“It was just a prank, bro,” I state with not even an ounce of irony.

Lisa Wilbourn’s adherence to the metric system and subsequent lack of available ounces—

Hush. Don’t want us to get branded as heretics.

“A prank,” the woman on the other side of the wide, crystal desk littered with papers and notebooks reflective of what Einstein would praise as a very definitely cluttered table, says with a barely repressed sigh that hints at…

…

At…

…

Look, Power, I know we agreed it would be better if I didn’t use you to traumatize my mandated therapist, but really? Not even a hint?

…

Fine! I’ll do it by myself.

Lisa Wilbourn’s addiction to meme culture—

With a very dignified snort, I lean back on the sinfully comfortable leather chair and send it swaying back and forth, my right foot resting sideways on my thigh and my left digging into the lush, green carpet to make a very pointed, insolent statement consistent of oscillatory mechanics and excess of levity.

“Lisa…” Doctor Yamada says in what I definitely don’t need Power to realize is a futile attempt not to let it show that she’s trying not to pinch the bridge of her nose after more than an hour of infructuous, uncooperative, infuriating, futile therapy on one of the few parahumans who understands precisely how this is supposed to work.

That is: very much not like this.

“Look, Piggot stomped all over any written and unwritten rules of engagement, and I repaid her by fixing the goddamn mess of mingled parental roles and romantic attraction that she’d gotten herself into. I was her savior. So, yeah, I used dismantling her bike as a chance to bond with Dinah over a shared, lighthearted project. So what? I also set Piggot and Hannah on a path to heal after coaching Tagg, of all people, to get her away from the most dangerous bent of her Mengelian project. I saved that woman twice, thrice, if you count getting her fired and healed, so what’s a bit of vandalism compared to that?”

There. A perfectly rational summary of the events that led to me taking the choices I took. There’s nothing wrong with—

“You set her bike on fire,” Jessica points out, straightening up on her own sinful chair and contrasting my insolent, defiant posturing with perfectly professional poise as the white wall behind her sharply delineates the black leather surrounding her.

… She would make for a pretty convincing supervillain, you know? Not one of the masked, vaudeville kinds, but maybe an Accord-type letting you know what your choices and lack thereof are.

“I mean… What’s a little arson between friends?” I offer with a not-at-all nervous grin.

“Apparently, quite a lot,” she counters.

“Well, you don’t see me complaining that much about the time my house was shot by a sniper that I had to convert into a PRT asset, do you?”

“Lisa… how many sessions have we had?” she says.

“I… one mandatory monthly, two mandatory follow-ups after every S-class mission, four years since, thanks to me, the stupid policy about forced rotations was abolished—”

“Would it be safe to say that it’s near a hundred?”

“Oh, how I long for a time when psychotherapy education will have a stronger foundation on the hard sciences—”

“Lisa.”

“Yes! Yes, it’s upward of a hundred. Darn it, what’s this all—”

“You bring Victor up each and every time.”

I blink at her.

“Really?” I say, more curious than anything.

“Really,” she says with a very unprofessional tone.

… I should report her. Maybe get a new therapist in Brockton that won’t keep throwing in my face—

“Lisa, you did revoke the policy to force a rotation between therapists and parahuman patients. Can you tell me why that is?”

“… So that, apparently, you can steal my Sherlock shtick and intrude on my inner monologue,” I say, not at all pouting as I lift my foot off the carpet and allow the chair to rotate to a stop until I’m looking at her sideways.

“Lisa…”

“Are you really that set on constantly using my name? Yes, I know, it’s a good way to establish rapport, but it also comes off as unnatural and forced if abused, thus being more than a little counterproductive when you go above the line that much.”

“You’re making this more difficult than usual,” she says, uncaring of the script she should be following.

Where are all the ‘And how does that make you feel?’ Where are all the ‘Tell me about your mother?’ Where is my goddamn excuse to quote Blade Runner at you, Jess?

“I’m somewhat stressed,” I end up saying outside the privacy of my shared headspace.

