Chapter Text
Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high…
The 2AM alarm rang next to her ear. She’d been awake for ten minutes, the routine already ingrained in her body. She groaned and rolled around in her sleeping bag. Her feet, unused to the non-stop movement, were still tender and blistered; their car had broken down yesterday afternoon, and they’d walked five miles to a campground on foot.
There's a land that I heard of once in a lullaby…
The alarm didn’t sing the words, but chimed in a bell-like approximation of the melody. Paige Mcabee mumbled the lyrics to the song under her breath, feeling the supernatural ease of notes spinning to a tune, even in her sleep-choked throat.
Lung was in the bed on the other side of the room. He was the challenging one. Her Master effect wasn’t that strong, nor did it stick. Keeping him under control was a constant, exhausting task, and the price for one mistake would be vicious. It wasn’t just all the heroes of the world she was running from, but time itself, looming.
But these were the only scraps of life left to her now. And it was getting easier day by day to make something of them.
His body was sturdy, dwarfed hers, his tan skin and arm tattoos bared by the muscle tee he was wearing. Paige hummed the rest of the song in his ear as he slept, and whispered the litany of commands, spun them into his dreams. Keep me safe, don’t hurt me, don’t get me in trouble, don’t hurt Bakuda, don’t kill anyone…
Then she plodded over, feet socked and sore, to the sleeping bag next to hers. She sat and did the same for Bakuda, who was snoring with her mouth open. Her glasses, which they had stolen from a store back near Abbotsford so that she could see, were pushed on top of her forehead. She hadn’t bothered to take them off and put them on the nightstand, and they pushed her bangs to every angle.
Incidentally, on the nightstand were Lung’s glasses, also stolen, because his eyes were still weak. Some psychopath from his city had apparently carved them out.
She was—had been—an small-time star, a radio singer, and yet it was melodies, tunes without words that she liked the most. Her mother’s aimless lullabies, her father’s hands on the piano, the classical station in the car: memories that molded her heart when it was still unblemished and young. Humming to the rhythm of the snoring, she gently removed the girl’s glasses, folded them with twin clicks, and put them on the floor between them. With a finger, she combed the stray hairs curtaining Bakuda’s forehead until they lay flat.
How strange it was, that even the worst, most awful people in the world could look so vulnerable, so human, so powerless, when they slept.
Birds fly over the rainbow, why, then, oh why can't I?
She crawled back into the padding of her sleeping bag, hugged herself for warmth, angled herself away from the shaft of moonlight, and squeezed her eyes shut. She willed herself to go to sleep, hoping to get at least two hours before the 5AM alarm.
~ ~ ~
Bakuda pointed at a car, walking back from the restroom, other hand tucked in her armpit. “What about that one?”
“Eye-catching. Superfluous. Poor on icy roads,” said Lung.
“You’re no fuckin’ fun,” grumbled Bakuda, returning to her natural spot next to Paige.
The three of them sat on the rest area picnic bench. Lung was still bare-armed, unbothered by the cold. Paige was dressed warmly, with the hood of her jacket up and pulled tight to hide her hair, wrapped up with Bakuda in a big blanket they had nabbed from a camping van.
“Whatever one won’t take too much damage when you blow the lock,” said Paige, trying to go for encouraging and missing the mark.
“Who do you think I am, birdy? You think I can’t be subtle? I can break into any car without leaving a dent.”
“I know you can,” she said. “You will. You broke us out, after all.” She knew Bakuda liked it when she brought it up, could feel her satisfaction at being reminded of the successful escape. She hummed under her breath, and Bakuda seemed to relax, leaning into her side, a bit sourly to call it cuddling.
Another car pulled into the rest stop parking lot, and this time Lung nodded his approval of the vehicle. They waited for the driver to go into the restroom, and then Bakuda sprang up from the table, covering Paige in extra blanket. She pulled two small discs out of her pocket, tossed them like dice in the palm of her hand, and swaggered over to the car. The two of them followed behind as she stuck them on the hinges, and with a small (and impressively subtle) puff, the door swung loosely open.
“I’m driving.”
“Don’t even think about it,” said Lung, manhandling her over to the passenger side.
“You blind motherfucker, why do you always get—”
“Let Lung drive.” Paige climbed in the backseat. Ten in the morning and she was already dead-tired. “And buckle your seatbelts.”
