Chapter Text
It had been four years since my life had changed.
Four years of fear, and terror, and death. The lingering terrors and paranoia, both from myself, and from everyone around me. That I was damaged goods. That I was a criminal or a villain just an inch from snapping. That I was just a bomb waiting to go off.
But where everyone else worried, I knew that would never happen. After all, if I had wanted to kill them, I could have. I was not harmless, not some wallflower of a girl any more.
Where once I’d been powerless, now I had a gift. Not a Parahuman power, not some fantastical ability that allowed me to alter the laws of physics, and wear spandex without fear of judgement.
No. Instead, I received the greatest gift that you could get in this world, via air-mail straight from Canada: a Suit.
A Dragonsuit. A creation of the world’s greatest Tinker, standardized to fit human Pilots, and equipped with enough weaponry to take over a small country.
Four years of striving to live up to the standard of Dragon, the principles and ethics of the dead hero guiding my life. Isolation, efficiency, and hard work. I’d put my nose to the grindstone. Four years was a respectable career, in my eyes, in a world where Rookie Pilots were chewed up and spit out in the first few months of live combat.
And yet, looking back, I was left with only a single bitter, regretful thought:
I should have done this years ago.
The thought echoed in my head, and I scowled, pulling my coat tighter around me as I left the library behind.
The study group had been… nice. Nobody was judgmental, nobody was condescending. I didn’t necessarily need their help in the class, but I’d gone anyway. Maybe I was looking for confirmation of my suspicion, maybe I wanted to remind myself of why I didn’t go to group activities.
My lingering fears hadn’t come true. There was no sneering, no mockery, no bullying. When I’d introduced myself, nobody had known who I was, and nobody had cared.
It should have felt like a relief, but it didn’t.
I’d spent the past five years being so afraid of bullies. Bending my back, never speaking up, never fighting back. For the first year or so, it had been a survival mechanism. I could still remember, so painfully clear, the cruel pranks that had ruined my academics, tainted my reputation, battered my body, and eventually led to a hospitalization.
But that was four years ago, now.
I walked through the cold chill of campus, entering the student center for a quick cup of tea. It was so much colder here in Minnesota than it had been back at home. Alien, in some ways. The people were Midwesterners, not the crass New Englanders that I had grown up amongst.
The student center’s television was playing as the warmth of the building enveloped me. I tried to ignore it as I walked over to the free drinks counter, but it was turned up loud.
“…it’s been four years since the death of Dragon and the often-associated destruction of Brockton Bay by Leviathan,” the TV said, droning on.
I saw a couple of freshmen watching, their eyes glued to the screen. Did they have any idea what it was like? To lose everything? To lose your family, your home, even your people – as abstract as that concept had been, in Brockton. They couldn’t. They had no idea what it was like to wake up screaming. Seeing the faces of the dead. Seeing the butcher shop that had been made of your favorite library. Seeing the noblest heroes skewered on light-posts and lamp-poles like macabre decoration.
“We have confirmed that Armsmaster will be speaking at the memorial service,” the TV continued in the background. “The Triumvirate has also pledged to be present, but has warned attendees that their schedule is not ironclad, as the ongoing Armor Wars may require intervention…”
“Can’t believe they won’t be there,” one of the freshmen said, over the television. I focused on the urn, holding the tap down until my travel mug was full.
“The Triumvirate’s important,” someone else argued.
“So was Dragon,” the first freshman spat back.
“…marks the four year anniversary of the modern age of heroics,” the TV continued, uncaring and unaware of the bickering college students. “Debates still rage about whether the proliferation of Dragonsuits has been a net positive or a net negative for the world, but perhaps the words of Alexandria fit best, in her speech one year ago today…”
I turned away, fitting the lid back on my travel mug and walking off.
It was amazing to see how little the early events of my life mattered. Or perhaps it was painful? To me, those years of bullying had felt like the most important event in the world. Everything before them was a distant dream, and I never believed I’d have any happiness after them.
