Battle Vixens! - 128

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Episode 128: The Other Shoe

Amp bent over in front of the redheaded vixen, then gently pulled her into a hug. "Nngh..AAAH!" A burst of fire went out from her body for a second, singing the cot, before pulling back into her body.

"Shhh...it'll be okay..." Cynthia breathed heavily and loudly a couple of times, let out something like a sob, and then her breaths stabilized. Amp let go and got out of the way so she could sit up and look around.

"...Thanks, I guess. Have we, met before?"
"I was around when you were 'revived'. But we didn't really talk. I'm Amp," she said.
"The one who can wake people up, huh."

"That's me!" she said with a bright, sweet smile. "Oh, most people aren't s'posed to know about me, though."

Cynthia nodded. "I'll keep a lid on it, then..."

Looking around the room a little more, she spotted Rowan standing off to the side. "Guess you think I got reckless again? That ain't it, I promise. Maybe there was another option, but—I just thought if that thing was gonna get me or her, it'd better be me. My power was hardly workin' in all that rain as it was."

"I thought that might have been your reasoning," he said. "She was able to keep it from using your power very effectively."

"That's...good. Where is she, anyway?"
"Waiting outside. I thought...you might want some space, for a moment."
"I did. But...I'm ready now."

Cynthia stood up carefully, then went over to the door. She paused briefly to look Amp's way one more time. "Thanks—really. I wouldn't-a had the confidence to just jump in front of that thing...relearn what it's like to be in one—if I wasn't so sure someone would be there to wake me up after."
"Glad I could help," Amp said.

After she left, Rowan said, "I suppose you'll need to head back out right away."
"Yeah," she nodded. "I wanna make sure there's plenty of time before the monsters show up."
"Pass on a message to Light for me. If she needs my power...use it. As soon as I know it's possible, I'll be heading your way to assist."

"Got it."

"Cynth!" Both of them came together into a hug for a long moment. Dawn was sobbing, which made the other vixen tear up, too. After they both let go, however, she took a couple of steps back. "I guess..we need to talk, huh."
"Yeah, we need to talk," she said. "Ain't any good to swallow our feelings just to make each other feel better. They just..boil up to the surface at the worst times anyway."

"Uh-huh..."

Dawn sniffed. "All I ever wanna do is protect the people I care about...but every time I try to keep you safe, I do somethin' stupid, an' you get hurt bad instead."

"You're so much better than I am, though," Cynthia said. "I keep on dragging you down. There's all these other folks who care about you—who care about both of us—and you can't give up your life, and all of them, just for me. Not no more."

"I guess...we got so used to havin' nobody but each other to depend on, we hardly know how to be around everyone else."

Cynthia crossed her arms, taking a deep breath. The thought had come to her in the middle of the excruciating pain inside that monster's belly, but as horrible as it was, it still felt like it was true. At the very least, Dawn needed to hear her say it—she needed to let it out of her own mouth.

"Maybe we...shouldn't be 'together' anymore, you know? Maybe, just for a little while. Clingin' so tight to each other all the time's...just gonna lead to us tearin' each other apart."

Dawn sniffed again, some tears freezing themselves on the way down her cheeks. "I know.." she choked out. "You're right. Always are. Still...hurts."
"...Yeah. Hurts for me, too."

---

Emma's hiding in our apartment.

She's worried people could find her in hers.

Amory had been warned about the basic situation by a couple of texts from his roommate, but that didn't quite prepare him for the sight he saw when he unlocked the door and came inside. There was no light—besides the faint rays of badly-overcast sun from the windows—and Emma was crumpled into a little ball on the floor, facing the wall. For most people, fox-forms meant an upgrade in physical ability, raw power, and confidence, but Amory couldn't help the feeling that she was keeping that form right now just because it was smaller than her human one.

Her ears twitched slightly—having heard him coming in, of course—and she showed her first signs of life in the form of a loud sniff, pulling herself partway out of the fetal position to turn her head half-backwards. "...Hey. Um...B-blake's taking a nap," she said.

"Forget him, what about you?" he said quietly, coming closer. "What're you doing down there?"

