Jean-Paul triggers first. He’s the youngest, but also the most vulnerable of them. Does he trigger first because he needs the power to survive the worst day of his life– what would otherwise break him– or does he trigger because without the others he will not survive his life?
A power helps. Jean-Paul becomes Hijack becomes valued. It improves his quality of life in some ways, but only serves to underscore his powerlessness in so many others.
More importantly, Jean-Paul triggers, and in the palm of his hand is a gemstone so large his fingers barely close around it, pink like what he will later realize is akin to pink saphire, and alight with a living, moving flame within. He clutches it in his hand throughout his trigger event and finds sobbing refuge in four other souls that he can barely reach.
He gets the sense that they’re sleeping.
It reminds him of being very, very young; his haziest of memories, from before Father was more than a frown on mother’s lips, and the nights were scary but days were soft, gossamer things, warm with his mother’s sleeping breaths beside him. She would sleep next to him, and though he was not really safe or protected, he felt both, and never alone in those moments.
The others are sleeping inside him, and though they are yet to wake, Jean-Paul is not alone.
During his breaking point, he has somewhere to reach out, somewhere for his mind to retreat against the darkness, and strong blue light flows over him, concerned. Something yellow brushes curiously against him, and a flash of light is righteous-indignant-appalled, but not at him. It’s a shield around his thoughts, dulling the sensations of his body just a little bit further.
More distant still, and rumbling deep, red spills through the cracks. It flows slow as magma through the gestalt, running through each color like a chain through four charms; binding, connecting.
Jean-Paul survives his trigger. Eventually, he cleans up and even shakily manages to stand. Then he gives up and crawls to the shower and spends several comotose hours under the hot water, staring at colors behind his eyes, pink pulsing dull under a rainbow of other lights.
He is not alone.
He survives.
–
One by one they come into focus.
At age eleven, the first light shimmers into place, hurt and pulsing SOS. It wakes me from a dead sleep, disturbing Emma next to me. She coos and pats me, still half-asleep, as I do the same for the pink light. Echos of the others appear– blue, yellow, white– but only the pink stays, slotting into the back of my brain like it’s always been there.
Pink fills my life in new and surprising ways. I find myself picking it out in stores, eyes lingering on spring flowers, waking up early to see the dawn. On those days, it feels like pink is there, fingers brushing mine, watching the sunrise with me.
My twelfth birthday passes and I have pink candles on the cake. Dad is delighted. Mom talks me into a few dresses and skirts, all the while enforcing a fiercely feminist message. I don’t have to dress like this, but there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m just as smart, capable and strong in a bow as a suit.
I don’t feel strong. I don’t like sports, and get out of breath easily, though I’m not asthmatic. Mom frowns thoughtfully and we start jogging in the mornings, the sunset alive– and pink– over the ocean behind us.
Just before my thirteenth birthday, blue flips online. One second it’s asleep, waiting in the inactive area of my brain I have no access to, and then a navy so deep it’s almost black floods everything.
Worse, it’s close. I’m inconsolable. Dad has no sick days, but mom has tenure, so she stays with me. I keep trying to get her to go with me somewhere, to take me, but while I can point to the exact direction I need to be, it doesn’t align with roads or sidewalks.
She bundles me up and takes me out anyway. We wander the streets for hours until it’s too dark to continue, me stumbling and slow due to the way pink and I are all but curled around blue.
He needs us. My hands clench empty, trying to reach out for something– a focus, a point of connection– but I have nothing and have to balance the stronger connection I get when I stay still and quiet and squeeze my eyes closed to concentrate, with the bone-deep urge to go, find, be.
Blue does not fade back into obscurity. It stays as vibrant as pink, if not more so. The sense of closeness is maddening.
After a week, mom makes me go back to school. I don’t fight her. I’m tired from the fight and blue’s light has lost some of its frenetic intensity.
I lose the burning certainty that if I just go in one very specific direction, I’ll find the source of the blue light. It settles into a more generic sense of proximity, of closer-than-pink, and part of me relaxes even as my awareness fades.
–
Hijack doesn’t kill a man.
His focus is not on proving himself, but guarding the blue light that burns like a twin sun to his own pink star. He can’t let anyone else suspect the connection; he does not know what precisely it is.
But it’s his, his alone, and he is not allowed to keep things, unless they are so very secret.
He focuses on becoming the most obscure sibling, without making it obvious that he’s holding back. Subtle, he fights to be subtle, like the veins of brilliant blue through the navy light. He doesn’t refuse every job; is merely conveniently otherwise occupied when they come.
When red, white and yellow fade back into obscurity, blue burns, and it becomes a dueting orbit, altering his path. Any time he relaxes, his chin turns to the south, eyes seeking something the rest of him knows is on the horizon.
He wasn’t in the right position to drop everything when blue slipped into crisis, complete with a direction to run. He’d wanted to– god, he had wanted to– leave everything and go, but he’d be followed. He had nothing prepared, no exit plan.
