Battle Vixens! - 56

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Episode 56: Bring Her Back

Clark felt a white-hot, blinding, unfathomable and incomprehensible rage. She restrained the puppeteer first, retaining just enough rational thought to know that this was necessary, and then pulled and pulled until she heard the body snap—and then pulled some more, just in case. Not until a great, multicolored cloud began to rise up from the limp, lifeless body caught in her wires to signal the woman who had killed her wife was well and truly dead did she let go, allowing them to dissipate and drop her unceremoniously to the ground, lying on her back in an unnaturally twisted position.

Almost at once that cloud of power rushed toward the surviving Dr. Quinn, overwhelming her senses. At the same time, something difficult to describe in words occurred, where the world appeared to slow down around her. She could simultaneously feel the continued rush of the powers of thirteen different vixens, an unimaginable torrent rushing into her that felt equal parts sickening and good, even as she was brought out of the rush enough to move around and consciously perceive the rest of the world again.

"Well, well...this is a surprise." Clark had only heard this voice once before, but something about it was instantly recognizable. Like the Cheshire cat reappearing from its smiling teeth, the one responsible for everyone's powers appeared a few steps in front of her, just between Rory's body and the puppeteer's, wearing an unbelievably punchable grin—if only she were capable of being punched. "I thought for certain that Light would do it. Or, at least the policeman—who's always been ready to take a life. Going down the list, out of everyone here who could have killed her, I must say I am almost astonished that it was you."

The pain of seeing Rory stabbed was still raw, and Clark's rage automatically directed itself at this new target. "Why are you here? What do you want?!" She stepped aggressively forward, and—at the same time—didn't, really. This was some sort of partially out-of-body experience, with her "real" self still stuck in place mid-power-absorption.

"What do I want...?" She gave an infuriatingly smug chuckle. "I already have it. You see, this here," she said, leaning down slightly to lift the lifeless puppeteer's head slightly, "is it. My enemy's head on a platter. The friend of my enemy, perhaps you might say," she said, rising again to give a brief circular gesture with her hand. "As for why I'm here.." In that uncomfortable, threatening manner that Clark knew her to be capable of from Light's recounting of previous visits, she was suddenly inches away from the smaller girl, bent down toward her face with that disgusting grin. "Why, to reward you of course! And I have a couple of very nice options lined up for you."

She moved back slightly again, standing next to the stream of power still flowing into Clark's actual body. "This one's power is great, and now it's going to be yours. But, perhaps, instead of simply taking it on as weakened, 'stolen' power, I can make it all yours." She traced a hand along the line of energy as though it were solid threads that she could pick up and weave at will. "Just think of it: With power like that, the enemy wouldn't even be able to touch you. Any other vixens feeling particularly murderous would quickly fall in line or easily be crushed by your righteous wrath. Or..."

The Giver moved again, this time kneeling next to Rory's body. Clark felt a spike of rage again that was fit to boil over if she touched her, but thankfully she didn't, just leaving the smaller vixen still angry enough to remain speechless. "The way that one wielded stolen powers was quite unique, you know. Quite a bit of the people she took them from is still there, even now. Death is an awfully tricky thing, as I'm sure you can imagine, and there's no bringing back someone who's really dead, even for me. But—being the one who gave everyone their powers, I have a bit of a backdoor. Cheating death, sometimes, is possible."

She slowly stood up while Clark struggled mentally with the obvious implications of her words. "If you're willing to give up your claim to everyone's power but hers," she said, pointing to the dead puppeteer, "I can help you put them back together again. More or less, you make bodies for them, I reshape them into real bodies, then we channel their powers in and use those to pull them back from 'mostly dead' to 'fully alive' again. You should know, however, that death really doesn't like being cheated. This will be somewhat painful, and even I can only bring so much back this way. You'll have to figure out how to get the rest back yourselves."

The tall, many-tailed woman took a couple of slow, normal steps toward Clark, gently kicking the puppeteer's lifeless body out of her way as she did so. "I'll give you as much time as I can to consider your answer if you like, but we must do one or the other of them now. These roads are mutually exclusive and rather difficult, if not impossible, to track back on."

Tears (real or not) streaming down from her eyes by now, Clark glared for what felt like a long moment up at the Giver's face, trying to make sense of the bizarre woman. "...I can't understand why you would bother giving someone a choice, when you already know what they're gonna pick. Or are you so detached from every human emotion there is that you can't comprehend how I feel right now?"

She shrugged. "I've lived more than long enough to thoroughly consider perspectives that aren't my own, but I don't see how the choice is obvious from your point of view. You're a scientist; think about it logically: Their lives were already lost, and it's not all that many people in the end. Think how many other lives you could save if you took the first option. I guarantee that the people you bring back won't be nearly as cooperative as they would be as your puppets, and you and your allies may never have another chance like this again."

"You really...you really don't understand," Clark said through an almost-sob, with a tone of something like wonder. She shook her head, swallowing and taking a careful breath. "I hope that someday you get to find out what it's like to actually care about another person. Rory is my wife. I love her, and you took her away. Bring her back. And everyone else you let her murder, too. I don't care what it costs me."

