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The heart of the collapsed building is dank and dark as a womb, sprawled on groaning support beams. “Bad foundations,” Puffy clucks, testing the give of one. “Wouldn’t have lasted another year even if the fight didn’t bring it down. Are you claustrophobic?”

“No,” Tommy lies, and follows her down a precarious flight of stairs.

Puffy, fearless, leads them toward a gaping maw of a wall. Tommy shivers involuntarily, dragging his hand along its surface. The smoke has long died away, but the clarity of the gloom prickles at the nape of his neck.

Dreamon’s illusions were perfect, logical, seamless.

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“I know how,” says Bad softly, leaning over in the chair so his long, lank hair curtains them from the world. “You don’t have to.”

“I know,” says Ponk shortly. Ze’s always been pragmatic, and instead of mellowing over time hir jagged edges have crystallized. It’s how hir hands are steady as ze threads the shoelace through the loop.

“I remember,” Bad insists. The urgency of it, the proof of his caged memory, bubbles in his chest.

“I know you remember, you fucking asshole,” Ponk snaps back, even as ze double-knots his boots with undue care. “I just wanna help.”

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“Ah. I know when I’ve fucked up. My sincerest apologies,” says Goatman. He lifts his arms in the universal sign of surrender, like there aren’t already three guns and a knife to his neck.

Crumb listens for the tell-tale squeak of kevlar that always precedes Jordan’s descent down his dais. It never comes: Jordan’s white-knuckling the arms of his chair, a vein throbbing hard in his neck.

The safety on Ivory’s gun is off, the barrel kissing Goatman’s temple. TapL’s palm is flat against Goatman’s throat, his fingers languid silver lines.

“That’s enough,” Jordan says heavily.

Goatman tilts his head.

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Tina is more sunshine that Niki knows what to do with. On the hottest day of the year Tina declares that American lemonade is wrong and clatters through the communal kitchen for lemons and sugar and sparkling soda, linen sleeves rolled to her elbows and inkspill hair tied back in a bun. 

“It’s fizzy?” Niki demands, fascinated by the sweating glass Tina shoves into her hands. “Is it still sweet?”

“Yeah, the cider and the chung keep it sweet,” Tina says absently, whipping up another batch for Techno and Phil. “Try it.”

Niki does, and tastes sunlight and sputtering fireworks.

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“This is the most humiliating experience of my life,” Karl declares, hunched protectively over his ankle as Quackity hovers overhead. “I hate this entire apartment complex, and also SMP Paving.”

“It’s just a turned ankle,” Callum says. “You’re being dramatic.”

“Running is my whole thing, Callum,” Karl retorts with appropriate exasperation. “Y’know, the thing that puts stress on your bones? Like your ankles?”

“I actually think ankles count as joints,” Quackity pipes up from where he’s poring over Karl’s impressively purpling ankle. 

“You shut up, you told the entire world you flunked out of every aid class you ever took.”

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Poison is evocative. It brings to mind images of velvet, dark family secrets, wine scarlet as blood. The reality is much more calculated and unromantic: Crumb, lanky and nondescript as any unpaid university intern, slips a gram of potassium cyanide into Acosta’s coffee at seven A.M. and is miles away by the time the House rep begins to asphyxiate.

Ivory treats Crumb out that night to a fancy dinner in the city, all suits and ties and sleek glittering gowns, and hides her smile as Crumb swirls their wine imperiously like they’ve seen Ivory do dozens of times before.

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Budgeting is all well and good, but there’s only so much Connor can do on flat fees. He’s short on groceries this week, again, and it’s not like he can beg the landlord to slash his rent for another tantalizing glimpse of his anti-villainy hero boyfriend across the world. His landlord’s gotta put food on the table too.

So Connor displaces his usual client and blocks out a full hour for the highest-paying job. He spritzes some Febreeze around the house for good measure.

“Hi, Charon,” says Nightwalker, haggard, and Connor tamps down the squirm of guilt in his gut.

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George watches through Sylvee’s eyes as she jerks her head to the side, a slash of white-gold hair. Moments later a bullet careens past — the secondhand whoosh bites through George’s brain. If Sylvee had been two seconds slower the bullet would have hit her dead between the eyes.

Nice dodge, he wants to say. I’m watching your flank. Keep moving. Now, now, duck now. He doesn’t, because the extra stimuli only serves as a ball and chain, an overwhelming cacophony of sound.

George may have her eyes, but the only thing Sylvee can count on now is her own instincts.

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Mika likes doing Flowerfall’s hair. Not just because she has a raging crush on the hero — nobody’s as blunt, abrasive, beautiful as her — but also because Flowerfall takes care of herself in a way none of Mika’s other assignments do. Her hair is thick and lush. She always smells like some kind of fruity shampoo. She even chats with Mika during makeovers, instead of staring glazed down at her phone like Ultraviolet or dozing off like Planet Duck.

“They teach you this stuff in the programs,” Flowerfall explained once, thumbing a long, twisting lock of hair. “How to be pretty.”

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“I don’t think I’m doin’ this right,” Techno confesses to the back of Phil’s head. Phil’s shoulders shake as he laughs.

“It doesn’t have to be complicated, mate,” he says comfortably, reaching his hand out. Techno passes him the tangled plait of his own hair, and Phil laughs again. “Don’t listen to the tutorial, it’s bullshit. Look, I’ll teach you how to just braid it normally.”

Techno eyes him. “This is just a tactical ruse to get me to play with your hair, isn’t it?”

Phil elbows Techno’s knee, and Techno chuckles as he carefully parts Phil’s hair into threes.

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Aimsey parts the oranges into halves, then quarters, stars knife flashing expertly through the fruit. Star hands one to Bill, another to Sophie.

“There’s one left,” Bill points out, almost pouting. “Can I have it?”

“Half to a quarter? No way.” Sophie, who likes arguing for the sake of arguing, tosses her head. Her horn gleams bronze-black in the weak sunlight. “At least make it equal.”

Aimsey smothers stars grin into stars orange slice, the golden smile of it. Star only grows the freshest fruits. People could bicker and barter and die for these.

They call star Eris, these days.

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One of the first things they taught you in Quiet Sun was the most economical way to kill a man. They sat the slew of almost-teenagers with inhuman abilities in perfect rows before a Smartboard and mapped the human body, its arteries, its softest spots. They were mirthless lessons; giggling meant demotions, and enough demotions meant disappearing.

Garf remembers poring over the charts after classes, tracing the vivid red coils in anatomical mockups. Feeling the raised plastic ridges across the neck.

It’s how he knew where to cut as the Chief of Operations thrashed beneath him, all those years later.

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Wilbur refuses to let Tommy within a mile radius of his guitar, so he starts him off with a uke. Tommy falls in love with it at first strum, never mind that he accidentally tuned the C to an Eb. He likes the sweetness of the ukulele, how it sings when he plucks.

Wilbur teaches him how to play “Here Comes the Sun.” They go through the Beatles together, and then ABBA. Wilbur once almost takes both their eyes out with a string tuned to strain. Together, fingers on matching strings, they make music that brightens Wilbur’s cold, impersonal apartment.

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They have pageants every year for the girls, especially the ones in entertainment — choose your fighter, only the fighters in question sit coyly in their loaned thousand-dollar dresses and bat their rhinestoned lashes when the cameras crawl by.

This year’s highlight is newcomer Diviner, luminous as a pearl in a draping, diaphanous silk number. Her skin shimmers like she’s been brushed with dew, and she pushes the shining waterfall of her hair over her shoulder when she smiles.

After the final shot the girls crowd the showers, stripped of their borrowed beauty. Tina watches the glittering water swirl, drain away.

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Some people get smoke breaks. Grian gets wing breaks.

He still has to sit at a desk inside a cubicle for most of the day for paperwork, but his entire back starts to cramp eventually from the weight of his extra limbs and how awkwardly he folds them, so Xisuma forces him to take breaks at least every two hours to stretch. X tries, very hard, to be a good boss.

Grian sits in the park out back, kicking his legs. His wings soak in the sleepy summer air, splayed in the drench of sun. He wiggles, closes his eyes.

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Nowadays, Bad works mostly with kids. The chaos is an easy one to predict, and they don’t care if he isn’t all the way there.

“I made a moon,” a little boy proclaims, jabbing his finger at a crumpled approximation of a circle tacked to the wall. “Look.”

“It’s green,” Bad observes mildly.

The boy nods. “Exactly,” he says, satisfied. “It’s ee-vont garden.”

“Avant garde?”

“Yeah. My mom says art means whatever you want it to mean.”

Bad rubs his face with his sleeve and collaborates with the kid to create a truly catastrophic effigy of his hassled homeroom teacher.

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The reality of Goatman’s Bridge sets in quick for Boomer, especially since he gets sent out with Jackpot to kill a trespassing Hellhound literally two days in.

“Please, please, I got a girlfriend, man,” the dude begs, eyes so huge they’re almost all white.

Jackpot calmly fires into the Hellhound’s knee, reloads, and fires again between the eyes. The screaming cuts short.

Yesterday, Jackpot lost twenty dollars to Boomer because he was bleeding his cards during poker. He groaned and griped, but forked it over, and even gave Boomer a pat on the back.

“It gets easier,” says Jackpot quietly.

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Cleo remembers what it was like, being one of the first girls at Chase. All the whispering, the pitying eyes. Then the accident, half her face hanging open, the stitches, the horror. She’d been talking shit about the Council two days before the villain with hatchets for hands came and —

She remembers first the fury roaring alive in her stitched-together chest, then the ruinous grief, then the defeat. How the eyes that stared back at her in the bathroom mirror hardly looked like her own.

So before the Council kills her girl, Cleo tries to teach her how to survive.

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All the fruit here is wrong. There’s not much Tina remembers of Korea, but she knows this much: all the fruit here is wrong. The apples are waxy and hard, the pears small and brown and lumpy. She thinks she’ll cry if she encounters one more grape that isn’t a luscious blue one from back home.

It’s out of sheer desperation that she asks Aimsey, “Do you know what persimmons are?”

“Sure,” says Aimsey, like it’s nothing. A plump orange fruit drops from his antlers, and he passes it to her, beaming. “Hope it’s good. I can always grow more.”

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Mika’s not special, and she’s not proud. She’s just like any other useless fawning stan that comes inches short of pawing at heroes for self-gratification, and the shame makes her feel sick. But this is the most she’ll ever get.

So she watches the clips over and over, video highlights of Flowerfall’s heroics: her pale fingers on her gun; the lean flex of her muscles as she lands from a mile-long leap; the glossy chestnut curls Mika styled just that morning bouncing around her shoulders.

The unhesitating precision of her strength when she breaks a villain’s neck with her legs.

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He ultimately specialized into engineering — advanced weapons development — but Doc loved the aesthetology courses. He would have liked to be a design hero in the purely costume sense, studying iconography, sending tester uniforms out to the MET and MCFW.

Buried beneath his stacks of meticulous blueprinting for collapsed buildings, apartment renovations, and improvements on nuclear warheads are gossamer-thin leaves of paper, so delicate any changes in humidity will disintegrate them. They show models perfectly matching his agencymates: swatches of color against skin, experimental shapes draped over bodies, scrawled notes on the mechanics behind the design.

Before missiles, Doc sketched dresses.

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“How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Eight.”

“Very good. Follow my finger with your eye, not your head. Any pain?”

“Minimal.” Etho’s had worse.

The therapist clucks his tongue, but lets it go. “All right. If you’ll just follow me straight down the hall. Have you thought about getting a cane or a service dog?”

Etho’s stomach lurches at the mere idea. “Definitely not.”

“Most patients with vision loss benefit from those types of accommodations.”

“I’m not really most people,” Etho retorts flatly, thinking of the shrapnel. A freak accident, at least. Not like Cleo. “It’s really fine. Thanks.”

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Sniff’s senses weren’t quite fine-grained enough for any investigative work when they’d been sidekicking. Just one more in a towering pile of disappointments — constantly too slow and too stupid.

Then they met Charles.

“It isn’t about deserving,” they said firmly, gripping Sniff’s hands tight over the crumpled rejection letters. Both of them were shaking, but Charles’s voice remained steady. “This isn’t fair. We’re smart, we’re capable. We did nothing to deserve this. But it happened. The only way out is through. Right?”

“Yeah,” Sniff choked out. They had no idea what real fear was yet. That was yet to come.

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Techno clatters around the kitchen, Wilbur at his side, looking for a specific can of soup. It’s one of Phil’s low days, and Techno’s not feeling too hot either, so Campbell’s it is. Cheap, easy, minimal effort. The staple of those fallen from grace.

“Can we have potato leek, Uncle?” Wilbur asks, awful polite. Despite the fog inside him, Techno grins.

“You’re way nicer than I was at that age,” he says, tweaking Wilbur’s nose. His — the kid preens, eyes shining. Techno dives back into the cabinet under the sink, where their mountain of canned goods reside, with renewed vigor.

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Squid will never, ever, ever say it — but pain and time have made Kristin a goddess. She’s untouchable because of how horribly it all ended, how much Phil loved her. How much Phil still loves her, for all that he and Techno have shiny matching rings that say we are each other’s.

She can’t make any mistakes if she’s dead, see. Squid’s not heartless and Techno’s the only friend he’s got left from back then so he’ll keep his mouth shut, but he thinks Techno sees it sometimes: the blind, hungry loyalty, like a plane screaming out of the sky.

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Quackity knows better than everyone else how deeply Schlatt loves. He knows how to take care of everyone and everything, even though there are some wack-ass hybrids in the Bridge. He buffs Hana’s horns, grooms Clary’s undercoat, even picks fleas off for Fundy without a word. 

And this, this is how he cares for Quackity, his best friend, his closest confidant: by sitting him down every other night, bringing out a little bottle of oil, and preening his wings for him, silent and steady. 

This is the real Schlatt, Quackity always thinks. The Schlatt no one else gets to have.

