Lynn
Lynn was instantly beloved in the back rooms of El Vaquero, one of the Promise's numerous Mexican restaurants.
For starters, she didn't care how hot the scalding water was as she scoured plate after plate (and, similarly, little did she seem to notice the water was more steam than water after a few minutes of her furious scrubbing). Secondly, when one of the older cooks - a two-time carjacker and one-time willing participant in an extraterrestrial work release program - commented on Lynn's rather diminutive stature in Spanish, Lynn informed him that, despite her small size, she was more sexually endowed than any of the other line cooks.
Lynn's knowledge of the Spanish language was, shall we saw, a few inches wide and thirty miles deep. For the purposes of winning over these crew, she may as well have been trained at the United Nations.
Regardless, for the first time on the Promise, she had found a group that took an instant liking to her. Lynn also dialed back her paranoia a bit. People like Archie or Natalie or the snake's pit Gennedy watched over made absolutely no sense to Lynn. Lynn could not understand wanting to come to this place.
These guys hadn't. Lynn had been a few years younger when she'd worked in a kitchen last, although she did a brief stint in one when she was...well, doing a brief stint. It was familiar. It was comfortable. They smoked out by the dumpsters during breaks and Lynn felt just comfortable enough to shit-talk the Promise in Spanish, in muttered tones with her coworkers as the clamor of the restaurant deafened them to any eavesdroppers.
"Vas a romperla." Antonio said, grabbing the cup out of her hand.
Lynn blinked. She'd put cracks in the glass.
"Disculpa," Lynn muttered, staring down at it. The water boiled around four hundred degrees as it rolled over hands - a fact the other dishwashers had objected to before Lynn told them to stop being pussies and did their work for them (admittedly, with a stool under her so she could reach the sink). She stared down at the water for a moment, taking a few deep breaths. The steel of the restaurant walls looked the same, sometime, and she'd tripped over a gym bag coming into work that afternoon. Once, Lynn had picked up one of the menus and thought it was in Chinese before she clinched her eyes open and shut and forced them to read it correctly. She looked around at the gallons of grease sealed on the other side of the room, of the smell of sizzling vegetables and cooking meat. Lynn turned back and scrubbed a plate, where her nose still looked broken in the reflection.
---
Class was bullshit.
Lynn was told she was below the standard aptitude level of a child her age, which pissed her off for a number of reasons, as did most things. Regardless, she gritted her teeth and suffered through class. Most days. Her attendance was not spectacular. On one or two days, she woke up and stared at the ceiling, sweat steaming off her. There were nights Salamandra and she were locked around each other, the woman a few inches taller each time she showed up again. Lynn struggled to get her footing when her right knee split open with pain, and then Salamandra was over her, looking down, her hands around her neck -
On those days, Lynn did not go to class. She walked the campus and smoked, or drank coffee in the most run-down diner she could find on the Promise. Her teachers strongly suggested Lynn get a tutor. When their suggestions turned to orders, Lynn just didn't show up for tutoring. Surprisingly, none of the tutors seemed particularly motivated to tell the teachers Lynn was not showing up. Lynn has a talent for asking for things nicely, I suppose.
Power training class was at least something. The instructor was a jackass, but Lynn could admit there was plenty to learn, and this guy had an inkling of respect for her - a respect Lynn attributed to any surviving cafeteria footage that was circulating the Promise.
"You need more control," he barked. "You'll burn down your dorm when you sneeze if you don't get a lid on it." Lynn bit back a few choice words, mostly bringing into question his preference in sexual partners, perhaps questioning his desire for broadening his romantic interests beyond the realm of the two-legged. That would only prove his point, after all, and anyone who thought they had Lynn figured out could go and fuck themselves. Whether it was getting three (to five) square meals a day or the training, Lynn did notice her flames came to her more quickly, her arms and legs felt stronger than before, her eyes danced with light more brightly. Lynn even glanced in the mirror one morning and could not count all of her ribs. She stood and stared for a while, grinning crookedly, letting herself feel like she and Lucy were dressing up again for a moment.