Bakuda gave her a spiteful glare but followed her command, getting into the passenger seat. Lung did not seem particularly grateful that she had taken his side, clearly thinking he’d had it handled. After so much time spent with the two of them, much of the initial terror had faded into a more familiar exasperation: would it kill them to just get along for once?
Lung looked at Bakuda and said, “You’ll pay for that mouth of yours.” As credible as his threats might have been, reaching for his seatbelt at the same time somewhat ruined the effect.
Bakuda cracked her neck. “White girl’s keeping me safe.”
Then she rooted around in the center console and fished out a CD, turning to show it to her tauntingly. Great—a fan. Because the driver had kept it, the Bad Canary record, even with the notoriety that now overshadowed her music. She really didn't want to reapply her power to her own songs. Not anymore. She considered commanding her to put the CD back, but some confusing combination of feelings held her tongue: conflicted nostalgia for her crashed and burned career, guilt for mastering Bakuda more than necessary with the driving argument, and a bizarre sense of… protectiveness. She was, in a messed up way, responsible for the murderous Tinker now. She had brought her into another cage, a cage of her own, one where only she held the key.
As the first too-familiar track began to play, Bakuda smiled cattily, and Paige flushed in annoyance and embarrassment and nothing else.
~ ~ ~
This was a beyond insane operation. Paige was well aware of it.
The whole country was probably on a manhunt for them. Lung could kill her with a flick of his fingers. Bakuda was… an honest-to-god psycho, a living, ticking time bomb. But if they turned themselves in, it'd be right back to the max-security prison with the world’s deadliest supervillains. After she had seen firsthand how even villains destined for the Birdcage could escape, her faith in the heroes was at an all-time low. If she dropped them off at some Guild base and booked it, who’s to say they wouldn’t escape again and come after her for everything she’d done?
After the first few days of constant effort, calming them down again and again as they continued to struggle, finally she commanded, her voice raw and spent, “Tell me what would need to happen for you to just forget about me even after my power wears off. To leave me alone.”
And Lung had said, the words forced from him, “Get us to Brockton Bay. Do that, and I will consider repaying you by letting you go free, and ensuring the girl does the same.” It wasn't a promise, but it was better than nothing.
The trip was sinuous and slow going, especially without resorting to the simple idea of solving every problem with instant violence, an instinct which came so naturally for her two… captives? Captors? Conspirators?
It wasn’t just the broken car from yesterday. They’d had to make frequent stops, take backroads, avoid the TCH and any other populated areas. They'd stopped a couple times just to briefly admire the sights of placid blue lakes and sweeping mountains. And there'd been one or two run-ins with the police, where she'd used her power to escape. But her power, as always, wore off, and three, four hours later, they’d report what had happened. She had felt the roar of indignance within Lung. He’d wanted to kill them. Instead the three of them ran away, changed vehicles, disguises, directions.
The scariest part of it all was that, as the weeks went by and they approached the other side of the country, she was, in her own fucked up, desperate way, growing attached to the two of them. Becoming part of this, part of their little unit. In order to control Lung, she’d had to understand him. She could see it in him, the way he reached for his anger in an attempt to overwhelm her calm.
But when he wasn’t fighting her, he was, in this part-alliance, part-mutual hostage situation of theirs, a strangely reliable presence. Paige remembered the incongruous scene, earlier that week, of him squatting on the road, which had been rocky and poorly maintained, grunting as he tightened the lug bolts of the spare tire with his bare fingers.
Bakuda, in sharp contrast, was frighteningly suggestible, so very easy to control. After Paige had figured out what worked, she responded to all of her commands promptly and without complaint. Once or twice, she had even caught herself thinking of the girl as hers, or worse, as part of her, so closely intertwined as to be a second body under Paige’s mind.
Realizing that, when she was confident that the two of them could remain under her control as long as she needed it, she had loosened her hold; allowed them to speak their minds, regain their selves. Evil and heartless as they were, she tried never to force them to do something they would truly hate. And that must have the first seed, that slackening of the rope, that kernel which had been allowed, dubiously, to grow into…
“Thank you. You’re doing very good.” Carefully—she had to be oh-so careful with her words now, always—she said, “If it’s alright with you, do the same to the other foot, too.”
