Chapter Text
“So, why did you want to work at Resident Restaurants?” asked the lady with the golden tooth. Grian had been staring at it for the past five minutes.
Money. “It’s a lovely work environment,” he chirped. A livable wage. “I’ve had dinner here before, and I believe I’m a perfect fit for an employee!” I have never had enough money to have dinner here.
The lady gave a smile that didn’t reach her eyes, her golden canine shining. “And your past experience as a waiter? On your file, it says-”
Grian became vaguely aware that those were forged and he had no idea what they said.
“-Antonio’s Italian for four years, is that correct?”
It has not been legal for me to work for four years. “Yes!”
“And you are 23, is that correct?”
I am seventeen years old. “That is correct,” said Grian, smiling in what he hoped was a relaxed way.
“Right, that’s fantastic.” the lady said, the tone of her voice slightly to the right of disdain and the left of performative politeness, and Grian tried not to sag with defeat. “Our time is up,” she said, standing and motioning for Grian to as well. “We’ll get back to you, I wish you the best of luck, Mr-”
She looked down at his file, then back up at him, down again and back up at him. “-Grian.”
A second of awkwardness hung between them before she handed the file back to him and he slung his bag over his shoulder and he walked out of the room.
The door swung shut behind him and he immediately deflated, letting out a long, crushed breath and dropping the false posture that held up his shoulders like a clothes-hanger. The file was slippy under his sweaty hands. That interview was completely blown, and now he would have to sit through another stressful session with his knee bouncing under the table just to make more than minimum wage.
And now Grian would have to call Mumbo and break the news.
He checked his phone. Shift at the cafe in 20 minutes, so he strode through the building to the entrance and began the heavy walk to the highstreet as he dialled Mumbo’s number.
“Hey, Spoon,” he said in a low voice into the microphone.
“Grian? What’s going on?” came the gritty, glitchy voice.
“I blew the interview,” Grian struggled with opening his file, “yeah, my file said I worked at the Chinese across the street, what’s it called, Imperial Magic? Yeah, no, yeah, she asked me if I worked at Antonio’s, and I,” he blew out through his teeth and snapped the folder shut, “said yes.”
Mumbo gave an audible sigh from the other side of the phone. “Well, I haven’t got any further with asking for a raise, so it’s not like I can be pissed off with you.”
Grian smiled, pained and guilty. “I’ll bring you home some coffee after my shift?”
“Yeah,” said Mumbo, “Latte with vanilla syrup?”
“And an extra sugar.” said Grian, his phone sandwiched between his shoulder and cheek as he hurried down the alleyway at the side of the cafe and kicked open the push door.
“Thanks,” he heard Mumbo grin through the phone before he ended the call.
“Hey!” shouted a familiar voice, “Hey! G!”
Grian tugged his apron off the peg and walked towards the coffee machines in the front of the shop to the source, “Hey, Aims,”
“How was the interview?” Aimsey asked, busy making what was most likely a frappuccino-concoction in size large to last her shift. Grian groaned and dropped the file in front of her.
“Blew it,” he mumbled, “Think Mumbo’ll forgive me if I bring him home his favourite coffee?”
“God knows I would,” said Aimsey, “want a strawberries and cream vanilla frappuccino?”
“Shit,” Grian said after a beat of consideration, “go for it.”
The rest of his shift went by as normally as it could; the frappucino was immensely caffeinated and Grian appreciated it. It was almost unbearably sweet though; Grian thought probably sweeter than an actual milkshake. However, he had always liked sweet things.
Aimsey ranted to him about how coffee-milkshakes were just as good if not better than little concentrated shots of caffeine. Her reasoning was that anything may as well taste good. Grian replied saying that if everything was good, there would be no challenges in life. Aimsey said she wouldn’t eat a brussel sprout at gunpoint: Grian threw a towel at her.
It had nearly started to get dark when his shift ended.
“I’ll see you Friday,” said Grian as he swung the door shut.
The underground home was fairly quiet. He’d gotten used to being alert constantly - being outside meant danger, especially when you were like him.
The bandages under Grian’s shirt suddenly felt hot and itchy.
He got home without much issue, coffee on the counter, get the door shut. Shrugging off his fancy overshirt and ripping the bandages from underneath his vest, his wings unfolded from where they’d been pressed against his back all day, and he stretched them, the blinds closed tight.
“Mumbo! Coffee!” he called, flexing the muscles in his wings and folding them against his back again. Red, yellow, blue. Mumbo came into the kitchen and grabbed the latte.
“You patrolling tonight?”
“Definitely. Things haven’t been quiet lately, what with the protests.”
“Do I need to be the man in the chair?”
“Not necessarily,” said Grian, “but if I press the panic button you track me?”
Mumbo didn’t look convinced. “Are you sure? What if you can’t press it? Hands tied?”