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Aeltumn hadn’t wanted entertainment, like hundreds of heroes before him. His power was made for design. He wanted to create beautiful things.

He became the beautiful thing, instead. Because he had to be.

It’s not all bad. They let him go into rescue because Nox yells on his behalf. And Noctis, his old mentor, has played the game for years. It was Noctis who helped with Aeltumn’s makeup and Noctis who combed his hair and Noctis who told him how to sit and smile and shine brighter than every star on set.

In entertainment, you’re beautiful, or you die trying.

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Goatman’s Bridge doesn’t ask. Goatman does. “Got a lotta balls for showing up here after all the rumors and everything,” he drawls, drawing one leg over the other. “Had a bad fight, huh? Had to show him who’s boss?”

“No,” Skeppy croaks, feeling so cold inside you could probably break bits of his intestines off like icicles. “No, nothing like that. I’m — I came here because I’m not a hero anymore. I never was.”

Goatman snorts. “You were ranked thirty-seventh until recently. I wouldn’t say you’re not a hero.”

“No hero does what I did.”

“And what did you do?”

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“Hang on — gonna vomit.”

“Don’t do that,” yelps Grian, dancing out of the way as Mumbo collapses to his hands and knees on the pavement. Stress rolls her eyes and crouches beside her junior. 

“Nice, steady breaths now — that’s a love.” She rubs Mumbo’s back soundly for good measure. “Still feelin’ ill? Shall I give Impulse a ring?”

Mumbo makes a miserable noise. Stress pinches a glare at Grian. 

“Now why’d you nosedive like that, Gri? You know our vestibular systems aren’t made like yours — ”

Grian throws up his arms. And his wings. All of them. “He asked me to!”

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The legal line between criminal and villain is vague on purpose. It’s something you learn in the field: the difference between a slap on the wrist and life without parole is being born unnatural. The pale, pointing hands shining out of the gloom: danger, danger, danger.

Alone in the room the Fates provided, Ponk traces the rivulets of ridged tissue on his tricep. Outlines the phantom edge of each of Sam’s fingers, his broad palm, on the shiny blown-glass flesh. Feels the faint, spiderwebbed scars skitter over his neck and bleed down toward the trickle of veins in his forearm.

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“Where’s your girlfriend?”

“Shut up, Quackity,” Sam snaps, then spins on his heel, hand over mouth, horrified with himself for what is maybe the sixty-ninth worst thing Quackity’s ever heard in his life. “Sorry, I’m so sorry. I don’t know where that came from.”

Quackity thinks he knows where it came from. Sam’s fresh off patrol and smells like smoke. Burnt flesh. When Schlatt would lock himself in his room, drinking himself into a stupor, Quackity wanted to yell at the door, What have you done now?

Quackity claps Sam on the back. “No sweat. You good to question Dreamon?”

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Phil patters around the kitchen, feet bare and hair loose, and Techno’s heart sings to hear him humming. A good day. 

Pausing his tune, Phil levels his oat-coated spatula at Techno. He’s the most wonderful thing in the world. “You want milk or water in it?”

“Water’s fine. Fruit?” Techno pats the table hopefully. Phil snorts, brandishing a resealable bag of frozen berries at him. 

“You used to hate oatmeal. Made faces every time Kristin packed it for you. Look how far the mighty have fallen.”

“Listen, man, we’re gettin’ old and it’s heart-healthy. It has protein. It has omega-3s.”

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“Hellooo, Mapporu!” Parkmo goes at Mapple in a flying tackle, either forgetting or willfully ignoring the fact that he’s six feet and some change of lean muscle and crowing laughter. Unter watches, fascinated, as he catches Mapple in the waist with a shared “OUGH” and they both go down heavy. Good thing the grass is overgrown and thus very springy and absorbent. 

The two roll to a stop, clinging, giggling. Parkmo is peppering little kisses all over Mapple’s scrunched-up face, only sitting up once Mapple waves him off to spit grass out of his mouth and grin up at him.

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Xisuma is a senior hero, head of the biggest triple-R agency under the Act, and a decent actor. He’s perfected the art of the poker face. It’s how he gets through the grating yearly meetings with independent stakeholders who live in four different mansions seasonally, maintains composure before a sea of flashing cameras as he holds yet another press conference to cover his defense of the houseless on Twitter, and stands straight-faced as the Council lays out their agenda for the month and their expectations, all of which could have been provided in a concise email of about two megabytes.

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The secret is that Purpled is not naturally gifted with his many talents, such as his scathing wit and ability to shoot five targets dead center at twenty-five yards with a dummy handgun. All of this is skill handpicked and elaborated upon, contingency upon contingency. In a lackluster biology elective Purpled learned about the drive of evolution to perfect survival: it lives in the slight waver before he melts into thin air, or the six full seconds it takes for him to map three exits in order of risk in any given room.

Purpled’s heroics demand survival of the fittest.

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She almost doesn’t make it to the docks. A sawtoothed staircase in the office nearly bit her entire leg off and she’s limping, leaning heavily on Walli’s shoulder, cursing violently with every bloody step.

“Take it easy, Hannah,” Walli’s rasping, adjusting his shoulders. Both of them sound like they chug ten packs a day, maybe because they’ve inhaled enough smoke to power a small train from Dripleaf County to Aether.

Hannah wants to snarl. Shriek. Snap something over her knee, like a spine, like a snare. She’s a live wire, on the verge of detonation. She wants to break something.

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Ranboo’s never been inside Dream’s apartment before. He stares around, taking in the framed photographs and humble little Roomba vrr-ing over the living room carpet, as Dream staggers to the kitchen and wrenches open the fridge door. 

“We keep these for emergencies,” he explains roughly, then bites his bracer as he sloshes white liquor over the ugly gash in his thigh. 

Ranboo holds still, mesmerized, half stuck in his daze. The sun sets the lazy dust motes aglitter. There’s a partially-eaten bagel sandwich, still squashed in its aluminum foil, sitting on the sofa. Dream’s face is white under his veil.

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The sidekicks and rookie heroes aren’t supposed to be allowed near the alcohol, but everyone turns a blind eye. It’s where Ivory has her first drink, not Ivory then yet, just a kid in a suit too crisp for broadening shoulders. There were cocktails in sleek glasses, eye-watering colors all, and someone had pressed a Cosmopolitan into Ivory’s hand. She only remembers the garish pink of it now, one in a blur of anxious memories.

What she does remember with stark clarity is Cleo’s white, stricken face, broken in half by the scar. The downturned corners of her lipsticky mouth.

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Purpled applied to three agencies, two of which accepted him, but ultimately Chase — older, venerated, full of heroes with personal vendettas against villainy — wouldn’t have worked for him. Quackity knows this is why the kid chose tiny, stifling Planet Duck Agency.

Paparazzi has a field day with it, hushed speculation blooming in droves from Purpled’s decision. Everyone wants a piece of the prodigy. Purp’s about as emotive about it all as he is about mountains of paperwork at his desk or flowers and desperate confessions in his cubby: profoundly unimpressed. Now that’s a kid who won’t need a media manager.

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Schlatt spends a stint as an electrician for Spark, mapping the veritable city of data banks and folders upon folders that keep the agency chugging. It’s hardly glamorous, hapless interns constantly scurrying underfoot, holding wrenches and hammers and boxes overflowing with coiled wires in every color.

But it’s not about the work itself, and not about the minimum wage he scrapes in from it. What he wants is information: fingers fumbling down a motherboard at lunch break, feeling the gyri of the thing, noting its notches. Where he needs to press to take out the lights. The emergency call buttons.

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The nightmare never ended for Phil. He’d been twenty-five when the Council tore his whole world apart and he’s well into his thirties now, shoulders shaking from the effort of holding the nocked arrow of his fury taut within him, the ravenous, desperate need to survive long enough to watch the Council burn coalescing into a shining arrowhead. 

The quiet voice at the back of his head, soft and dazed and ribboning around him when he dreams, begs, Come away, stop dying for me, that’s enough, you’re enough.

It’s never going to be enough, he tells her, bow in hand.

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“Arrowhead is one of our greatest assets,” Gethsemane says, calm as ever, not a hair out of place. “Why would I hand him over to you?”

Schlatt scoffs. “Because he’s useful. You know how the Council is about guys like him.” Hands steady in his lap. “Don’t you worry about him, man? The attention he might get?” Gethsemane tips his head noncommittally. Schlatt switches tracks. “Heard he’s got a civ girlfriend.” Gethsemane’s eyes slide away: bingo. “Whaddaya think’ll happen if he gets caught?”

The head of Trinity looks up low through his lashes. Schlatt lifts an arch eyebrow in return.

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Emcee is a flurry of strawberries and cream come April, the island’s native magnolias and cherry blossoms bursting into color. It’s just in time for half a dozen events that lure in tourists — sakura festival, spring fling, and, of course, HeroCon.

HeroCon 2046 is sparse and grim, the attendees and the panelists alike on the edge of a knife: nobody wants to repeat last year’s incident. Online conspiracy theorists are already insisting that HeroCon 2045 is what got the top three heroes killed.

The group panels are meticulously organized. Audience members are intensely scrutinized. One of three questions is planted.

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Seto used to be the crybaby of the family, tearing up at the slightest provocation. He cried over broken circuits. He cried when he failed a pop quiz. He cried when they all got together, as many of the Chase Co. heroes and sidekicks and clerks as they could cram into an auditorium, to sing him happy birthday. Ty would tease him mercilessly.

Then Quentin died, and Seth went missing, and Ian had to go and get his throat cut in a back alley downtown. Seto went pale and quiet and hard-eyed. Stopped whistling through the gap in his teeth.

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Their boss sleeps here every night and so do most of them, Xen included, since, hello, program dropout. They all gave up anything even vaguely resembling civilian life the moment they stepped out of line.

He shares a gutted Victoria’s Secret with Eighty on the second floor, right by the escalators that don’t work anymore. Most of it’s been renovated over time; there are drawers now for their belongings, and two beds with actual frames and mattress toppers. Eighty, who’s a bigger sap than he lets on, keeps candles that smell like flowers.

The mall ain’t much, but it’s home.

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Jordan stares for a long moment at the unwrapped candy in his hand, fiery as a ruby, glistening amidst golden foil. It’s a prototype Sunspot sent a day or two ago, an unexpected and not particularly pleasant surprise. The packaging is old-fashioned, a nostalgia kick. The color is incredible, nothing like any jawbreaker or lollipop or mint. It’s like a jewel.

And one minute of sucking on it will kill him almost instantly.

“Jordan?” Crumb fetches closer to his chair, chin hooked over its arms. “What is that? Can I have some?”

“It’s tetrodotoxin,” Jordan says gently. “A government prototype.”

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Skeppy fights kids off for Bad in the training gyms when they get too mean, because everyone’s afraid of Skeppy and his crooked frown and how he pulls his lips away from his teeth when he yells. Nobody’s afraid of Bad; he cries when people step on ants on the sidewalk.

So Skeppy puts up his fists and says, “I’ll whup you if you look at him,” or “Just try me,” when other students stare at Bad like he’s easy pickings. Rumor’s gone around about Skeppy’s powers, so everyone always backs off and replies, “Hey, I didn’t mean it. Sorry.”

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“Very dapper,” Eret says approvingly, adjusting Foolish’s collar for him. “You look good, Foolish.”

“I guess.” Foolish doesn’t want to schmooze. He’s waxed and coiffed and polished and glowing and buffed like a marble statue of a Greek god, and he feels like his skin doesn’t fit right: pinched at the shoulders, bland and impersonal.

Eret, at least, likes dressing up. “You’re dashing,” he tells him, case in point, reaching up on tiptoe to fix the elaborate pin in Foolish’s hair. “Just three hours, then we can go home and play Animal Crossing. What kind of pizza do you want?”

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Ren, BDubs, Etho: the Hermit heroes that are still neck deep in anti-villainy know Cleo was a warning. Half a female hero’s worth is their face.

By unanimous and unspoken agreement they stop talking their treason and pull away from all social media. Only an idiot couldn’t put the pieces together — Cleo’s televised scoff at a proclamation of the Council’s glory, and two days later she got wheeled into SMP General’s ICU with half her face hanging off her head.

BDubs visits her in the hospital. He adds his flowers to the mountain started by the rest of the office.

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An internship with a hero agency is a lucky catch, even if it is unpaid. Angelo mostly does a lot of scurrying this way and that with an armful of papers, but the other interns are nice, and the secretaries lend him their makeup sometimes, so he’s presentable when he approaches the heroes who keep him and his friends safe every day, tray in hand.

Gardener takes his coffee straight. King Conduct likes it with more sugar and milk and flavoring than grounds. Songster exclusively drinks London fogs because he’s a complete asshole with a taste for terrorizing hapless interns.

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Quackity finally finds Fundy crying in the second floor bathrooms. 

“He didn’t mean it, man,” he tries, nudging the stall door with his shoulder. It doesn’t budge. Fundy only sobs louder. 

Quackity feels for him. He gets it, he does; Fundy grew up practically taking Schlatt’s words for fucking gospel. You sow all that trust and wait for a bounty and instead you get bottles thrown at you; it’s not exactly the high returns you hope for. 

Fundy’s tail twitches on the tile, ruddy red. Quackity curls his hand into a fist on the stall door and tries to understand.

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The first time he used his power Jack knew he was going to die. A robbery gone sour at the corner store where he was shopping in his pajamas; shots pinged off the windows, and Jack keeled over when something — glass, debris, a bullet — caught him in the throat.

One of the robbers noticed, scrambled over. Jack groped for their arm, vision whited out on the fringes, and the door closed, his hands went cold again. Overhead, the robber fell, mouth scarlet with hand-me-down blood.

Jack was fourteen. His younger brother had died two weeks ago saving hostages from villains.

