Hannah

What I’m about to say should be no surprise at all, given that I’m the lone sane member of a quartet consistent of overpowered Tinkers and a too-often frantic Mover:

“You’re all being ridiculous.”

It still needed to be said.

“You and Colin look absolutely adorable in matching outfits,” Minnie says, taking pictures with her phone of me and Colin wearing… matching outfits.

That is, black tuxedos.

“That is not the ridiculous part,” I tell her, unnecessarily clarifying things.

“I agree. These shoes are utterly unpractical,” Colin says, looking down with a mild frown at perfectly sensible Oxford shoes and forcing me to re-address a point that should’ve never been brought up from the very start.

“You’re not allowed to wear boots to your daughter’s wedding.”

“Lisa would understand—”

“Lisa would make sure to target you with all kinds of traps perfectly designed to work around whatever the heck you feel you need to include in formal footwear.”

“See? It would help keep her busy. It would be the considerate thing to do, given all the stress she’s under and her perennial need for distractions—”

“Colin,” Dragon finally says, stepping out from behind the two of us and still staring with a critical eye, “no.”

Colin pouts and drops the subject.

… And I don’t feel jealous at all. Absolutely not. I’ve got no reason at all to be jealous in the slightest of how easily Dragon can reign him in whenever Minnie and I struggle—all right, not that Minnie struggles that much. She usually just takes it as an excuse to distract him with sex.

Which makes my current circumstances even more baffling.

“Still. Ridiculous,” I mumble out.

“It’s an unnecessary precaution, but also one that doesn’t have any downsides,” Dragon chides me in that perfectly roundabout way she has of chiding me outside the bedroom.

… Damn it.

“We’ve got the bachelorette party in three hours. Could you all just let me win the argument so I can change into something comfortable and not bulletproof?” I say.

“Give me a smile,” Minnie says, making me reflexively smile at the camera before I notice and dropping into a growl as soon as I’m able. “There. Perfect. Mood swing captured in all its beauty.”

“I would strangle you if I wasn’t confident that you would enjoy it…”

“Wait until after the wedding. I’ll be drunk enough that it will also count as a dubcon fantasy.”

“… Please don’t say that in front of the reporters,” Dragon hopelessly pleads.

And Minnie smiles, beatific and radiant.

This, of course, is when the conversation about how I’m not even allowed to pick out the clothes I’ll wear to my quasi-daughter figure’s wedding devolves into Dragon and Minnie engaging in the sort of argument that is only possible when a ball of chaos and reckless energy meets a non-confrontational, unfailingly polite, weapon of mass destruction.

It is also when Colin slides his hand over mine and gives me a reassuring squeeze that, to this day, still makes my heart beat like a machine gun.

And my power slips my grasp as it once again abandons the shape of a fancy sword cane to turn into a riding crop when I look up into the eyes of the father of Lisa’s sibling.

The one in my belly that only the four of us know about, and the only reason they’ve all gone overprotectively mad and replaced most of my clothes with bulletproof Tinker fabrics.

At least one of us will leave that wedding sober.

***

Colin

“I still don’t understand why I can’t come,” I say to my three girlfriends as they rush out the door with unnecessary agitation, seeing as it’s still far from the meeting time.

“Because it’s a bachelorette’s party,” Dragon unhelpfully reminds me.

“And I’m a bachelor. Unless Minnie did something while I was asleep that I haven’t consented to. Again.”

“I’ve got all your kinks on a signed piece of paper, you prick!” the Mover yells from the corridor of Hannah’s former bachelorette pad.

“I’ve got neighbors,” Hannah says, uselessly contributing an already-known fact.

“The gender distinction is important, Colin,” Dragon says, barely hiding her exasperation after enduring a slightly longer than usual verbal spar with Minnie.

“I am told that is a very reactionary stance and that you should be ashamed of yourself,” I politely answer.

“You two are impossible…” she says.

“Stop riling her up. She will take it seriously,” Hannah says, glaring at me over her shoulder with a look of reproach.

“I am her boyfriend. She should take me seriously,” I logically reply.

“… You’re sleeping on the couch,” Hannah says for no discernible reason whatsoever.

