—chapter eleven.

  ❛ the follies of a young broken heart. ❜  

ELODIE VERBECK HAD A VERY LARGE PROBLEM.

Well, to be fair, she had several very large problems. As most young adults do. Only, of course, her V.L.P (very large problems) were very much out of those late night crime television shows, like she was the side character sobbing in an uncomfortable police station chair mumbling about something or other, innocence and the like. Not because she was a crier; but because she was pretty sure she should be, at that point.

However, Elodie did not like to think about any of those very large problems. Acknowledgement meant accepting they were there, and she was the sort of person who simply ploughed through life with a knife and steely eyes and hoped that she never had to look back. And of course with that, came never being able to say 'no' when the ever familiar monotone voice of a cranky secretary called her on one of her few days off.

It did not help that she was never busy. She did try to come up with excuses, reasons for why she couldn't waste time on him - but they weren't ever enough. Outside of work, what did she even do? Maybe mess around with a modern-day Robin Hood then and again, but that was not 'busy', that was just...that.

Certainly not enough reason to not confront her father.

But as she walked the halls of the station, bandaged hands shaking and knees knocking against one another, Elodie really wished she had come up with an excuse for herself that time. Or had just not considered this at all. Or considered a little more -- there were a thousand things she could have and should have done, if she was being honest (which she rarely was). She had done this all on her own, dug the grave that was losing its appeal by the second and sent her own self off to her own doom.

A half dozen ways out rang through her head; a work emergency, or Ellis emergency...maybe she could change her address, her name...how bad would moving to Thailand and giving up on civilization be for--

"--you good there?"

Elodie startled out of her reverie to stare, wide-eyed, at the woman before her. Patch, that was her name, right? She had never spoken with the woman before, though she had seen her around then and again. Patch had to be new to it all, though, because no one kept that curious, wide-eyed look for long in that line of work. And that was especially truly in her case. Unfortunately.

She just nodded her head. Her hands crashed against her body. Trembling waves against polyester cliffs; pitiful offenses for an piteous villain. "Dandy."

"Okay. You just, stopped listening for a moment. Wasn't sure."

The waves were turning into red-hot lava and surely, she was going to burn a hole through her jeans if she wasn't careful. Elodie slipped her hands out of her pockets and behind her back, twisting the waves into their fingernail prisons. She did her best to keep her chin up. "Just lost in thought. Can we keep going?"

Patch just nodded and continued on. Elodie appreciated that.

They paused outside the ever familiar door. The young woman paused in the doorway, watching Elodie shiver. "Twenty minutes. I'll be right here, and so will the guards here. You need anything..."

"Thanks," she murmured, barely a sound above the static drowning her in her mind. She wasn't focused enough to see the soft look Patch shot her back, nor the clang of the doors around her drumming unsteady rhythms -- all she could think about was him.

She sincerely hoped Miss Eudora Patch was not a mind reader.

Elodie sank into the seat across from him. Her lips were red from worrying and pursed, yielding an ugly stain across her young features. She could hardly look at him, but then again she had to, and she stared him down with all the strength she had left. He was a gifted liar, but she knew him, and she knew his eyes. They, at least, would yield some truth.

"Good afternoon, Lola.  How has life been? It feels like it's been too--"

"--Let's talk."

"No hello?"

She ignored him and pressed her hands down onto the table, folded with her fingers interlaced, digging into her healing cuts. "It's important. An' not about this case, we can get to that later - this is about me, and...you."

"I'm afraid I don't know what you mean, Lola, I-"

"-save it," she hissed, anger flaring and dipping low as she hung her head. Her hands pulled back. "Save it. Let me talk."

"That attitude-"

 "-I am not in the right state of mind to deal with your voice, so unless it is going to tell me what I need to know, I don't want to hear it."

He nodded, still with that godforsaken smile that would haunt her til -- probably past whatever hell she was going to. 

"I need to talk to you about..." she paused, glancing over her shoulder to where Patch stood. Her voice lowered into a shaky whisper. "You know what."

"What?"