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They get married having lived together for thirty years and been in love for twenty. They invite the entire office and the whole family, what’s left of it. Mitch wears a pantsuit with a train six feet long. Jerome stumbles twice over his vows and ends up crying so hard no one can make out the last ten sentences. When Martyn tells them to kiss already and get it over with, Jerome fully jumps Mitch and they both go toppling to the floor while the entire congregation bellows and throws rice like they’re shooting to kill.

It’s a happy day.

Chapter Text

Martyn heads the liquidation of Evo Offices, now a lifeless husk without Blue and Green. He hadn’t planned on staying — he had wanted to transfer, and was already signing paperwork for it — but he’s the oldest of Evo’s survivors and seniority means something in heroics, so Martyn squares his shoulders and starts redistributing funds and tactics and tech and heroes, sidekicks last of all.

When he gets to Taurtis and Grian he stops, pen hovering over the paper. If it were up to him, he would keep them. He would try to keep them safe.

But he lost his chance.

Chapter Text

“I’m sorry,” Tina rasps, “I’m really sorry, I just — don’t think I can move.”

“That’s okay, we can stay in. It’s honestly not a big deal.” Sylvee cancels the Lyft discreetly, phone behind her back.

Tina scowls. “It’s stupid,” she bites with uncharacteristic venom, sprawled on Sylvee’s couch. Sylvee blinks, then crouches beside her.

“It’s not stupid. They ruined it for us, you know? I get it. Honest. I still can’t tell whether I’m full or not. I get stomachaches all the time.”

Tina, always the softest-hearted of them all, goes wet-eyed. Hushed, she says, “This isn’t what I wanted.”

Chapter Text

They put up a statue in Strawberry Hill to commemorate his loss, which is rich considering he’s not dead and he didn’t lift a finger for the billionaires up in the Strawberry Hill-Clement Gardens area. Still, he goes to see it, hands tucked in his pockets, hair dyed pointedly blond. Crumb, because they’d never go anywhere if it weren’t for him, tags along.

They stare up at it together for a long moment. It’s cream-colored with a lustrous finish. The familiar, heavy drape of his cape makes his heart twist.

“They got your chin wrong,” says Crumb mildly. Jordan laughs.

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The freedom is part of the appeal — from pressure, from prying eyes, from paparazzi. It’s refreshingly new; Jimmy likes that everyone is his equal, that everyone addresses him by name. There aren’t rules, the way there are when he’s Firebird. He doesn’t have to show up dressed to the nines, since it’s not as though there’s a uniform. He’s his namesake amongst the ranks of the Fates: wild-eyed, eager, ready to spark a firestorm.

But he loves heroics, too. The program hammered that into him long before Phil pulled him aside and told him seriously, There’s always a choice, mate.

Chapter Text

The day unfolds hot and dry, the sun a blazing hellstar and the sky a deafening blue: the worst days to patrol. Kevlar chafes.

Dream, infuriatingly unmoved even with literally every inch of his skin covered by some kind of reinforced fabric, says, “Well, I mean, I could probably ask Gethsemane for a favor and get, like, rain. Or snow or something.”

“Whenever you make me think about the weather you bring me one step closer to fucking strangling you,” Sapnap snaps. 

Dream scoffs. Archly, he retorts, “What, you wanna go? Sappy Nappy?”

“Oh, you’re dead — c’mere you bitchass fuck!”

Chapter Text

Tubbo wakes up alone, and he can’t feel his legs.

The careful foundation of his longheaded cool crumbling brick by pitiful brick. He is in a hospital and his head hurts and his mouth is so dry, dry as a desert, and he can’t feel his fucking legs.

A nurse clatters in when a monitor starts beeping shrilly. She tells him it’s okay, it’s just the painkillers, he’ll be back on his feet in no time: no damage to the spinal cord. “It’s a miracle you’re alive,” she tells him, beaming, like he’s supposed to be grateful for having survived.

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Mumbo is, by nature, a fussy person. He was the oldest of five. It makes him feel wanted, to worry over Tango’s singed hair or Grian’s messy wings or Gem’s battle bruises. Sometimes he thinks he’ll die fussing over someone else.

Not like this — Iskall and Stress perched over him, eyes wide as moons. Ash raining down. Fussing is the last thing on his mind right now — his head is full of fire. Iskall is swearing a blue streak. Stress’s lips thin. 

She strokes his hair, her power weaving through him. She sings. The last thing he feels is peace.

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After the scandal with Camoufleur, every hero just kind of… quits their therapists. Plenty of youth counselors contracted under heroics programs lose their jobs, and some particularly paranoid agencies stop covering mental health services on their company medical insurance plans altogether. There’re four more successful hero suicides that month alone.

You can strip us to the bone, say the rigor mortis smiles of the senior hero in the bathtub, the sidekick staring down an eighteen-wheeler, the winged hero who leapt off the roof, the broken doll neck of the design head framed with rope. But we choose how we die.

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It’s Mitch’s party trick, the plasma bow-and-arrow. Aim and fire into mundane memory: a robber, a murderer, a trafficker, a rapist. When he was twenty he was ruthless and Chase Co. was his bloody beneficiary. There was a reason they called him Cutthroat, a reason why he cultivated that persona with relish. He was the only graduate of his cohort to have killed dozens.

More than twenty years later and Mitch still thinks back on the history he cannot scrub off his skin, no matter how hard he tries. He doesn’t know how Jerome can stand to look at him.

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“Mind if I sit?”

Connor’s eyes flicker up, then flicker back down. Schlatt dumps all his shit into an empty chair and hops up onto the desk.

This is their meeting place, the corner table in the library nobody likes because it’s got a rickety leg. They probably come off as drug dealers, never mind that Schlatt’s never even seen marijuana in his life and Connor would probably hurl if someone so much as breathed in his direction after taking a hit. 

“I’ll do your comp chem if you do my aes crit,” Schlatt offers. Connor sets down his book.

Chapter Text

Jack screams when he opens the door. The sound knifes through Schlatt’s head like a buzzsaw.

“Jesus, man,” he groans, slapping a hand down into the pool of blood slowly spreading around him. “Dramatic much?” Except none of that happens, it unfolds in Schlatt’s head like a funhouse mirror, because Schlatt’s bleeding out, and Quackity is gone, he pulled out a gun and he— 

Jack’s knelt beside him, muttering frantically. He puts unflinching pressure over the wound in Schlatt’s stomach and howls for a medic, and Schlatt’s breath catches.

The shape of Quackity is still here, in Jack’s steady hands.

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Of all the ways Aeor imagined he would die he never imagined poison — not the shatter of toxin across his veins like a lightning strike, collapsing in the middle of the lobby in bloody foam.

It’s a bad way to go. He’s never been able to heal himself, and he’s surrounded by fans and colleagues and close-kept friends; there is no surviving this, he has mere seconds at best.

He gropes desperately for a familiar face amidst the heave of panicked expressions above him, and then Fwhip is there, like a miracle.

“I’m here, boss,” he says. “I’m right here.”

Chapter Text

Techno, with the restraint of at least two retail workers, does not tear the apartment to pieces when he wakes up and Phil’s side of the bed is cold. He instead does breathing exercises for ten minutes and then goes out into the kitchen. He stops when he sees the cockeyed crow on the windowsill.

Phil’s bobbing his head, staring out at the open sky. He twists to tuck his beak into his feathers, pausing when he spots Techno staring back at him.

“Hey, man,” Techno says, at a loss for words. “How’s it going?”

Phil croaks, “Can’t fly anymore.”

Chapter Text

“It’s easier if everyone has me totally wrong from the beginning,” Mapple explains. “Gender’s a joke anyway, so.”

“Yeah, that’s smart,” Parkmo says agreeably, because Mapple’s right and because neither of them have been very married to being boys since they were gawky, gangly losers tripping through the halls in year five. Mapple stops fiddling with his ring to beam at Parkmo.

“I think I’ll go by She of the Heights,” he says. “It was one of Hera’s titles. Or Kallisti — the engraving on the apple of discord. Maybe both.”

Parkmo taps his chin. “Do you know any messenger goddesses?”

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They’ve both drunk far too much, but then, Etho shouldn’t have visited. He knew full well it was the anniversary of Ivory’s disappearance (Cleo steadfastly believes her girl isn’t dead) and came over with tequila anyway, so it’s really his fault.

“Cleo?” whispers Etho.

“Yeah?”

Etho hooks his chin over the rim of the bottle, fingers laced around its neck. “I’m so afraid of dying like this,” he admits, and Cleo forces her eyes to focus on him.

“Like what?”

“Before fifty. Before I even get to retire. I just want,” he says, voice cracking, “to rest for a bit.”

Chapter Text

In the end it’s easy — so easy — to walk away from heroics. Not in the physical sense, because it takes twenty hours total and by the time she lands in Dublin for her layover Alyssa’s practically dead on her feet, but in the mental, emotional sense: heroics broke her heart. She can’t look at her loved ones. She never wants to be a hero ever again; they’ll have to draw and quarter her first.

Months later Alyssa will get off her couch, phone in hand, blood draining from her face, as the news breaks. Emcee Island a cauldron of flame.

Chapter Text

Iris’s power does the heavy lifting: charms a barista into accepting his pitiful tip, or cop cars to pass him over. But he has to do more when the stakes are higher. The same way Parkmo piles on makeup and curls his extensions like he’s preparing for war, Iris has to cut his creases and dye his roots his iconic glossy silver until it’s impossible for even the strongest-willed of corporate assholes to look away. 

At least he’s not the Poison Ivy-type. He knew a guy who had to hit second base before people would jump out windows for him.

Chapter Text

“Of course, O Cow-Eyed, White-Armed one,” Gakbyul quips, leaning over the back of Mapple’s chair. “What’s up?”

Mapple grins, clearly pleased. “Just needed another pair of eyes,” he says, by which he means he needed another strat major. Gakbyul, intrigued, diverts his attention to the geographical trend analysis Mapple has pulled up on his third monitor.

“…Is this the Fates?”

“Yeah. From 2057 until now. It’s weird, right?”

“Very weird. And erratic as fuck.” Gakbyul purses his lips. “Have they called you?”

Mapple gives him one of his Chesire smiles. “Not since November. I think we’re in for a surprise.”

Chapter Text

The crazy thing about chronic pain is that it keeps going until you have nothing left to give. It’s so loud that you can’t talk or think or move or breathe or, heck, exist. It really brings a guy down.

H lives with it as best he can, his very own terrible roommate who refuses to pay rent. He makes sure to allocate some funds toward PT, takes extra care to stretch his back and ankles and knees at least twice every day. Some days he can’t leave his bed, let alone the apartment, but it rarely gets that bad.

Chapter Text

Owen is so dangerous his family donated him to the government — which is why he only uses his powers on his people once. It’s the most important thing he’ll ever use them for.

SWAT is pounding on the door, the Outsiders sold out on a dime, so Owen has to be extra loud and extra sweet: “Graecie, Apo,” and he has just a second to appreciate the open horror in Graecie’s face before it’s seamed behind the slam of induced apathy as he tells them, “Will you, please, go home for me?” — the last of a string of cutting lies.

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Morbid curiosity trips Violet into asking, “Do you believe in God?”

A dozen heads swivel toward her. Instant shame burns bright in her belly but she keeps her jaw set — Eloise expects nothing but pride. 

It’s Midnox, a decade her senior, who finally says, like he’s sourcing each word from a gutter with shit stomped into it, “From what I remember… nothing too crazy. Church on Sundays.” There’s not even a hint of pleasant nostalgia on his face. “But it’s been years since I thought about God. And honestly, if He exists, I’d like to tear Him a new one.”

Chapter Text

Ty is the shit icing on the shit cake of 2049, the final death in the family to wrap up a spectacularly devastating year that started with Ian’s murder. And here they all thought that was the worst it could possibly get.

He and Mitch still have to go in to identify the body — standard procedure, says the lady on duty with an apologetic wince, which is how Jerome knows it’s gonna be bad. Even then, he’s not at all prepared for the lurid red edges of every single bullet hole in stark relief. Ty’s narrow chest a trypophobic nightmare.

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Even before she turned to villainy, Deytra had fallen back on pickpocketing; Spleep has made more than one scornful comment about how she’s part buzzard. Garf, offended on her behalf, had called her resourceful. Deytra herself prefers the term “opportunist.”

And really, what better opportunity than an apocalyptic fallout to finally kill the director of the CIA?

“You can’t leave.” The wall of fire has finally closed in. Her rings will keep him here, roasting alive, a slow agonizing death that’s more than the bastard deserves. The director’s eyes finally, finally go wide and terrified.

Deytra beams. “Better start screaming.”

Chapter Text

“You owe me everything,” Strawberri says sharply, and Sherbert has to seriously question their decision not to kill her the instant she walked in.

“I don’t owe you squat,” they return, fighting to sound bored. “And if you’ll excuse me, I’m kinda busy trying to figure out this fucking supply drop.”

“Of course you owe me. Look how quiet I’m keeping,” Strawberri says, matter-of-fact, in that wonderfully grating way of theirs. 

“Don’t push your luck, Gaea.” It takes no effort for Sherb’s voice to jag into mocking territory. 

Strawberri scoffs, her soft edges serrated. “Then don’t make it easy, Blackbird.”

Chapter Text

“Look sharp, Goner,” Wildcard calls out as they pass, the delight in their eyes unmistakable at Skeppy’s glare. “This ain’t heroics. No rules on playing nice.”

And Skeppy could get that if it weren’t for how readily everybody is stocking up on lethal weapons. Wildcard himself is toting three separate handguns, and he smirks when he catches Skeppy staring. 

There’s a law somewhere that prevents any and all conflict, armed or otherwise, between sanctioned hero agencies. It prevents outward infighting and makes sure the public image of heroics stays squeaky-clean. 

When Jackpot passes him a magazine, Skeppy holds deliberately still.

Chapter Text

In what even he himself would consider to be a profoundly good mood, Unter happily foists himself upon the nearest unwitting victim: Yuseong. 

“Oh no,” says the man of the hour, broken from his riveting doomscrolling. “Not you.”