“I know. And there’s nothing wrong with being tense when your life is about to take a big turn. Now, tell me, is it a big turn?”

I suck my lips inward and puff my cheeks, insolently staring up at the white tiles of the fiberglass ceiling like I’m still a teenager with a chip on her shoulder rather than…

Rather than a twenty-four-year-old.

A career woman. An accomplished one. Times Magazine cover. One of the very few unmasked capes in the world, even if I keep pushing to make that number grow. To make it safer for whoever wants to take the risk of living as themselves.

To be themselves.

Like so many weren’t allowed to for so long.

“Doctor… I don’t even know what a big change is anymore,” I mutter, somewhat deflated of energy.

The rigidity of her posture lessens, and the mask on her face slips as she shoots me a small smile that, were Power in a more cooperative mood, I could easily tag as somewhat proud.

My therapist is proud of me. Yay. Another mother figure acquired.

Dragon, Pamela, Hannah, Minnie—

I know how to count, thank you very much.

“Let’s talk through it,” she says, relaxing further as she reaches for a wooden pen shortened almost to a nub and a notebook that I know is mostly dedicated to me and my puerile hijinks from whenever I reverse to who I used to be before…

Before a lot happened.

***

Six Years Ago

There once was a man. This, in and of itself, is not such a grand statement: there have been many men through the years, and, as long as I keep pulling some miracle out of my adequately exercised buttocks, there will be more men to come.

In fact, if there was one thing remarkable about this man, it wasn’t him, but the people whose lives he touched. It could be argued that for the worse. In some cases, there was no argument at all to be made.

But he was also a husband.

A father.

And is it so bad for a father to seek out his daughter? Isn’t it the natural thing to do? Isn’t it expected?

Well, yes, it was expected.

It was predictable.

And so, predictably, the man sat at his office desk, a desk more expensive than any piece of furniture at the home he once shared with his wife, daughter, and son, and stared at the open envelope that had the name of his private investigator on it.

A private investigator who regretted informing him that he was leaving the case, afforded him a full refund, and asked him very politely to lose his number.

The man seethed.

Because, on another open envelope, there was a letter from a divorce lawyer based in Boston that informed him of the terms in which his marriage would now end.

The envelope had a substantial amount of documents that hinted at many things the man would have rather kept hidden and, thus, he was forced to accede.

To sign the documents.

To accept that he would never again see his wife and daughter.

His son… he had left behind a long time ago.

And so, Charles Livsey clicked his expensive Montblanc pen closed, the blue ink on his divorce papers still wet, and never found out if there had been a hidden message from his daughter in the pile of documents spilling from the second envelope.

***

Now

“Is this something you feel needs closure?” Jessica says without any inflection at all other than the inquiry itself.

I close my eyes and sink my head back into the plush cushion before I grumble and reach up to undo my ponytail, shaking my hair loose in a quarter of a Taylor before I try again with more comfortable results.

“Maybe?” I answer. “I… It’s been too long.”

“You’ve always skirted around the issue before.”

“I… It’s just… I don’t want him here. Never. I despise him. But… he should be, shouldn’t he? He should’ve kept trying.”

“You threatened him. Very thoroughly.”

“Does that matter? Would I ever give up on a… a daughter? A son? What if…”

I trail off, opening my eyes to turn to my right, to look directly at the only woman who can be so utterly non-judgmental of me and my many, many issues at the drop of a hat.

Not even Tay or Dragon manage to avoid the occasional slip-up. Particularly not when I obsessively retread old ground like somebody too firmly anchored to her past and the trauma that stems from it.

“Are you worried about second gen capes?” she tactfully says.

“I am not ready for children,” I immediately answer with only half a panic attack.

“That is not what I asked, Lisa.”

I wet my lips again in a nervous gesture I rarely allow myself in public, and…

Nod.

“I… I have a family, now,” I hesitantly say. “But… it’s far from a normal one, and it took a lot of effort to build. I don’t know… I don’t know if a kid of mine… if Taylor and I…”

She waits for me to finish my thought, avoiding interjecting as always.