"Just...you know...sulking." She sniffed again. "I screwed everything up again, just like I always do..."

"Come on, that's not true. This isn't even that bad—"
"Really!?" she snapped suddenly. And then, angrily: "How would you know?" Then, just as suddenly again, she turned back toward the wall. "Sorry..."

"I guess I don't know," Amory said, skipping over the apology. He felt like she didn't want him too close to her, so he sat down on the edge of the nearest chair instead. "But it's definitely not the end of the world, right? Plenty of other people, never even hid that they were vixens in the first place."

"I know that...I know that! It's just—me, for me, this sucks worse than anyone else, because—I'm me."

"What makes it so bad for you?" His tone wasn't accusatory—he genuinely wanted to understand.
"I hate attention. I hate the feeling that people, so many people I don't know, are looking at me, watching me. I could—I could put up with it when I was 'Gemma', because there was always someone else I could be, and hide behind that and not have to worry about people finding me. But now I screwed that all up! There's nothing to hide behind, and it's my own stupid fault!"

"You knew you'd have to tell people eventually," he tried.
"Eventually...eventually! I can deal with eventually, because it's basically like 'never'! The monsters will be gone eventually. Eventually, everyone else in my family will get old and die! I don't have to worry about that because the person who'll have to deal with it is another me, probably completely different, maybe who's even figured everything out! But this is right now, and I'm not any better than I was when all this started!"
"That's not true," Amory said in a sterner tone.

"It is!" Emma stood up suddenly and turned around. "Look what I'm doing right now!" when she tried to be louder, her voice came out painfully hoarse and cracked, but she seemed to completely ignore this and force it out anyway. "I'm throwing a tantrum over something every other person on this planet could just deal with! But I can't! I've ruined everything all over again, for no good reason!"

"'No good reason'?" Amory noticed at this point that Blake's door was open—and hadn't been before. He took a small step out into the living room. "You saved someone's life, Emma. There are no better reasons."

"I could've done it in a way that wasn't stupid!" she said, turning on him. "That didn't tell everyone 'hey, look at me, I'm Gemma'!"

"From what I saw, I don't know that there was a smarter way to do it. There wasn't any time to think about what to do."
"There had to be another way!"

"This one wasn't that bad," he insisted.

"Oh yeah!?" she advanced on him a few steps, waving her arms his way. "Well I don't see you going out in the halls and saying 'hey everyone, I'm Light! Lemme just transform in front of you so you'll all know it'!"

She stopped, took in a sharp beath, dropped her arms to the sides. "I'm sorry. That wasn't—that's not fair. I'm the one who screwed up."

"You didn't. In that same situation, Emma—I probably would've hesitated. I would've taken too long trying to think of alternatives, and gotten someone killed. That's screwing up. I'd regret it for the rest of my life."
"So you want me to not regret this?!" she said, angry again.
"No, I just..."
"You just what?"
"I can't accept that you did something wrong. There just, weren't any other options."

"Great." Emma put her arms out into the air turned around, pacing back towards the wall. "So I didn't do anything wrong, and my whole life is ruined anyway!"

Amory thought he should try to step in again at this point. "That's an exaggeration, isn't it? It can't be that bad."

She turned around, taking in a sharp breath to retort something angrily, then letting it out again. Some tears were streaming down her face, making him want to get up and go give her hug or something...but she didn't want that, and he couldn't force it on her. She finally squeaked out: "He knows..."
"Wait, who?"
"Your dad!" she said, pointing at him. "He knows, he told me that he figured out you got powers almost as soon as the second wave happened! He basically guessed what kind, too! And he made me promise not to tell you that, so that's another thing I can't do right—but he told me to see how I'd react! I didn't get it at the time, but he was testing me to see whether I'd protect you, even from him! But now he'll know I was just protecting myself!"

Amory needed a long moment to take this news in. He'd known...for that long? And hadn't said anything? It was hard to reconcile this information with everything he'd ever known about his father. But Emma didn't have a habit of randomly making up lies, and she was clearly in a 'too-much-honesty' kind of mood right now.

Finally he said, "No—he's smarter than that. There's no reason it couldn't be both."

