Chapter Text
Dexterity speaks of conviction
Conviction demands belief
Belief speaks of the truth
And the truth will set you free
The truth will set your house on fire
Look out, your house is on fire
To escape the fire you must be quick
This requires clarity-The World/Inferno Friendship Society, "All I Can Do to Help You With Your Nightmares is Keep You Up Late"
The dream Barnaby had the most began one of three ways: heat, water, the Moon. In some brief moments of reprieve, he sees the Moon hanging above, cut like paper above the city. His vision is quartered; blinders on the sides of his face, the shadows of inactive interfaces ahead. For a moment he feels that he is nothing but his mind held captive in a screaming metal shell. His absent neck lurches, sending sloshing the watery liquid in his skull where his brain sits percolating, soft and obliterated. He watches the Moon like a guide, traces its many craters with his scattered spots of vision, but it only hangs silently above like a suspended sword.
More often than not, the Moon is out of sight; he waits in occluded darkness with the water rocking about his cranium. In time, it begins to rise, pressing outward against its cracking shell. Incredible, piercing pain between his eyes and down his nonexistent spine, and yet he feels he floats in stasis, untouched and untouchable. It is a terrible sort of bliss. When the tides part and Barnaby is left dry in the moonlight, parched and abandoned, he hopes to wake up. His thoughts rap against the inside of the armored shell.
What follows most often is the heat. On unlucky nights, this is where he begins – a foregone conclusion of suffering. The realization makes his body weak. He feels it now: his chest, its limbs, long slender legs closed shut in the iron maiden of his Hero suit. The suit is both him and not until the heat settles in. A tickle at first, it climbs and climbs until he is sticky with sweat. He is surrounded by flames he cannot see. Somehow he knows that this is the heat of the flames that took his parents on that Christmas Eve; it is manifested in his veins, an indelible part of him now. Inside the suit, the white-hot metal singes his skin, melds itself to his flesh. Barnaby cannot move, and then all at once, he can move all too well, the suit fused to him like a second skin. Heat licks at his toes, races up his thighs, and the suit carries him forward of its own will. He wishes he would burn. Instead, the heat presses inward until he can no longer feel his own body at all. He is a frayed brain stem and a pair of wide-shut eyes in a facsimile human shape.
The suit holds him up, holds him together. It knows what to do better than he. It walks and talks for him, fights with claw and kick. There is no use for his forgotten body forged to its insides like iron. In some ways, it is a blessing; in most ways, it is everything he fears.
In the final moments before he wakes, a portentous and familiar hum. The Moon tries to drown it out with its shine, but it seems just as ill-equipped as Barnaby, dangling helplessly in the vacuum of space. It speaks from deep inside his armor and buries itself in the web of nerves that forms his consciousness, sinking into him like a velvety knife.
Good boy, Barnaby.
One of the psychologists newly kept on retainer by HeroTV -- an emerging expert, so they claimed, on NEXT-specific psychotherapy -- had compared Barnaby’s mind to an ocean with irregular tides. Subject to the pushes and pulls of the Moon, the tide flowed and receded to and from the shore. Darkened deserts that would drown again in time; whose time, no one could be certain. And every so often, a great regurgitation; the Moon pulled back the sea like a magician's silver-lined cape, pushing forth artifacts once thought lost to its depths. Detritus, treasure, the glint of a knife once buried to its hilt in the sand. For the time being, the psychologist explained, twisting a finger absentmindedly through the strands of dark hair framing her face, Barnaby could not hope to predict the tides, nor what they would leave in their wake. In time, and with the effort of an ancient astronomer, he could learn to predict the Moon’s movements, its effects on the tides. But for now, Barnaby was more akin to sailor than astronomer. He had the tools, she said, to make it to shore; but looking around him, Barnaby only saw leagues and leagues of black-touched waves, all desperate to steal him into their depths.
It was clear that this was the first such case that the young psychologist had dealt with. Maverick's power, after all, had been unprecedented in and of itself, and its true scope was still unknown. For most, the memories that Maverick had manipulated and altered over the years returned naturally after his death, sliding into place like a joint into a socket. For Barnaby, the frequency and severity with which Maverick had manipulated his mind – dozens if not hundreds of times over most of his life – made the process more akin to a woodchipper, so violent was it in its fragmentation. That was another metaphor the psychologist was fond of; Barnaby could tell she was proud of herself for it in spite of the visceral image it carried.