Until I turn toward her with a pleading look that she knows all too well.

“You have a family, Lisa. One that you built. It seems to me that you’re more ready to build on that than someone who never had to make the effort,” she offers with all the kindness the United States of America can afford to pay her for.

“Thanks,” I murmur, somewhat drained.

“You’re welcome. Is that everything you wanted to get to—”

I laugh. Almost cackle.

She, again, does an admirable job of restraining a frustrated groan.

***

Four Years Ago

There once was a man stolen. Everything he had, taken away.

He had no name, no family, no friends.

He only had a number.

“Welcome back, Thirteen,” the gentle voice of a woman speaking from a drone greeted him as the world seemed to shift against him, offering unwieldy resistance to every one of his aborted movements as he kept pushing the green fields of light that were their only defense against the monster.

The unmoving monster.

Thirteen tried to answer, to say something to the Dragon that spoke to him in perfectly nuanced Chinese, but not in Mandarin.

And then Thirteen paused in his fight, his struggle.

Because what Dragon spoke was… It was one of the Eastern dialects. A tongue of the Wu family, one softened by the murmured initials, the sounds that he had missed during his years of enforced adherence to the official dialect of his regime.

The sounds he didn’t know he had missed.

‘You used to have a name,’ he had read before making the bravest choice in his life. ‘I’ll give it back to you.’

The world kept shifting around him, and firm, robotic arms crawled across wavering, almost unyielding air to reach him and drag him out.

To pull him away from the green lights that were held by a power he no longer felt.

And then, finally, the arms got him out of the frozen bubble where the monster roared defiantly, and Thirteen dropped to his knees, swallowing mouthfuls of air to the point of strain, of a hurt deep in his chest that crawled up to his eyes as he forced himself to look away and let go of the unending battle he had finally been allowed to leave behind.

His eyes met those of the woman looking at him through a computer monitor set on a floating drone, the woman who had spoken to him in his lost tongue.

And, with as many sibilant, murmured initials as he pleased, Thirteen asked:

“What was my name?”

And Dragon answered:

“Your name is Ni Wei. Your daughter is Ni Fang. Your wife is…”

And so went on and on, the list of names that Thirteen got back.

***

Now

“It took a lot of effort, didn’t it?” Yamada says with a slight smile that shows more empathy than I attribute to her in my most uncharitable moments.

“What? Dismantling a parahuman-backed dictatorial regime after I swiftly took all their most powerful agents off the board with a masterstroke of tactical genius? Super easy. Barely an inconvenience.”

“It took you three years.”

“Three very easy years. I was coasting. Really.”

For some very rude reason, Yamada allows herself to roll her eyes.

“Do you feel the need to conceal how much you—” she starts.

“I don’t want to hear that from somebody who buys eye concealers by the dozen.”

“Lisa…” she says with maybe a hint of disappointment.

“What? I’m not allowed to quip now? Do you realize that would mean a surgical intervention? I thought you quacks stopped relying on lobotomies a long time ago.”

“Are lobotomies something you want to talk about?”

I stop.

And nod.

***

Two Years Ago

“Are you sure about this?” Tagg asked, the only unpowered human in a room with some of the most powerful people on the planet.

“No. Not at all. Never sure,” a girl who lied too easily said with horrified honesty.

“It’s… a more humane system than we currently have,” Dragon said, the distaste clear in every syllable.

“We can guarantee no aftereffects. It will even get rid of some of the worse side effects of trigger events. It could be a chance to heal,” Panacea said, more optimistic than she had been when the girl met her.

Cranial… Cranial didn’t say anything; she just took advantage of the holographic displays that Dragon had furnished the PRT’s headquarters with a long time ago to display charts upon charts of things nobody but those touched by powers could ever have a chance of understanding without ten years well spent in college.

“You know perfectly well this means nothing to me,” Tagg said, leaning forward at the head of the long desk they were all sitting at.

“I know,” the Case 53 said. “That’s why I’m going to explain it.”

And she did.

