Pumpking

Issue 45

5 minutes without incident

"The Pantheon won't kill me."

"Do I look like a member of the Pantheon to you?"

I looked like a monster. The sort that children worried might be under their bed.

The Pumpkin-King considered me with his glowing Halloween face. He thought about it for a long while. He didn't have skin or lips. I had no idea what he was thinking.

"I am not getting paid enough for this shit," The so-called King grumbled, "Fine, we surrender. We thought the Hercules would be an easy target after all the recent attacks. Good chance to plunder some alien artefacts, alright? We're just thieves."

Stephanie Sims gave me a nod and I stepped out of the way. She was wearing her plain skirt suit still, hair in a perfect bun. She adjusted her glasses, "Lower your shields, lay down your weapons and prepare for boarding."

It took about an hour for the heroes to clean up the attackers and ship them off for processing in jail.

The second I was off the view screen I collapsed.

My knees turned to jelly. My stomach roiled and I spent twenty minutes vomiting and crying in a corner while Stephanie held my hair out of my face and told me how brave and scary I was.

I was shaking and still dry retching when a medic finally found me and stuck a needle in my arm to calm my nerves. Apparently I was in shock.

It was Fast-lane who helped carry me to the Medbay, he was on clean-up and the girm expression on his face said there was a lot to clean up.

I was lucky.

There were only a few heroes that needed patching up.

They'd lost four of their rank, mostly from the auxiliary groups that were on the ship. The bulk of the plant-head mass had distracted the alpha squads and left the ship vulnerable while their tactical team infiltrated the Hercules. The ploy would have worked, especially if it was just a time-staller since the objective was not to kill everyone, but merely to rob the Pantheon.

I was given some lemonaide and told to try and drink it. Since my whole body was covered in chitton armour, my mouth was about the only part that hadn't been overtaken. My stomach rebelled a little, but since I was in sick bay and the doctor looked like she would offer free enemas if I didn't obey her command I took a sip. I retched back up a few minutes later, still feeling pathetic.

"It's just your body reacting to all the adrenaline in your system. You'll be fine once you calm down."

"Don't people die of shock?"

"Only on television." She had that gentle smile about her that made me wonder if she practiced that line. Didn't they survive just fine on television? Wasn't real shock the sort that killed you because your heart couldn't handle it?

I didn't want to argue with the doctor, instead I lay back and concentrated on my breathing. My thoughts were so quiet now, after so much.

I felt like I was just adrift inside myself. Like I'd whittled away all the crap around me and found something real, a core. I was actually sort of peaceful. I didn't know if I liked the core of myself; she seemed violent and feral; but... there was no shadow of my wishy-washy shell over me. it was probably not going to last all that long. At least I hoped I was back to normal soon enough. I wasn't sure I could handle being like this for all that much longer.

"You did good today, Dion." Whisper's voice cut through my gurgling stomach. I was curled on my side, breathing deeply in and out of a blue bucket and drooling a little. It was an attractive look.

"I didn't do it for your praise, Phantom."

"I know. And now you know something about me." He touched my shoulder lightly and then walked off, presumably on some other errand.

And now I knew something about him? That he was happy I wasn't looking to be teacher's pet? No... no, he meant that he didn't look for praise either. This wasn't about the glory of the busty reporters taking his story into the papers; it wasn't about being the smiling hero of the city. It was about doing what he could do to make a difference; whether anyone noticed or not.

I'd broken rules, I'd killed today. I hadn't liked it, I still didn't like it. But I'd let myself commit to death.

I had let myself believe that it was needful—that I had no way of avoiding it. It was wasteful, terrible, it gnawed at my soul, sullied me in ways I hadn't thought possible—but it had been necessary.

His words from before came back to me and suddenly I felt worse. I'd let myself do something terrible, I'd become a murderer for necessity, and I hadn't considered it wrong or bad. I hadn't let it get to me; I'd hidden behind walls and let myself do what I needed to do to survive, to save others, and to stop something bad from happening. It wasn't the sort of thing that people would praise. I could see the fearful looks I was getting, the whisper of 'yeah, her, the freaky one that explodes things.' I suddenly felt awful, awful because everything I'd said to Whisper had been moral idealism, childish and unintelligent. And he'd been wise enough, experienced enough, not to bother trying to explain the stains upon his hands.

My hands were black claws, sharp and edged; nothing human about them. The symbiote had spread across my body like a thick armour; taking all sense of humanity from my appearance. Would it ever go back? I didn't know. I would lose my jobs, I would have to find something that didn't involve being seen. All my years of hard work, trying to suppress this monster.

"Are you stuck in that black-stuff?" Fast-lane was sitting beside the bed, drinking a can of coffee. Ew, coffee in a can.

I blinked, realizing that my face was unreadable and no one could tell I was on the verge of tears. "Yeah."

"Where'd it come from?"

"My symbiote."

"Ew." He paused. "Sorry, not very sensitive to say that. Can you turn it off?"

"I don't... I mean, I don't know."

"Well does it have a safe-word or something?"

I had no idea.

"Maybe you have to think safe thoughts."

"Safe thoughts?"

"Like 'it's okay, I'm okay, we're all good?'"

I looked down at my claws, "But it's not okay. I'm not okay, people are dead—I—"

He put the coffee down and touched my head. Then, to my surprised, he sat on the bed and wrapped two arms around me and whispered in my ear, "It's okay, we're okay, and you're going to be okay."

He repeated it over and over again until I was just a sobbing girl, curled against his chest, crying for my father.