Liberty and Death, Chapter 66
Chapter 66
Cora finally let Linnea fall away as she walked through the doors of Luxholme. A mistake.
She hadn’t realized it at the time, but taking up the mantle of Linnea’s cruelty was as much armor as it was tactic. What she’d seen in that Textillery? That wasn’t something a simple St. Paul girl could handle. No matter how much she’d seen in Hollywood. No matter how much she’d seen in Tyrinno.
She stumbled, as the image of a woman’s face, or half of one at least, bereft from the rest of its body, wearing such an expression of resigned terror it would have made her want to weep even if it had been whole. It hadn’t. None of them had.
The floor rushed up to meet her, but she had just enough strength to reach out. To curl weak fingers into the tactical webbing on the back of Hawk’s plate carrier. Even in the instant, she felt them giving out. But they hadn’t had to last long.
Hawk spun, breaking Cora’s grip, but it didn’t matter, because the grip Cora fell into was stronger than any would ever need to be. Hawk hefted her, and Cora went from never having been princess carried outside of a movie set to doing it twice in one week.
She didn’t even have the strength to put her arms around Hawk’s neck, to support herself at all. She just buried herself in the soft cushion of Hawk’s chest, and realized that her eyes were burning, her cheeks wet with tears.
When she felt Hawk try and put her down, she didn’t let her. That strength that had betrayed her came roaring back to wrap around Hawk’s waist, and she heard the big girl sigh over her sobs. Felt her sit down, then lay them both out on a bed that was beginning to be familiar.
“I’m just a fucking movie star….” Cora gasped, body wracked with sobs. “I got all those people killed! I’m not a fucking revolutionary! I’m not a hero! I just play one at the movies!”
Hawk didn’t say anything back, as Cora repeated some combination of that mantra a hundred times. It wouldn’t have mattered if she had. This trauma was bone deep, and it had a long way to go on its way out before it could be reached by anyone else. She just held Cora tight, stopped her body from breaking itself from sobbing, pressing her face tight to her breast, and stroking fingers gently through her hair.
There reached a point when Cora was empty, and that hurt nearly as bad as the pain. She wasn’t done with that pain. She hadn’t felt enough. What about when she had to tell the Rescues that because of Cora trying to play hero, hundreds more of their friends and family were dead? God, she’d just finished creating a household that wasn’t actively contemplating her murder, and then she’d just given a whole new group a great reason to want her dead. Blankets. She’d given them blankets instead of any true security. Any real protection from the horrors of this world, which had found a way to reach them anyway.
It was too much. It was simply too much, and Cora had always had one tried and tested way to deal with feelings like this.
She gripped tight on the collar of Hawk’s carrier, pulling herself up into a hungry, sloppy kiss she would have been embarrassed about, if she had the capacity right now. She’d make Hawk fill her before anything else could. Finally let this big badass consume her the way she’d been threatening too, let that be her world for a little while.
Hawk’s lips didn’t part. Cora pressed harder, reaching one hand down to pull aside Hawk’s bodysuit, searching for her heat.
She felt Hawk’s hand grab the back of her neck, then lift her bodily off the bed, easily as scruffing a kitten.
“Cora, what–”
“What the fuck good is keeping a barbarian in the house if she won’t fuck your brains out when you need it!?”Cora hissed, too far gone to be shocked at her tone, or her words. She felt her face go soft more than she willed it. “C’mon,” she purred, or tried, her voice to nasal, too flavored with tears for anything but a Monster to find sexy. “Just like you wanted right? I’ll be good for you, I just- I need something else, whatever you want, I–”
Hawk may have been a Monster in the literal sense of the word. Might have spent most of her life as one in every sense. But despite what music, stories, and sayings would have you believe, people did change.
Cora couldn’t really read the look in Hawk’s eyes as the giantess slapped a hand over her mouth that could have covered her entire face. Maybe she didn’t want to read it.
There was concern, sure. But what else? Anger? Disgust?
She didn’t get much time to examine it. Hawk roughly pulled her back to her chest, still stubbornly covered by a plate carrier. Cora tried to bite, then lick, then plead, but Hawk just kept her held tight. So tight, until the mania passed.
Cora found more tears then, and went about spending them until she fell asleep.
The next morning, Cora sat next to Hawk in the office, a grim council convened around them.