“I could do with a nap,” I ponderingly tell her while stroking my beard.

“Will wonders never cease…” Dragon says, failing to accuse me of being mastered in a slightly disappointing manner.

“Not if I can help it!” Minnie says right before teleporting behind Dragon and pushing her out the door, teleporting right in front of me to hang from my neck while she gives me a kiss deep enough to count as a dubcon scenario, and then leaving my arms suddenly empty as the entrance door’s slam echoes in a suddenly vacated apartment that has only a lone bachelor in it.

Just as planned.

… Or that’s what I would like to say if I wasn’t feeling actually lonely now that the house is as peaceful as I sometimes complain it isn’t.

“Call Alec,” I say as I walk toward the living room and a sofa that is now comfortable enough that I wouldn’t mind overly much sleeping on it. Particularly given Minnie’s newly acquired tendency to sleep-teleport toward the nearest non-snuggling body.

… I’ve still not asked Lisa how that is possible. I’m a bit wary of any likely answer.

“Hey, if it isn’t the Saint Seiya refugee,” the Canadian Master tells me through the speakers of the room as if he were right in front of me.

“The what?” I stupidly ask.

“Oh, dear, don’t tell me I’ve finally stumbled upon a nerdy anything at all that you don’t know about? This is rich. I wonder how much I can get out of Lisa for this information…”

“I can Google the answer.”

“Well, yes, but would you really get the in-depth scope on how, precisely, a man ends up yelling at God for giving him a hundred kids from ninety-nine different women just from a cursory web search?”

“… I am already feeling slighted.”

“Good! It took three sentences fewer than on average. I may make it to the national circuit, at this rate.”

I close my eyes, try not to calculate the likelihood that Lisa and her sibling figure may one day formalize a competitive league of ‘annoying me through infuriating phone calls,’ and repress the long-suffering sigh of somebody who has some very reasonable reasons to quote, ‘Never tell me the odds.’

Then I drop into the sofa and stare up into a ceiling that is, after all these years, familiar enough.

“You little piece of shit,” I finally answer in a measured, calm, and reasonable tone.

“Your derision fills me with the opposite of shame.”

“Pride. You mean pride.”

“Well, yes, but would the paraphrased quote be immediately recognizable if I went around and said it like that?”

I wet my lips, try not to groan, and fail at one of those two things.

“You’re the one who keeps quoting the Internet at me, big guy. You don’t have any right to get pissy when the turns table.”

“Can we talk about the actual reason I’m inflicting a great deal of pain on my already abused brain by calling you?” I somewhat hopelessly ask.

“Well, sure. I guess we can.”

“Then are the preparations ready—”

“Will we, though? That’s a much more interesting question, don’t you think?”

“… Alec, I swear I’ll hack into your Call of Duty account, infect it with a tinkertech virus, and make sure that any alter you ever try to get your hands on will have an extra-sophisticated profanity filter installed and start all conversations with a well-meaning, blandly motivational quote.”

“… You know that I’d take that as a challenge, don’t you?”

“Why don’t you take as a challenge telling me how the preparations for tomorrow are going?”

There’s a brief silence on the other end of the line interspersed by the rapid-fire clacking of an abused keyboard.

“They are going swimmingly,” he says with an excited tone.

“If this is a hint that you’re planning to reenact the Carrie scene and flooding the reception with pig’s blood, I’ll gut you like a Crawler—”

“Aww, Papa Wolf is a great look on you. I can see how you melted the panties off your three babes now.”

“That actually was via the application of ultrasonic tech and a heuristic resonance frequency inducer.”

“… Talk nerdy to me, daddy.”

“Get rekt, noob,” I say.

And immediately regret it just as it dawns on me what’s the likelihood of this conversation being recorded.

So, after a bit more regret, a few actual specifics, and then some thoroughly specific threats, the distressing call ends, and I’m left once again alone in a noticeably empty apartment that I’ve been forbidden from fully furbishing with a functional lab by people who insist that I need to better separate my professional and personal life, never mind that the Venn diagram of the people I know in one or the other is as near to a circle as to make Plato proud.