"Dammit, I - the," she paused, sucking in a breath and regaining her mumble. Her hands were starting to get too hot, and too fast. Shouldn't she get a moment to collect her thoughts? "The human oven-top thing."

"Your talent."

"No."

"Well, that is what you're referring to, yes?"

"But it's not what this is."

"You cannot deny who you are-"

"-I'm talking," she hissed, lowering her tone as the guards looked their way. "Shit. Look, I just - it's been...bad, lately."

He cocked his head, his curiosity piqued, but said nothing.

"I can't control my stress like before. This case is really drawin' it out of me, and I need to be able...I need to...I don't know what I need," she whispered, half to herself. "I just need to get this under control, before something happens."

Her father sat back in his chair, practically preening under his glare. For a man in an orange jumpsuit, handcuffed forward with a grim fate hanging over his head, he was stupidly cocky. But then again, he always was, and maybe that was the worst part of it all.

She wanted to throw something. Maybe him.

"You know," he started, licking at his chapped lips. "children, they take and take. I never thought that having offspring would yield so much pain, so much strain on my poor heart...but they just hiss and scratch and then ask us to lick their wounds, ignoring the damage they have done to us."

"Shut the hell up." Elodie was losing control, and fast. She knew it too well; but she couldn't bring herself to care in his presence. Not when he egged her on so. "Enough with your metaphorical bullshit."

He ignored her growl. "You know, you were always so headstrong, and before...well, before, I could control that, we had worked on that." 

Worked was not the word she would use.

"But you've grown so feral in adulthood, and I can't help but wonder if you had just listened to me..." he waved his handcuffed hands awkwardly. "But, c'est la vie, non?"

"I can't see how that matters."

"And that bitter blindness will be your brutal undoing, Lola."

He knew what he was doing. He was too good at it - making her revert back to her eleven-year-old self, so small and still fighting but losing badly against his forked tongue and fangs. She scrunched her eyes up tight and wished she could escape, curl up in a ball and forget about him and all of it, really. 

Elodie had run the conversation through over and over in her head, planned out every move and counterreactions, had thought over the situation a thousand times - and yet one word from him, and the train was derailed.

But he was still the one locked up. And she did have more power over him, even if he played otherwise. She just had to ignore his bluff and carry on, even if it cost her everything. 

"I just need some answers."

He clicked his tongue. "Need? You know I hate that word. It's such a bitter exaggeration."

"Fine. I want," she gritted. "You owe me that much, considering all of this."

"This?"

"Trying to get you out of here." For a horrible reason. Barely a reason at all.

Somehow, his grin grew larger. "That was your choice, Lola. And a very good one, but the good deed sort of dies when you remind someone of it all the time. Didn't I teach you to be humble?"

"Shut up," Elodie croaked. Her grip on her own hands grew tighter. But the waves wouldn't settle; they only grew, and lapped at her clothes and softer skin until they smoked. "I am not here to play into your mind games today, or solve your crossword-riddle-mumbo-jumbo. I just need to figure this out."

"Want."

"Yeah. That."

The man faked a pout. "What's the magic word?"

"...please." It was a garbled word, choked and angry, but if it'd help her case...she was desperate enough to do it.

"That's all I ask," he nodded back, smarmy and coated with malevolence. "Now. What is it you want to know?"

"Did you always know I was like this?"

"Like what, Lola?" He raised a grey brow, "if you mean the insolence, well that was your mother, may the devil rot her soul she-

"-you know what I mean." Elodie swiped at her lip, finding red to stain her too-hot fingertips. Angrily, she wiped it away and ploughed forward. "When I get - when I got angry, something happens. Happened. Did you always know?"

It was only then, that he hesitated. It was brief and hardly there, but when one spent a lifetime trying to pick apart a man's lies...it was easy for her to catch that sliver of a frown that stained his features. Still, he kept up the lax smile and the glimmer in his eyes that said there was more than what was going to be said.

"You know we adopted you a day after you were born. What a miracle baby you were! Really, a gift from the heavens that..."