“He should’ve killed me when he had the chance,” Kyra snarled. She was pacing in front of the fireplace, its heat nothing compared to her eyes.
‘I’m glad he didn’t Kyra, I would miss you,’ Lux said, making Kyra miss a step. She’d definitely been expecting her fury to be echoed, not met with sweetness.
“T-thanks, Lux,” Kyra stammered, but Cora was on the same page as her.
“No, you’re right, we’re going to make him fucking regret this,” Cora sniffed. She was just now, a whole night later, getting over the recoil from what they’d seen. Of all the things she’d seen in Tyrinno, that was what would stay with her.
Now, after Cora had emptied herself, she was filling back up with rage.
Enough rage to take drastic action.
Hawk moved to stop her, as Cora reached into her pocket dimension, pulled out the <Outgrowth Aspectation>
CORA, N–
and crushed it in her hand.
Blaze. Fire. Hell.
It felt like heat at least. What it was, actually, was growth. Uncontrolled and unstoppable it blazed through every cell in her body. It burned through her, similar to getting her class, but from the outside in. The wrong way. A way that she knew, without a doubt, would be fatal unchecked.
Every single atom in her multiplied, doubling, tripleing, growing at a rate incompatible with life as she knew it. Already, she could feel herself growing, grossly spilling over the couch, onto the floor, over Hawk.
She’d apologize, but her mouth was too big, and it was on the floor anyway.
[OUTGROWTH ASPECTATION INTEGRATED]
The words flashed in front of one of her eyes. There was no angle where it would be able to be in front of both of them right now.
[CHOOSE SKILL TO BE MODIFIED]
The growth hadn’t spared Cora’s brain. To some extent, she was probably smarter. It felt like she had sixteen different thought process all going at once, too many trains of thought, on constant collision courses with one another. She forced one through, the one she’d held in her mind since she’d reached through her pocket dimension.
{Stunt Double}
[SKILL: {Stunt Double} SELECTED]
[PROCESSING…]
Each moment added more streams of consciousness. Drowning in each other, then drowning again in floods of agony. There was no ‘Cora’ left. Cora’s, maybe, but the time when she was one whole? A pleasant memory. Not that she could even access that.
[ADDITIONAL INPUT NEEDED]
NNNoyaagghaoooo…
[ASPECTATION INTEGRATION PUSHING [Vit] BEYOND SAFE LIMITS]
[MODIFICATION OF {Stunt Double} IMPOSSIBLE]
[FINDING WORKAROUND….]
Cora could feel her friends screaming, as much as she heard it. It didn’t mean anything to her. Not the one of her that first noticed it. Somewhere down the line, another of her tried to echo it, but couldn’t find the right mouth.
[SELECT A STAT-ASSOCIATED ROLE]
Cora wished she’d been smarter. Had a little more discretion. Really thought this one through. Different parts of her had each thought, sure, but it was apparently enough.
[[Int] SELECTED]
[NO ROLE ASSOCIATED WITH STAT]
[SCANNING BODY OF WORK…]
[CONGRATULATIONS! INTEGRATION COMPLETE!]
All of the new minds, all of the extra body parts, they all ripped away from Cora, and she fell out of the seething mass like a child from a horrid womb. Her first conscious thought as a human once more was: Fuck. I’m going to have to kill my flesh baby.
But before any of them had any real idea what was happening, that terrible, pulsing mass of flesh began to coalesce. Began to take shape. And as layer after layer smoothed, built, or fell away, that shape started to become very familiar.
Perfect tanned skin. Legs to die for, with just enough padding to be plush, but not enough to make their shape anything but immaculate. Curves for days, the kind of midsection a master sculptor would agonize over capturing. A pair of F-Cups, flawless by any definition of the word, that Cora had been missing since she woke up here six days ago.
And right above those, a face she’d seen in the mirror every day of her life until her new life began. Crowned, almost as she remembered, by long, sleek, silky straight hair, so golden as to almost glow.
Two things were distinctly not as she remembered. Long, elegant, pointy ears protruding from beneath that hair, and bright emerald eyes that danced with motes of magic.
“Fitting, I suppose,” said Lysander Pridelorn, as Cora watched her own lips curve up in an amused grin, “That you’d wait to call on your aspect of Intelligence until well after you needed it.”