I often complain about the lack of silence. About Hannah doing whatever it is she will experiment with in the kitchen, Minnie being unable to remain unattached to a warm body for more than a few minutes at a time, or Dragon hypocritically messing around with one of her drones’ portable labs.

I often complain, yes, but… I also remember a time before, when only a soft voice in my armor fought away the ever-present silence that was a life spent between the workshop and the battlefield with ever more sparse visits to a nursing home where the woman who raised me languished.

I think about calling her. Just to hear a friendly voice. Just to… to cling to that fearful warmth that still hasn’t faded from when I woke up from my coma to find her restored to me by a girl who came into my life and uprooted it.

By my… daughter. My daughter giving my mother back to me.

I lean back against the sofa, letting the plush cushions engulf me, and the tension drains away as I yet again look up into a ceiling that has become this familiar after many a movie night surrounded by women I love.

I discover that I’m smiling.

And, even as the lingering specter of tomorrow and how perfect everything needs to be tries to bring some tension back, I just keep smiling in the rare silence of an apartment that is mine in everything but legality.

“Incoming call from: Chris,” the aural speakers say, making me raise a lazy eyebrow at the somewhat unexpected contact, given how he usually communicates through emails filled with entirely too many diagrams and, on some unfortunate occasions, a few videos documenting precisely how and why a procedure needs to be changed.

“Pick up,” I say, not moving from the perfectly comfortable spot I just discovered, lodged between two back cushions that align with my spine.

“Hey, can you talk?” the nervous Tinker asks.

“Sure,” I say, still dwelling in morose satisfaction.

“It’s just… okay, this is… Fuck it. I was just over at Dinah’s, and we were… you know. And, suddenly, she hits me with, ‘You need to leave right now,’ which I thought was just Dinah being Dinah, but she was more frantic than usual, and I got concerned, so I pressed her to tell me what was wrong and she just… She just says forty-three. ‘Forty-three what?’ I, reasonably, ask her. ‘Forty-three percent chances you get me pregnant if you don’t get out of my apartment in the next five minutes.’ And a part of me just wanted to run the fuck away right then and there, but another is like… ‘Well, maybe that’s what we need to finally stop doing this whole song and dance,’ which I know sounds frankly terrible, and stupid, and the last thing we should even be thinking of before we solve the actual issues, whatever those may be, but… I don’t even know. And, well, it’s not like I can ask Dennis about this, not with Missy and Dinah having their weird book club, so… A little help?”

I blink up at my ceiling. The familiar, up till a few seconds ago, comforting ceiling.

And I try very hard not to swear up a storm.

Goddamn Thinkers.

***

Lisa

Standing in front of my apartment building, the gleaming tower of tall glass windows behind me, and the busy, wide street in front of me, I say something I rarely conceived myself as capable of saying:

“Isn’t this a bit much, guys?”

In front of me, a Dragon carrier big enough to transport a full battalion—whatever a battalion is—

According to US Army regulations, battalion size ranging from three hundred to a thousand—

Okay, fine, a carrier big enough to carry an indeterminate number of people, ranging from a squad to a small battalion. Is that better?

Lisa Wilbourn’s uncharacteristic lack of concern for precise measurements—

Anyway! In front of me, there’s a Dragon-red mech-slash-carrier parked in a lane and a half, causing about as much annoying honking from the traffic slowly driving around it as it does camera flashes from the people hanging out of the windows of the cars slowing the traffic, and in front of the waste of taxpayer money there’s… a group of people bigger than I thought.

Spearheaded by a very annoyed Dinah.

All of them are women wearing ‘My fiancée defeated a parahuman gang with a phone’ t-shirts, which, while endearing, is blatantly untrue, seeing as most of those gathered here don’t have fiancées, much less ones who should become the patron saintess of telemarketers.

“Uh… do we really need all… this?” I say, gesturing at… this.

“I need a lot of things right now, and some of them can be substituted by what we’ll find at the end of the road,” Dinah says, not being ominous at all.

“… This is about Chris. This about you, and Chris, and your pathological need to be absolutely certain of everything—”

“You told me not to ask Janus to check!”

“Because you need to learn to live your life, not because I wanted you to exercise your controlling tendencies in actually toxic ways!”

