Deception | Sequel

"Elias?"

I jerk, a snap of lightning hitting my insides, nearly choking on a gasp. "Oh, sorry. It's just...a lot to think about." Understatement. Wincing, I take a long sip of my punch and push away the edge of snow in my fingers and the questions hanging like sharpened icicles over my head.

I can't think about all that right now. It's just—too much. I can't handle questioning everything I've known, even all the boxes I know I filter and don't filter through, under her stare. I just— have to do it later. When I am in private. When I am alone.

Swallowing hard, I press the threatening whirlpool of thoughts into the empty wasteland of my memories and lock them there, focusing on Deception's face, her smile with a glitch in it, and the darkening amethyst of her eyes.

Deception tilts her chin down, eyes flitting around my face, sobering. "I suppose it is," she says, soft and serious and understanding—so unlike the passion and gusto of moments before.

And she says nothing else, letting me gather my thoughts, letting me melt and piece back together, letting me mend the seams I tore and pretending that she didn't see them. I draw in another slow breath, measuring it, marking it, timing it to the inconstant silence in between twitters from some bird unseen.

Edison does—did?—this with me. He'd patiently let me gather myself after spilling my stuffing no matter how long I needed with no comment, no judgment, no impatience. David did it too, and Dr. Egret, and I know they are good.

So does that make Deception good? The question blooms in my mind, expanding like a puff of smoke in the sky, growing bigger and bigger until it dissipates, no walls or answers to hold it back. I don't know. She...isn't what I expected. She isn't a villain like Cyclone, all snarled words and slapping wind, or a villain like Conflagration, obsessive and unstable. She isn't a villain like me—Blank Slate me—sharp-tongued, always daring others to take it one step farther, to toe the line and push it one inch deeper.

Instead, she's been...like a woman who found out her supposed boyfriend doesn't remember her anymore, a person with goals and aspirations for a better world, a person who's...not as evil as the news or I made her out to be.

She's not evil. But...not good, either? If she isn't evil, isn't horrible, isn't mind controlling people left and right, then who is she? I stare at Deception's face, her eyes, the way her shoulders are relaxed and she angles herself towards me, and filter through not the Villain box or the Hero, or even the one hastily labeled 'Gray', and all that is left I see is a woman. A woman who cares about me enough to stay silent as I stare, enough to tell me her plans, enough to be somewhat vulnerable to me despite the distance of time between us.

My teeth clench and I fight off a grimace twisted with the scrunch and shadowy edges of confusion, dropping my gaze to the pleasant red of my drink. Bubbles wobble as they rise to the surface, disappearing the instant they touch it. Their ripples distort the faint reflection of my face, twisting it nearly beyond recognition.

Was this the woman my younger self saw and fell in love with? Was this how my younger self could say, 'she will accept you in every way'? Not looking through the evil or the villain boxes, but something else. Someone else other than labels. Was this how, some time before, I fell in love with her?

Weight settles in the bottom of my lungs, heavy, not like a ball and chain, but like a thick blanket. I inhale and exhale, feeling the edges, the shape, the form, and almost understand. Almost see how I could've seen her.

Almost, but not quite.

Deception still captured me—but did she see it like that?—and took me away from End. She still has strong opinions about the Heroes and says Edison hates me. There's still things that don't line up, and yet...I wonder. Was there one time where I hadn't filtered through labels and seen her for what she was? Is that how I had come, back then, to be her right-hand-man? Her boyfriend?