With Great Power Comes Great Fear of Hurting People With That Power

*Camelot Park, April 7, 2020*

With a sudden influx of people into her small apartment, Atlanta was taking every opportunity to get out. And with so many things surrounding Reaper One happening in the last week, it was time to tell Ernest what she knew.

She desperately hopes he takes it well.

Armed with a bag of marshmallows, she sits on a bench and waits for Ernest. In her rush, she’d gotten there well before the time they’d arranged to meet, so she’s leaning back and staring at the sky. She’s holding the coin that Boon had given her for Valentine’s Day, rubbing the ridges to try and ease her anxiety. The hoodie she’s wearing today has the Halcyon United Roller Team logo on it. It’s one of Boon’s that she’s stolen, and it’s comically large on her.

Ernest strolls through the park, headphones filling his ears with music and his sight with wavy blue cubes. He keeps dispersing the threads of clouds that start gathering around him, refusing to let them coalesce into a storm. Atlanta had promised she’d tell him the important things, but she might change her mind if he freaked out whenever she did. This time, he would try to be more reasonable.

Besides, she’d said it wasn’t all bad news. Maybe everything was perfectly fine.

When he spots Atlanta, he pulls his headphones down around his neck and waves. “Hey, Atlanta! What’s up?” he says as he makes his way over to the bench and sits next to her.

Atlanta jumps when Ernest calls her name and nearly drops her coin, but catches it. “Oh. Hey, Ernest. Sorry, I was in my own head there. It’s uh, been a time.” Glancing around at the other park-goers, Atlanta stands with her coin in one hand and her backpack in the other. “Do you wanna walk? I don’t wanna be overheard.”

“Oh, sure.” Ernest stands again, waiting with his hands tucked into his jacket pockets for Atlanta to lead the way. “So, what did you want to talk about?”

Atlanta fumbles with her bag and holds out the bag of marshmallows awkwardly for a moment before speaking. “I brought marshmallows.”

Ernest takes the marshmallows, holding the bag in mild confusion. “Is this–“ He also looks around to see if anyone around is paying particularly close attention to them, and lowers his voice. “Is this supposed to be a code word thing?”

"Oh. Uh, it wasn't supposed to be. Since the code word is a sign not a present...Should I do that, too? This is just…parts of this are gonna be hard to hear so I brought marshmallows to make it better? That's stupid isn't it. I'm sorry." Atlanta shoulders her backpack and pulls the sleeves of Boon’s hoodie down over her hands.

“Okay, I was trying not to be worried about all this, but you aren’t exactly making it easy.” Ernest fidgets with the headphones around his neck and begins walking towards an emptier area of the park. “So do you want to give the good news or the bad news first? I’d say start with the bad but you probably have a better idea about what order makes more sense.”

"Sorry. It's kinda all mixed together… the good and the bad news, I mean. I guess, to begin, a piece of good news is that my mom and her parent were trapped in Reaper One's Pockets, but we got them out and they're both fine. The bad news about that is that there are now five people and one bathroom in my apartment." Atlanta grins, since that's mostly a joke. But that's still a bad people to bathroom ratio.

“You went into Reaper One’s Pockets?“ A loud crack of thunder echoes overhead and people turn to look in their direction. Ernest tries to ignore the attention and keep moving, speaking in a hushed whisper. “Are you okay? I mean, I guess you’re okay, at least, you’re here and not trapped in the past or whatever. But there were still people stuck there? Including your mom? I’m pretty sure she wasn’t around in 1955.”

Atlanta grimaces. “Sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have led with that. But yeah. We’re okay. There are some Aquilonians still stuck there, but they seemed to be working with Reaper One. But we got Hero One and my mom out.” Atlanta bites her lip, realizing that once again she’d dropped some big information. “So uh, Hero One and Reaper One aren’t connected anymore. And my mom went in a few years ago to get them out. Because Hero One is my grandparent, apparently. And my mom is a hero, her hero name is Daybreak. Anyway, she got caught and got stuck there. Which is where she’s been this whole time…” Atlanta trails off, conflicting emotions clear on her face. On the one hand, she’s glad to have her mom back. On the other, knowing she had been trapped and lost four years was...a lot.

“Hero One is still alive? And you’re related? I guess that explains why your powers seemed so similar. But if they’re not being possessed anymore, that reaper could be anywhere…” The formerly clear sky begins clouding over, and other park goers begin glancing up in concern. “I’m sorry that your mom got stuck there too.” Ernest stops in his tracks as a realization hits him. “This is all my fault. I mean, I knew that about Hero One already, but I didn’t know that they were your grandparent, or that your mom…” He looks to Atlanta, guilt evident across his face as rain begins to fall.

Concerned, Atlanta reaches up to put her hands on Ernest's shoulders. "Hey, it's not your fault, Ernest. There's no way you could have known." *This isn't even the worst part…how is he going to react when he finds out about what Conmoro told me?* "This isn't all of it, but we can talk another time if you want to process all of this first. I promise it's not your fault, Ernest." She smiles reassuringly up at him, ignoring the rain.