“I’ll pretend that wasn’t super insulting,” Unter says airily. “Anyway! I’m bored. Come play League with me.”

“Iris?” 

“Busy.”

“Metta?”

“Out for lunch.”

Almost hopefully Yuseong asks, “What about Mapple?” 

Unter shakes his head. “He’s in one of his moods,” he says mournfully, putting on his best puppy eyes. 

Yuseong predictably folds like wet tissue paper with a gruff, “Fine. You win.”

Chapter Text

Techno and Phil have the same cheesy taste in statements, which is why they send at least three people ducking for cover when they stroll into Jordan’s place.

Jordan, to his credit, just sighs and clears off a spot at the table he and his lieutenants crowd around every morning. “Lachesis, Atropos,” he says, acknowledging each of them with a nod. Then, to Phil, “And was this shift really necessary?”

Phil, limping just his usual tad, offers a smug, hoarse chirp and fans his whiskers. Techno digs a hand into his partner’s plush, stripy scruff and tries not to laugh.

Chapter Text

People like Oeca should never have been brought to Emcee in the first place — people who’re poison to the bone, who’re never gonna get better. The screening only caught him because he was the kid who watched his whole family die and that spread nasty rumors about his powers. And sure, Dan tried — god knows Oeca’s mentor tried — but there’s only so much he could have done when Oeca was fighting for his fucking life in the glue trap of heroics.

It’s why he went to the Outsiders: he couldn’t save his own family. Might as well save someone else’s.

Chapter Text

“You look lovely as ever, Cleo,” says Ren, all charm, bowing to kiss Cleo’s hand. Cleo rolls their eyes and shoves him lightly with their shoulder.

“Yeah, all right, you mutt,” they say without heat. “Fetch me a drink?”

Ren bats his eyelashes. “Do I get a treat after?”

“I should have X fire you,” Cleo retorts playfully. Ren throws his head back when he laughs, and this time is no different: the column of his throat bared as he cackles.

Someday, Cleo will stop flinching for a knife that isn’t there to land a killing blow that isn’t necessary.

Chapter Text

Kara’s therapist makes national news with her sordid tell-all about the mental state of Chase Co. sidekick Camoufleur. Hatred and speculation and hungry, prying eyes follow Kara up the steps of Godeye Agency, but her juniors, bless them, don’t give a single inch. In all her years of heroics she’s never seen a triple-R hero look as cold as Foolish does when he freezes the entire flock of reporters on her tail with a single glare.

“I can’t go back to — that,” Kara explains uselessly in the privacy of Eret’s office. Blinks back tears when they simply pat her hand.

Chapter Text

Scrapping is fun because it’s like tearing at one another with all the ferocity of a pack of starving wolves. There’s so little Sapnap is allowed to do anyway, so he might as well be the best at beating the shit out of people.

Splayed on the mat, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, Sapnap watches Ranboo limp away with their hands in shaking fists. The sidekick’s ferocious, for all that they try to act shy; they nearly broke his teeth in. He stares down at his belly, where he got kicked, and waits for the skin to blacken.

Chapter Text

“What was it like at Chase?”

Jaiden’s answering look is sharp, the cut of her lips sharper. She rolls her gum around in her mouth a while before replying, slowly, “Bad. Sometimes it was great, but… we were all there because we were so similar. And not in a good way.”

Roier frowns. “I don’t understand.”

Jaiden mulls it over. “We were — too similar. To see that we were all sinking. We couldn’t tell where someone ended and someone else began. We all wanted the same thing, mostly.” She shakes her head. “It’s like that. When you kill people together.”

Chapter Text

The mutt follows Angelo down ten blocks before he finally veers off the sidewalk and offers it a hand to sniff. It’s a mixed breed, spotty but stout, limping heavily on its stump front paw. Angelo takes in the genealogy of the dog at a glance — his tiny gift, enough to get screened but not enough for more than coffee-running — and rummages through his bag for any spare snacks.

There needs to be a better animal service system in place, he thinks viciously, forking over half a sandwich. He’s seen way too many stray animals around here with missing legs.

Chapter Text

The Fates aren’t sensitive, but they have standards. Lackeys with no respect for Lachesis because of his scarred arm need to be made examples of.

“Besides,” Missa murmurs sidelong to Aimsey, who’s holding stars breath as the idiot begs for their life, “this is only a little bit about respect for betters. Shaming people for limbs they’ve lost is an asshole move.” His gentle face twists. “I couldn’t be paid to bury that body.”

Aimsey makes sure to hold very still as Atropos says something long-winded and scathing. Star swallows hard when Broker steps forth and shoots the poor bastard.

Chapter Text

Ivory takes great pride in her hair, long and lush, never cut save the shave she’d been forced to get while on the run. It maintains an even tone of pale, lovely rose, and she always asks TapL to comb it for her because she insists no one has the ability to make her glossy hair shine even brighter.

TapL understands vanity, which is why she asks him. He paints his nails with the same careful precision he wires bombs, gel and color and topcoat with meticulously kept nail beds. They bicker, but TapL, loyal, wants her to feel beautiful.

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An interviewer once asked George whether he’s ever felt powerless. It’s the only question, to date, that George has ever fumbled. The video of him blinking stupidly at the interviewer has been clipped to death. 

It was an unbelievable question: of course George knows powerlessness. He knows it every day, surrounded by scores of colleagues and friends whose slumbers he knows are plagued with unspeakable horrors. He knows it every night that Sapnap sleepwalks to the kitchen and drops their knives in the sink. He knows it, keenly, every time Dream screams himself awake before George can even reach him.

Chapter Text

“Can you leave?”

Walli pauses at the door, hand on the frame. Gently, he says, “I don’t mind taking care of you, dude.”

Purpled shoots him a glare. “Well, I mind, okay? Just — go take care of someone else. How’s Astelic?”

“She’s peachy. You gave her your cold,” Walli reports, not without amusement. Setting aside the thermometer, he shuffles over to the bed and sits on the edge. Picks a loose thread. Purpled’s apartment is sparse at best. “Y’know, you’ll feel better with some sleep.”

“I don’t care about feeling better,” sniffles Purpled tartly. “I wanna go back to work.”

Chapter Text

Mitch’s finger traces the lurid red lines on the cold gray chest. Jerome might hurl.

“He wouldn’t,” he whispers, white-knuckling the rim of the body tray. Disbelief has doused him, tidal, total. He feels frozen all over, foggy, pale and sodden with a grief he barely understands. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t real — the doubt is planted, the memory is sullied. Machinima is forever dirty. 

When Mitch finally turns away, his eyes are hellish. “They’re lucky they’re dead,” he says lowly, “because if they weren’t, I would’ve killed them myself.”

Carved into Machinima’s chest: “Blood Traitor.” The ultimate accusation.

Chapter Text

“And what are you in the country for? Business, pleasure?”

“Business,” Alyssa grinds out, somehow managing not to sound as completely rabid as she feels. She tore out of her apartment with her hair still wet from the shower and barely remembered to snag her passport on the way, so it’s no wonder the agent looks her over critically. 

Not that Alyssa cares. Her heartbeat hammers between her temples, each toll sounding like all the people she loves burning on that godforsaken island. Callahan. Oh god, Callahan. 

“Well. Welcome to D.C., ma’am,” says the agent blandly. Alyssa could cry.

Chapter Text

It’s just their luck the one time they forget their chipped cards that TSA decides they’re shady. Alyssa doesn’t even have her heroics license on her. Still, trying to look as innocent as possible, she chirps, “He’s my best friend. Born here, raised here. Not a single unpatriotic thought in him. Right, Callahan?”

“Yeah, I’d die for this country,” says Callahan, so earnestly Alyssa winces. 

Maybe they sell the bit too hard, because they get kicked out of the airport. On the upside, the guards’ faces when they return in full, glorious uniform flanked by Council bodyguards is a hoot.

Chapter Text

“How do I look?” Foolish asks. 

Eret pauses in the middle of spritzing on perfume. Another day, another outing to fund their agency. At least tonight’s do is exclusively triple-R, and Eret will be surrounded by familiar faces. In the mirror, they can see Foolish fidgeting with his delicate, lacy sleeves. 

They set down the bottle and stand, wandering over to him. He’s slicked his hair back, and Eret can see the exquisite diamond earrings he was sent by the brand he ambassadors. 

Eret lifts a palm to Foolish’s cheek. Smiles to themself when his scales brighten under their thumb.

Chapter Text

The agency outing this year is the bar of crystalline beach out in Windsweep, the sand so white it sparkles in the sun. Grian, who makes sublime deadweight, is bundled into an industrial-strength life jacket and sent on his way. He spends the whole afternoon winging through the air above splashing range of his coworkers, watching them frolic in the gleaming waves. He drops beach balls on them. Come dinner he’s red and peeling and Pearl slathers him head to toe with aloe, but she brushes grains of sand from his feathers and Scar feeds him marshmallows with his fingers.

Chapter Text

It’s worse because he definitely would have seen it coming if he didn’t love heroics the way he did. The programs are a cesspool of rumors, and students disappear even more readily than low-ranking heroes do. In year three, a sixth year who used to run his mouth got killed in a freak accident; Tommy went to the funeral grimly and remembers Tubbo’s hand on his wrist, clinging ever tighter.

Hounder, Dovetail, Squid Kid, Crabapple. Thousands of heroes that vanished from the beautiful lie. Tommy’s not special, and he never will be. Just one more thing Dreamon took from him.

Chapter Text

“I do,” says Jimmy, his heart hammering in his head. “I absolutely do mind.”

The partygoer glances back at him, startled. It just makes Jimmy burn hotter. 

“You can’t speak about him that way. You don’t know what he’s done for all of you, for all the — the queer kids out there who want to be heroes, to know it’s okay.” Jimmy nearly chokes on his fury, snarling at this round-eyed nobody who threw out a casual insult like Jimmy was just another pretty, empty-headed bauble to be laughed about. “You — you — Starstruck is more than you will ever be.”

Chapter Text

Sometimes when Quackity presses his ear to Karl’s chest, he can hear the soft rev of his breath like an engine. It’s crazy how quiet it is, almost a purr if he didn’t know better. Karl always laughs at him, bemused. Just another day in the life for him, forever ready to run. He’s six feet or so of pure speed, every last movement an afterthought. He caught a bullet for Quackity once: not the way you think, the ‘take me, not him’ way, but literally. He plucked it out of the air.

Changing the world comes easy to Karl.

Chapter Text

Bad comes back from the hospital to find the apartment is the same as he left it, save a fine skin of dust. The Roomba is parked amiably in the corner. The toadstool salt and pepper shakers are rubbing elbows on the table. When Bad opens the fridge, the cabbage has gone bad, but all the condiment bottles jingle merrily, and Bad finds himself on the floor, on his knees, blinking tears and cold sweat out of his lashes. 

He cleans rigorously, religiously. He throws out the sriracha, even the expensive wasabi. He wasn’t the one who liked spicy food.

Chapter Text

Doc finds X in the thirtieth-floor broom closet with his head in his hands and slides to the floor beside him, never mind the floor’s filthy with old cleaning materials and dust from every corner of the Hermit Offices HQ. He waits. 

“I’ve been warned,” X says through gritted teeth, “by some higher-ups. It seems that we’re — overconfident. In our position.” After a moment he rolls his shoulders, no doubt remembering that he’s the head of the biggest triple-R agency to date. “Be ready to have your ranking docked.”

Doc clasps X’s shoulder. “Mm. It will be okay.”

“Will it?”

Chapter Text

Zek waits for twenty minutes before anyone thinks to inform him that his mentor is in the hospital. “He’s what,” he chokes, following Bodil down the hall after being dismissed by King Conduct. 

“We’re not sure yet exactly what happened,” Bodil explains, “but he’s going to be out for a while, so you’re being transferred to a different mentor. Is there any other stuff you want changed while we’re at it? Your alias? Your concentration?”

The low-grade terror that circles Zek like water around a drain snaps cold. Last week his anti-villainy classmate was gunned down in a winnable fight.

Chapter Text

Dream wishes sometimes he took that offer to teach a strat elective for Dripleaf, back in 2056. He was too young and too busy to accept, but it haunts him enough that sometimes George wakes him from dreams of lecturing to a sea of faceless voices, a thousand raking eyes, little bloody beating hearts. Dripleaf is the poorest county, and while that doesn’t mean much on Emcee, it does mean the three Dripleaf programs consistently turn out the most hero-turned-villains.

He wants to stand before them, the shiny-eyed groups of five or six, and tell them to run and hide.

Chapter Text

Leo’s not so much older than Crumb that it makes a difference. They kicked her out because she was an objective threat, so full of wide-eyed righteousness she would have made a killer poster child for her program’s weak-kneed social justice extracurricular. She was smart and she was personable, and was about to declare the most threatening major of all — history.  

Most history majors, if they don’t specialize into propaganda, disappear even before sidekick apps. It was probably meant as a slap on the wrist: Don’t do drugs, don’t sneak out, don’t get curious about what the government is hiding.

Chapter Text

And sure, he was a dream operative — what intelligence agency doesn’t want an agent who knows with complete certainty that the people he’s talking to are spewing utter bullshit — but it’s like they forgot that once a person gets a taste of freedom, they know to want for it. 

So Zee jumped ship the only way he knew how — by faking his brutal, bloody suicide in a blackened hotel room, preceded by weeks of shifty eyes and crumbling faith and little whispers here and there, just touching upon the possibility. It’s not like anybody around could tell he was lying.

Chapter Text

The file is three pages long and reads like a twelve-year-old’s first swing at scribing creepypasta. Quackity grips the paper so hard it creases and asks weakly, “So the guy is—?”

“Dead,” says the Council lackey. “Put a gun in his mouth. He couldn’t take whatever he’d seen, whatever the Harbinger did to him.”

“This says ‘hyperrealistic hallucinations.’ What — exactly — does that mean?”