“Well, I guess none of us will get what we want because I intend to become utterly intoxicated long before the night’s over, so there goes my toxic self-control.”

“… Do you want me to keep your phone so you don’t end up drunk-dialing him?”

Dinah, endearingly shorter Dinah, pouts up at me, her arms crossed over the white, unburned cotton shirt, and ends up rummaging through her jeans before handing me her phone.

“Don’t give it to me under any circumstances,” she mumbles.

“… What the Hell happened this time?” I ask.

“Today is about you—”

“Dinah.”

“… Babies.”

“I’ll eviscerate him if he doesn’t do a double wedding—”

“No! No, I mean that babies almost happened, and I’m still—I keep having flashbacks of all the ways he could have… And each one would have turned into a different person, and all of them were adorable, and I… I almost had a daughter, a son, or, in one permutation, triplets, so can we please just get on the spaceship, abuse Missy’s power to get to Vegas, and get me black-out drunk so I can fall face-first into a puke-covered stripper rather than keep reliving this? Pretty please?”

I blink at Dinah.

Then I look over her shoulder at the white-shirted crowd standing behind her, among which number some of the most powerful women on the entire planet, all of them looking at my adoptive little sister with emotions ranging from shock to utter, absolute, sadistic glee.

Then I look back at a Thinker nine slowly realizing what she just subjected herself to.

“I can make sure the triplets are always on the table,” Amy says as her palm ominously falls with a thundering clap on top of Dinah’s shoulder, the grin on the biokinetic’s face about as wide as Vicky’s.

“Birth control. I can make tinkertech birth control. No side effects, no inconveniences, no unexpected triplets,” Dragon says in what is very clearly the start of a panic attack as she shoves Amy out of the way as politely as she can manage to do so.

“Oh, sure, now you come up with tinkertech birth control,” Hannah mutters from the side of the recently vacated, Dragon-shaped slice of sidewalk.

…

“Am I going to have another sibling?” I stupidly ask.

Three of the assorted women responsible for the worsening of Brockton Bay’s traffic issues freeze.

“Sorry! We didn’t mean to say anything until after the wedding!” Minnie hurriedly apologizes, teleporting to my left with a guilty look as if she is the one responsible for Hannah’s state, which I’m perfectly assured is not the case unless Dragon has done something far more deliberate and wet-tinkery than I think occurred.

“You planned to go to my bachelorette party and my—my ixnay, not drink a single glass of alcohol, and expect me not to realize that Hannah was pregnant?” I say, more offended than shocked.

“Told you it was a bad idea,” Dragon mumbles.

“That’s not what you said a month ago,” Minnie suggestively quips. And by ‘suggestively,’ I mean that such an eyebrow waggle would have gotten her fined in at least ten states.

“Does this mean I don’t have to hide it anymore? Because Dean insisted, but, honestly, I don’t think it’s such a big deal—”

“Dean what?” Amy says, whirling around to face a cheeky blonde whose current grin is near enough to infringing on my trademark that I can feel my lawyer-calling finger itching.

“Psyche,” she has the gall to say.

“Before anyone asks, I’m off the clock, and I refuse to deal with this,” Jessica says from where she’s leaning against a lamppost slightly to the side of the horde of mostly parahuman women and healthily sublimating her stress by nervously fumbling for a pack of smokes as Amy splutters in what I believe to be the prelude to the kind of apoplectic shock that, ironically, only she is qualified to deal with.

“I thought you quit?” I dumbly ask the person responsible for managing my worst vices other than those that Taylor enjoys dealing with.

“So did I,” she mumbles.

“If you light that up in front of my pregnant girlfriend, I’ll have to gut you like a fish. I hope you understand,” Minnie cheerfully says, her hand instinctively dropping to where she usually keeps her rapier.

“I can take care of any complications. Or I can make it so that tobacco tastes like literal shit to her rather than figurative one. Whichever you think would be funniest,” Amy says, regaining her diction in ways that make me hopeful about her chances of a full recovery.