...and he went on, but she stopped listening, if only to save herself the pain of his manipulation. She did not care to hear that same tale all over again; how he found her, plucked her from the arms of a woman who couldn't care for her and brought her back to America. He spoke highly of her, but it wasn't really of her - more of the object he had collected and cultivated into his toy. The little girl he had used as a weapon, and only faked love when he had to, saving face before revealing the much more sinister one behind.

 If she could, she would shut him up right then and there, burn his tongue clean off so she never had to hear another sly syllable leak from his lips. But still he went on, and she allowed it, if only to save the anguish of another argument.

"When did you realise I was different, though?"

"You always were," he retorted, faux anger flashing in his eyes. "You were just different in a special way." 

"How?"

Of course, he dared not share the circumstances - a coward latched onto his belief that he was a good man. Because how dare he mention what he had done to her? "Lola, you've always been special. It's why we adopted you."

"No. I want to know when you knew of what I could fuckin' do, not how much I cried as a baby or shit like that."

"Lola, I-" he was growing angry, really angry then. She wondered why he was even entertaining her, at that point, when it was so obvious what he really wanted. He was egging her on. "You were always an angry kid, stubborn like nothing else. Your mother hated it, and so I shouldered the burden, because I'd not leave you to suffer at your own wicked ways.

Her hands scraped divets into the table's underside. She prayed no one else heard the scratching, or saw the plastic melting over her bitten-down fingernails.

"We thought you had a fever a lot. It always faded when you calmed down, and your mother wrote it off as a behavioural thing. Always so eager to ignore a problem."

"But...?"

"Well, over time these outbursts grew more sudden - you were a kid, of course, you would get upset a lot, at little issues. You would get so hot, like an oven, but you never seemed to notice - or if you did, it didn't hurt you. But it...I always have said, Lola, you are like a star. I suppose, your abilities just fell in naturally."

Elodie leant forward. Even while he spoke, she could feel her hands heat, a wildfire raging beneath her skin that was not contained by her own flesh-and-bone cage. "You're giving me nothing. You're just spinning a pretty fucking tale about a happy family with a miracle-baby, and all these little natural happenings, cute little allusions to the stars and such - do you think I am an idiot?"

Her tone was rising dangerously high, enough for the guards to look over and mumble between themselves. She hardly glanced their way. "I can't continue through life as a freak. And I need you to tell me how to turn them off!"

"Lola, darling, you are a lot of things, but freak? Don't ever say that about yourself."

"You were the one who said it first, you bastard!" At that point, she was yelling, and the men by the door were drawn forward, but still, she could not care. "You made me this way, you sick fuck, you did all this to yourself and - don't touch me! I need to talk to him, please--!"

They paid her no mind, pulling her away from the table and out of the room, urging her that she had to calm down. But Elodie could not calm down. Her entire body quivered with rage as she shook in their arms, a boiling vat threatening to spill over and burn them all.

"Ma'am, please-"

"-get back," she hissed, not only for her sake but for theirs. She knew even in her delirium that she was growing too hot, to the point where they would soon balk and crumble. Elodie felt herself push out of their arms and fall against the wall, ignoring the curious looks of bystanders and glares of the guards and -

- Patch. The young woman had been leaning outside but had moved to stand with arms crossed, taking in the situation. To her it must look strange, Elodie raging and crying and telling them to back off, a previously stone-faced woman who spat every word. She knew nothing about the situation and that only made things worse.

"What is the-"

"-I need to keep talking to him," she blurted, hands still fisted and clenched against the fire brewing. She tried to breathe, heaving great gulps of air, but it only seemed to fuel the flames. "Please, I still have time!"

"You need to calm down, first."

"I am calm."

"No, you're not," Patch retorted. "What happened in there? Did he say, do something?"

Elodie averted her gaze. There was no point playing into the fake sympathy in the woman's eyes, because there was nothing good she could admit to save her face. He did, by all accounts, nothing. He just sat and sang smooth croons to goad her into getting mad, and she did, because no matter what she tried, Elodie still had to be a product of her father's verbal slaughter.

She came for answers, and left with fresh bruises.

"Please, just let me talk to him again."