But life changed, and then they were gone. Emma, Sophia, Madison… I was starting to have trouble remembering their faces. Sometimes I’d catch myself reminiscing on something one of them had said, and realized that I was misattributing it, thinking that the wrong person had said it.
Nobody knew me here. I wasn’t lowest scum in the pond. It was a strange feeling. Like I was a worm trapped underneath a rock, and someone had lifted it up, revealing me to the world’s sunshine… and here I was, still paralyzed in place, waiting for that rock to come crashing down on top of me. Waiting for the world to return to form.
Not to say that bullying didn’t still happen. I crossed the quad at a brisk pace, and I still saw eyes following me. Boys. The same kind of boys that had mocked my appearance back in Winslow, still staring at me, even several states away.
Was this really any better, I wondered, as I headed towards my dormitory. I’d swapped obvious behavior from monsters, facilitated by uncaring authority figures, for more subtle behavior that I couldn’t call out without seeming like a bitch. It was more insidious. College professors rarely cared much about the welfare of their students, because attending college was supposed to make you an adult. So few of my classmates acted like adults.
I stewed in my thoughts as I walked. The tea helped, but there was no true solution for my restlessness. I’d tried so many, and nothing worked. The sensation in my core ate away me, like my stomach acid had spread through my skin.
The door chimed as I tapped my student ID on the card reader. I stepped inside with a sigh, and a feeling of relief as the late winter chill was banished again. I might have been a true New Englander, but Brockton Bay had always been unusually temperate for its location. Humid subtropical on the Koppen scale. We’d get snow and frost, and it’d get below freezing most nights, but it averaged in the mid-20’s to high-30’s in winter. Out here, it averaged two months of freezing weather straight, never getting above 32, on a good year.
I ignored the greetings from a desk-bound university staffer, and headed to the elevators. My dorm was huge, a product of the slow population shift away from the coasts. I punched the button for the twelfth floor, and settled in to wait.
“Hey, hold the elevator!” someone called from the doorway.
I looked up. It was a boy I recognized from some of my classes, just entering the building. His name escaped me, but his eyes hadn’t. He had sandy blond hair and a childish innocence to his face, the opposite of his real personality. He was typical of those boys; their eyes strayed, and I had to bite down the urge to tell them to mind their own business, because they hadn’t publicly done anything wrong.
I reached out and pressed the door close button a couple times. I didn’t want one of those boys to know what floor I lived on. It was bad enough this one had learned my dorm. The elevator responded, the doors shutting swiftly as the boy approached, still calling out. The elevator jolted to life and started moving upwards.
A sigh slipped out, and I grimaced. I’d had nearly four years of no public bullying, but I still nearly panicked at things like that. They still got to me so easily. It was a personal failing. I should more cool, more calm, but all it took was the slightest glance out of place, and I got fixated on where their eyes were wandering, what their words really meant.
The ugly feeling in my chest surged, and I gulped, pressing a hand against the wall and leaning my weight on it.
Was this really the most important thing in my life? No. Not nearly. But when it happened, it felt like it, if only for a moment. Then the moment passed, and I remembered how much bigger my problems were, and how little this stuff should matter.
I blinked involuntarily, and it seemed for a moment as if the elevator’s lights had flickered. In the back of mind, I heard a voice. Female. Desperate. The tiniest hints of a Canadian accent. She was begging.
I shook my head violently, and glared up at the elevator’s display. Faster. I needed to get out of this thing faster. I needed to get to work, needed to move on. The day was still young. I had no more classes, and no more homework.
Most college students would have used this free time for some pleasure. Maybe a sport, maybe hanging out with friends, maybe drugs. I couldn’t. Even if I wanted any of things, there was an ugly burning feeling that drove me onwards.
Guilt.
The elevator opened to show my floor, and I strode quickly to my room, driven onwards by the guilt in my stomach.