“Argos is getting nervous,” Rachel says, looking down at a rottweiler-mix pup that is heartbreakingly, anxiously looking around at the fast-talking people, and…

And I crouch down and gesture for him to come at me, the fluffy ball of black and orange fur half-leaping, half-rolling as he cheerfully bounds toward his adopted aunt until I can pick him up and allow him to slobber all over my face, enjoying this brief window of time in which I’m still able to handle him like I never could Brutus.

I briefly shut down the chaotic gaggle that are my friends, coworkers, and chosen family, and just…

“You’re a good boy. You’re the best boy,” I tell him, to his utter delight.

Lisa Wilbourn’s accurate appraisal of canine qualities—

Yeah.

“Vegas? Really?” Taylor says, changing the subject to a more manageable one as she finally steps out from where she was supposed to be hiding behind the group.

“It’s traditional,” I say, pulling away from Argos just enough that he ends up briefly licking the air between us.

“Ah, yes. Tradition. That thing we care so much about,” she says with an eye-roll that has Amy scoff for reasons that I will charitably relate to sheer eye-emoting-related envy.

“This is the first bachelorette party I have attended with two bachelorettes. Even if the second one attending was supposed to be a surprise,” Vicky comments.

“And with no less than three parental figures,” somebody whose pay is about to get docked snipes in the middle of glaring at a smug biotinker.

“You do care about traditions. The first thing you had to do was stick your nose in somebody else’s business,” the girl who is currently not pregnant with triplets says.

“Oh, as opposite to Chris sticking his business in—” Missy starts to say, grumpily climbing out of the ship where she had, presumably, been using her power to listen in on us all.

“One word. One word about this, Missy, and Dennis will get a very detailed email about the kind of books you actually enjoy,” my terrifying little sister says, pulling a page out of my book and making me feel warm pride that is, nonetheless, not as warm as the fuzzy puppy struggling in my hands.

“Two can play that game,” the most powerful Shaker I’ve ever met mutters.

“Yes. But only one will win,” the most powerful Thinker I know of defiantly replies.

Which is, of course, when I shove an enthusiastic pup right into her face, and she undignifiedly squawks as slobber other than Chris’ is generously offered.

***

“I thought the plan was going to Vegas?” I ask, leaning back on one of the more comfortable seats Dragon has ever furnished her ships with.

“That was Dinah’s plan. After careful consideration, we all decided that Dinah is not to be trusted,” Missy says from her own cream-leather seat.

I take a look at the girl grumpily nursing a champagne glass to my right, then at the smug blonde Shaker standing by the side of her best friend-slash-mortal enemy that is currently oversaturating the smug blonde quotient in these surprisingly not cramped quarters.

Thankfully, Amy didn’t bring Piggot along. There could’ve been a singularity.

“At least I’m still getting drunk,” my little sister mumbles.

“I tweaked the alcohol. You can’t go over a pleasant buzz with it, and it will not give you any hangover,” Dragon amiably yet sadistically announces over her shoulder, her words immediately followed by a despairing groan.

“Hey,” a soft voice darkly whispers in my ear as long arms surround me from behind.

“Hey,” I say, leaning to my right so my head goes past the headrest and I can get nearer to my fiancée.

“You sure you’re all right with this? No wild party?” she asks.

Completely unnecessarily.

“I am with you. That’s as much excitement as I could ever need,” I say, adding the pleasure of warm, comfortable affection to the satisfaction of immediately causing Amy to loudly gag.

“Grow up,” Vicky tells her with an admirable eye roll.

“You only buy into that sappiness because of those trashy books of yours,” Amy immediately ripostes.

“Or maybe I enjoy seeing the people I care about being happily in love. Speaking of—”

“Nope! Not talking about that!” a corralled healer says.

“As a professional therapist, I am all for cathartic confrontation and resolution,” Jessica ominously says, standing behind Amy with a glass of tinkertech champagne and narrowed eyes.

“I didn’t even tweak your taste buds that much! I just restored your perception to before you started smoking!”

“I’m pretty sure that counts as assault with a parahuman ability, Ames,” I say.

“Oh, like you are one to talk,” she unreasonably comments.

“Resentfulness doesn’t suit your complexion,” I dignifiedly answer, tilting my head up in aristocratic dismissal of the plebeian accusation.