“My hands are never tied,” Grian lied, “I’ll be fine, don’t you worry about me.”
“What if you get caught up with another vigilante?”
“It’s not like Goat or Ranboo would hurt me. New guy looks a bit nervous and Goat’s defended me before. Remember the thief?”
It was only a few months before that a thief had nearly shot Grian in the head. Armed robbery of some corner shop, classic give me the money in the register! Grian hadn’t expected him to actually shoot.
He also hadn’t expected Goat to have been watching from the shadows, or to fly in out of nowhere and push him out of the way. Augmented instincts were crazy - if Goat hadn’t been there, Grian would have died.
“Fine,” Mumbo said, with a concerned mother look on his face, “but what about Auxilium? What about the tip-off?”
Grian said a bit too irritatedly that it was fine, and Auxilium had been inactive recently, so there was no way he’d come after him.
Mumbo relented. “Okay. When are you going?”
“Five minutes? I’ll grab my suit.” Grian began to make his way to the room.
Mumbo laughed, “Your suit? ” and Grian responded, “Shut your trap!”
He was sort of right. The ‘suit’ was a combination of a thick ‘superhero suit’ costume he had found on Etsy, dyed black, with sports trainers and slits in the back for his wings, a storage belt and an assorted mishmash of elbow, knee and shin pads. He’d added little knick-knacks, badges and enhancements over his time as a vigilante, but it wasn’t like a professional suit by far. He strapped the orange goggles around his neck.
“Mumbo, I’m leaving!” and he climbed out of the window and slid down the pipe on the side of the dirty brick wall.
It was dark now, which was never a good thing in the Westside. Patrolling was always dangerous; doing something illegal in the open isn’t a good look when heroes are out. Since Sheriff made his debut there had been at least one hero willing to patrol the Westside, and while that was good for civilian Grian, it was terrifying for Macaw. Anti villain activists never took kindly to vigilantes.
Grian breathed into his hands and rubbed them together, but it did nothing to stop the cold.
The city was quiet. Too quiet, almost, Grian grew wary and his heartbeat quickened as he slid over roof-tops and boosted his kinetic store, just enough, just about, flare your wings just enough to glide, and land.
The curfew had been more effective than Grian had expected - with a small fine for being caught outside past midnight, most of the Westside citizens, strapped for cash, stayed inside. He was starting to think he should just turn and go home early before he heard it.
“ Lizzie, please-” in the distance. Grian stopped in his tracks.
The voice was low and strained and coming from an alleyway to his left. Grian folded his wings tightly to his back and approached the alleyway, back to the wall, stealthy and slow.
“I can’t wait ,” the voice choked, and a low quality voice responded. On the phone? The man let out a sob. He sounded in pain. Grian felt a sudden rush of empathy, and swallowed it immediately. He focused on the voice and tried to manipulate the sound waves.
“It’s…to…, Vi, I’ll…there…you’ll….”
“It hurts,” the man mumbled. Grian got a better grip on the waves.
“I’ll…soon…Vi, you’ve…to stay conscious…sunlight…be sorry. He’ll… sorry. They’ll all be sorry.”
There was a bad feeling in Grian’s gut about this. He wound the waves around his fingers and held them to his left ear. The man had gone eerily quiet.
“Vi..?”
The sound of running on the phone.
A yell, the same name, “Vi!”
Grian dropped the waves and ran into the alleyway.
A figure was lying propped against the wall with the phone still in his hands, and there was a slick coating of blood stretching from his neck and collarbones to his chest. Grian dropped to his knees and examined the damage.
Burns. Red, inflamed sunlight burns, deep into his flesh, and Grian realised who the girl on the phone was talking about. The S in sunlight was capitalised, and the #1 hero had hurt this man, and bad.
Pressing his hands to the man’s injury, Grian felt the thrill of the energy running through him and grabbed onto the skin cells.
Red blood cells. That was it. Grian felt sick - remembering biology from Year 9 had never been his forte, and healing without science was downright impossible for him. He had to know how to let the skin knit itself together again. He’d never been able to just do it. He scrunched up his face and screwed his eyes shut.
Red blood cells. New tissue, sew the skin together with itself. When Grian opened his eyes, the skin was new and shiny and pink and stared back at him.
Unfortunately, so did a pair of bright green eyes.
Grian shot up, and the man stayed on the floor. The sun had begun to come up and into the sky, and Grian could see his face.
His masked face.
Grian had just saved the villain Venus from bleeding out in an alleyway.
He turned and ran.
***
“He had brown eyes,” Venus added helpfully.
“The colour of his eyes is not going to help me track him,” Lizzie snapped, “God! You’re lucky you’re injured.”
“He healed me!”
“He didn’t heal your concussion, did he? You just had to drive him away by staring into his eyes and remembering their colour!”