I hadn’t done anything to deserve this guilt. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I’d actually done some good in the world. But the guilt still remained. It whispered at me, saying that I hadn’t done enough. That I wasn’t good enough. That I needed to do more with my life, that I needed to be more. It pushed me like an impatient child on a school bus.
The door of my super-single slammed behind me as I entered as quickly as possible, so nobody could see inside. Normally, my suite would hold four people in double-rooms, or two people in singles, but I’d paid for the whole thing. That gave me two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living area, and a kitchen. Normally, it was neat and tidy, because I was well aware that if I didn’t do the small chores, they started to pile up very quickly.
Not today, though. Today, my living room looked like a refugee’s hovel. A large blue tarp was spread over the living room carpet, centered beneath a pair low metal tables straining with the weight of an enormous metal boot, sized for a giant. Slick oil and patches of sticky grease dotted the table and tarp. Assorted wrenches and tools were neatly placed on a second table.
In the middle of the tarp was a robot. It would have stood six and a half feet tall if it had been standing up. Instead, it was kneeling on the tarp, one arm jammed up to the elbow inside the boot, the other tapping on a sleek tablet connected to the boot with a cord. Its head was a flattened plate that vaguely resembled a skull without the jaw, teeth, or nose, and two little blue LEDs functioned as eyes.
The robot was also, for reasons I could not explain, wearing baggy canvas pants, a raggedy vest, and a headscarf. Even before being coated with the detritus of the ongoing machine maintenance, all its clothing looked like it’d been fished out of the garbage, with several patchy holes revealing the robot’s metal limbs and myomers beneath them.
“What. Are. You. Doing?” I demanded, hissing the words out behind clenched teeth.
The skull-mask of the robot turned to look at me. It wasn’t capable of moving at all, but somehow, it looked surprised.
“Achuta, chowbasa bata!” it chittered to me, waving the hand not currently buried inside a piece of Tinkertech, apparently happy to see me.
“In the living room?!” I snapped, setting my bag down on a side-table as I restrained my voice. The walls of the dorm were thick, and I’d had the foresight to put up soundproofing, but I wasn’t going to risk it by yelling.
“Haku?” It said, tilted its head quizzically. “Haku sa goola foo wata?”
“It’s visible from the door, just for starters!” I said, moving closer and wincing at the smell. “You couldn’t do this in the spare bedroom? Out of sight?”
“Nobata,” the robot replied, shaking its head. “Peetch… cramped.”
Its voice changed as it spoke, going from the usual fluid language to a harsh monotone as it was forced to speak in English.
“Don’t do it again,” I said, as the robot extricated its arm from the machinery.
A spatter of oil flicked off as it shook its arm, narrowly missing me and landing on the tarp. My eyes narrowed, and the robot shrugged.
“Whatever,” I sighed. “Did you get the leak fixed?”
“Tagwa!” the robot said, giving me an enthusiastic thumbs up.
“Then put it together,” I told it. “I’m going out.”
The robot leapt to its feet, snapped a quick salute, and started racing through a re-assembly process, hands flying as it hurriedly reconnected hydraulics, structural frames, and cover-plates.
I closed my eyes and stepped back, out of range of the squirting lubricants. I stepped away, and tried my best to ignore the quiet clanking of metal as I returned to the suite’s entryway and took a right turn into the kitchen.
My fridge was filled with pre-cooked, sous vide meals. Not the healthiest of things, but they tasted surprisingly good. I pulled out one for chicken parmesan and tossed it in the microwave. I busied myself with setting out a proper place-setting on the table, even if I was the only one eating.
By the time the food was on my plate, the robot had finished its job and come over to join me. I shot it a quick glare before it could sit down in the upholstered seat next to mine. It froze, before quickly moving away and returning with a thick chair of plain, non-padded metal, which wouldn’t absorb the leftover oil and grease from the robot’s ragged clothes.
I ate quickly, mechanically. The robot held out its tablet for me to read as I ate, and from the looks of things, it had done good work. The small hydraulic leak had popped up a little while back, and it had been a bitch to track down the exact cause. At least four locations were possible sources, and we’d had to check all four to find it.