And incidentally taking a look through the transparent ceiling of this Dragoncraft at a night sky filled with more stars than I’ve ever seen as we fly over the Atlantic Ocean, heading North so I can see the aurora borealis for the first time in my life.

No, so that Taylor and I can.

It’s a bit of an early gift from Dragon, who, as I predicted long ago, out of all my mother figures, gives the best gifts.

Such as, in this instance, a trip far from Brockton, surrounded by people I love and love me—or, at least, tolerate one another—heading away from the stress that tomorrow will inevitably bring me as we talk and drink the night away in comfortable seats, with pleasant music and with, impossibly for anyone other than her and her husband in all but legality, a flying ship that has enough room for us to walk around and dance.

So that’s how my and Taylor’s bachelorette party goes: in warmth, snark, and relaxed joy that is a soothing prelude to tomorrow.

Except for the brief moment in which a Dinah who has managed to get drunk off tinkertech champagne begs me to give her back her phone.

“I just… I don’t want to lose him…” she says, morose and close to tearful as Missy comfortably pats her back.

Which, I guess, is as good a cue for me to enact a master plan that’s been brewing for years as any I could’ve hoped to get.

“Dinah… I am going to give you one chance, okay?”

“A chance at what? Is this a test? To give me my own phone back—”

“Chances you and Chris will get divorced if you call him right now,” I say.

Her eyes widen.

“Forty-two percent…” she says, her heart breaking with every percentage Janus goes through.

“Okay. Okay, that’s… that’s still better than even chances that the marriage works?” Missy tries to say, going from consolingly patting her best friend’s back to trying and failing not to glare at me.

“No,” I say, not wasting either the timing or the opening. “Those are the chances that they remain married, whether or not it works out for the best. Or that they never get married in the first place.”

“You can be such a bitch,” a Shaker who shouldn’t meddle with Thinkers mutters.

But I’ve got a brilliant, villainous masterplan to bear to fruition, and so I mercifully ignore her.

“Dinah. Sis. Look at me. Hey,” I say, leaning forward and to my right on another comfortable seat, one that is almost like a sofa going along the right wall of the Dragoncraft, with Argos tiredly sleeping by my side as Rachel silently stares at the scene in a way that hints at her knowing I’m going somewhere with this.

“What? Isn’t this why you told me to never ask—” she starts.

And I cup her cheeks, forcing her to look up at me and the gentlest smile I can offer her.

“Chances you and Chris get divorced?”

“… Twenty percent.”

“What?” Missy asks, baffled far more than she should after years of sharing comics with her best friend.

“I could keep going. I could keep swaying your mental state and tilting the scales one way or another. I could tell you whether that twenty is because now that you’re aware of the very real possibility that you’ll drive him away, you’ll be more careful, or if it’s just that you’ll get more scared and break things off before marriage is even on the table. I could just ask you another question and get you the clarity you so often crave for. Do you want me to?”

And Dinah, sweet, smart, paranoid Dinah…

Nods.

I have to hold back from snorting.

“You are impossible. Okay, one last time: chances that you and Chris will be together one year from now if you finally commit to going to therapy?” I say, ignoring a voyeuristically listening Jessica stiffening by Minnie’s side.

“Ninety-seven percent,” Dinah incredulously mutters.

And Missy squeals like the teenager none of us still are before hugging her best friend with such enveloping force that I could swear the Dragoncraft trembles, with Argos yipping in his sleep for a short moment of endearing cuteness that is entirely superfluous to his already borderline impossible existence.

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch Tay’s exasperated, fond smile and Dragon’s proud one.

I answer them with the happiest I can offer.

As I hope I always will.

 

 

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

And… well, that’s it.

I mean, not the above chapter; this is the antepenultimate one, but I just finished writing the very last one. The End. The big climax of the story (which… yeah, almost 12k words, so it definitely qualifies as big).

I’m… still riding the mellow wave of exhaustion, satisfaction, and nerves slowly starting to leave my body after a week of obsessing over it and trying to do my best for this pair of dorks and everyone they’ve come to meet over the past couple of years. I’ll write an afterword when I’ve got the strength to do so, but, meanwhile…

Look forward to it.

(It’s only two weeks, after all.)

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!