Chapter Text
Choking smoke fills the air. The heat is oppressive, and the ground shakes. To a child, it is as if the sky is falling.
You are Taylor Hebert. You are seven years old, and today was supposed to be a good day. Your mom took you along last year for a take your daughter to work day at the college; her lecture wasn’t as good as a bedtime story, but she’d talked about the Iliad, which she hasn’t let you read yet. She says you’re not old enough for the subtext stuff. This year was your dad’s turn to take you to work, and it had gone well enough at first – you've spent a solid chunk of your childhood running wild through the Docks, even if only around the Dockworker’s Union facility, so it was familiar and stuff, but your dad made sure to get you a Union badge (he wouldn’t take your union dues, for some reason – and you’d saved up birthday money for it, too!) and a hard hat and vest for the part where you’d visited the still-active part of the trainyards, but things had suddenly gone very wrong.
Dad had been called away from showing you around by some problem over at the main office. He’d left you with one of the dockworkers you know, Amir, and Amir had brought you into one of the old office buildings the Union uses for storage with a few others. But then you found out why your dad had to go away.
The Empire is one of the Big Bads in the city, you know. Your mom hates them, hates them like only someone whose grandpa was in a concentration camp in Poland can hate them, and she always makes sure to tell you not to go anywhere near Empire territory. They hate it when people have things they don’t, Dad had explained, and sometimes they come to parts of the city that don’t belong to them and break things until people give them what they want. You can’t get away with that, and you don’t think they should be able to either, but no one asked you.
The Empire is serious this time, though. Hookwolf is out there, somewhere – a wolf the size of a car, made of hooks and knives and blades, as destructive as it comes. Amir had told you that it would be okay. The Union doesn’t tolerate this sort of thing, he said. The Union fights back. They protect their own, and the Empire isn’t big or strong enough to stop them – except that maybe they are, with Hookwolf. He scares you. They all do, the whole Empire, but Hookwolf is the worst of them all. And sure enough, he’d come by, and he’d sliced through a propane tank on the outside of the building – a safe distance away, according to Union Rules (the most important kind, Dad always says), but too close with that much damage anyway – and he’d smashed part of a wall when he did.
Now the ceiling is falling. Now the air is filling with ash and dust, and you’re on the ground, coughing and hacking and trying to stay below the level of the smoke. You’ve put on your hard hat and vest, because safety rules are there for a reason, and the Dockworkers in the room are – they're –
Your mom tells you bedtime stories from Greek mythology. One was about Atlas, who held up the sky. You never thought much about it – that's not how the sky works, Emma has told you that it’s all air pressure and gravity, there isn’t a Titan with the weight of all that vastness on his shoulders somewhere on a mountain – but now you get it. In this moment, five men and women in the suffocating dark hold up the sky for you, and you know what heroes are.
You’ll hear stories, later on. Your dad rallies the Union against the Empire; they get crowbars and dump trucks and cranes, toss the Empire’s trucks into the Bay and beat their men back. Capes come and wreck part of the Dockyard, but your dad is the real, proper kind of mad by now; he puts Stormtiger in the hospital personally. He leads the charge against the Empire. He finds you and your heroes in the ruined building, and you see him break the door down with a hammer whose head is as big as your shoulder, roaring like a wild animal, to find five dockworkers holding up your personal falling sky and you in the middle, little arms raised to try to catch it if they falter. You are rescued, and you live, and you remember three things forever.
The first: never, ever get Danny Hebert truly angry. Half the city finds out that the Dockworkers Association is friends t0 a lot more than just the men and women who unload boats; the plumbers and delivery drivers and electricians and more are part of that crowd. The Empire’s most visible businesses are driven to their knees by picketing, and they shy away from Danny Hebert in the street for over a year.
The second: Capes are not invincible against mere mortals. The Union had taken on three capes, one of them Hookwolf, and inertia works as well on a wolf made of knives as it does on a man. Hookwolf had gone down when two men with wrecking balls on cranes got up close and personal with him. Cricket had been dogpiled by a dozen men in welding gear, her bladed weapons useless. And Stormtiger walked with a limp for the rest of his life.
The third: the sky falls sometimes. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be caught, if you have enough hands.