For all her good intentions, the metaphors seldom helped Barnaby to process or even contextualize what had happened to him. The tidal metaphor only made him think of how little of the planet's oceans had been explored -- how many perceived monsters lurked in its depths, and what great mythologies man had invented to soothe themselves of its vast, unknowable horrors. He thought of the animals that had adapted themselves to its darkness, sharp-toothed and light-horned, crafting queer adaptations into their bodies to survive, for hundreds of thousands of years. There was life in the ocean -- no one could deny that. Barnaby only wondered what form he would have to take to live with it.
Kotetsu was more optimistic than he. The man didn't blink when, seemingly overnight, his confident, collected Bunny morphed, changeling-like, into a hothouse orchid, crying out in the night from the bile puked up by the latest receding tides. Barnaby was quieter now, more thoughtful than he'd been before. It was simply because, as he'd explained to Kotetsu as best he could, the words came more slowly to him. It quickly became apparent that many of his social graces had been crafted through Maverick's preternatural influence; without those tentpoles to hold him upright, what remained was the Barnaby that Maverick had shuttered from the world, overestimated and underprotected. Yet, looking straight at the shattered architecture of Barnaby's mind, Kotetsu asserted, from day one, that it was nothing the two of them couldn't fix together. That was something Kotetsu was good at: making the unfixable seem fixable.
As Barnaby began to spend more of his downtime at Kotetsu's apartment, both the space and the man seemed to morph themselves to fit alongside whatever sorry state he was in. A pile of Kotetsu’s discarded clothes on the bedroom floor, displaced from a dresser drawer he had cleaned out specifically to house some of Barnaby's belongings; a long-lost, recently discovered record in Kotetsu's collection that just happened to be one of Barnaby's favorites. The smallest of comforts Barnaby was sure Kotetsu had gone to great lengths to get for him. It was simultaneously the least and most Kotetsu could do – adapting, in his own way, to the ocean’s new and terrible depths. Somehow, through the haze and turbulence of Barnaby's piecemeal psyche, his panic attacks and midnight breakdowns, Kotetsu had come to love him. Perhaps it had always been the final destination of their story: ultimate villain vanquished, the Hero returns from Hell to claim his promised one. In all the times Barnaby had dared to imagine it, he'd pictured fewer joint trips to the pharmacy to pick up a new medication.
When he was around Kotetsu, the tides quieted somewhat. Barnaby's cavernous apartment only served to echo the thunders of his subconscious, which sat churning darkly over the missing fragments of his memory, licking at the blank spaces like a fresh wound that wouldn't heal. His sudden awareness of their absence almost hurt more than the memories themselves. The ocean offered those memories up at its own will, with no reason or purpose to its timing. Featureless shades of people, adults and children; places he couldn't recall having visited; occasionally, a memory of his body, a sensation stored deep in his muscles that Barnaby could not name. Like a ghost remembering its human form: heavy, blissful, and diseased. He recognized those feelings, terribly so, in bed with Kotetsu for the first time.
Kotetsu hadn't expected their first try to go perfectly -- he hadn't been with anyone in years -- but he didn't think he was that rusty, he said. Didn't think he would be so bad that Bunny would break down in tears like he did. Kotetsu’s hands on his waist like crawling ivy tearing at its masonry, like a storm of sea debris holding fast ‘round his ankles, pulling him down, pulling harder as he kicked and kicked against it. It wasn't Kotetsu at the other end; it was that knife in the sand, the hilt tide-smoothed but the blade sharp enough to cut, preserved in ancient sand. Barnaby felt those tides recede and thought of the times he had seen Kotetsu as his parents' murderer, pasted in place like a paper doll. That same feeling of horrible unreality, like watching his own life played out in pantomime. What failure of memory collapsed on him now? What familiar weight was upon him now, inside him, pushing and pulling like a riptide ready to tear him limb from limb? Horrible, horrible, that pearl taken from its shell at the bottom of the sea, over and over again. The sea opening like salvation, like an annihilation. Maverick. Maverick. Maverick.
It was Yuri Petrov's idea that he get a houseplant.