Ernest flinches back from the contact, a low roll of thunder echoing overhead. “It is,” he insists, shaking his head. “If I hadn’t told Hero One to absorb my storm, then none of this would have happened. Or at least it wouldn’t have been as bad. They probably hate me. And they’d be right too. This whole time I’ve blamed their powers and been scared of yours, but mine were what caused everything to fall apart in the first place.”

Atlanta withdraws her hands and holds them up to give Ernest space. "That Reaper corrupts everything it comes in contact with, Ernest. Your powers aren't the problem. Reaper One corrupted a lot of powers, and a lot of people. There's a whole wing of bookshelves in the Consortium library of magic users who have fallen victim to them, and who knows how many others there are. You're not the problem here. The fact that you haven't gotten corrupted proves that." She says all this quietly, but with conviction. "I'm sorry to throw all this at you, but I don't want to hide it from you."

“How do you know that’s true?” Ernest’s voice is loud enough to draw the attention of a few passersby, but most of them are too busy rushing for the cover of nearby gazebos to pay the conversation much attention. “I keep having those nightmares, and they’ve been getting worse. What if that means they’re in my head or something?” He presses his wrists to his temples as hail begins to fall. “And even if they aren’t, they wouldn’t be the only one I gave my powers to and let them do awful things. Because I didn’t learn my lesson the first time.”

Atlanta flinches as she gets hit by hail. She wants to step closer, but is very aware of Ernest's feelings about her own powers and how he just pulled away. "I know because I've met you, Ernest. No part of you is evil! And because I've spent a long time being ashamed of having powers. And now I have these Pockets that have corrupted every other person who has been exposed to them except for my grandparent, and you know what? They're not going to corrupt me. That's what I choose. I won't let them. And if your contact with Reaper One was going to corrupt you, wouldn't it have happened by now? It's been months. We've all made mistakes and hurt people, but that doesn't make us or our powers evil, Ernest. I’m sorry you’ve been having nightmares, but that’s all they are. You’re NOT bad.”

Ernest sits heavily on the ground, still clutching his head. “Maybe you can decide that your Pockets aren’t evil. I thought I could use my powers to protect people, but I end up causing more problems than I solve. And every time I find out about Reaper One or Bishop or Dez hurting people with my powers, it feels like part of me is doing it. I just want it all to stop!” Hail and rain seem to hang in midair for a moment before tumbling to the ground. The sun shines through the oddly still air, no sign of the heavy clouds that obscured it seconds ago.

Atlanta covers her head as the last of the hail falls. When it's done, she carefully sits next to Ernest and reaches out to squeeze his shoulder. "I'm sorry that's how it feels right now, but you do a lot of good, Ernest. Do you want to talk about it? About Bishop? Or Dez? How are they using your powers? I don't know if I can help, but I can listen."

Ernest doesn’t visibly react to the contact, staring straight ahead, but he doesn’t pull away this time. When he speaks, his voice is nearly a monotone, as if reciting a passage from a textbook. “Back in December, my dad convinced me to help him research my powers. He was working for Bishop at the time. And I didn’t bother to look into anything about what Bishop was like as a company, even though I should have realized my dad might have ended up somewhere shady given that the first person I saw him talking to in Halcyon was Yamato–“

A hint of frustration bleeds into his voice for the last few words, and wind starts to whip past his shoulder. He pauses to take a deep breath, and then continues on in the same flat tone as before. “He had me charge up a battery with lightning that I generated. I didn’t want to continue doing the experiments after that, but Bishop kept the battery. The next time I saw it, or thought I saw it, was with this woman Dez, who had it in some kind of suit that let her control my lightning. She’s working with HELIX, trying to kidnap the kids they experimented on to give powers. But then when we fought Bishop up on those skyscrapers, I realized that those huge batteries they used to charge up the dimensional knife were full of my lightning. So they must have figured out a way to make more, and now they’re using it to do all kinds of terrible things. And I can’t stop them.” There’s no anger or despair to the last point, just a simple statement of fact.

The concern on Atlanta's face grows as she listens. When Ernest finishes, she squeezes his shoulder again. Quietly, she says, "First of all, Ernest, bad things that others do aren't your fault. It doesn't matter if they couldn't have happened without your help. It's still not your fault. Second, whatever Bishop is doing, you're wrong if you think that we can't stop them as soon as we have the chance. We saved Boon from a demon. The team saved Casper from something worse. We can get stuff out of some Bishop lab. Or from some HELIX lackey." Atlanta smiles reassuringly. "Third, can I give you a hug?"

“I just… I can’t keep making the same mistake over and over. Even if it’s not totally my fault, the truth is that if my powers weren’t involved, we wouldn’t have so much of a mess to clean up. I have to make sure that no one uses them anymore.” Ernest sighs. “Sorry about freaking out like that,” he says, gesturing to the cleared sky. “It won’t happen again. And sure, a hug would be fine.”

