Lemon
> > Reverend Mike came to the point of his Sunday sermon with an emphatic gesture. "But what can *I* do?" he said, his booming voice bringing Noel Aquino briefly out of his troubled reverie. The words echoed in Noel's brain.
What can *I* do?
That question had gotten him into this mess. Always trying to be the good Christian, Noel Aquino had stepped forward and offered his hand to a girl in trouble.
Now he was trapped. Now he had a different question to ponder:
What can I *do*?
The answer seemed obvious. He could do what he should have done three weeks ago -- get the temptress out of his house and into the hands of someone who could handle her. His church was full of kind-hearted people, always willing to help each other or take in a wayward soul. A half-dozen of them had already offered their help in private, including the Robinsons sitting just a few feet away. Had he taken them up on their offer to shelter the poor girl in his stead, it would have quelled the whispers now traded by some of the more judgemental of the congregation. And the firm hand the Robinsons showed with their daughter Becky may have provided better guidance for Angela than Noel had managed. Indeed, Noel feared Angela was more lost now than she'd been three weeks ago, falling back into choices that were noble but misguided and dangerous. The same choices that had caused her so much strife in the first place.
It was the destructive potential of the attention those choices could bring that forced Noel's hand.
True, it seemed that Angela Barrett was no longer being hunted by those who would either use her gift or take it from her. But the great speed with which the Labor Day incident had been swept under the rug, the great serious effort expended to explain away impossible events, with hardly a dissenting voice or follow-up inquiry by anyone, was to Noel Aquino's instincts merely an indication of even greater trouble to come. Angela's gift was such that even if she never wielded it again, even if everyone believed that the phenomenon known as Sapphire was destroyed, it was too strange and too fantastic for the last words to have been written.
Noel thought with a gallows-humor smile that Angela was like a bad car -- a lemon. Maybe you didn't want a former superheroine living in your house, but you couldn't in good conscience send her to live with someone else.
Superheroine. A word not used with a straight face outside the realm of comic book geekdom. But that's what Angela was. At least, that's what she'd been as Sapphire.
Sapphire was not directly sprung out of the comic book mold -- at least, not any comic book that could be sold to minors. She was far from an Amazon at only 5'4" flat-footed, maybe a buck five on the scale, and she lacked the impossibly-developed musculature and equally-impossibly-developed breasts of a stereotypical heroine. Neither did she outfit herself in brightly-colored spandex or black leather or imposing body armor. Always dressed in scandalously brief outfits of the most insubstantial fabrics, wearing a silver tiara and a sapphire on each wrist and foot -- gemstones so large they put royalty to shame -- and tiptoeing atop towering high heels, Sapphire looked more like an ad for boudoir photography than a comic book cover.
Never had he seen such a delicate charicature of a young woman.
Looks, however, can be deceiving.
Noel didn't understand all the ins and outs of Angela's gift, but according to tales of her exploits as Sapphire, she'd taken shotgun and small arms fire to the chest at point blank range, survived the bombing of her own house, dropped from the sky to dispense justice on common criminals using a powerful form of telekinesis, and used a forcefield to direct a massive bomb's explosion away from a building. And even if such stories could be discounted, explained away with bulletproof vests and wire harness work and shaped charges, Noel had seen with his own eyes as Sapphire, wearing only a tiny bikini panty, with no explosives or wires in sight, blasted a hole in a foot-thick concrete jail cell ceiling and then simply flew up through it. Well, she didn't fly so much as she seemed carried aloft by the slightest breeze, like some kind of storybook fairy come to life. A fairy who kicked ass.
Noel knew the sapphires she wore had something to do with her power. He didn't know if they'd work for just anyone, or if there was something special about Angela. He knew there had been another young woman with similar gemstones around her neck -- called the Black Widow for the string of murders she committed by literally fucking men to death. The Black Widow shared Sapphire's impenetrable skin and taste for outre outfits, but no one had ever seen her defy gravity or display any telekinetic ability. In any case, the Black Widow was dead. Angela and her sapphires were, so far as he knew, unique.
Noel suspected that the skimpy costumes were also somehow required. As Sapphire, Angela's wardrobe bordered on the obscene, a collection of barely-there tops and skirts that went far beyond simple distraction. There had to be some purpose or prerequisite for such scandalous attire, some condition to her gift, because Angela was far from an exhibitionist. Though sometimes she dressed in the flirty and provocative style common to pretty girls her age, especially around the house, she was perpetually surprised by the reactions her body provoked, not to mention frequently unaware of the extent to which that body was exposed. Whenever such conditions were pointed out, she became immediately embarassed and ashamed. Such impossibly persistent innocence only added to her allure.
Noel also suspected a sexual element underlying her abilities, as if Sapphire somehow channeled the force of creation through her own libido, and occasionally either gained strength or lost control as the vagaries of her urges or desires dictated. Of course, this was not something Angela had ever talked about, and maybe was nothing more than Noel's own imagination run wild, but for whatever reason, reports of Sapphire's activities didn't always place her in full control of her generally-formidable faculties.
Noel brought himself back to the issue at hand. Whatever the source or nature of Angela's gift, Sapphire was retired.
Without anyone uttering a word on the subject, everyone in the Aquino household understood the fortunate hand they'd been dealt in the aftermath of a cruel summer. Despite the tragedies both personal and public, that chapter had been closed with much of their lives intact and unfettered. As far as anyone else knew, Sapphire had been destroyed saving the people in that assembly hall. There were no more government agents trying to kill them, no lunatics threatening the public safety -- at least, no more than usual -- and no international incidents destabilizing the globe. Noel tried not to let his imagination get the best of him, but it was difficult to frame reality in the face of what he had seen Angela do as Sapphire. There was silent agreement that Angela could not simply don her gear and go out into the night looking for trouble. Whether she could ever again use her gift at all was a question left for another day.
Alas, Noel feared that day was coming fast. And as he found his obsession more difficult to hide, as Angela became aware of something more in him than a caring father figure, and as she in her own confused way seemed to encourage his interest, Noel knew circumstances were pushing her out the door into a world she only knew how to face as Sapphire.