Quackity’s never seen a Council grunt emote. The guard shudders and shakes his head. “I looked the Harbinger in the eye once. It was just all dark, all blood. I could feel my fucking insides turn inside-out.”

Chapter Text

“My name is Mapple,” says Kallisti, smiling mischievously. Yuseong chokes on his cornflakes and has to be thumped on the back by Ggumong.

“You gave — you trust me??” Yuseong manages, when he’s finally not in danger of dying. “Oh my god, oh my god, Kallisti.”

“Mapple,” corrects his boss. He’s gentle about it, sitting in the only space at the counter not flooded with sunlight, dragging his spoon through his cereal. “It’s a good name. You should use it.”

“It is a good name,” says Parkmo, just this side of defensive. “It’s lovely, is what.”

“Simp.”

“Mapple,” Yuseong echoes faintly.

Chapter Text

Even with the fiddly weights Squid sewed carefully into Phil’s old shirts, most days, Techno kneels before Phil at the edge of the couch and buttons them up for him. Phil prefers sweaters so it’s not a daily exercise, but it feels ritualistic nonetheless, the hush that settles over the whole house, the studied steadiness with which Techno slots each button into place. Once he glances up into Phil’s eyes while he’s fixing his collar and is stunned stupid and scarlet at the quiet reverence on his face: something loved and lost. Techno stammers something senseless out and Phil cackles.

Chapter Text

Velvet laughs, letting his eyes linger on the line of Ant’s shoulders in his plain shirt. This relationship shit’s not half bad, really — Velvet knew he was ruined for any kind of love the moment he got into the program, but Ant’s nice and easygoing and he’s one hell of a looker. 

Ant notices him noticing. He gives Velvet one of those delicious half-smiles and slithers over, still holding one of the beer cans Starstruck passed out. “Very classy,” Velvet breathes, tracing the ring pull with his finger. 

“Shut up,” Ant snorts, and kisses the smugness right out of Velvet.

Chapter Text

It took Condi two weeks to choose Nox Co., and even then, he thought he’d made a mistake. Second-guessing a Greek chorus flitting around him. He watched cohortmates flock to Chase and bit his lip to keep the longing out of his voice, convincing himself he was lucky to have Nox, lucky to be mentored by kind, smiling heroes rather than Chase’s wordless perfection.

But in 2049, the glowing, benevolent head of Chase Co. got his neck cut and chest mangled in a back alley like the backstabbing filth he was. Biz had nudged his shoulder and whispered, Good instincts.

Chapter Text

Schlatt was supposed to save them. Fundy’s power was nothing special — maybe he could’ve been funneled into design — except he entered the programs at the height of the second boom of nuclear armament, and he could easily handle the materials needed to mass-produce nuclear reactor cores. Circumstances made him a target; when Schlatt got up on that table and talked about who should and shouldn’t be afraid, Fundy had chosen him without a second thought. He almost tripped over himself to get in line.

Seven years proved him wrong, and really, Fundy should’ve known better than to bet on miracles.

Chapter Text

Seto never mentioned a sister. He never mentioned his blood family at all, period, and everyone took the hint: loved the family he’d built, rather than the one he was born into. All heroes have a fraught relationship with the house they came from; people learn to be tactful. Seto was good with kids, though, at tying shoes and patting heads and offering snacks, and Mitch always wondered. 

When he and Jerome corner the girl with the bushy brown hair and he sees the flash of the gap between her teeth as she snarls, Mitch knows exactly who killed Machinima.

Chapter Text

The pancake Sapnap was trying to flip goes straight into the opposite burner. Induction cooktops were definitely a good investment. “Shit!”

“Good going,” snarks George, scraping the gently sizzling goo off of the counter more kindly than his tone would suggest. “Try another. Lower heat for longer, maybe.”

“Thank god for you,” Sapnap tells him earnestly, trying not to look too wild-eyed. Judging by George’s involuntary step back, he’s failing miserably. “If you weren’t here, Dream and I would totally be eating shit raw. Burnt eggs and, like, dog food. Undercooked meat and everything. You’re the best. I love you.”

Chapter Text

The upstairs neighbor absolutely knows who Phil is, but she’s so grateful for his babysitting expertise that Techno’s pretty sure she’d take a bullet for him. It’s the kind of stubborn loyalty Techno would reward, were she a part of the Fates. Completely powerless, alas. 

It’s not just Phil’s ability to change diapers and sing lullabies and burp the kid like a champ: it’s also that he can shift into any animal he likes, and babies are crazy for that sorta thing. Techno watches from the kitchen, highly entertained, as the baby grabs fistfuls of Phil’s varicolored plumage, babbling nonsense. 

Chapter Text

The blinding lasers in excruciating colors all and pounding music like a second heart aren’t exactly Pearl’s scene, but she’s always enjoyed the way everyone’s watching everyone, how there’s nothing subtle about any of it at all. She hip-checks Grian, who’s dressed in a spiked leather jacket and nursing a Shirley Temple like the broody grimdark chicken he is. “You come here often?” she hollers against the overly enthusiastic house DJ. 

“I think we should break up,” declares Grian with zero pathos, no devastation, no nothing. He’s never going to whip the rumor mill into a frenzy with that attitude.

Chapter Text

High tide out by the beach at Dripleaf, where the dark sand is made up of crunchy bits of old shells and shiny seaglass shards. Mapple picks his way across the black rocks that pock the foamy tide, reminded faintly of childhood vacations to Jeju. 

Parkmo, as agile as he is freakishly tall, hops merrily from rock to rock, crowing at the top of his lungs. Mapple’s Valentine’s Day gift was a day of his undivided attention, and the first thing Parkmo demanded was a beach date. Of course. 

Parkmo sings a nonsense ditty, arms thrown wide. Mapple follows him.

Chapter Text

Wilbur comes to between one serene breath and the next, crashing into awareness so hard he sees stars. His lashes flutter, but his mind’s still sharp — he can see the brick walls of the alley, and the broad back of the man that brought him here.

His heart skips a furtive beat. Uncle.

The childish joy only lasts as long as Wilbur remembers why he’s here. Horror climbs into the lining of his teeth, and he staggers; when Uncle — Technoblade — whips around, Wilbur sings the walls into the way. He’s a coward, forever a coward. He can’t face his father.

Chapter Text

“I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Well, probably not,” Foolish says easily, since he loses most of his battles in the interest of winning the wars. “But it would be fun. And you gotta be bored as fuck, cooped up in here.”

“…Maybe,” says Songster warily, about four days shy of a shower and in desperate need of one. He’s a poster child for self-neglect. 

Foolish hands the karaoke mic to him, handle first, pressing it into his palm. 

“Go nuts,” he tells Songster, solemn. His laptop begins to squeeze out the tinny opening lines of “Careless Whisper.”

Chapter Text

Biz was bottom of his class because nobody would lay a finger on him — every last one too afraid, remembering how the asshole that punched him in the face got sent to detention with the twin of Biz’s broken nose. He knows better than most the pipeline to villainy, how things fester down in the gathering dark. 

Goatman’s Bridge is revelatory. It’s a goddamn experience, meeting people like him who can do horrible things. Goner has shifty eyes but can play a mean hand of poker; Griz smiles sweet and shoots even sweeter. He has friends. People he’d kill for.

Chapter Text

A light goes out in the apartment across the way. Graecie watches it go, knuckles white on her skirt.

She’s maintained a civilian life, somehow. She was never the most useful, only really good for the smuggling part because precious rations could be shared amongst the refugees while she subsisted off of bark and crickets — she didn’t know what to do with the sheer weight of the Outsiders’ legacy when Magic died and she still doesn’t now. She sticks to her part-time, to her gossipy coworkers. She silences her burner in case it’s Redd or Squidney or, god forbid, Oeca.

Chapter Text

“I could’ve been his fucking crown jewel,” Hannah fumes as Chaz slumps over his cup of coffee at the cooler.

Hannah likes to pretend she’s way more over the Bridge than she actually is. Chaz has never met a person madder than her, so incandescent with rage that she glows with what the paparazzi blubbers is beauty. They’re all stupid; Hannah’s dangerous.

Still, Chaz likes her. A lot. “He knew that,” he says wearily. “You know he was saving a name for you, right? Kicker. That’s the card that’s—”

“—used to break ties,” finishes Hannah. Her voice has gone funny.

Chapter Text

George isn’t keen on sharing the bed at first. It’s one thing for Dream and Sapnap, who’ve been inseparable since they were eleven and allegedly pushed their dorm beds together, making all manner of unholy noise for their poor neighbors, just to be those couple inches closer. George has never really been the touchy-feely type.

But then, his first year roommates weren’t Dream and Sapnap, who push the beds together anyway; wasn’t Dream, who hugs George from behind when he’s making eggs and toast; wasn’t Sapnap, who pulls George facefirst into the pillows and sighs happily once they’re cuddled together.

Chapter Text

“I took everything from him,” Skeppy confesses, hushed. Griz scoffs soundlessly.

“Sounds like you only took as much as you wanted,” he says in someone else’s voice — unfamiliar, high, drawling, a cynical something that clings to his vowels. A passerby shudders and starts moving faster: not a good voice, then. A voice feared.

Skeppy swallows hard. “I didn’t want to.”

“No?” Griz affects a chromatic cackle that raises every hair on Skeppy’s arms, the nape of his neck. At the stoop by the escalators, Roier picks up the gun he was cleaning, eyes huge. “No? Then why’d you do it?”

Chapter Text

“Hey,” says Sam, “um.”

Ponk looks up from where they’re adjusting their necklace. The gala ran late. It’s either one in the morning or more, and Ponk’s eager to get going — early shift tomorrow. They stop at the look on Sam’s face.

He’s been drinking; Ponk saw him holding a glass in one hand, laughing amidst the sea of glitter. The champagne doesn’t explain the bright red of the tips of his ears.

“Hey,” says Ponk.

Sam stoops to kiss them on the cheek. It dances through Ponk’s face and into the bones of their jaw with a little zip!

Chapter Text

All the small fry are cowering in the hall. Small wonder: Kallisti’s furious.

“How dare you bring him to me like this,” she says, quiet, unyielding. Nothing her power could manage would do Jamtteul any harm, but no doubt Kallisti’s pet cannibal and living forcefield aren’t far.

Kallisti’s lip curls. “He was yours before he was mine,” she concedes, “but that doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t matter that he likes you best. It doesn’t matter that you’ve better resources, greater protections. Do not,” she hisses, her fingers a brand around Jamtteul’s wrist, “presume that I won’t destroy you for him.”

Chapter Text

This is the part they’re supposed to hate. The blinding lights, the flood of fans slavering on the doorstep: Dream took Stage Presence three years straight, fully prepared to hate every single person he shook the hand and signed the merch and kissed the fanart of for doing this to him.

So maybe there’s a dirty stir of shame deep down within him for loving it. For eating that shit up, the lights and cameras and ardent, desperate eyes. Maybe in another life he was made for the screens, filled with a nameless charisma that keeps him at the top.

Chapter Text

This new thing, this bright and terrible and precious new thing, makes Sam an incomprehensible mess. Ponk considers xyrself a patient person, but xe has limits. Xe has standards.

“You need to stop shorting the block whenever anyone asks if we’re fucking,” xe tsks, hauling Sam out of the blacked-out control room. Sam, a prude by practice, almost kills both of them by tripping over Ponk’s feet, his eyes popping out of his skull. 

“You’re crazy!” he squeaks. “Don’t say that so loud!”

“We’re not even actually fucking, you stupid cunt. My god, it’s like you’ve never spread rumors before.”

Chapter Text

After, Backlash leaves. Jack waits, but no one follows — too busy washing the blood off. Jack wipes his hands on his trousers and goes to get her.

She’s sitting on the curb, flexing her fingers around phantom triggers. The gun in her holster goes unnoticed; she ejects a nonexistent cartridge, fiddles with the bullets. He can see them as clearly as she does.

Jack folds himself down beside her. In the oppressive silence he can feel her shaking, so he shrugs off his battered denim jacket, faded from years of fond wear, and drapes it over her shoulders. Backlash stills.

Chapter Text

“Heigh-ho, Mitch! Got a couple schedules with your name on ‘em.” 

Mitch glances up in that way he has: a sidelong slide, like you’re barely worth his attention. It had girls swooning in his heyday, before he went and tied the knot with Jerome, and what a press nightmare that was. Preston keeps beaming.

Mitch stands and smiles back. “Thanks, man,” he says, utterly disarming, sweeping the papers onto his desk to join the mountain already there. It’s only fair. Preston’s sure the wedding invite is still sitting on his coffee table. Nothing personal — just gotta keep your work-life separated. 

Chapter Text

“You would’ve fit right into Chase,” Jaiden tells her bluntly, cleaning her nails with an actual dagger. She’s one of the coolest people Hannah’s ever met, and Hannah desperately doesn’t to fuck this up. 

“Okay,” she croaks weakly. It’s not her proudest moment. 

Jaiden shoots her this sharp, calculative look that Hannah desperately wants to learn, the kind of edge that only comes with a lot of experience. “Yeah,” she says now, tucking her dagger into its sheath on her leg. “You’re tough. You’d kill anyone who tries to fuck with you.” A faint smile. “You would’ve eaten Rune alive.”

Chapter Text

Dinner in the mood-lit gastropub on the corner of Twelfth and Maple, Gem’s elbow nearly sending the candle into the shallow dish of balsamic and olive oil. It’s younger than Stress goes for, but she makes do with a smoked-something Reuben and watches admiringly as Gem picks out a salad with far too many kinds of leaves and a pasta with cream and pollock roe.

“The salad here’s eh,” Gem says, leaning in conspiringly and tilting a hand back and forth like she’s not dropping fifteen bucks on said salad. “But the pasta is fucking — sorry, freakin’ — bomb. I’ll share.”

Chapter Text

Tommy looks at the sticky mess of his hands, then up at Eryn, then back down again. “I’ve never made bread before.”

