeth.”

Baz reluctantly pulled back his lips all the way across, despite feeling sore down into his bones, and only felt worse when her face fell immediately. “C’mon. It’s that bad?”

“No, it’s perfect. You look perfect,” she said. “But I really liked that little crooked spot…it was so cute. I knew you were human.” She dropped her hands, covering her mouth. “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Rissa—”

She stood abruptly to start walking away. “Look, forget it. I’m exhausted, I’m hormonal. I thought you were dead. If I keep talking right now, I’ll just say selfish things I shouldn’t, and I don’t want to fight with you.”

“Good,” he said, following her up a few steps. “I’m not fightin’ you. I can take it.”

“You’ve been through enough. You shouldn’t have to.”

Sebastian got in front of her to block her path, and they both looked at each other for a minute. He was familiar with that look, though not from Marissa. She’d used up everything she had keeping herself together, and now that the crisis seemed past, she was about to crumble. He’d be damned if he let her do that alone.

“Have it your way,” Marissa said. She curled her hands into fists, but didn’t try to get around him again. “There is no normal life for you, is there? I know it’s what you always said you wanted, and I wanted to believe that. I mean, I waited years, believing that. But I don’t think you can stop yourself. This, all right—” she waved furiously— “this is who you are. I wouldn’t have met you in the first place if you had any idea how to go through life without throwing yourself on grenades. You weren’t going to hang that up. We were never going to work out a compromise, no matter how things turned out, and after all that, I’m still just the ordinary girl you have along for the ride. You’re going to scare me, I’m going to worry about our children, that’s my life now. There’s no excuse for me not seeing it before.”

He silently set a hand on the railing below her, and she leaned sideways into his arm. “Sebastian, I do love you,” she said shakily. “I love you more than anything, and we will figure something out, and I will get used to this. But I might need a minute first.”

He nodded. “You take your time.”

That seemed to be what she’d needed. She broke down in tears, and when he stepped back down to get closer, she threw herself into him. He stood there for what felt like a long time with her, his thoughts scattered and shallow. He’d said he would put her first. Maybe that would be a harder promise to keep than he had thought, but he’d said it, and nobody was going to make him a liar…

Eventually, he gave up on making sense of it all and let himself go to a low alert, mostly paying attention to Marissa’s heartbeat pattering under his arms and the low-resolution, double-time wsh-wsh-wsh that he was afraid to look at more closely, in case he hurt something. He needed to get used to this, too. But they could figure something out together.

<#8, Part Two || Directory || #9, Part One>

Thanks so much for reading! Radiance #9, Lion-Hearted Girl, is up next: supposing that Sylph and the science team do get Lady Radiance back on her feet…well, what then? I appreciate your forbearance as the plot threads slowly spin together…

I’ve been quite ill for a couple of weeks now and unfortunately can’t promise when I’ll be able to write again. However, when the next episode does come out, you know where to find it. In the meantime, if you enjoyed this installment of Radiance, you can show it by leaving a like or comment, sharing this post, or just continuing to read. :) Everyone’s welcome in the fan club!