It doesn’t take long to make one.
Now that he knows it’s an option, he dedicates everything to two goals. First, to leave. Second, to not get caught.
He gets impressions from blue during the preparations, anger and frustration that mirrors his own, and more rarely– more precious– bits of amusement and satisfaction. He curls like a dragon around those emotions, wondering. He pokes and prods them, wants to eke them into real happiness, love, laughter, just to see what it’s like.
The emotions around him are so muted that the impressions he gets from the blue light are breathtakingly deep in comparison. Even muted– muted!– they are more vibrant than he’s felt in years, if ever.
Though he doesn’t recognize everything he feels from the connection, he’s willing to burn his life down for even a glimpse of it. He doesn’t know what blue feels from him, but he knows what he doesn’t want to send; what he refuses to send. [thought; he wants his light to be beautiful. Or maybe save this for an actual conversation]
He drops Hijack like he dropped Jean-Paul so many years ago, and slips out of the world he’s known in a new skin. He’s Alec and every step into the world is one of wonder, of interest, that he feeds along to blue– or tries to, anyway, who knows what makes it across. He feels curiosity and interest, at least, and assumes it’s working.
Alec doesn’t feel anger or disdain, greed or fury; he basks in the open interest in him! It’s the best kind of drug, more potent than any heroin done through a puppet’s body. He sinks into it eagerly, without restraint, searching out good things to feel– all so he finally has something nice to share. It creates a feedback loop that he never wants to give up.
–
He can’t go straight south-east from Montreal. He refuses to lead them straight there, if he’s followed.
Alec goes southwest instead, aiming for the large population centers of New York. He probably won’t make it as far as Manhatten– the detour is already hard enough– but he makes it more obvious he’s going that way.
He’s in Syracuse, stealing from the more wealthy mansions in the area, when yellow screams practically right on top of him. He is not in Montreal. He is not even being watched.
Alec drops everything and runs. Even so close, it’s not easy. Yellow is freaking the fuck out, but not online. About halfway there and rising, if he had to guess. Blue reaches out from further away for them both, and for the first time in his life Alec feels responsibility settle onto his shoulders.
Blue-tinged urgency carries him forward and Alec acts for both of them, slamming his way into a dark house covered in sweat and heaving. Yellow is there, in front of him, a writhing mess of horror and worry, and there is a body.
It’s still warm.
For the first time in his existence, Alec is thankful for his upbringing, for the things he knows and the things he can do. He takes half a second for brilliant green eyes to sear into his, for yellow to settle into the gestalt like she’s always been there, and swallows down the urge to touch her.
Alec pushes everything aside with the ease of long practice and doesn’t stop running, dropping to his knees in front of this important person, power already reaching out and demanding.
Yellow sees what he’s doing and there’s a rush of information, almost too much to parse. She sways and he doesn’t even have the room to catch her, not even with his power, because it’s all focused on the guy.
It takes time to learn a new puppet but Yellow knows him, sees basically everything, and feeds her every sense impression through the connection to Alec. It helps, makes it faster. Alec has never learned CPR amongst a house of hedonist killers but he knows the human body and knows the theory.
He starts compressions even as he slips his power into the blood, nerves, muscles. The body was warm, the lips just turning blue. Oxygen is forced through the system even as he works, arms burning, power mapping out a brand new network that he’s known his entire life.
Alec will not accept failure here, not for something– someone– that matters, and he snarls into the gestalt. Yellow flips fully online and the information flow doubles, tripples; red pulses like a beating heart, giving a rhythm, and under his working hands, the same organ stutters weakly.
White roars into fury, an echoing sonic attack that rings his ears and part of his mind like a struck bell, and little licks of pink flame erupt under his fingers. The body’s heartbeat catches, fighting back under his hands, and the body jerks.
Alec has not so much ‘lost track’ as never thought to count the number of mouths he’s felt on his, never anything to write home about, never anything that matters before; it takes no thought at all to press his lips to these blue ones and breathe.
They work more as five people than one, or two. Everything slips into concert and flows, like a machine using five parts, and Alec’s hands, Alec’s mouth.
Yellow who is Sarah who is his/theirs slides next to him as Reggie Lively gasps weak stuttered breaths and a little silver device comes out, quickly dialing 911.
You can’t be here, Yellow beats, still too fast, frantic. There’s a edge of control that’s leaching in and it feels right, solid, real. It feels like it will stay when the panic fades.
“You’re in danger. Running– away.” She says, once she’s passed off the directions and muted the phone. Reggie’s breaths are still shallow and they take turns filling his lungs, in a steady rhythm and without discussion.
Alec has never kept someone alive before. It’s a novel feeling. Adrenaline is so loud in him, almost drowning out the pulse of color. Almost, but never.
“Running toward.” He insists, tangling their fingers together, eyes electric blue and intense.
Her face softens and she nods, still half-triggered, half lost in the gestalt, the five-spaced, three-taken inset of his mind where their connections meet.