"So I guess he's smarter than me. No surprise there."

A tense silence hung over the room for a moment.

Finally, Emma said: "...I should leave, huh? I'm in the way here. I should just, go back to my own room. It's so easy to just use my powers to hide that I'm going in there, and if I don't make any noise and leave the lights off then nobody'll even know I'm there. I should've just done that in the first place."

"You're not in the way," Blake said.
"Well I can't fight!" she snapped back. "Not today! Maybe not ever again! Look at me!" she gestured violently at herself. "I'm still the same coward who stalked you instead of asking you out!" she said, making the same kind of gesture at Amory. Then, waving toward Blake: "And I'm still the same stupid, selfish person who tried to kill you out of jealousy for someone I'd barely even talked to! I...I..." She sniffed, and stumbled backwards, clumsily landing back to sitting on the floor and pulling her arms back around her knees again, pushing her face into them to inadequately muffle a loud, frustrated, angry scream.

She drew her head back up again and sniffed loudly. "Sorry...I'm sorry," she said quietly. "It's just—

"Hi...my name's Emma Hayes," she said slowly, in what seemed like a failed imitation of a calm, friendly tone of voice. "We've, met before, but what you might not know about me is that—even though I'm a really dumb, scatterbrained girl most of the time, sometimes I can be really good at focusing on all of the worst things. And just sometimes, when something makes that extra bad—like when my life goes through a change too big for me to deal with—I have a massive, crippling anxiety attack and just, turn into a huge jerk and lash out at anyone who tries to help me out of it."
She leaned forward a little bit and hugged her knees again. "...It happened when I realized that going to college would mean leaving my family behind and living with a total stranger—I locked myself in my room for a week. April had to leave food in front of the door and then make sure I knew she wasn't anywhere nearby before I'd accept it. I almost missed graduation."

Then she sat up again, letting go of her knees to wave her arms around as she started talking faster and faster: "But then that stranger turned out to be really nice! Her name was Beryl, and she practically sensed it every time it was gonna happen again, and pulled me out of it! Like when that monster ate me and I thought I was better off never using my powers again and never learning anything else, just to keep that from happening again but worse! I was probably just too angry for it to happen when I found out who she really was! But now, because of that—she's gone, and she's never coming back! That person I knew might as well have died! And it's like I killed her," she said, drawing her hands in to point to herself, "because in the end she was just a lie that I figured out the truth about."

She panted after that long stream of words, needing to sniff a couple more times before finally catching her breath. Then she slowly pulled herself back up onto her feet, looking at Blake. "You should..use my power, however you need to, for today. Our emotions affect our powers, and with the way I feel right now, there's no way I can be anything but a, a liability. I'll...try to get over it. But I just—can't make any guarantees. I'm, really sorry about all of this."

Blake nodded slowly. "Take care of yourself. I just—want you to understand one thing. What you did, doesn't make you stupid. It makes you a hero."

Amory had taken the opportunity to stand up and move closer to Emma. After all of that, he couldn't...not try to give her a hug! So he physically made the offer, and she accepted after a second, sobbing again into his shoulder. She pulled out of with another hard sniff. "Sorry...I'll see you later." Then she started off toward the door, making herself disappear again.

After she left, Blake gave Amory a sympathetic expression, mixed with a tinge of stress and exhaustion. "I'm...gonna try to get some more sleep. Guess I should eat before everything starts up, too."
"Yeah. I'll let you know when it's time," Amory said. Then he remembered: "Oh, right—Rowan said you could use her power if you need it. And, if the attack on the city is light enough to make it possible, he'll be coming here himself to help."
"...Thanks."

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Happy eclipse day!
First: I should admit I cribbed that "Hi, I'm [x], and these are my mental problems!" thing from the comic All Night Laundry. It's probably not as good here, either.
Second: I hope this is adequately conveyed already, but I want to be clear that the problem isn't meant to be exclusively that everyone knows who Gemma is now. That is somewhat bad for her, but the more important thing is that it's pushed her mentally off the edge and into an emotional downward spiral, during which a lot of other unprocessed trauama, doubts, fears, guilt, etc. bubbled back up to the surface.