Day by day, Lynn found it harder and harder to keep her guard as high as it should be. It did not make her less jumpy, or keep her eyes off the entrances and exits as she sat down to eat. She never stopped trying to fit as much food in her mouth as quickly as she could, but she had to admit they had enough time to put another hit on her. The breakout was a sloppy job, Lynn thought. There's something at work here. Archie and me and Nat were just icing on the cake. There was something hidden on the Promise, something Lynn could not see, no matter where she looked.
The thing about Lynn, of course, is that everywhere she went, with her hair glimmering and her eyes burning, there were only more and more shadows, deeper and darker the harder Lynn tried to cast them away.
---
Lynn sat in the woods, some two miles off the path and with her back to a tree. Lynn had lost count of how many times she had come out here - after a shift, smelling of dish soap and Mexican food, or after class, where she would stare down at her notes and grow angrier and angrier, smoke curling off the edges of the pages. This is fucking bullshit, Lynn wanted to scream. Everyone else could finish the readings in minutes, but Lynn did not know what half the shit meant. Math, likewise, was an impossibility to her, and Lynn did not care about anything they taught her in history class, because it was all propaganda anyways. The only classes Lynn seemed to scrape by in with a modicum of academic prowess was chemistry, which seemed to come naturally to her (naturally enough - she hovered at a C+, near the edge of a B) and power training. Spanish, at least, wasn't too much of a struggle, but whoever thought their classroom Castilian was worth a damn was an idiot in Lynn's book.
She'd earned the attention of the Spanish teacher on the first day.
"How do you say what's up?" he asked, drawing a name and turning to Lynn.
"Comó andas," Lynn said.
The teacher blinked. "I...yeah, in Argentina, I suppose." He stared at her curiously then kept going, Lynn grinding her teeth as a few others glanced in her direction. One girl asked if Lynn had studied abroad.
Lynn shook her head. That thought and others came to her, sometimes, and she could not force them out. Lynn flipped through her notebook, running back over the observations she'd jotted down. It was another day or two before she and Keaton would meet again and exchange what they'd found out. Insomuch as Lynn could trust anyone on this place, she was beginning to feel she could trust Keaton.
No.
She couldn't. She was getting to know Keaton. That was something. But Keaton was like everyone else on this ship - looking for a reason to throw her under the bus. It was just now they were useful to one another. Lynn did not mistake that for anything more. The more Keaton knew about Lynn, the more Keaton could tell Gennedy the next time they were locked up on trumped up charges. She didn't know who had ratted on her in the interrogations, or why Gennedy hadn't come for her again already, but they had to be plotting something. Lynn stared down at her notebook, going back over everything. There was something she had missed. In her mind, this was no different than the harsh red ink at the top of her classwork. Another reminder. Another puzzle Lynn was too slow to solve. She leaned back against the tree and tucked away her notebook, sparing a few minutes to pass over some bars she'd written idly on a slow day at work, a brief sketch she'd made with the charcoal of her fingers. If anyone saw this shit they'd laugh until the day I die, Lynn thought.
Lynn liked the woods. They were quiet, and out from Gennedy's para-traitor eyes. She never had her phone on, as she did not want Cara listening in, so there was nothing to distract her other than the occasional chirp of a bird or gurgling of the river. At times, though, the quiet was too much. She would - she would remember things. Four people, there and gone again, in the blink of an eye and a flash of heat. A bottle in her hand, a flash of pain across her face. A scratching inside her knee, like the sinew was still trying to stitch itself together again. Lynn rubbed idly at her nose, fully healed, save for the scar at the top.
"Oy, Lynn."
"Don't use my name, you fucking moron," Lynn muttered, reaching into her pocket and drawing out two hundred credits. The boy - a few years older than Lynn, skinny as a junkie and shifty as a fox, reached out and tossed her a pill bottle. Lynn checked it and nodded, tucking it away. The man counted Lynn's restaurant money and nodded.
"Pleasure."
"Hey," Lynn said, glancing back up at him. She hadn't figured out what kind of powers he had to be here, but Lynn had a grudging respect for anyone who came here with a noose around their necks, parahuman or - "I dannae what the fuck you're on abou'." she said, catching her breath. "Aint no gettin' off this ship. One way ticket n' all. - or....or otherwise.
"...yeah?"
"Sorry," Lynn said, shaking her head straight. For a moment she'd been - she'd been somewhere else. "You ever looking to expand?"
The boy shrugged. "Maybe. You handle your shit?"