It felt almost domestic, sitting down for a meal with the robot, but rather than fill the void in my chest, it just highlighted it. The robot couldn’t eat. It was only wasting time, sitting here attending to my shallow needs. I shouldn’t be trying to pretend. But what was the alternative? Eating at the counter, like food was nothing but fuel, and abandon one of the little rituals that made us human?
I glanced up at the wall, and bit my lip as I stared up at the two pictures hanging from it. The robot muttered something that sounded apologetic, and quickly reached for a clean rag. He carefully took down one of the pictures, carefully wiped down the tiny splotch of oil that had landed on it, and reverently put it back up.
It didn’t have real feelings, of course. I’d seen the robot’s programming. It didn’t feel emotions, it just imitated them, learning how to better respond to my rules and requests.
But still… the little touch made my chest feel a little less empty, simple mimicry or not. I reached up and slowly touched each frame, one at a time.
“I miss you, Mom,” I whispered. “I miss you, Dad.”
The photographs didn’t respond. They never did.
My stomach tightened, and I stood up from the table, no longer hungry, even though I’d only eaten half the small meal. I moved to put away the food, but the robot beat me to it, picking up the plate in both its three-fingered hands moving it away to the kitchen for me.
I moved over to the metal tables, and inspected the reassembled boot. It looked good to me, so I stretched a hand out over it, pulled back my sleeve, and revealed the long, thin bracelet hidden underneath. It was a two-piece, with rings of shiny silver atop a thin black padding.
It looked indistinguishable from a common accessory, but I still didn’t want anyone to see it. There was always the chance that they’d recognize what it was, what it meant.
The bracelet twisted, the two silver rings detaching from each other, spreading apart and revealing a bevy of glowing lights hidden beneath them. I waved my wrist over the boot, and a pane of light projected outwards from my bracelet, shaped like a transparent, electric-blue pyramid, enveloping the boot. There was a quiet hum, and the boot folded in on itself, shrinking down, before finally shooting upwards, bending unnaturally as the bracelet sucked it up like a bizarre vacuum cleaner.
I glanced down at the robot’s tablet, which was now displaying a complicated readout of the entire Suit’s systems. Four years ago, I’d been nearly unable to understand any of it when I was not actively wearing the Suit, my mind interlaced with its systems. By now, it was second-nature. The boot had been re-integrated into my Suit successfully. On my internal damage readout, the yellow-marked outline of the left leg was now glowing green instead.
I went to my room and swiftly changed. My daily clothes went into a hamper, and I pulled a long one-piece garment off a hook on the back of my door. I pulled it on with the ease of long experience, shrugging my shoulders into the sleeves and pulling my long hair out of the way as the Suit sealed itself up along my spine. Fully covered, I looked like a diver ready to go shark-hunting. I slipped on a loose-fitting tracksuit and some sneakers to cover myself up and avoid awkward questions and curious eyes alike.
“I’m heading out!” I called out, as I headed over to the door.
The robot poked its head out from the spare bedroom that was its home, into my line of sight.
“Foo gusha!” it replied, waving a thumbs up in my direction.
I checked through the peephole to make sure the hallway was clear, then quickly exited and shut the door behind me. I strode quickly towards the elevators, but took a turn right before I got to them, and entered the emergency stairwell. It was rarely ever used, especially to go up multiple floors. Plus, there was actually two emergency stairwells, crisscrossing over each other, so it was even more isolated. Perfect for people, and ensuring nobody asked why I was going to the roof.
The echo of my steps on the stairs bounced off the concrete-block walls around me. The clink of my bracelet on the handrail rang out louder than a doorbell. I tried to keep quiet, but there wasn’t much point with how empty it was.
My thoughts chased me up the steps.
Had I even needed to go to that study group? I was already ahead in class. I could have used that time to head out earlier. I could have already been doing good works for the past few hours.
