Family Bias
There was always something about the Good Doctor that I didn’t like. Call instinct. Call it bias. Call it an intrinsic disrespect for people who attach “doctor” to their name despite having earned no scholarly merit whatsoever. The point is, I’d chalked it up to my own damage interfering with sense, plus a fair amount of bias. After all, he's so insistent on getting in my way.
I was wrong. And I was right. And, as usual, it was the kid who suffered for it.
They call him Tiny Tyke. His real name is Timothy Tanes, because his parents—his mother, our father—hate him almost as much as the Doctor does.
It isn’t his fault. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s our dear old dad’s.
I’m pretty sure the man actually is a Super, not merely a nascent one. His gift is finding, and breeding with, latent gene carriers. There’s six of us so far; all by different people; all active Supers in some capacity.
Not that dad knows. Not that he cares. He’s on to number seven, now, and Timmy’s mother has no idea where her son is tonight. Or any night, for that matter.
Perhaps I’m being too harsh. The woman works three jobs; she isn’t home enough to notice how often he isn’t there. But kindness has never come naturally to me, and Timmy deserves my effort more than she does right now.
Timmy hasn’t said a word since I found the bruises. He isn’t tied to the chair; I gave that up when his glove slipped to show the purple and black finger marks on his wrist. He’s covering them with his still-gloved hand, glaring at me like he’s challenging me to say something.
I like challenges. I know how to handle those. I take off my mask.
Timmy’s eyes widen. This isn’t part of his internal script for this interaction; the one that says I plan on ransoming him back to the Good Doctor, or otherwise telling the Good Doctor where he is as part of some elaborate scheme to kill the man. (Which, yes, but that’s being tabled for the moment.) Point is, the Villain isn’t supposed to reveal themselves to their kidnapee; not unless they aren’t planning for a return or escape. He’s smart enough to understand that. Good.
“Riley,” I say, with a nod at myself.
He swallows; glares.
“Your name is Timmy.”
“No it’s not.”
I smile, knowing full well how that looks. My canines are sharper than normal people’s. It has nothing to do with my powerset; everything to do with the powerset of an uncle on my mother’s side we all politely pretend isn’t the Virginia Wolfman.
“It is. Don’t ask me to call you by that ridiculous moniker they gave you. I won’t.” He starts to protest, and I add, “And don’t try to tell me you picked it yourself; no ten-year-old would do that to themselves. Not in this day and age.”
His mouth closes with an audible click. If Supers’ didn‘t have instincts keeping them from hurting themselves, I’d worry about that. Timmy comes from the uninteresting, unimaginative but generally useful power pools: super strength, flight, unverified but probable speed augmentation. I’ve estimated he could wreck this room in three-point-two seconds without the restraints I’d built for him.
It’s hard to decide if either A) I’ve put him off-kilter enough not consider trying, B) he wants to have this conversation on some level, or C) he’s so used to obeying people of presumed authority that he’s resigned himself to his place in this drama.
There I go making up stories again. Better to just ask.
“So, Timmy, tell me, what do you think is going on here?”
Slowly, his brow knits together. “You kidnapped me?”
“I’ll ignore that you answered a question with a question. Yes, I kidnapped you. Why?”
His shoulders relax by degrees as his gaze darts around the room and back to me. We’re alone. We’re also surrounded by stereotypical laboratory instruments, though I was certain not to put anything acidic or flammable in the area. It probably looks like a functional lab to him, instead of a dressed up storage space.
I’d taken the rest of the siblings to the real lab, their first time. Not Timmy. Too much risk in that. Unfortunately, it'd been high time I had a conversation with him, and doing so on the street as myself was far riskier than just abducting him for a few hours. A Villain abducting a Hero’s sidekick can be explained a lot better than, say, a neighbor calling the police about a strange woman lurking around the apartment building. My real identity has thus far upheld a squeaky clean reputation, and I intend to keep it that way.
But Timmy isn’t just wanting to know where we are; no. He’s looking for an escape route, or weapons. My hands twitch, safely pressed against the desk I’ve been leaning against, as I gather a thin sheen of my excess energy onto my palms. Not too much—too much and the ignition will spark. Just enough that I can defend myself, if I must.
I don’t like hurting children—detest it, really—but I’m not stupid. Timmy is old enough, and powerful enough, to kill me if I hesitate. I’ll do a lot of things for family; I won’t die for them.
Finally, Timmy asks with exaggerated care, “Shouldn’t you know why you kidnapped me?”
“I do. I’m more interested if you’ve figured it out.”
“Look, I don’t know what crack you’ve been smoking, Gaslight, but you need to let me go right now.”
“And if I do, where will you go?” I aim my gaze pointedly at his arm. He’d relaxed enough to uncover the bruises, and now his fingers clench over it again. Timmy hisses, involuntarily. They’re still fresh.
It’s all I can do to keep my voice conversational as I double down on the question, “Back to the Good Doctor?” “He didn’t do anything wrong.”
Timmy’s eyes are intense and shiny. I know those eyes; just like he has to know mine, now that’s he’s seen them. Another gift of Dad’s line which always breeds true. We all have those same haunted, hollow eyes
I spent two years believing that Timmy was the one to finally break that mold. Goddammit.
“If he didn’t do anything wrong, why defend him?”
“It’s just training.” Timmy’s cheeks and ears are pink as he looks away. “I’m strong! He has to train me harder than the others, that’s all. I could hurt people. I have to—I have to know what it feels like if I…”
The words are out before I can stop them; clipped and needy and far, far too obvious. “What others?”