She talked about the things Amy understood without having the words for them. All the technical minutiae, the things that would need to be tested and developed by people other than Tinkers to make the process reliable enough to implement it as policy.

And, finally, Tagg held up a hand and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath that made his broad chest strain the button-up shirt inadequately fit to a frame that had grown a bit over the years.

“So. One signature. One vote from me, and this goes to Congress, where we hope to revoke decades of human rights. Is that what you’re asking me to do?” he said, more tired than the girl remembered ever seeing him.

“No,” Dragon said. “One signature, months of work, maybe years, and then I’ll be free of the Birdcage.”

And that was the only reason for the girl to take that path.

To free Dragon, yet again.

***

Now

“I took notes, the first time we discussed this,” my legally mandated therapist says.

“I know. Allow me to indulge in some relaxing recreation of the past, if you please.”

“I’m here for you, Lisa. We will spend our time however you need to.”

I lift up my eyes from my lap and look at her with a suspicious squint that doesn’t pierce her air of serenity.

“I could break you, you know?” I say like I maybe did a few times at the start of these sessions that I knew I needed but definitely didn’t want. “I could get Power to tell me precisely what to say to make you shatter that perfectly accommodating façade. Maybe throw a glass of water at me. Get this session to be properly cathartic.”

And she does roll her eyes.

Heh. Still got it.

“Is that something you want?” she says.

“Not particularly, no. Otherwise, I would’ve already done it.”

“So. You do everything you want?”

“Doctor—”

“And avoid everything you don’t want?”

“You know perfectly well that’s not how it works—”

“Then did you want it, Lisa? Did you want to institute a legal way for the government to take away powers?”

I worry at my lip with my teeth and look all over her littered desk, as unable as ever to find any meaningful pattern in the spread of loose papers, open notebooks, and personal effects.

Maybe because there is nothing to be found. Because Doctor Yamada randomly places everything differently each time I come over as a way to… what? Engage my worst tendencies? Observe how I react? Give me something to try and distract myself with from too sharp emotional stings when we inadvertently delve too deeply?

What’s the meaning behind there being no meaning?

“What did I tell you? The last time?” I weakly ask.

“That you wanted to get rid of the guilt of shattering Bakuda. That you wanted to declaw her so it would be possible to lock her up in an asylum rather than have her hanging over your conscience for the rest of her natural life.”

“Anything else?”

“That you couldn’t stand Dragon, of all people, being forced to remain a jailer.”

“What else?”

“That you couldn’t stand the notion of the Birdcage. That Canary was the last straw. That you would have done anything to get rid of it.”

“I did, didn’t I? I did anything.”

Yamada’s eyes grow cold as she stares down at me. Not because she’s taller, but because I’m leaning forward, my elbows on my knees, and I… I look like a supplicant asking for absolution.

Except that’s not what she’s here for.

“No. You did not do ‘anything.’ You spent a great deal of effort and political capital in coming up with a non-lethal way to deal with supervillains too dangerous to be held captive.”

“A way that involves lobotomy.”

“Have you come up with a better alternative?”

“You know I haven’t.”

“Have you tried to?”

I pause.

I look at a woman who’s likely trying not to come across as unbearably smug.

And, rolling my eyes, I nod.

“You’re always ready to think the worst of yourself, Lisa. Does that tie to your fear of abandonment—”

“Nah, nah, nah! I can’t hear you!”

“Lisa—”

“Why does everyone keep bringing that up?! I don’t have a pathological fear of abandonment; my fear of abandonment is perfectly well-founded in objective data, and none of you can ever bring up a convincing alternative interpretation of my painstaking research! I will not sit here and listen to any more outrageous, counterfactual claims—”

“If you get up from that chair and leave, I’m reporting you as uncooperative.”

I, in the middle of doing just that, freeze.

“I’m very cooperative. Ask Taylor. I always do what I’m told,” I say as I slowly sit back down.

Yamada, very unprofessionally, schools her face while making it very obvious that she doesn’t appreciate my perfectly relevant change in subject.