It was Barnaby's first day back at work after a week-long sabbatical. Kotetsu had insisted he take a longer break, but Barnaby had been flaky enough recently. His year-long break and subsequent reinstatement as a Second League Hero had given him the flexibility he desperately needed in the immediate wake of Maverick’s death; now, being bumped back up to the First League, he really needed to get it together again. Agnes and the higher-ups were doing their best to understand while lacking most of the critical information about his condition, but their patience for the absence of their most beloved Hero was wearing thin, and Barnaby was almost out of sick days. Besides, the comforts of Kotetsu's apartment did little to fill the void of his absence as Kotetsu heroed without him.
To Barnaby’s surprise, sometime in the interim while he was away, Judge Yuri Petrov had been appointed the new head of HeroTV, a position he seemed neither enthusiastic nor terribly suited for. Nevertheless, the network sponsors and shareholders had since ceased their cries for a replacement for Albert Maverick, and that was all Agnes could have hoped for. A year or two ago, Barnaby couldn't have imagined someone like Yuri Petrov heading their operation, but a lot could change in much shorter periods of time. Barnaby knew this well.
Beyond the most superficial observations, Barnaby had little to say about Yuri Petrov. Cold and austere, he had always stood out among the decrepit career politicians of the Justice Bureau. He chose his words like a soldier selecting his weapons, turning them over and over again in the light to be sure of their quality before he used them. In the rare, brief moments when he and Kotetsu had spoken to him, Yuri Petrov had cast an indelible air of unknowability -- yet, in moments of true crisis, he had proven their ally. If Albert Maverick had been HeroTV's doting father, its incubator, Barnaby thought, then Yuri Petrov would be its governess – cruel and strict, with a hidden, undying belief in the show’s potential, in spite of himself. When Barnaby was called into Yuri's office that first day back, he expected to receive a scolding appropriate of such a status.
Instead, Yuri Petrov folded his hands on his desk beside what looked to be a freshly brewed cup of tea, and looking absently at a point just above Barnaby's head, asked him, "Have you ever had an interest in horticulture?"
Barnaby blinked. Before he had the wherewithal to temper himself, he replied with a curt, "What?"
"Horticulture," Yuri repeated, unfazed. "The keeping of plants." The judge leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs in what seemed to Barnaby a facsimile of casualness. It was something he found familiar, in the most intimate and cutting way. Still Yuri's gaze remained elsewhere, somewhere just beyond Barnaby, but close enough that a layman would be fooled into thinking he was making eye contact. Barnaby didn't mind at all; these days, he had trouble meeting anyone's eyes for too long. Yuri's eyes in particular had always held an almost supernatural intensity that warded off all forms of contact. Barnaby was grateful for the reprieve, however unintentional.
"Not...especially," came Barnaby's stilted reply. "Apologies, Judge Petrov, but was there something else you needed to speak to me about? Is it about my absence?"
A wooden creak cut through the air as Yuri reclined. "I am not ignorant of your current circumstances," he continued. "If you're worried about your job attendance and your performance as a Hero, don't be -- at least for the time being. In this case, my relative indifference regarding the future of HeroTV works to your benefit."
"Sir," Barnaby started. "Still, I do apologize for the inconveniences I've caused. It was never my intention to--"
"Like I said. No apologies needed." Yuri lifted a hand from his desk as if to gesture. Seemingly thinking better of it, he instead chose to bring his teacup to his lips. "I've spoken plainly to you. I ask that you assume my honesty. I've only spoken the truth." As Yuri tilted the teacup toward himself, Barnaby traced the amber streak running down its side that ended in a tiny pearl of honey near its base.
"Sir," Barnaby repeated quietly.
The teacup met its saucer with a soft clink. "Nevertheless. What I asked you is not entirely unrelated to the troubles you've had recently." Yuri paused another moment, his ashen hair unfurling curtain-like along his jaw. It had gotten much longer, Barnaby noticed, since the last time he had seen him. He was, by all accounts, a beautiful man, albeit in an unsettling sort of way -- the very definition of the word uncanny.