“Neither have I. Pretty sure it’s not supposed to bubble like that, though.”

“What the fuck are you guys doing,” Tubbo demands, poking his head into the communal kitchen on his way back from his acrobatics extracurricular. He’s really sweaty. “What the fuck is — oh my god, it’s moving. It’s alive.”

“This is my son,” Tommy tells him solemnly. “I’ve gifted him with the miracle of life.”

“That thing is fucking sentient — abso-fucking-lutely not, get away from me!”

Chapter Text

As a rule of thumb, Preston feels no fear. Oh, sure, he’s appropriately wary, being the agent of a couple high-profile AV heroes and all, but he’s not afraid of them. He treats ‘em like exotic handlers treat tigers — though they’re cuddlers most times, they’re still tigers, and they still bite.

And boy, do they bite. If Preston was any lower on the corporate ladder, he would have gotten the ax. He’s only still here because he crafted the Mitch of Chase legend and rebuffed the interview offers when Cleo got hacked. He’s surrounded on every side by empty cubicles. 

Chapter Text

Of the Hunters, Punz is, by far, the best shooter, probably because Sylvee’s hands shake too much and Sapnap can’t touch flammable materials as a precaution. Punz got top marks in every ranged combat course he took and a physics elective as the cherry on top: he studied velocity, displacement, the bullet glistening in the meat of the wound, its butt caved by the hammer.

That’s its own gospel. Punz saw firsthand what happens to heroes who take it as religion — Chase ground that lesson into him — but he gets out there anyway, aims and fires. He shoots to kill.

Chapter Text

Quackity’s on TV again. Schlatt watches the way he flirts with the crowd, just the way he used to flirt with death, and aches, not that he’d let anyone know it. Roulette’s full of heroics escapees and decent people: they look away, clean their guns or pick their noses, letting Goatman have his moment.

Quackity’s moles static softly under Schlatt’s fingers. His cheeks are thin. He still gesticulates wildly, with both hands, like a conductor for an invisible orchestra. Schlatt doesn’t get how anybody could ever look that happy having presented themselves, belly up, for the Council to carve away.

Chapter Text

The rooftop garden a kingdom of light. Connor hitches up a leg and watches Schlatt ramble about something or another, the glaring sun flashing off his rings when he gestures.

This is the best place on campus, better even than the library: a broken-down, halfassed greenhouse with the walls punched out, off-limits due to structural concerns. It’s so green Connor’s eyes hurt, and it smells hot and hazy.

Things grew here even when the district cut the funding. The flowers and the ferns and the fruit trees all. Schlatt shades his eyes with his hand, and Connor looks at him.

Chapter Text

“We’re speaking a different language, you and I,” says Griz, soft, wearing Schlatt’s voice. Schlatt himself is taking a nap. Jaiden is either babysitting or on deck as damage control. It’s hard to say what Schlatt wants, these days.

Griz cackles. It’s a pretty good approximation of Schlatt’s laugh, and to the untrained ear he’s exactly who he’s supposed to be. “Thanks but no thanks, sweetheart. We just don’t have the time. You know how it is.” 

Over the line, someone unimportant snaps, “Don’t patronize me.”

Schlatt’s old roguish smile surfaces across years on Griz’s mouth. “Can you blame me?”

Chapter Text

It’s hard to think through the quiet, unreal pain — silent, constant, like it plans to live here forever. He means to say “I’m okay,” and it comes out as “Could be better,” which is probably a Freudian slip. 

“You want ibuprofen?” 5up says immediately, attentive. “I have a bunch lying around somewhere. And a heat pack. Here, you can sit down if you want, let me go grab some things for you.”

“Don’t exert yourself,” Chayanne protests weakly, teetering into the proffered chair on complaining legs. “It’ll go away.”

“But I can make it go away faster,” 5up says reasonably.

Chapter Text

This is the fun part — the agents and anchors and station managers falling back. This is when they feed the fans some clip fodder.

“That’s all from us here at MCN,” Quackity says convivially. “I’m Planet Duck, here with — damn, I don’t remember.”

“Can’t have been that important,” Songster agrees, his smile cynical and charming. “Songster, at your service.” 

Quackity leans forward onto his elbows for a moment, making a point of studying Songster. The light puddles against him, obligingly flattering. He’s good-looking, all winged eyeliner and sharp edges.

“We gotta grab dinner sometime,” Quackity says in a tactical purr.

Chapter Text

The Row is full of pigeons, the gutters grubby with feathers. Techno can’t bring himself to hate them the way everyone in the heaving bustle of downtown SMP hates them, not the least because his own partner favors bird shifts. The lot of them were thrown away following domestication. They probably understand him better than all the people in the city combined. 

On their first night sleeping on the street, a black-and-blue pigeon pecks inquisitively through Techno’s ratty hair. He’s got his hands tucked into his armpits, trying to get comfortable, and its beady black eyes stare back into his. 

Chapter Text

The Spark Co. outposts are staffed with ordinary people. They source their heroes from the motherland of Emcee, but when Sam rings the Cali branch, a perfectly normal person with a wife and kids picks up. “Spark Co. California, at the service of the world. My name is Dina, how may I help you today?”

“Just me,” says Sam lamely. “Sorry. I’m… doing the rounds.”

“Sam.” The call manager’s voice goes butter-soft. “All good. How’s it hangin’?”

I’m holding the number one hero in my basement, Sam thinks. Out loud, he says, “Things are fine. Hey, how’re Rowan and Logan?”

Chapter Text

It’s been a long time since design was a worthy pursuit. Bodil has seen countless trends come and go, aesthetology fade in and out of public interest. It’s widely accepted that heroes design uniforms for heroes, since obviously a civilian would flub it: only heroes know what heroes need. 

But despite the vapid stares reserved for him and his ilk, there’s a simple and uncomplicated beauty to fashion. The pearlescent powder dabbed under Catmeleon’s eyes, or the fine white fractals painted onto King Conduct’s temples. Flowerfall’s roses, when she finally got them. The way her face, wreathed in thorns, glowed. 

Chapter Text

False’s cohort was the first deployed. It didn’t matter to the protestors that their beloved heroes were holding the riot shields. If anything, it just made them angrier. 

When the bombs flew in October at Brookfield Market, they killed six demonstrators and three heroes. Three of False’s program friends were dead in an instant. She heard it on the radio, and she knew every single one of their names. 

When they put her up on that podium, even before Doc squeezed her shoulder, False knew that more than she wanted to be free, she didn’t want anybody else to die. 

Chapter Text

Purpled came to Planet Duck already bogged down with bad habits, the first of which being, in Hannah’s humble opinion, his insufferable fucking attitude. 

“Can you not be a dick for two minutes?” she snaps at him, patting poor Gauri on the shoulder as he weeps. “Her dog died yesterday, Jesus Christ.”

Purpled is silent for a long moment, long enough that Hannah glances up at him. She’s genuinely taken aback by the blankness of his face.

“Sorry,” he says finally, crouching in front of Gauri and holding out a tentative hand. His expression so carefully cobbled together. “Sorry, Gauri.”

Chapter Text

“Shit!” 

The car screeches to a halt so abruptly that Jerome snaps back into the headrest. “Ow,” he mumbles. 

His sidekick is too busy white-knuckling the wheel to respond. Prodigy of the Modern Era, Chase Co.’s youngest, a villain hunter after Mitch’s heart, and he’s sweating from a little prowl around the street. Jerome’s chest aches just looking at him. 

“Ease up on the pedal,” he suggests, loosening the death grip the seatbelt has on his neck. “Take it nice and slow, capiche?”

Cube, who has never encountered a challenge he hasn’t faced head-on, replies, his face determined, “Capiche.”

Chapter Text

Sam scuffs his sneakers on the carpet. The whole world is a different color, ever since Jordan disappeared. He’s trying to find his feet in the agency, learn faces, keep people happy, but sometimes he’ll stop to take a breath and reality will drag its dirty fingers over the illusion: he’s a twenty-two-year-old with six years of heroics experience. This isn’t his agency.

Ant bounds out of the locker room, his lanyard dangling from his fist. “Thanks for waiting up,” he says breathlessly, grabbing Sam’s hand and towing him towards the lobby. Something jagged in Sam slots back into place.

Chapter Text

When X steps into her cubicle, Cleo already knows.

“Don’t,” she croaks, holding out a hand to preempt him. She doesn’t need the grisly detail that every news reporter and Twitter conspiracist will tear her open to find out. The less she knows, the better.

X, because he’s a better friend than he is a boss, pauses to let her gather herself before telling her, “The whole block blew up during the storm — twenty injured, four dead. Terrorist attack, allegedly.”

Cleo closes her eyes. “And un-allegedly?”

X folds his fingers into hers and says, “A lightning bolt leveled her apartment.”

Chapter Text

One Tuesday afternoon finds Tubbo falling in love with his job again when the sun’s falling just right through his window and his body doesn’t ache for once and the air’s light with the smell of possibility. He shrinks away from it on instinct, disgusted with himself, slamming his work laptop shut and reaching for his phone before remembering hey, heroics fucked that too, remember how you’re avoiding Tommy and ignoring Ranboo and how Eryn’s probably dead?

And even then he can’t help how he reaches out, past the money and politics and constant, crushing despair. His fingertips brushing hope.

Chapter Text

“You play poker?” asks Jackpot, peering critically at Charlie over his 3-D goggles. Charlie, who’s aware how unlike a seasoned card player he looks, tries for a beaming smile instead.

Bettel smirks. “Nobody’s Roulette without knowing poker. It’s parta the job description.”

“It’s not,” says Blackjack worriedly, darting a glance at Charlie. “Martingale? You know it’s not, right?”

“I missed that part on the LinkedIn post,” says Charlie brightly. “I can play slapjack and go fish, though.”

Bettel’s smirk stretches wide until he looks disconcertingly like a jack-o’-lantern. “We’ll make a Bridger outta you yet,” he says, pleased as punch.

Chapter Text

Broker walks her hand up the pale swathe of her left arm, where Karl can see bullet entry wounds, fading to white. Her voice is careful. “I didn’t hate myself enough to cling to a reality that didn’t exist. I couldn’t live with the Bridge, but I couldn’t live with Spark, either.” She eyes Karl. “No offense.”

“None taken.” Karl gets it. Maybe not the whole picture — Spark Co. is little more than fragments of memory — but he does remember how lucky he was: a white boy with a cool superpower. 

And they broke his head open anyway. Tough shit.

Chapter Text

The loss is inarticulable. By day Techno ransacks Goodwill and by night he curls up in Phil’s lap, Phil’s silent tears trickling secondhand down his cheeks, into his hair. He has no right to grieve her as all-consumingly as Phil does. She was his wife; legally, to Techno, she was nothing.

But if she was nothing then Techno wouldn’t feel like somebody melonballed him with a chainsaw. If she was nothing then Techno wouldn’t see her in every passing woman with dark hair, red lips, a laugh so total she doubles over for it. Love, that soft and insidious thing.

Chapter Text

The worst part is the greasy sheen to them, like an oil spill. Bill readjusts his septum as he picks past the fallen body, wrinkling his lip when Aimsey toes it over. 

“Bill,” star says reproachfully, “did you have to?”

Bill rolls his eyes. “Well, no, I didn’t have to, but the big bosses asked and all. ‘Sides, it’s better like this. We don’t have to fight. We’re eliminating waste and conserving energy. Nifty, innit?”

“Taking a dead body anywhere is pretty suspicious, man.”

“He’s not dead, just… frozen.” Bill’s great for kidnapping that way. “C’mon, let’s bring him back.”

Chapter Text

“Poor Falling Sun,” tsks Vegetta, neatening the newspaper under his hands. “Poor, poor kid.”

Ivory kicks an elegant leg out. “You better not be getting thoughts, Vegetta,” she teases. “You know Jordan doesn’t take strays.”

“And what a terrible thing to have, thoughts!” Vegetta shoots back, though he’s grinning ear to ear. Ivory’s heart flip-flops helplessly in her chest: he saved her with that smile, and he probably knows it. He turns twenty-eight this April but it feels like a hundred; Pete calls him a sympathetic bastard, and Vegetta just smiles and keeps on hurting for people he’ll never meet.

Chapter Text

“I’m gonna — I’m gonna take my fucking skin off.”

“Don’t. Lookame.” Boomer snaps his fingers in front of Purpled’s face. In the empty shoe shop, it echoes like gunshots, and Purpled doesn’t even budge. “Lookame, Purp, c’mon.”

Boomer never knew about this part. He kinda assumed that heroics was everything it seemed, each hero a gleaming, faceted jewel in every color. He bought into the Council’s shitfaced lie and feels stupid about it, because of course nobody gets a horde of pretty faces with flashy costumes and deadly powers without breaking them in thoroughly.

Purpled digs his fingers in harder. 

Chapter Text

The light seeping from beneath the door is a cold white warning — Phil doesn’t like keeping the overhead lights running — but Techno goes in, anyway. He ignores the lampshade crumpled against the corner like a broken body and sits on the edge of the bed.

The crow in the sheets pulls his head from under his only wing and opens his beak in a scream.

“I know,” Techno mutters, shame searing through him. “I’m sorry.”

The crow pauses. He slips from the veritable nest he’s made, wobbles over to Techno’s leg, and tucks his head to Techno’s side. He coos.

Chapter Text

Every year in June, Gizzy bakes cookies for the graduating kids over in Aether. It’s been over twenty years since he last walked his program’s halls, but he still remembers the oppressive, obliterative delirium of being a heroics student, and how nobody was waiting for him when he got home. 

He’s got nothing but time, these days, so he bakes every kind of cookie in existence. Snickerdoodles, chocolate chip, double chocolate chip, lemon, ginger, pumpkin, roll-and-cut, slice-and-dice, the ugliest cookies he’s ever seen and some that rival the the prettiest bakery window cookies. He packs them up in ribboned boxes.