Bakuda, cross-legged and rosy-cheeked, looked up at her heatedly from the floor, but did not protest. And she started to massage Paige's left foot, kneading the cramping arch with calloused fingers, thin but strong, wiry with a Tinker’s delicate but steady grace.
In the company of monsters, she had tried her best not to become one herself.
But perhaps, Paige thought, remembering what it was that she had gotten Birdcaged for in the first place—perhaps it was already too late?
~ ~ ~
“And you know, regular bombs, they’ve all got this sparkly stuff that only the cops can see. Sounds crazy, but I’m being for fuckin’ serious. Microtaggant particles, look it up. If you use them illegally, it gets all over your hands, all over the explosion site, they take one look at it under their fancy forensic microscope and it tells them where you got it, when it was made, so regular bombs would never fly. Luckily, we don’t have to deal with any of that. In-house, baby.”
We? thought Paige, to herself. Yes, I suppose it is.
“Pretty and smart… you really do know everything,” she murmured. Bakuda scoffed, lips curling up in a glow. Paige pretended that she hadn’t grown to enjoy seeing Bakuda’s reactions, that they didn’t make her feel pleased and reassured of her control, telling herself it was only to make her more cooperative when the next alarm went off.
She tried to remember that the girl had held an entire city hostage, sewed bombs into heads, killed dozens without a second thought. It was in one way impossible, and in another, all too easy to imagine.
“Give me the cooler,” said Paige, humming as she checked the water. Bakuda, without looking up from the firepit, picked up the cooler by the handle and moved it over to the other side of the bench. Paige opened it. Inside was a large package of four defrosted mackerels (for Lung), hot dogs and hot dog buns (the best camping food), and some soft white tofu (Bakuda, of all people, was vegetarian), all "liberated" from the grocery store.
The other girl was squatting by the bench, staring, entranced, into the open flame, the light of it flickering off of her glasses. It seemed almost to pour out, inexhaustibly, as if by magic, from a bomb that she’d lit at the center of the firepit, the shell of it cracked open in two like an egg.
“Here. Screw the grill plate into the pole.”
Bakuda complied, clamping it on. One by one, Paige set the mackerel on it, and then after a few minutes, the hot dogs. The water in the cooking pot began to boil. Bakuda fished soup base and seaweed out of her bag, as well as several pouches of ready-rice, which she tossed wholesale in the pot.
The third member of their group had been set to cleaning the shower of the hunting cabin, deserted for months for the off-season. Once the food was ready—the heaping pile of fish for Lung, soup for Bakuda, hot dogs for her—she called for him, and Lung emerged, broad-shouldered, through the door of the cabin.
“Soup?” offered Bakuda. “Come on, birdy, try it.”
Paige wrinkled her nose at the sight of the seaweed but nodded. Bakuda fed her a spoonful, tipping it into her mouth.
“It’s good,” she said, diplomatically, and handed over a paper plate with a hot dog in return.
Bakuda ate with a dour expression on her face. “Blech. Fuckin’ instant rice. Could really go for some real rice—”
“Don’t complain about your food,” rumbled Lung, already half done with his meal.
“Great. Just great. Camping in the middle of Shithole, Canada with two people telling me what to do, every day, do this, do that—”
“Be good and eat your soup, Bakuda,” she murmured.
Bakuda shut up and ate her soup.
Later, she had Bakuda help her with cleaning the cooking area, while Lung went back in the cabin. “Why do I always have to be the one to help you?” she said, her voice nearly a whine.
Paige hummed—one of her own songs, stuck in her head unwillingly. “You’re better company,” she admitted.
And Bakuda had no response to that.
~ ~ ~
The long, warm shower had been heaven, and Paige fell into a deep, comfortable, and much-needed sleep.
The 2AM alarm rang, and she reluctantly opened her eyes. She realized instantly, by the position of her body, that she was sitting in a chair. Why was she sitting in a chair? Had she fallen asleep like that? She reached to rub the sleep out of her eyes. Her hand didn’t move. Behind her back, she felt the sensation of rope tugging against her wrist. She looked down. She was covered in a mess of metal parts and wires. She looked up.
Bakuda laughed. “Well, little birdy, I think we can say you weren’t expecting that, were you?”