"Very well then," she said with a nod, rubbing her hands together. "Perhaps I ought to hope for that too, someday; it sounds positively exciting. But, for the moment—let's make a miracle happen, shall we?"

There wasn't time to do much more than look on in abject shock. One minute the puppeteer fell and all her puppets were dust, and then everyone could see the multitude of her powers rushing into Clark Quinn's body. And then, at about the same time as the last of it converged into her, she rose, floating slightly off of the ground with her clothes and hair whipping around in otherwise nonexistent wind, a brilliant blue light glowing from the outline of her body and especially shining out from her eyes.

Blue strings struck out from that light toward various unoccupied positions nearby, one of them seeming to go into Rory's back and cause her body to turn into a blue light before dissipating. Then, from the end of each string came a ball of light which grew and reformed steadily into a body, bearing the distinctive traits of long hair, fox ears, a tail—all of them floating just slightly off of the ground. The light burst off of each one, leaving not a puppet but a fully-fleshed, humanlike vixen's body behind, eyes closed, floating in midair. More light, this time in various colors and patterns, flowed in spirals along the string, seeming to dim the light around Clark by leaving herand cause each newly-formed body to suddenly gasp and start breathing when it entered her through the back.

Finally, the strings collapsed away starting from the point of contact with each reformed vixen and traveling back toward their origin, letting each one down onto her feet in turn. When it was done, Clark's body appeared to have gained a bit of height beyond its usual "amplified" size, and her eyes closed as she fell down onto her hands and knees, panting as if from an extreme physical exertion. White mist poured out of her as she shrank back most of the way to her usual size, but retained the type of outfit Amp's power usual gave her and a bit of the extra height and physical maturity usually present in that form.

When she opened her eyes, Clark found Rory standing there facing her from a few of feet away—the other side of Tobias Mond's lifeless body, which was still conspicuously present—with a slightly concerned but otherwise strangely blank expression. Still only halfway through catching her breath, she leapt up at her revived wife, throwing her arms around her in a hug and equal parts sobbing and laughing with relief. Rory had no trouble catching her and staying upright, of course, but seemed to only return the hug very gently and hesitantly, as if uncertain what the appropriate response to this was.

"Uh..hey, there."
Dr. Quinn pulled out of the hug enough to look up at her wife, still crying and smiling.
"What's..this about?"
"You..you're alive!" she said.
"I..guess I am." Rory shrugged. "Um..who are you?" This question stopped Clark in her tracks, and it probably showed. The taller vixen attempted to save face somewhat, regaining a slightly blank look of concern, her ears folding down a bit. "I mean..I think..you look familiar somehow, but.."
Clark let go, and stepped back slightly, looking up into her wife's face and really taking in the blank, confused expression in her eyes for the first time. "I..what do you mean? It's me." No obvious response. "Clark? Clark Quinn? Your husband?"
"My what?" The way she asked this question suggested not shock at the claim, but more that she didn't know the word 'husband'.

"You—I took your last name!" Clark said, waving her hands forward at her. "How can you—?!" She stopped, sensing some fear in response to her shouting, and said more quietly: "You really, don't remember, do you?"
"I'm..very sorry, but I, suppose I don't." In response to Clark's continued stunned silence, she looked even more worried, her ears still folded down. "I mean—like I said, you do look really familiar. When I..first saw you, I felt..really happy, and..I'm really sorry if I'm, making you feel bad now, but.."

Clark drew in a long breath that suppressed the beginnings of another sob, then exhaled slowly and sniffed, wiping her eyes on a sleeve. "No, nono I'm sorry." This was what she'd meant about bringing the rest back on their own, wasn't it? "It's...you're. I'm happy you're alive. I can hardly even believe it. That should be enough for right now. We'll...we'll work on the rest later, I guess." Her hands went up onto Rory's shoulders in an attempt at a comforting gesture, which the taller vixen appeared to accept much more readily than she had the sudden tackle-hug earlier. Clark made a desperate effort to smile comfortingly up at her, and was rewarded with a small, yet present smile back, and Rory's tail slowly wagging behind her in a further expression of friendliness toward the nice person she couldn't quite seem to remember at all.

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This is a shorter episode; it's essentially the "end" of the last one, but it needed to be separated out as its own episode as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, back when I posted "Knight Sacrifice", I said the following: "I certainly don't take major character death lightly...Just wait and see". This is what I had in mind. I essentially had planned this out before "The Missing Morning", and hopefully it now starts to be clear why that series of events even happened in the first place. 

 

As far as bringing people back from the dead, I feel personally (and hope at least some of you will agree) that this doesn't do what happens in a lot of mediums where it makes death feel cheap and risks less meaningful. The conditions for this "revival" are too specific to be easily replicated pretty much ever, and it has an obvious, very high cost whose full ramifications will be explored more in future episodes. 

 

 Hopefully, now that this difficult-to-write part is more or less through, I can get parts of this story written more often than, like, two within a six-month period. I guess we'll see, anyway.