Chapter Text

Heroics doesn’t teach you bare-bones survival: what to do when you’re lost, no food, no water, no way to get out. Even the rescue-relief students only learn the basics. If you’re stranded, you’re screwed, same as any untrained civilian.

Dream licks his cracked lips. Sam didn’t want to hear what he had to say, and his vested aversion to the truth has driven off any chance of Dream being fed.

Thankfully, heroics has taught him other kinds of arguably more important survival. He shows his throat when Sam or Quackity comes by. He sits quietly. He speaks when spoken to.

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When Sapnap comes home, the house is empty save a thin skin of dust. He wipes his face, turns on the Roomba, and veers into the bathroom to grab the laundry hamper and dump two weeks’ worth of neglected clothes into the washer.

He slows to a stop in front of the master bedroom. He hesitates before nudging it open, hamper set on his hip, and looks in, just in case.

George’s dark hair peeks out of the lip of the sheets that Sapnap changed this morning. He can just see the tip of George’s toes in Dream’s pizza-patterned socks.

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The first and only time Jerome ever saw Seto mad, it was three months after Machinima gutted Clara like a fish. They were all standing out in the garden, Seto’s mouth a deep furrow, his hair brittle with the harsh shampoo.

“Enough,” Machinima had said, quiet. “You need to rest.”

“All I’ve been doing is resting. I want out,” Seto shot back. He was all teeth, almost snapping. Jerome remembers the weight of Mitch’s hand on the small of his back, tensing when Machinima took a step forward.

But all Machinima did was reach out. Fold Seto into their arms.

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Dream remembers the terrible, totalitarian fear of being sixteen like it was yesterday. He still wakes up now with that nameless, mutated terror churning in his stomach. He can keep Sapnap and George up all night with the sheer blunt force of his panic: sunrise through the sill like a death sentence.

It’s not the same. He knows it’s not the same. But still, staring up at the skinny-armed sidekick with his shoulders curled in, Dream feels like he’s traveled through time — like he’s sixteen again, gripping the dorm sink, looking into the mirror and trying not to throw up.

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Holdover from Machinima’s time are the field signals — curt, one-word orders from a superior to their sidekick. Long ago, Mitch trotted to Machinima’s side just like this, with the click of a tongue and a flicked wrist: Heel, puppy, and Mitch did exactly that.

Old habits die hard. Call him selfish but Mitch wanted to cling to the things that made Chase Chase, even after Skyward was dead as dead gets. He and Jerome had to gut the agency top to bottom; he just wants to keep this one, unsullied thing.

“Heel, Wilder,” he tells his sidekick, and Wilder does.

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Koma screams and ducks under his desk when the windows blow in, shooting deadly shards every which way. Overhead he can hear the gurgle of some unfortunate coworker as they choke and die. 

Crunch of glass underfoot. The heavy tread tells Koma boots, bulletproof vests, carrying some heavy object or weapon. 

He quietly nudges the wall with his toe. The camera affixed to it tumbles to the carpet at his feet. Showtime. 

Koma skids out from under his desk. His first knife drops the two thugs with guns. Nobody expects a mild-mannered office worker to be affiliated with Argo Navis. 

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“This isn’t the year. The unrest isn’t wide enough.”

“Like brute force wouldn’t work,” Shelby says, sullen. The look Bombshell gives her turns her to stone. 

“I get why you’re skeptical. But this is a reality most of us present have lived for ten, twenty years. Thirty, if Xephos and Honeydew had made it, but their constitutions aren’t really up for subterfuge anymore.” Bombshell’s thumb grazes the edge of his untouched plate. “The 2050 riots failed. It’s too soon. And the villains won’t back us up. If we try, there’ll be nothing good waiting for us on the other side.”

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It’s Etho, of all people, who snags X’s sleeve and says roughly, “Please don’t go.”

X gently pulls his hand from Etho’s grip. “It’s my job. And my power is perfectly suited to the task. Everything will be okay, you’ll see.”

“I don’t believe you.” Etho looks hunted. “What are they thinking, sending one man out to contain a uranium spill?”

Cost efficiency, for one. X is deployed when there aren’t enough gas masks or hazmat suits to go around. Radioactivity is nothing to sniff at, but X has much better natural protections than the average person. 

Etho’s mouth thins.

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Puffy blinks down at the heap of flowers on her desk, each one a bright, friendly pink and strewn alongside ribbons and individually wrapped chocolates. “Who’s this from?”

Kit doubles back from his way to the vending machine and calls, “I stole one of your chocolates, sorry. They’re fucking delicious. It’s from Foolish and Eret, I’m pretty sure.”

“What for?” Puffy selects a heart-shaped chocolate and unwraps the glistening purple foil. 

Kit’s mouth hitches up at the corner. “Well, boss, call me crazy, but I think it’s for Mother’s Day.”

Puffy almost drops her chocolate. Her heart swells with song. 

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“Ren.” Skizz’s voice trembles. “You didn’t.”

Ren, frozen in front of the communal fridge, croaks, “Um. Yes. I didn’t.” 

“Impulse has been cooking so many meals for me to take to work,” Skizz says mournfully. “Because he’s a good friend. He slaved over that lasagna, Ren. It’s my favorite. It takes three hours to make and he’s a full-time hero.”

No villain has ever managed to frighten Ren, toughened by his wild years as Chase Co.’s slavering wolf. He cowers now from Skizz’s wobbling lip.

“In my defense,” he says weakly, “I was very hungry.”

“So was I, Ren!”

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Jerome whips around, sick with adrenaline. Glint on the opposite rooftop — sniper’s scope — he zeroes in, wishing more than anything he had Machinima’s teleportation or Seraphim’s wings or Seto’s gales, any of it, his power tearing at its leash.

“Mitch!” he barks instead. “Is he—”

“We’re fine — go,” Mitch snaps back. His voice is pulled taut. Jerome hazards a glance over his shoulder and freezes: Punz, eyes big and scared, face spattered with scarlet. The sight of Mitch’s blood, bright red against his white arm, makes Jerome’s chest tighten to the point of pain.

Mitch snarls, “I’m fine, Everhunt — go!”

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Puffy remembers the girl she mentored before she disappeared into the annals of history as just another casualty, the one with bright red hair and freckles like stars. She’d never tasted ice cream before. After her first shift, Puffy brought her to parlor and they picked out flavors together.

Puffy recalls perfectly every single sidekick she’s ever had. She remembers this one for her sparkling eyes, how she hummed in delight at the first spoonful. The lushness of Puffy’s own bite, tinged with vanilla. The way her sidekick’s cheeks had dimpled, sweet and shy, when Puffy slid over her share.

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By unspoken agreement, all whispers of weapons caches and nuclear armament and missile launching get funneled to Sunspot, Argo Navis, and Team Salad. It’s only fair. 

It does make for some awkward moments, though. Koma’s first knife pings uselessly off Counterspell’s open palm, and they snarl wordlessly at one another. 

“Run along now,” says Jamtteul calmly, stepping between them. “Kallisti will receive every single code, don’t you fret.”

“Excuse us for worrying about what you’ll use nuclear warheads for, Briar Rose,” retorts Venus. She bares her teeth demonstratively, fearsome as anything. What Jamtteul wouldn’t give to poach her from Kallisti. 

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“Is there a problem, Whisperer?”

All the hairs on the back of Owen’s neck stand up on end. Graecie tenses beside him, and they turn as one to face the lone approaching figure. 

“Maze,” Owen says, mouth dry. Not the most dangerous by a long shot, but still Sunspot and therefore to be avoided at any cost. “No, we’re just… having a look around.”

The Maze regards him with amusement. Slowly, liquidly, she draws nearer. 

“Remember that the Los Alamos labs are our turf,” she purrs as the floor spins dizzyingly under Owen’s feet. “Goodbye. The Harbinger sends his regards.”

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Sunspot is a loose coalition at best; at worst they’re an interest club hellbent on revenge through any means possible, even if they have to strangle each other for it. Case in point: Poverty and Debunky are at each other’s throats. Spagheters scoffs. 

Except — Garf stands, and his voice is colder than an arctic wasteland as he says, “That’s enough.”

The room hollows into silence. The roof caves. The ground erupts into pincers—

It’s not real. But Garf is dusting his hands and Poverty and Debunky are shrinking back, cowed. The Harbinger runs a tight ship with a tighter leash. 

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Roier tosses his extra handgun to Eighty the moment he comes into view, yelling, “Where is he? Eighty, where is he?”

“Got him right here,” says Eighty easily, dragging Cellbit behind him by the scruff. He’s yowling fit to bring the whole prison down and the sight of him blooms bright and unguarded in Roier’s chest. 

Before he can say anything, Eighty bodily foists Cellbit onto him. They collide like two stars, by which Roier means Cellbit nearly concusses him two seconds into their heartfelt reunion. 

“Culero,” he sputters. 

“Hiii, guapito,” croons Cellbit, bruised and ragged and stupid-smug about it. 

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“I still don’t understand perfume ads,” Pearl grumbles, picking fronds of grass from the frills of her lime-green Marc Jacobs dress. It’s a loan and could probably pay off a good chunk of her program debt — best to handle with care. “Especially photoshoots.”

“Well, the idea is that it smells like frolicking in a field of flowers,” says Gem, ever the voice of reason. Pearl squints at her; Gem’s effortlessly lovely in cool blue silk, her hair teased into tumbling orange waves. 

Gem catches her glaring and laughs, kicking out her bare feet. “What? It gets us paid, doesn’t it?”

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Beautiful people — really, truly beautiful people — don’t have to try to look good. They don’t need to try for much of anything — they can just sit there, hands folded demurely, smiling their vapid smiles and raking in thousands of dollars in sponsorship deals. Beauty can be bought, taught, sold to the highest bidder. Easy to love beautiful heroes. Easier still to want them. 

But there is a reason Dreamon Hunters have horns. Why Flowerfall snaps the neck of every villain who crosses her. Why Gorgon walked out of the hospital with her head held high, her face broken in half. 

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“Hey,” whispers Seto, stirring a breeze as he slips his hand into Mitch’s. It’s small and soft, and Mitch squeezes it on instinct, threading their fingers together.

“Hi,” he says, instead of saying all of the things he wants to say. “Are you waiting for Ty?”

Seto nods. His big brown eyes are trained intently on the screen, but he squeezes back. “He’s in the final bracket with Zed.”

“Good for him.”

“Mm.” Seto shuffles his feet, then shimmies closer, his frilled skirt flaring around their ankles like the tanglelegs of jellyfish. Mitch’s face goes hot.

“Seto,” he squeaks, trapped.

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“Graecie, it’s just me. You can trust me,” Strawberri had told her after everything, earnest, and Graecie— 

She didn’t know what she was giving up, then. The night before, the world had ended. She didn’t remember it perfectly, but between her and Apo, they put it together piecemeal: their leader had betrayed the Outsiders. Owen was gone and Rasbi was dead and she didn’t think it would matter.

“Owen was selling our clients out to the Sleepers,” she told Strawberri, hushed and terrible like it was all a bad dream, and missed the way Strawberri’s eyes went sharp with hunger.

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“It’s pissing it down, is what,” Tommy declares, sticking his whole head out of the window like a maniac. Wilbur swears and grabs Tommy’s leg as he continues blithely, “Gotta put on the old gumboots and take a nice stroll ‘round the bend.”

“Speak the Queen’s English, man,” Wilbur pants, heaving the rest of Tommy back into the room by the ankle. “They standardized us for a reason — are you wearing an umbrella hat?”

“Tubbo made it for me himself. It’s pretty, innit?” Tommy preens. The papier-mâché heap on his head crumples sadly under the weight of the torrential downpour.

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“All done!” chirps Niki’s makeup artist, spinning her chair towards the mirror with a winning smile.

Back in the Bridge, Niki did her own face every morning. She loved the e-girl aesthetic of decades past, the heavy-handed colors and graphic eyeliner; when she took her place in the food court at nine, she was cut-creased and dark-lipped and fearsomely beautiful, like a succubus, like a demon.

In the cold light of Spark Co.’s green room, Niki sees a woman with perfect skin and blue doe eyes. Her apple cheeks and bright red smile make her look ten years older.

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“And this year’s number one hero… is Dreamon! Come on up!”

A hundred thousand covetous eyes swivel to stare ravenously at Dream, sleek and dapper in green-gold Armani. Sitting inappropriately close to him, George can feel the way Dream goes stiff, the way sweat springs out on his palms. It’s kind of gross, but George doesn’t snatch his hand away.

“It’s okay,” he whispers. Carefully, out of the side of his mouth, so the cameras can’t catch his words, so Dream won’t have to see them all over tomorrow’s tabloids. “Go.” He nudges Dream’s leg with his knee. “You won.”

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Ant draws the handgun from under the table and says, “Get out.”

“Ooh, ouch. What am I, your dirty little secret?” Bloodmonger waggles his eyebrows, coy.

“You’ll be a dirty little corpse if you keep it up.” Ant sets his jaw, disengages the safety. “I won’t ask you again. Get. Out.”

Bloodmonger’s beaming face mutates into something not at all cute. The brutish, ugly twist to his red-limned mouth, like he wants to bite Ant’s head off. Ant digs his fingers into the handle of his gun.

Don’t be afraid, he reminds himself sternly. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

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The ground snaps up, elastic under Alyssa’s guidance. Venus just twirls gracefully up into a tree, bringing a scowl to Alyssa’s face. The villain beams down at her, her comically massive bow bouncing as she cocks her hip. 

“Is that all you got, Founder?” she hollers. 

Alyssa grinds her heel into the dirt and feels the whole earth shudder at her touch. “I’m just getting started,” she shoots back. 

Venus’s grin stretches unnaturally wide. Alyssa’s treated to a perfect view of Venus’s grotesque Chelsea smile, all teeth and tongue. 

“If you want me,” Venus says sweetly, “come and get me.”

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It’s funny — they only ever really crossed paths before this in the hallowed halls of Dripleaf District 1, but Argo Navis has a way of making your people so precious you’d kill to keep them. 