Then her eyes narrow, and I wish Power wasn’t as cooperative.

***

Five Years Ago

“Please don’t leave me!” a perfectly sensible girl said, her knees sliding on a flawlessly waxed wooden floor as she clung to the waist of a taller girl who kept unreasonably walking to the door of their shared apartment.

“We talked about this,” the taller girl said, quickly running out of patience.

“We clearly didn’t talk enough, seeing as you’re doing something other than what I want you to do!”

“Liz, for fuck’s sake—” she started to say right before the door she’d been walking toward swung open, and a tanned woman walked in, leaning on what likely was a cane sword made of dark green light that always helped bring out her eyes.

“As bad as we expected, then?” she said, a smile bringing up the left corner of her lips.

“Hannah! Save me, Hannah! Tay has been affected by a Master power and needs to be confined for the next three weeks!” I—the girl said.

“That’s a very specific time window,” Hannah said with no more inflection than a hint of humor she failed to disguise.

“She’s being ridiculous,” Taylor muttered.

“Me? Me? Ridiculous? I’m not the one going to Africa.”

“I’m going to enact your plan, you insufferable—”

“You’re going to the most dangerous continent in the world! What if Moord Nag shows up for a snack? Or if the Ash Beast goes on an enthusiastic walk? Or if—”

Taylor leaned down and grabbed the older girl under her armpits, dragging her up despite a remarkable lack of cooperation until, pointlessly showing off what years in the gym had done for her, she brought the blonde up to stare right into her eyes.

“If that happens, I’ll call the smartest girl on the planet, and my fiancée will figure out how to save me and every single person selected for the mission she spent a month of planning on,” she said.

And then, of course, before the blonde could reply, she pulled her close and kissed her until both their eyes were closed, and the anxiety could find no purchase on the avalanche of feelings cascading all over a scared girl who never wanted to let go.

Then, after three weeks were up and the mission was over, after the Suez Canal was made once more navigable and the whole region was covered with perfectly pollinated plants, an entire new ecosystem flourishing in an impossible span of time, when the tall girl came back…

She was forced to wear a shirt that factually, objectively, and not at all boastfully stated ‘My Fiancée Defeated a Parahuman Gang With a Phone’ for an entire week.

***

Now

“You’ve never liked Taylor being a field agent,” she says, trying not to smile or sigh in exasperation.

It’s sometimes hard to tell when a certain someone doesn’t cooperate.

Lisa Wilbourn’s regrettable lack of acumen regarding the correct interpretation of body language cues pointing to self-designation ‘Sherlock—’

Grow up.

Geometry of parahuman abilities’ interfaces—

“Gee, what gave me away?” I say, referencing her earlier comment before she can correctly infer just how much of my inner dialogue is not spent on idle banter regarding the Nanoha fandom and how Fate Testarossa is a perfect example of why blondes in fiction need not be vapid.

Also, Yamada is staring at me.

“I think we’ve run out of time,” she finally says.

“I still have twenty minutes. Also, I’m your boss, so, you know, I could rearrange your schedule so you could delight in my ever-enjoyable presence. No need to thank me.”

“I will sue.”

“You won’t. You never do.”

“You once explained to me, at length, how things went for the Inductivist Turkey.”

“Oh, you mean that delightful, whimsical tale dreamed up by British philosopher Bertrand Russell about a Turkey who always gets fed at the same time and deduces a universal law regarding that time being when humans feed it, only for Thanksgiving to come around and—”

“Yes. That. I mean that.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything? Also, Russell, seeing as he was British, actually talked about a chicken; the turkey thing came later,” I say, innocently blinking and smiling in a way I’m told worked much better when I was in my teens.

By assholes. I’m told that by assholes. The whole lot of them.

“Lisa… Do you intend to keep self-flagellating today of all days?” she says with a hint of a groan and a bit of a shoulder slump.

“I don’t see why today would be special?” I say, blinking guilessly, which is entirely different from blinking innocently, so, there.