Lynn raised an eyebrow.
He snorted. "Alright. I'll keep you posted."
Lynn nodded and waited until he had left before she pulled out the ceramic mug from her bag, one of many quietly appropriated from the cafeteria. She placed it on the forest floor before her and sat cross-legged, filling it with water from her bottle. Lynn picked it up in her hands and held it gingerly, trying to take deep breaths. Slowly, the water came to a boil, the cheap porcelain heating in her hands as well. Lynn took another deep breath, a bead of sweat trickling down her face. She could get the whole forest blazing, easy, but this was different - this was like a one finger push up rather than a bench press.
"Just the water," Lynn told herself, softly, trying to keep her breathing steady. "Not the mug, just the water." The water boiled and steamed, but the mug was heating up faster. Lynn cursed, prompting her whole temperature to spike before she calmed herself down, staring at the rippling surface.
"Tienes frío?" Lynn asked, Clarita shivering beside her.
"Sí." Lynn grabbed her hot chocolate, gone cold some hours past, and warmed it back up to her, the beverage boiling again in a matter of minutes. "Cuídate." Lynn ran a hand through her hair as - the side of the wall exploded and Clarita was gone, three others too, vaporized and -
The mug exploded. It snapped and - four people - the water burst apart in a cloud of superheated steam. "Motherfuck," Lynn cursed, one of the porcelain shards slicing her forearm, the other missing her hoodie narrowly. Lynn fumed (literally and figuratively) for a moment, taking as many deep breaths as she could. Her heart was thundering against her skull, though why, she could not say. She fumbled for one of the Xanax, swallowing it dry and taking more deep breaths. She wasn't far from where she'd been when she - when the restaurant had burst open, Archie curled around Natalie, Salamandra dead, the...the everything.
Lynn put another mug on the ground and tried again. And again. When she'd run out of mugs, she gathered her things to leave, spotting it at the last moment. Lynn knelt down and picked it up, rolling the doll over in her hands, muddied and worse for the wear. It was a bunny rabbit - Lucy had one like it when they were younger, but Lynn couldn't remember the name of it. The hair was mostly worn away, one of the button eyes dangling loose. Around its ankle was a tag, one Lynn recognized without even needing to read it.
"Those fucking bastards," Lynn murmured to herself. Gennedy's face swam into her mind and her hair danced with fire. She tucked it in her backpack, zipping it tight. She and Keaton would have a lot to talk about.
---
Homecoming. Lynn didn't get the point. She'd never anticipated graduating high school - which, self-fulfilling or no, seemed to be a relatively safe assumption given recent weeks on the Promise - and never had much of a home to stay at anyway. Lynn sat in the park at the designated place, backpack next to her, notepad sprawled on the stone table. Lynn smoked a cigarette, one leg brought up to her chest and the other rocking back and forth on the ground below her. Her phone buzzed, prompting Lynn to flip it over. Work?
Archie. Meet up at the mall. Group text with Keaton and one other - Natalie. Something in Lynn twisted, bent around like drooping dead flowers, and she flipped the phone over. Lynn hadn't seen much of any of them, save Keaton for their weekly meet-ups. She had a class with the other two, but tried her best to keep a distance. In the park around her, a few kids played, which Lynn watched with a hint of a smile. They fucking suck at soccer, Lynn thought, although she doubted if she could do much better. Basketball, most assuredly, although Lynn suppose they were probably some of the few she could reasonably compete against in terms of height. Lynn considered the announcement from earlier. This will work on the sheep, she thought. The wolves invite them to dance, and they'll put on their dancing shoes. Not Lynn. She was going to have no part of whatever consolation prize for letting rapists out of custody that Dunbar had drummed up. Lynn would be working, either at El Vaquero or on the scrawled words on the page before her. Lynn had paced over the Promise's station a dozen times over, relishing in at least the length of the leash she had on her now. In juvy, she'd paced every inch of the yard. This was no different. Just a better view.
Lynn picked at a meal someone had ordered but not picked up, meals the manager very graciously always saw fit to pass along to Lynn. She munched on the chicken noisily as she waited for the rendezvous, her other hand idly scrawling lyrics into her notebook, on a page separate from the breadcrumbs and dead ends and red herrings.
Spoopy Scary
Mixtape Ghost N