“Why do you like me?” Gakbyul asked just once, feeble liquid courage acting as a crutch. They’d been passing around somebody’s questionable homemade cocktail mix, and looking at Suhyeon sidelong was making Gakbyul’s head spin. 

Suhyeon just smiled, pulling one of his soft white ears over his shoulder. “Because I don’t have to make you like me,” he said, as if it were that simple. 

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The pay isn’t so bad that you starve. Most sidekicks pull in enough income to at least make it through the first and worst year without resorting to the Row or picking up a part-time job. But if you’re in a low-income district, if you’re in triple-R, if your agency’s heroes aren’t popular — it’s hard. It’s really fucking hard. 

Coffee counts out his bills at the table with shaking hands. It’s the last of his pay left over after necessary expenses, debt payments, groceries. 

Just to be sure, he counts them again. Unsurprisingly, it’s still not enough for bus fare.

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She finds Seonha knelt beside Five’s prone form, stroking his face with careful, careful fingertips. Despite herself, alarm turns her heart over in her chest. Jamtteul had never intended to get attached, but, well. More the fool her for thinking she could best that persistent beast, loneliness, on her own.

“Is he dead?” she asks, crouching beside Seonha. The younger villain isn’t wearing her neutralizing bracelet; as Jamtteul watches on, one of Seonha’s fingers draws the finest red fracture down Five’s bruised cheek. 

“No,” Seonha says hollowly. “It could have been worse, but — it just grazed him. He got lucky.”

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Noctis stares at them, backlit by desk lamps. First-year sidekicks don’t usually get overnight shifts, especially not at Nox Co., but they carved out time for their mentor. Parkmo twines his fingers through Mapple’s, doesn’t miss the way Noctis’s face tightens infinitesimally. 

“You’re going villain,” she repeats.

“We thought this would be better than a two-weeks’ notice,” Mapple says. Parkmo only knew later that this was a portent of the person Mapple would grow up to be: cold as a lake glassed over with ice. For now, he squeezes Mapple’s hand. Mapple’s fingers flinch like he wants to squeeze back.

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There’s only so much Emcee you can take. The worst moods can drive Phil to his bed for days, even weeks, but when he’s more in sorts, the island pulls into focus: looks like the glorified birdcage he knows it is. 

That doesn’t stop Techno from intermittently grilling other Fates on vacation spots. Phil doesn’t know what he thinks he’s doing; ninety percent of their org were culled at eleven. Most of them have never been off-island.

“You need some whimsy, man,” Techno replies when asked. “We could escape to France and start a creperie once all this is over.”

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Taurtis is already there when Grian lands with a flurry of feathers by the entrance. The elderly security guard is dozing, so Grian bypasses him entirely, offering Taurtis a wave and what feels like a fifty-fifty chance at being a smile.

Taurtis, for what it’s worth, smiles back, patting the grass beside him. The graves before him gleam dully in the dark. 

“Sorry — my shift ran late,” Grian tells the headstones rather breathlessly. “X says hello.”

“I was telling them about the runaway farm animals you rescued yesterday,” Taurtis replies, amused. “We’ll make a Poultry Man out of you yet.”

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“You have to stand up straight, love, alright? Take a deep breath. Don’t let them take anything from you.”

Ivory, little seventeen-year-old Ivory, pulls a shivery breath in at Cleo’s request. Cleo feels their chest tighten to the point of pain, both gratified and devastated by their protégée’s unquestioning obedience. 

“Relax,” they tell her, brushing their hands over her shoulders. Her interim uniform is truly awful, mostly a stopgap measure so she doesn’t have to wear her old suit, but they try vainly to smooth the ruffles down anyway. “You’re lovely. You’ll be fine, Ivory.”

“Cleo,” whispers Ivory, “I’m scared.”

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Astelic siphons most of her adrenaline secondhand from Purpled. He’s the one that gets sent home early, nixed by the triple-Rs for his concussions and contusions and twisted ankles. Astelic sits in on the early-evening entertainment panels and learns how to smile so that her cheeks dimple.

She tries to parse the emotion that wells in her, sometimes, when she looks at Purpled. Worry. Pity. Something that feels like it could be envy, beading up like blood under her tongue. 

She doesn’t know what to make of that last one. How could anyone be jealous of the life Purpled lives?

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Jimmy almost never met his new boss. The fallout of Evo was so caustic he couldn’t bear to meet White Hart in the eye. It was pure chance that he got caught up in a bank robbery gone catastrophically, horrifically wrong and found himself facedown in a gutter after a villain panicked and leveled the whole block.

All he could taste was blood, and his toes were starting to go cold, but some new, iron stench warmed him from the inside out. Gauzy, like the edges of a dream, came White Hart’s voice.

Drink, he’d said. You have to drink.

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From his vantage point on the rooftop Gakbyul can see the exact moment everything goes tits-up — Rathar grabbing Suhyeon’s shoulder and wrenching him backward as the first gunshots crack the pavement. 

Rma’s senior but Gakbyul’s a lieutenant — his orders take priority. “Carukia,” demands Rma breathlessly, right on cue. 

“Requiem, Paradis, take point. Jag, flank — shit!” Some goon punches Jjoman in the chest so hard he nearly dismantles the kid. “Seonnyeo, cover Jag.” Seonha digs her heels in, her fingers a blur of silver when she slices the goon’s hand clean off. “Attagirl. Eudaemonia, shit’s sake, fall back. Midas, you’re up.”

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Goatman’s Bridge had massive industrial ovens the size of steel tanks, with equivalent firepower. They were one of the precious few useful holdovers from back when the mall was actually a mall. The first time Niki tries to bake a batch of cookies after she comes back, she burns them to shit. 

Temperature too low, dough too loose, Niki herself unforgivably distracted. Disgusted, she scrapes the charcoal lumps off the tray with the flat of a knife and flaps one of her towels until the dark, oily smoke vacates her kitchen. Once she’s done it’s like she never even tried. 

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Old archival habits die hard. The day after George does some spring cleaning and reorganizing, he comes home to Sapnap and Dream standing before the bookshelf with their hands on their hips, looking deeply perplexed. 

“I swear it was on the second shelf yesterday,” Dream is saying. “I mean, I put it there.”

Sapnap strokes his chin like he has a full beard instead of some dinky stubble. “Maybe someone broke into our apartment,” he muses. 

“And took our books? Dude, our awards are literally right there.”

Idiots, George thinks, helplessly fond, and turns away to go take a shower. 

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“If I breathe them in, do you think they’ll grow in my lungs? Slow death by fungal suffocation?”

Shelby snatches her hand away. “Oli,” she says reproachfully.

“Sorry!” Oli doesn’t sound sorry at all. In fact, he leans in a little more, his eyes shining. “And inaccurate too. You do poison, not mushrooms.”

A chill prickles up the back of Shelby’s neck. She can’t tell him this, not bright-eyed Oli, but she’s positive she’s accidentally killed people in the past, exactly how Oli’s describing it. Neurotoxic bioluminescence burning through the pulmonary arteries before she figured out how to control herself.

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There was a year, two above Purpled’s, when a tournament ended in tragedy. Purpled was sitting with the other third-years, feigning disinterest, when the agonized scream shattered across the speakers. Shining on the screens: the shriek of blood haloing the semifinalist’s flattened left arm. 

Injuries are frowned upon in tourneys, broken bones mean demerits, but a crushed limb? A promising candidate’s dominant arm, and their career destroyed with it? There was no official winner that year; nobody says the finalist’s name. When Purpled steps onto the platform two years later, he holds her memory in his mouth like an L-pill.

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“Oh, I don’t know,” Quackity drawls, swinging his leg out. “Might need a kiss to feel better.”

Schlatt stares at him, just long enough that Quackity stiffens, but then the moment passes and Schlatt throws his head back in a braying laugh. He smears the blood off his face with the back of his hand, turns to spit the rest of it into the grass, then leans in to press his mouth to Quackity’s scraped knee.

It’s methodical, no lingering, no ghost of hot breath. In fact, it scratches a little because Schlatt’s growing out his stubble. Quackity grins anyway.

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“Look out for him, okay?”

Techno blinks, following Kristin’s half-lidded gaze over to the soup aisle, where Phil, charmingly rumpled in an oversized hoodie, is comparing two identical cans of corn chowder, one in each hand.

“I bet you say that to all the sidekicks,” he says drily.

Kristin smirks. “Just my favorites.” She softens, though, reaching out to snarl her fingers in his sleeve. “I mean it, though. He needs you like you need him, I promise.”

Anxiety splinters down Techno’s back. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do,” Kristin promises, patting him once before letting him go. “You’ll see.”

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The negotiator can’t keep his eyes above Jamtteul’s neck, so all bets were off thirty minutes ago. She doesn’t even bother to feign surprise when Rathar leaps across the desk and drags the hapless idiot over it, scattering papers and briefcases every which way. The negotiator’s hired muscle pulls his gun in protest only to drop with a bullet hole in his temple a second later. The negotiator, finally comprehending the gravity of the situation, squeals like a stuck pig.

“Well, that’s that,” Jamtteul says matter-of-factly, rounding the table. “Do you remember slitting your mother’s throat with the kitchen knife?”

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The world bends, wavers, shimmers. Small wonder, since she’s up to her eyeballs in painkillers. Whoever greenlit a press conference one month out from a traumatic brain injury is getting the axe — and Cleo has to stifle a sharp, ugly laugh at the pun — as soon as she finishes giving her stupid statement.

At least the lights are dimmed. “I’m lucky to be alive,” she tells the sea of clicking shutters, slushy at the edges but too well-trained to let the sentence seep out between her fingers. “I’m thankful to all the doctors here, and my agency for their support.”

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Ranboo reads about it later in the psych elective. Recognition punches them hard in the sternum, and they clamp their lips together: It was part of the screening.

They remember the lady with clean fingernails who pressed a marshmallow onto the paper plate before them and said they could have another, two marshmallows all to themself, but only if they waited for fifteen minutes. Ranboo held strong for every torturous second.

Follow-up studies observed better life outcomes: lower BMI, higher SAT scores. Ranboo stares down at the image of the child staring covetously and marvels at all the untapped promise.

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Rach presses her face harder into her pillow when the door creaks open. 

“…Rach?” asks Astelic, her voice careful. “You okay?”

Humiliation spreads, slow but sure, from the center of Rach’s chest out to the tips of her fingers. “They all rejected me,” she mumbles into her sheets. “They all turned me down except — except Planet Duck.”

The breath whooshes out of Astelic, and the suffocating silence swells around them. They both know what the future holds for a girl spurned by anti-villainy but accepted eagerly by entertainment. 

Should’ve been uglier, Rach thinks dully. Should’ve been fatter, should’ve been stupider. 

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The lone Sleeper’s skull staves in under her brass knuckles — sick dense crunch like a bite of popcorn. He crumples in wordless foam, blood flecked at the corners of his mouth, his eyes rolling wet and white up into his head. Five seconds from being spotted to being dead, and there is now one less rotgut human trafficker in the world. 

Old Ponk would’ve balked at the brutality. New Ponk just buffs her knuckles off on her shirt and pulls her hood lower to hide her scars.  

Just because heroics betrayed her doesn’t mean she’s abandoned all pretense of justice.

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With uncharacteristic dark humor, Dream chuckles, “I mean, we figured you’d be smarter than that. Besides, powerful people don’t listen to sidekicks. And if everything went to hell, we could’ve… I dunno. Arranged an accident.” Sudden shame sears through him, and Dream stills. Sobers. Says, “We told you knowing we were prepared for any outcome.”

He’s expecting Ranboo — shy, anxious, hand-wringing Ranboo — to reel back in disgust and horror at the oblique death threat. But his sidekick just makes a soft, thoughtful noise.

“Oh, man. That’s really smart,” he says. A glimmer of awe in his voice.

Dream’s stomach twists.

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The first time Niki wanted to be a hero, she was watching television. The woman on the screen had pianist’s hands and sleek black hair, the white sweep of her swanlike neck just visible through her veil. Her, Niki’d thought, pressing a hand to the pixelated face. Just like her. 

Four years later she sat in the front row with her hands folded in her lap as the instructor queued a slideshow with that same hero on the cover image. Heroes-Gone-Rogue, the title read beneath, and Niki clasped her hands so tight she found finger-shaped bruises between her knuckles later. 

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A drug sting has been looming on the company calendar for three weeks. Today’s the day: twenty hours blocked out for a handpicked roster of field heroes and their respective control-room handlers. Ranboo’s sitting this one out; they’re too inexperienced.

Because nobody’s used to telling them no, though, they get to sit in the empty chair next to Somnia’s as he goes through a checklist of prep items, toying with his sleeping-syringe earrings. Next door in the armory, Dreamon will be inventorying neutralizing cartridges. Pyrexia and Gamebreaker have been scrapping since noon. Slowly but surely, Ranboo is mapping their rituals.

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The Pew Research Center has a whole portal dedicated to heroics. It’s the bread and butter of research projects from fourth year onward, and Tubbo sometimes scrolls casually through it. It’s kinda cool to think that he’ll be there someday, one of the tiny blips on a scatterplot about turnaround or rescue rates. 

He’ll go back to it later, when he’s eighteen and living half of a nightmare because the other half is crushed through his bad eye. He navigates to the page on mortality and stares at the pie chart of life-changing injuries, updated as of November 16, 2059.

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“Aren’t you cold?”

Jaiden’s breath coalesces, white as the snow falling around them in droves. She forgot her leather gloves back at home, and the skin of her knuckles is red and raw around the barrel and stock of her beloved sniper rifle. She twists to raise a sardonic eyebrow even though it’s probably impossible to tell through her ski mask. “What do you think?” she grumbles. 

A pair of arms blooms from Roier’s shoulders, removing his puffer jacket and draping it over her shoulders. Jaiden blinks, clutching her rifle closer to her body. 

“Shoot straight,” he tells her, grinning.