Timmy’s gaze darts back to me and away again. His jaw locks.
Sighing, I stand up from the desk—second mistake of the evening. For a split second I forgot my palms are coated in sickly yellow haze, like a thick mist attached to flesh. He notices and he’s out of the chair, stumbling backward over it and crashing to the floor.
I freeze.
Four times I’ve done this. You would think I’d learned a thing or two about how to handle kids. Hell, I have. Sort of. But Timmy is special, in his own way. He’s the only one who had another Super around to train them before I got there. He’s the only one the public’s classified Hero. He’s the only one who fought me before I could introduce him to his family.
How the fuck do I fix this?
Timmy’s eyes narrow. His fingers flex. He’s getting ready to do something I’m going to regret.
He lunges as I say, “I'm Riley Tanes.”
My other reaction—the ignition of the ghost fire in my fingertips, catching his wrist on the bruises, using his kinetic energy to twist him around and pull him against my chest—those are all born of muscle memory. I grab his other arm, locking him into place.
It’s a stupid, stupid move. He could rip my arms off, and I wouldn’t be able to stop him. One backward jerk of his head and my face would cave in. But Timmy doesn’t move. Instead, he trembles like a leaf, and pants like a wild animal, and goes so, so still I can feel my heart breaking in my chest.
I know this reaction; I know it in my bones. And I hate that I have to use it against him. But if I don’t… If I don’t, he’ll go back to the Doctor. That is not acceptable.
So instead of letting go, I hold him tighter, and I repeat in his ear, “My name is Riley Tanes. I’m your big sister.”
“You’re not,” he whispers.
“Have I ever lied to you, Tim?”
He trembles, and thinks, and just as I’m sure he won’t answer… he shakes his head. Because I haven’t. I’ve done a lot of things to the Good Doctor these past few years; done a lot of things to a lot of people. I never lied. Even Villains have their lines in the sand.
“Stands to reason I’m not lying now, doesn’t it?”
“If you’re my sister, why didn’t you say anything before?”
I swallow thickly, but I do not lie. “Because I thought you were safe. We all did.”
“We?”
“The others are downstairs. You can meet them now, if you’d like, or you can meet them later. After you’ve had some rest.”
His chest hitches softly, at first, and then in greater convulsions as he begins to cry.
“Please. Please, can’t I—my mom? Can’t I go home? My mom’s gonna…”
“No, Tim.” Finally, with deliberate care, I let the ghost fire dissipate as I take my hands off him and turn him around to face me. His face is already swollen and blotchy, stained with tears and snot. He’s just a boy. Just a goddamn kid who has no business being mixed up with any of this.
But if there’s anything I agree with that fucker about—and God do I hate the idea of agreeing with anything the Good Doctor endorsed—it’s that Timothy cannot be left alone in this. He’s too powerful, sure, but he’s also too easy to take advantage of. How’s that for justification? Cool story, still kidnapping…
“You aren’t going to like me for this. I’ve already made peace with that. But this is where you belong, Tim. For now, anyway. And if you want to leave when you get older, we’ll let you go. But this?”
I grab his hand and make him look at the marks on his arm. “This is unacceptable. No one here’s going to do that. I promise.”
“But you hurt other people!”
“Sometimes. Tell me, your Doctor? What’d he do to those bank robbers last week?”
“He knocked them unconscious…”
“He killed them, Tim.”
Tim’s eyes widen in alarm. “No—No that move it just knocks them unconscious. It doesn’t really hurt anybody!”
“No. That’s not how the standard human body works. There are no way to knock a non-Super unconscious that doesn’t render them dead or brain damaged.” I shake my head, letting Tim have his hand back as I stand up.
“He killed them because they robbed a bank. They robbed a bank because their boss sold the company they worked for, and stole the money he promised them. The money that was supposed to tide them, their families, and five hundred others, over while they looked for new employment on a saturated market.”
There’s a pause as Tim considered that. “Maybe the Doctor didn’t know the boss stole from their employees? We could have him arrested too.”
“Maybe you could. That depends. Is the Good Doctor’s real name Dougald Brinkerton?”
Tim’s eyes widen and he shakes his head far too quickly.
Sighing, I hold up one finger.
“Rule number one: we do not lie to each other in this family. I don’t hold the rest of you to my standards about lies in general, but we do not lie to family.
“Also, you’re a terrible liar. Brinkerton is the Good Doctor, which means that boss is Brinkerton. He stole from them, then killed them when they did something desperate. Not exactly the peak of morality, that.”
Tim’s eyes narrow, but he’s isn’t crying anymore. If anything, he seems intrigued. “Where’s your proof?”
“Ah.” I grin. “Now there is a great question. Proof we have in plenty. Come on. Let’s go meet the rest of the family, and have ourselves a little show and tell, shall we?”
Hoping this won’t constitute the third mistake of the evening, I press the button to open the door and wave Timothy ahead of me into the hall.
He hesitates before passing, but ultimately doesn’t run or fly or punch me. He just.. waits on the other side, looking a little confused and wary.
I’m certain this has become an intelligence gathering exercise for him, now. He’ll play nice, and listen to our stories, and try to figure out a way to relay all this back to his Doctor. That’s fine. So long as I’m aware he’s going to betray us, I can plan for it. I can plan for so, so many things.
Like burning the Good Doctor and everything he’s built to the fucking ground, and salting his ashes.
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