Unsure how to make her friend actually feel better, she scoots closer and gives him a hug. “It’s okay. I’ve definitely never made the same mistake over and over.” Atlanta pulls away and grins at her own expense. “I’m sorry for throwing so much at you at once. There’s--well, we can talk about what Conmoro told me later.” Atlanta rests her hand on Ernest’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”

Ernest leans into the hug but doesn’t quite return it. “I’m fine.” He feels bad about lying to Atlanta, but it’s more for his own sake than wanting to hide anything from her. If he admits how awful he’s feeling, he might start crying, and then it would probably rain and he is done with that. “You might as well tell me now. I’d rather know what’s going on,” he says quietly.

Atlanta pulls back and pulls one knee up to wrap her arms around. “Okay. So in the Consortium library, every bookshelf in the wing Whisper and I went to had been a person who was nearby – magically, or metaphysically or something – when Reaper One did their Pockets thing, and it corrupted all of them. Then later when I talked to Conmoro about it, they told me that no one else has Pockets like the three of us do. There are similar things that magic can do, but not Pockets like ours. One theory is that Reaper One corrupted the pocket dimension, and thus will corrupt everyone who can tap into it. Or maybe just the power itself is corrupting. The Consortium still has a task force that looks for people showing signs of having Pockets, because it’s just that dangerous.” Atlanta takes a deep breath to stave off tears. “I uh, didn’t ask what they’d do if they found someone who had it. And I don’t know if they know that Hero One is back now. I don’t know what they’d do if they found either of us. But that’s it. That’s what I wanted you to know. That you’re probably right. About me and this power.”

Ernest can feel a dark panic rising up again, the kind that he felt when Verve first showed him her Pocket powers, and when the clock landed on 1955 in the Dataverse, and every time the same set of dark flowing robes appears in his dreams. His hair starts to stand on end as static builds in the atmosphere, but before so much as a crackle of lightning can form, he forces the fear back down. The air returns to its artificial stillness. “I wish that I wasn’t. Maybe the Consortium knows some way to help? I really don’t understand all their magic stuff, but Conmoro didn’t really mind me blowing up a wing of their library. They have to be used to that kind of danger.” He begins picking at the grass next to him, shredding the blades between his fingernails. “I know that you really didn’t like the idea before, but it might be safer if you don’t use the Pockets as much? I’m going to try not to use my weather powers anymore. That way no one like that reaper or Bishop or Dez can get their hands on them again. And as a bonus, you won’t have to worry about getting hailed on anymore.” He gives Atlanta a strained smile.

Atlanta shakes her head. “I’ve been down the path of not using my powers. It doesn’t lead anywhere good, Ernest. You can’t bottle them up or keep them down for long. It doesn’t work like that. So I’m going to keep using mine, just carefully. And for the record, I think you not using your powers is a phenomenally bad idea. I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think it’s going to help you.” She tucks a curl behind her ear and looks out over the park, where other people are tentatively venturing out from their hiding places. “As for Conmoro...I trust them, but I don’t know if they’d risk letting me be out and free. The Consortium seems really concerned about Pockets. I don’t think they’d just put me in a bookshelf...probably...but I’m sure there are other places the Consortium could lock me away. And I know these sound like my typical excuses to keep secrets, but...not everyone in the Consortium can be as nice as they are, you know? This way they won’t have to choose between their loyalties and some random teenager they just met. I don’t know them well enough to ask that.”

“That’s true, I’ve met a few jerks on the Consortium too. Probably better not to tell them until you have a better idea about what they want to do about the Pockets.” Ernest holds one of the hailstones from the ground in his palm, letting it melt from the heat of his hand. “I wish I had a better idea for me or you than not using our powers. But I don’t know what else to do and I need to feel like I’m doing something to stop more horrible things from happening because of me.”

Atlanta pulls up her other knee and rests her chin on it. This whole conversation hadn’t gone quite as planned, and she doesn’t know how to fix it. “I’m sorry that all of this is so convoluted and shitty. I wish I could help or make things better, but it seems like I only make things worse for you.”

“Sorry that I always end up reacting so badly when we talk about this stuff. It’s not like you made any of this bad stuff happen. It was already going on, we just know about it now, which is better than not knowing. Everything you’ve actually done has been amazing. I mean, you saved Hero One and your mom from that reaper’s Pockets. I wouldn’t have believed that was possible before.” Ernest finds the bag that he’d dropped at some point during the brief storm. The marshmallows are somewhat squashed, but the plastic kept the rain from getting at them. He tears the bag open, pops a handful of marshmallows into his mouth, and holds it out to Atlanta. “I know you don’t like them as much as me, but do you want some marshmallows?”

“I could say the same things about Bishop and Dez, you know. But yeah, I’d love some marshmallows.” Atlanta picks a few out of the bag and pops one into her mouth. She looks down at her slightly muddy hoodie. “I’m gonna have to wash this before I give it back to Boon, huh?”

The two sit there in the grass, talking about much more mundane things like dates and school, until they finish off the bag.