“Taylor comes back from the mission tomorrow morning,” she says.

“Yes?” I say.

“And then, the day after tomorrow—”

“Ixnay on the however the goddamn ixnay thing goes!”

My therapist is blinking at me like I’ve lost my goddamn mind.

Life goals, people. The dream is within my reach.

“Lisa… You’re not going to solve all of your lingering issues before… ixnay,” she says, displaying the astonishingly high level of training she’s had in how to avoid stressors when dealing with unstable parahumans.

“I don’t see why not?” I say.

“Because we’ve been working on some of these subjects for years, and you still refuse to move out of the apartment where your fiancée almost bled to death.”

“I’m the very model of a modern major resilient,” I state, trying not to sing at the top of my lungs.

“… That makes no sense at all.”

“You’re being uncharacteristically adversarial today.”

“It must be because my current patient refuses to let me go so I can get fitted for a dress so I can—”

“Ixnay!”

And, finally, Doctor Yamada gives way entirely to Jess, and the woman glares at me before silently pointing to the door of her office.

“Fine,” I say, clearly implying that it isn’t. “But I’ll talk to your boss.”

“You are my boss,” she says.

“You’re terrible at your job. Your patients keep talking to themselves.”

It is with great triumph that I receive the empty paper cup she throws at my head.

***

“So, did she formally ask to get you another therapist?” Taylor asks from the spherical speaker on our bedside table.

“I don’t know why you keep asking this question. It’s very hurtful of you,” I say, sliding my hands under my pillow to capture that fresh feeling between it and the mattress below as I stare up at a ceiling only lit by a dimmed lamp that Dragon coded long ago to turn off whenever someone’s asleep in our bedroom.

“Liz, I’ve met Jess. You’ve brought her to have dinner a few times,” she says as if that explains anything at all.

“She didn’t appreciate my sushi. Should’ve fired her right then and there,” I say, remembering the poignant slight even years after the fact.

“Your sushi had me stuck in the bathroom for a whole day.”

“Because you appreciated it. And that’s why I love you.”

I stare at the shifting patterns of orange light drawn on my ceiling by Dragon’s lamp, as if a fireplace set in slow motion, and I allow myself to smile despite my anxiety and nerves.

“I love you too,” she whispers, and the speaker makes it seem like she does so right by my ear.

“I miss you,” I can’t help but say.

“I’ll be there tomorrow morning. First thing. Before you even wake up,” she reassures me.

My smile widens despite myself.

“Okay. Have a nice flight,” I tell her with maybe a bit of a shy tone that I can’t shake off even after years of cohabitation and the burning blaze of teen love having quieted down into something slightly more manageable.

Something… slower.

And deeper.

“I’ll try to sleep through it. I don’t want to be jet-lagged the day before—”

I slap my hand on the speaker and hang up on her.

Then I allow myself to giggle like the schoolgirl in love I never quite was and never quite stopped being until I go back to stare at a soothing display projected on my ceiling until I drift off.

Of course, when the morning comes, I wake up to the reassuring smell of burning cotton and the sounds of my fiancée quietly swearing as she burns yet another of the ‘My Fiancée Defeated a Parahuman Gang With a Phone’ shirts I set for her on the kitchen counter.

It’s the little traditions that keep the flame going, after all.

 

 

 

======================

And this is it, the beginning of the end. I’m both sad and happy that we’ve finally reached it, and I’m doing my best to live up to my own expectations, not to mention what I think you all deserve for sticking with this to the very end.

The next two chapters are already up, and they’re moving the date forward toward what Lisa doesn’t dare name even inside her own head while showing where all the cast is right now. Let’s say a couple of surprises will be shown soon enough and that I’m fighting the temptation to show even more of them than strictly necessary.

So… That’s about it for today. See you next week!

As always, I’d like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon: aj0413, LearningDiscord, Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, and Xalgeon. If you feel like maybe giving them a hand with keeping me in the writing business (and getting an early peek at my chapters before they go public, among other perks), consider joining them or buying one of my books on Amazon. Thank you for reading!