Rising from his swivel chair, Yuri turned to the windows lining the south wall of his office. On the sill sat a number of trinkets: little brass animals, their finishes worn from touch; an empty, decorative perfume bottle, its stopper starburst-shaped; a matchbox racecar, its paint faded with age. Barnaby wondered which were leftover from the office's previous occupant and, however unlikely, which were the judge's additions. When Yuri turned around again, his hands cupped a terracotta pot no larger than four or five inches in diameter. In its center, a single stem was propped to support a waxy leaf, larger and heavier than the stem alone could support. Placing it on the side of his desk nearer to Barnaby, he continued. "You might think it strange of me, but I have found them to be quite good listeners. When I myself have had such troubles – the sorts that are difficult to discuss with others – I’ve found solace in speaking my thoughts aloud to them. To speak to another living thing, human or not, often gives me clarity. At the very least, it ends up more productive than entertaining those pedantic mental phantoms. It can also be soothing to care for something.” Eyes cast downward, Yuri cupped the plant in one hand and tucked a strand of hair behind his ear with the other. If Barnaby didn’t know better, he would think the judge was a little embarrassed. “You may try it with this one, if you like. Its mother has served me well already."
Blinking, Barnaby leaned forward and took the pot in his hands. He knew little about plants, but could tell this one was well cared for. Deep green and rooted deeply in the soil, the cutting's single leaf folded palm-like at its center, leaving a deep seam from which its many translucent veins bled out. "This is from one of yours?"
“Apologies if this seems to have come out of nowhere to you. I realize we haven’t had much to do with each other in recent years, though that is soon to change. I might be being presumptuous about what a young man in your situation does or does not need. I only thought I would offer a touch of advice – something a bit more tangible than whatever our corporate-approved psychologists are probably offering you.” Yuri extended a finger toward the pot in Barnaby’s hands. "That one is easy to care for," he continued. "Only needs a little water when the soil is dry. It's a sensible choice for first-timers." A pause. "If you want to take it, that is."
"Aah, of course," Barnaby stammered. He blinked again, his mind white with static. The entire situation was so patently absurd that he couldn’t even find words for his thoughts, let alone his tongue. He looked down at the sprout again, imagining Yuri with a spray bottle in his hand, speaking to its leaves in that low, chilling tone he had like the basest vibrations of a stringed instrument, but tinged with the warmth of a mother. Finally, Barnaby muttered, "Thank you, Judge Petrov."
Yuri only nodded before turning his attention to the printed reports on his desk as if the entire conversation had never transpired.
The plant Barnaby received from Yuri Petrov held the distinction of being the first non-human, living thing in his apartment. The existential magnitude of this struck a chord in Barnaby beyond his not having any particular experience or interest in horticulture. An unfamiliar sense of anxiety settled over him as he placed the terracotta pot first on his kitchen counter, then the table next to the chair in the middle of the room, and finally the sill below the immense window that formed the western wall of his apartment. Everything else in the space seemed to dwarf the two of them as Barnaby sat beside the pot with a sigh.
I'm not even equipped for something like this.
Kotetsu had helped him carry home a bag of plant food from the hardware store down the street from the studio. It was nothing Barnaby couldn't handle on his own, but Kotetsu had seized the opportunity of the walk to his apartment as a chance to wheedle him in vain about the plant's origins ("What is that?" "A plant. I think." "Where did it come from?" "A bigger plant. ...I think"). The gift -- Barnaby felt presumptuous even calling it that -- didn't seem the sort of thing that Yuri would want to become a topic of conversation around the workplace.
It was a small, feeble, wisp of a thing, scarcely able to hold its own weight. Barnaby had had to shield it from the wind with his palm on his way home. And yet, he couldn't help but theorize the series of events that must have occurred for Yuri to give it to him. How he must have tended to its mother day by day; taken shears to her, tain-coated blades mirroring a white-knuckled grip; placed it in the pot, folding soil gently over its roots; and at some point, however improbably, thought of Barnaby and his sadness, and how it might be solved by the conversation it invited. A salve that Yuri himself attested to.
What had happened to Yuri Petrov, Barnaby wondered, to make him the way he was? Many people these days were probably wondering the same about him. Maybe that was what Yuri had sensed in him -- what propelled him to offer Barnaby such an intimate yet inscrutable gift. A deep, quiet well of things that neither of them could say aloud to anyone who would listen.
