Rorschach

The first hint was blood. A thin, pointillism line of it on the back of his right shoulder blade. A tickle in the back of Prim’s mind, the uncomfortable dissonance of deja vu. She stopped in the middle of the office, staring at him, hunched over his desk, bright beads of life staining his simple blue dress shirt. It was the breadth of his shoulders, the shade of his dark hair, and that line of blood, in exactly the same place. She had seen that man before, that wound before, not in a shirt and slacks, but in skin tight kevlar. The moment was broken when he turned around, a familiar, amiable smile on his face. Just Percival “call me Trip” Windsor III, golden boy of Capital Cities best selling newspaper, The Daily Forecast. Just the guy who beat her out to the crime beat. Just the man whose desk faced hers. Prim smiled back. She kept walking. Tried to shake off the oddness of the moment. By the time she’d reached her desk chair it all seemed impossibly silly. Her reflection stared back at her from the dark monitor. A perfectly ordinary girl, with brown hair, and brown eyes, and pretty, if unremarkable, features. Trip peered over his screen at her, lopsided grin in place.

“Coffee?” He asked, in his sunny, Virginia tinged way, all long vowels and easy friendship. He was Trip, and she was Primrose, and no one was anyone they weren’t meant to be.

“Please.” She replied, forcing the last of the strange sensation away. As he stood to go she caught sight of the blood again.

“Trip?” she called, he turned back, glancing over his shoulder at her, “you have blood on your shirt.”

The second time it happened she wasn’t Primrose Bryant. She was Sorceress, protector of the weak, superpowered hero. She wasn’t a brunette with brown eyes, she was herself, unglamoured, uncharmed. Eyes a burning, livid cyan. Indigo tresses matted with the sweat and dirt of combat. There was blood this time too. Hers. She’d taken a bullet for him. Quite literally flown in the face of danger. Her uniform was slick with blood, the scale-like second skin tattered and scorched where the round had penetrated her shoulder. Grey Knight raced ahead of them, shouting for Brilliance as he ran. Her body couldn’t heal with the bullet lodged in her clavicle. You could say a lot for the strength of alien bones, but the rarity of a through and through was not on the list. FrostBlade held her upright, helped her hobble into the base. It was, rather distressingly, a perfectly ordinary kind of night for them.

Sorceress grit her teeth as Brilliance dug the bullet from her shoulder. Another downside of her nature was how impossible she was to medicate. Metal scraped against the diamond structure of her bones, her muscle reforming almost as quickly as Brilliance sliced through it. Her blood ran thick and blue-black. In her own world that was normal. One Earth? Less so. Their loose family of heroes and aliens had found each other through Brilliance. In her first life, the one where she had been Dr Brianna Lancing, their resident medic had made a name for herself by saving the unsavable. Now she did the same thing, in very different ways. Neither of them had heard him come in. Sorceress couldn’t hear much of anything over the pounding of her heart in her ears. There had been two of them, and then there were three. Gray Knight was familiar in his uniform, the layers of silver and black kevlar, the patches of chainmail, the mask spreading like a rorschach across his eyes and cheekbones, obscuring any hard lines, any distinct features, even the featureless white screens over his eyes were comforting in their way. This night had been bad, but they were all still here. Sorceress took the bottle of whisky he offered her with her good hand.

“You’ve earned it.” He quipped, mouth tugging up on one side, into something that wasn’t quite a smile. Maybe it was the accent, the soft brush of Southern softness through gravel. Maybe it was that he had said those exact words to her a few days before, as he handed her a latte and a muffin. Maybe it was the exact curve of a mouth she had found herself, increasingly, interested in mapping with her tongue. Whatever it was didn’t matter, not really, it was the feeling. The same vertigo wave of before-ness, of been-there-done-that-ness, of knowing, in her crystalline, alien bones, that she knew this person twice over. And then he stood up, leaving her to her pain and whisky, and it was just Grey. Just her ally, colleague, and sometimes friend. Just a human vigilante whose hubris should have taken him out years ago.

The third time was also the last. They were in his apartment. A story half on each of their laptops, a pizza half-eaten between them, the TV droning softly at less than half volume. She was working up the courage to say something. His sleeves were rolled up, forearms tanned and veined and muscled in the best way. He had taken his contacts out, and now a pair of simple, silver framed glasses perched on his nose. Trip Windsor in all his finery. Studious, and kind. Sensible, but quick to laugh. Unbelievably hot, with his wide shoulders, and his rippling abs, and his tousled mess of dark hair. His eyes were a striking blue-grey. His mouth an inviting crescent of amusement. She wanted him in a way that felt hazardous to her continued employment, and inevitable in its completeness. Primrose Bryant, gossip columnist turned finally, finally, crime beat reporter, let her anxiety wash over her and take with it her hesitation.

“Trip-” they were cut off by the cacophony of a disaster. He was on his feet in moments, face to the glass.

“Explosion. 5th and Hex, I think.” Prim scrambled to join him, eyes locked on the iridescent flames a few blocks over.

“That isn’t normal fire.” She murmured. On her hip, hidden by the fall of her blouse, her pager trilled. It was louder than usual, and the chimes seemed to echo strangely. Beside her, Trip pulled an identical device from his pocket. There are moments in life, pivotal, world altering, hugely mundane moments, when you can feel the very Earth shift beneath your feet.

“I uh,” he waved the little box at her, too fast for her to read the screen, “family emergency. I’m sorry, we can-”

“Not a problem.” Prim replied, packing and leaving as quickly as possible. When she checked her own pager she knew what she’d find. A short message, ‘S +GK.5th x Hex.ASAP.’ It all came together then, the deja vu, the oddness of it all, the familiarity, even, perhaps, the ease with which she had come to trust him in both forms, her mind unwittingly connecting the two, the way they moved, the things they said. Two men. One man. Trip Windsor, Percival Windsor III, was Grey Knight.

There was no fourth time. There was inviting him to the beach, and noticing the scar over his ribs. Knowing it had come from a knife fight, knowing exactly who had left it there. There was handing Grey a bottle of raspberry vitamin water, because it's what Trip drank at work. There was showing up to his house without her eyes spelled, and hoping he would mention it. There was Grey whispering ‘aren’t you on deadline?’ in her ear when he came across her on patrol. There was knowing, and there was not saying it out loud. Finally, eventually, there were the words don’t you dare die on me, Windsor hissed over the slumped form of a superhero. Finally, eventually there was a kiss. And it was them. All of them. Prim, and Grey, and Sorceress, and Trip. There was a kiss in a sick bay, where a man who spent his days writing newspaper articles, and his nights becoming them, admitted softly:

“I knew it was you,” that wonderful asymmetric smirk in place, “I’d know you anywhere.”