“It’s not my fault!” Venus complained, “when a pretty guy heals me I get to look at his eyes! It’s fair game,”
“You don’t know if he was pretty, you told me you didn’t see his face,”
Venus yawned and stretched, his head nearly falling off the couch. “I saw his eyes. They were pretty enough,”
Lizzie sighed. “You’ve got to start letting me track you. Wasting time because you’re trying to remember street names-”
“I told you!” Venus said with the kind of irritation that showed this wasn’t a one time conversation, “the suit’s mechanism will-”
“Why can’t I know your name?”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“This is well on topic, and you know it. Why can’t I know your name? You know mine,”
“That’s different,” Venus said sharply, “everyone knows your name.”
“Way to remind me. Vi, I’ve seen your face, I’ve seen you in civilian clothes, you’re at my house-”
“It’s different!”
“ Why is it different?”
“Venus is the one thing I can control.”
Lizzie was silent, looking at the eighteen year old on the couch who could easily twist her mind into never asking him again. Who could lazily flick a finger and manipulate her into never arguing again.
And he didn’t.
And the doorbell rang.
“Velox is here,” Lizzie said, and went to get the door.
“Go ask him what his name is,” Venus called, his face in a cushion and his voice muffled.
“I already know it,” Lizzie shot back.
She swung open the door to find Callum Kay in a baseball cap and a hoodie, with bags under his eyes and a six pack of Coke hanging from his left hand.
“I didn’t have to be in costume, did I?”
Lizzie sighed and let him in. “No. What’s with the drinks?”
“I figured the kid would want something sweet.”
“I’m eighteen!” Venus called from the other room. Callum ignored him and watched Lizzie go to leave.
“Go beat Joel’s ass, yeah?”
“If Sunlight was patrolling today I’d send him to hospital,” said Lizzie without missing a beat. Callum sighed.
“But because he’s not, you can go fight your ex-boyfriend who was an accomplice to the crime instead?”
“He’s not my ex boyfriend,” she said flatly, and shut the door in his face.
Joel patrolled the Eastside in the rich areas, so Lizzie took the alleyway route, slipping between, behind and around buildings until she arrived in the neighbourhoods with clean red bricks and filled in potholes.
Joel SB, #3 hero Juniper, was sitting on the top of a building with his legs swinging, looking down at the houses like there was nothing better to do. She scaled the building and walked up behind him.
“How’d it feel, betraying your hero training?”
“Betraying?”
He was oddly calm. Back straight, core engaged, staring ahead like it would kill him to look her in the eye.
It probably would, on second thought.
“There was no betraying,” said Joel.
Lizzie set her jaw. “Article 28. Any hero, despite rank and/or status, may not attack any villain, in a neutral situation, with the intent of manslaughter. Neutral defined as a situation without drastic life or death risk and/or threats. This also applies to accomplices of the attack.”
Joel laughed. “Look at that. You might act like a villain, but you’re still a smart little shadow to me.”
“I have not been Shadow for a long time, Juniper. My name is Novo and you may as well use it.” said Lizzie, more confidently than she felt.
Joel stood up and turned, and began to walk towards her with no hesitation. “Your name is Lizzie,” he drawled, “and quoting hero textbooks doesn’t help your case.”
“My case?”
“None of your villains trust you, Lizzie.”
“Keep that name out of your mouth,” she said loudly, but he took another step forward. A threat. Lizzie stood her ground.
“Nobody wants a defected hero on their side. You betrayed us. Why not them?”
She bit her lip.
“And besides,” he shrugged, “who’s going to believe a villain who says they weren’t trying to kill a hero?”
She stayed silent.
“Dead villains can’t testify, Lizzie-” and she was on him, kick and scratch and bite and scream and completely forget about your telekinesis because all you want to do is hurt, hurt hurt.
And then it was over, and he had her pinned. “Now you’re acting like a villain, Lizzie!”
“Fuck you,” she choked out, and she breathed in slowly.
A pole from the fence at the bottom of the building ripped from the structure and began to rise into the air with Lizzie’s breath. She could feel it ascending, only 2 more floors, just a little bit longer, and-
Joel brought down his forearm onto her neck. The pole dropped down into the street and she brought up her hands to wrestle with his arm.
“I’m sorry, Lizzie,” he said. “I really did hope you’d grow out of this.”
Blank spots began to rise in her vision.
She was going to have to go back to the heroes.
No.
No.
“Get off of her,” came the smooth, familiar voice from her left.
Mercury.
Joel breathed out slowly as he lifted his arms and got to his feet. Mercury was standing a few feet away from them at the edge of the building, his stance set and definite and solid.
“Mercury,” Joel greeted him. “Nice to see you.”
“I wish I could say the same,” Mercury said. His eyes were red and his brow was furrowed. “Go jump off the building, why don’t you?”
Joel laughed, “You’re crazy, Mercury. It’s-”
“I don’t think you heard me, Juniper. Go to the edge of the building and jump.”