Barnaby unrolled the mouth of the plant food bag and dipped in a shallow, cupped hand. The material was light and feather-soft, flooding Barnaby's nostrils with a sweet, natural scent. With the fingers of his other hand, he gently patted it into the soil around the sprout along with some water for good measure. He looked down at his nails, brown-rimmed and earth-flecked, now packed to the brim with soil. It felt nice to have something in his hands, and to have something to show for it -- something to prove it had happened.
"Hi there," he said, squatting before the little plant and folding his arms over the sill. "I'm Barnaby."
That night, as he dozed on his windowsill, Barnaby dreamt of Albert Maverick.
Though he saw it while he was sleeping, Barnaby could hardly call it a dream. It was a vision like many he had had before -- of Maverick, Kotetsu, his parents, nameless ghosts whose names he couldn't yet recall. These visions, he knew, were not dreams; they were memories, washed ashore by the receding tides of Maverick's influence. As Barnaby walked through the dream, he was strangely aware of this. The scattered parts of his disjointed psyche still yet clung to the faintest whispers of reality they could grasp. This is real, they shouted out through dreamfog. This happened. Try to remember, even if it hurts.
This was a vision that repeated itself often to Barnaby, ever since he had first tried to be intimate with Kotetsu -- ever since his body remembered what his mind had staved off for so long. In it, he is in Maverick's office, the floor swept with the liminal quietness of the end of the workday. Everything seems bigger, the cabinets looming fearfully as his bare back is pressed to the top of the desk. His body is smaller, maybe 13 or 14 years old, unhewn and shapeless the further he looks down. Another man's voice behind his head, middle-aged; Barnaby cannot turn to look, but hears the click of the door and his departing footsteps disappearing down the hall. At his feet, Albert Maverick in stark relief, cut from the darkness by the halo of city lights pouring in through the office window. Barnaby knows what comes next. He knew it then and knows it now, looking down on himself in the dreamscape. His legs burn. Every part of him aches with a cold and familiar agony. Maverick is saying something, but not to him; he is turned toward a pocket of darkness in the corner of the room, where another pair of eyes glint in the light. Through the hazed film of tears and time, Barnaby cannot make out their owner. Try as he might, he can never grip that piece of the puzzle.
Try harder.
Barnaby never sticks around long enough to see what happens next, nor who those eyes belong too. He knows that when he wakes, he will feel this memory in his bones. He will carry the weight of Maverick's hands on his, the force of the man in the hall inside him, and all the being of his helpless self into the waking world, and he will know that it was real. He does not want to see what happens next.
The tide is coming. Washing everything away. It is so nice to forget. If what happened was inevitable, then your mind was doing you a favor. He was doing you a favor.
No. Try harder. This is important, can't you tell? The tide is coming to your knees now. It is not a benevolent force. The darkness will hold you sweetly, but you will not live to feel it. You have to kick back. Isn't that what rabbits are good at?
Maverick's palm presses to his forehead. The light of his NEXT powers activating ripples in a watery reflection on the desk's polished surface, casting the surroundings in unnatural blue. Bit by bit, Barnaby feels his limbs relax, his feet hanging limply off the edge. Maverick does not say anything more to him; he speaks again to the darkness, gestures to it in an easy way. The blue light paws at the edges of Barnaby's mind, curling them like burning paper. It's easy to forget; always is.
Kick, kick. Click, click.
Maverick's heels in the marbled hall outside. The door is open a crack, letting the light pour in in shafts. A sign he'll soon return. A beat as the sound rounds the corner and disappears. Someone climbs to their feet in the darkness.
I'm afraid.
Kick, kick.
Pouring of water; sudden shock of coolness on his raw-rubbed thighs, in rivulets down his chest. Another towel, and his face is wiped clear of tears and residue. He shudders at the touch on the back of his neck, then his back, as someone helps him sit upright. The fog deepens; he regrets, in the memory's own time, that he will not be able to remember this kindness.
Kick, kick!
But he is there now. He watches himself, and he remembers. He remembers, in the illumination of Stern Bild's innumerable lights, in the ambient glow of their temporary reprieve, how that young man’s milky skin shone translucent, marred with smears of makeup and fading bruises; what empty platitudes he had offered, in spite of his own cynicism, to a young boy who would not remember them; and, as the chill of the water used to wash him faded away, how it was replaced by a touch of fire no mere human could possess.
He remembers Yuri Petrov.