But Patch was no fool. Elodie knew that; the woman seemed smart, and at least loyal to whatever ideals her career had pounded into her brain. Sending the clearly upset woman back into the room with her father must have set off a hundred red flags. And really, Elodie had no reason to convince her to ignore them. Her father was a toxin, and if only five minutes had set her off like this - who was to say that even a second more wouldn't ruin her forever?

(And if she was being really honest, she did not want to go back in. And maybe Patch knew that.)

In the end, Patch shook her head. "I can't send you back in there, ma'am."

Elodie's lips twisted up into an ugly shape. She said nothing to that.

"Do you want to discuss-"

"-no," she whispered, barely a breath of sound. It was a far cry from the screams of before, so quiet that Patch had to lean in close to even hear. "Please. No."

"I...okay."

Elodie turned away from her then, facing her gaze down to her hands. She had calmed the anger down at least enough to walk out of the station, at least; the glow had left her trembling fingers, leaving only half-moon prints in its wake. The panic was still there and thunder still boomed, but it was from a distance. She could let it out later.

A noise came from her right, and she looked up to see Patch had slid down to sit beside her.

"I'm sorry," the young woman said softly. "I don't know your situation, but-"

"-it's fine. Really. I just got myself worked up." Anger issues and the like, she mumbled silently. Always so angry, charging in like a fresh bull, only to be distracted by the red and lose the fight. "It won't happen again."

"We can have a detail posted for future visits, if it'd help."

Elodie glanced away from Patch once again. Her kind eyes ached for her, and she did not like it; she did not want a stranger's pity. Especially not when they had no idea for what. 

"I don't think I'll be seeing him much before the trial."

"Alright."

The hall was silent then. Just the two women sitting beside one another amongst the cold white and grey shapes, listening to distant shouts of orders and retorts back.

Elodie knew Patch wanted to ask, or maybe offer some form of help. She could understand why, too. She knew how the situation looked; she wasn't a complete fool.

So instead of letting her say a thing more, she rose to her feet with an unsteady smile. She wore it poorly, but it felt better than a snarl.

"Thanks," she said.

"I didn't do anything, but you're welcome."

Elodie's lips parted, ready to say more, but she decided against it and turned. Without another word she marched down the hall and out of the young woman's view.

ELODIE LAY IN A BALL, CLUTCHING HER COMFORTER around her as though she was cold - when in reality, she was burning up, to the point where the sheets were singed and falling apart and soon she would have to change positions. If she could move.

She had called in sick to her shift, something she never did. Told Diego she was not home at all that night, so do not come by. Ignored her Grandmother's call, even if she knew it would hurt Ellis - she could not fake a happy tone that night. Her phone had rang once or twice, but she did not even bother to check who it could be. That, even that, was too much.

She wished that there was someone who she could tell. More than anything, the desire to get him off of her chest burned like a heavy fire; the sort with too much smoke that ruined her lungs and left her gasping for air. She wanted someone who would understand how hard it was to look her father in the eye, remembering who he had moulded her to be. Not a child, but a tool, a ways to create chaos by too-young, pale hands.

But she was alone. The few she did know could not know who she had been - and those who did, ignored it with her. The only adult who had seen her father's lack of mercy was the same one who had urged for her to fight for a trial; ranting to her about Archibald Morticelli's sick craving for a superhero would only bring more hell. And if Ellis remembered anything...she wasn't going to do that to him.

He was just a kid; he did not need her trauma on top of his own.

It would be her anger that ruined her, she was sure of it. He had been too; it had been the whole reason his work had gone so poorly. He never managed to rid her of that headstrong attitude, nor the way she was so quick to flame her upset. Everyone had known it, and even if she tried to escape it...

A tear slipped down her cheek, a silent 'dammit' mouthed to the wall across from her. It had been her anger that had saved her, but it would destroy her too. 

Maybe she would carry it with her forever. Not by choice, but because those things always stayed, like a cancer growing to fester in one's mind until it consumed everything good.

EDITED NOTE - Apologies for the wait. The next chapters will hopefully be smoother.

Thank you for reading, let me know what you thought.