Alec picks a yellow gem off the floor and presses it into her empty hand, presses her hand to her chest between them, presses his lips to her hair even though she’s just as tall as him.
“I can’t leave you.” He says, and despite every effort his voice is still flat, hints of emotion barely even there, though his throat wants to croak around it all– but she is Yellow is Sarah is seeing him completely, seeing right through him, and only half of that is her power.
Sirens sound in the distance, getting closer; this is the kind of neighborhood where response times are fast.
Her fingers clutch at his wrists until it almost hurts and she is disheveled and he wants to– has never wanted to before, but–
Sarah yanks him close by the t-shirt collar, kisses him, and then pushes him away in one breath: “Go!”
“Well now I don’t want to,” Alec says, blinking, but she shoves him again and he can’t be here so he picks up a gloriously pink gemstone and slips it into his pocket, grinning.
“Should I hide in your bedroom, then?” He jokes but she’s already pressing two fingers against Reggie’s throat, feeling the thready tremor of his pulse, and he slips out the house through the broken door, taking a moment to make it look good. Emergency services will likely boot it down anyway, they can take the blame.
He breaks into a neighboring mansion’s guest house, that looks like it hasn’t been used in months if not years, but cleaned regularly, and feels right at home in the splendor.
Alec throws himself back onto a comfy-enough sofa and closes his eyes. He sends tentative-reassurance-hope to Blue and curosity-satisfaction-eagerness to Red and thanks-awe-impressed to White, but the latter two are already fading into the background with the crisis handled. Not quite into sleep, but neither are they as Yellow was, half-triggered and yawning wider open still as he intervened.
Blue stays with him, as always, and it pulses louder and clearer with Yellow there now, not-quite-words but more than single strong emotions. Concepts and sensations, almost; yes, that’s it.
You-did-good and warm-mine-want make him shiver against the cushions, wallowing in it. Yellow grows slight distant but he knows her, knows Sarah, and so he can feel directly where she is from him in a way he can’t with Blue.
He doesn’t freak out when she hits the other side of the city, merely settles in to wait, probing carefully at the Yellow in his brain every so often so she doesn’t forget him.
Mine-surprise-longing, she sends. Wait-mine-soon. There are edges of other feelings, not directed at him. Grief-relief-guilt. Irritation-fury-disdain.
That last has him wanting to jump off the couch and find her– he knows he could find her– and he has to sit on his hands. It’s too dangerous. He’s dangerous, less a loaded gun right now and more a radioactive hunk of plutonium, and he can’t risk them being seen together.
A single picture or security camera frame of them together would paint a target on her back and he’ll be damned first.
Hesitating, he tries to find something to send. The connection seems precious and new and fragile– but she’s not. And the gestalt is embedded deep for all its newness, as real as the earth beneath his feet.
Alec says ‘fuck it’ and bundles up all he’s really feeling, hoping it comes across as ‘want me to kill someone for you‘ and then puts the devotion away before he hurts himself, smothered under a mask of irritation– at everything.
Amusement-denial-fondness from Yellow. A pulse of mine-fractured-ours, which makes his breath catch. He pulls Blue into the link by habit and is met with suprise-wonder-mine-mine-mine that comes from all three of them until it vibrates the mental space between the colors.
Alec wants to poke Red and White, too, but Yellow shooes him away from that direction and directly into Blue’s fond-amused-exasperated light, and follows it up with a complicated pulse of feelings– tinged with her own frustration for how imprecise this method of communication is– that basically spell out “For them to be here they’d have to trigger, idiot.”
He droops.
Alec plays around with the links for a little bit, sending back and forth, figuring out what he can do with one or both of them. It’s intriguing, satisfying on a bone-deep level, the kind of toy he can play with for literal hours. And he does. Not least because it’s a distraction for Sarah, who is starting to feel ragged with exhaustion and spent emotion– not something she sends, but a general impression of her light itself, and realizing that lets him zero in on Blue, too, who’s sending amusement-fondness but feels… haggard.
Intolerable.
He’s dozing off into the couch, plotting ways to make it better, when she slips in.
Alec can’t even stir before the door is thudding quietly back into place and yellow is all around him, on him, inside him. Sarah settles against him, under his arm like she wants to burrow under his skin and Alec presses his chin onto her head thinking it’s the strangest thing he’s ever felt in his life, and also that he never wants it to end.
She whispers that they can’t stay here– Reggie can’t stay here– and Alec doesn’t realize that his plans have been changing all night until he tells her, fragmented and slow, about East; about Blue.
Sarah nods. Then she presses closer and tells him Sarah is dead, and presses a new name– a new self– into his hands like a secret.
Alec whispers a dead name into her ear in return, watches her eyes widen, then soften. They kill Jean-Paul and Sarah and Reggie, too, for good measure.
Lisa pulls a spare cell-phone out of her bag and starts to program it for him.
–
Sidney Wilcott takes his neice to New York on vacation.