No, I thought to myself. My armor was still getting repaired while I was at the study group. I couldn’t have gone out with a malfunctioning limb.
The truth didn’t do much to ease the sensation. My skin was itching, my arms were shaking. It wasn’t anxiety, or anticipation, but adrenaline. The jitters of a race-horse in the stalls, waiting for the starter’s gun.
Maybe I was a junky, like the Merchants in Brockton. Maybe I was addicted to suicidal acts of insanity. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I could do far worse with my life than a pathological desire to do good.
Now, if only my heart would listen to my head on that subject.
I turned the final corner and climbed up the final staircase to the roof access. The door was locked, with an electronic detector to make sure no college kids decided to party on the roof. But it wasn’t the first time I’d gone through this route, and I knew exactly where to jam an improvised lockpick into it, and exactly how to twist to disable it temporarily.
The cold air greeted me as the door slammed shut. I shuddered, and stepped over to the side of the stairwell’s protruding wall, putting it between myself and the wind-chill.
There was more than one reason I’d paid for a super-single in the tallest dormitory on campus. There were plenty of taller buildings closer to the downtown of either Minneapolis or Saint Paul, but they were at the wrong angle to see on top of this roof, due to the stairwell’s enclosure. This high up, with the dormitory so wide, nobody could see a single part of what I was about to do next.
I ditched the tracksuit’s top, shimmied out of the bottoms, and slipped out of my shoes. Two steps forward, so I’d be standing right on top of a structural support pillar. Say what you will about the Twin Cities weather, it forced the locals to build pretty sturdy buildings.
I pressed two buttons in close sequence on my bracelet, and twisted the two silver rings apart. I held the bracelet out in front of me, and waited. The bracelet spun and whirled on my wrist, churning like two entwined gears, before it shattered into pieces, and blue light spilled out of it.
The boots came first, forming up on top of the pillar. Each one was wider than my shoulders, and they weren’t intended to hold my feet. Hydraulics, control cables, myomers, and dozens of electronic nodes materialized out of thin air, returning from the miniature pocket dimension inside of my bracelet. Smooth angular plates clamped around the internal guts, building higher and higher.
The knees came next, then the thighs, and the legs joined together in an enormous, thick torso with a broad chest. The Suit continued to form up, and I gazed at the worn slate-gray paintjob, at the scratches from battle-damage long since repaired. There were only two stand-out, identifying features to my Suit. On the chest, directly above the heart, were tally marks in red paint. Almost two full sets. The Suit’s right arm bore a thick black band of paint across the bicep. A sign of mourning.
Beyond that, the Suit looked indistinguishable from any Medium weight-class Dragonsuit, standing three and a half meters tall, and ready for war. A humanoid helmet rose over angled pauldrons, small nubs protruding almost invisibly to normal eyes, but marking the Suit’s radio, laser-comms, and satellite uplink to mine.
With the Suit fully deployed, the weapons emerged next. The bulky cylinder at the left hip. The boxy dispenser on the back right, above the butt cheek. Largest of all, the autocannon carried in both arms, six barrels visible.
I circled around the Dragonsuit slowly, until I was standing behind it. A cover plate peeled itself back, and I laid a bare hand on it. The scanning pad flashed once, twice, thrice, and then turned a bright green, recognizing my bioprint. The Suit’s back split apart, its spine un-knitting, opening up a space perhaps three feet high and two feet wide.
Hands pulling on the exposed grab bars, I hauled myself up into the Suit’s internal space, feet first. The Suit’s spine closed behind me, and I was left in total darkness for a moment. My legs curled beneath me, my arms folded tight to my sides. There was a soft hiss, and the brainwave harness lowered itself, closing around my skull and sealing tight.
My chest stilled, my breathing slowed, and my eyes fluttered closed. My body entered a hibernation, of sorts. Unmoving, unseeing, unknowing.
I inhaled, and pushed onwards with nothing but my mind. My ‘eyes’ opened, and I beheld the world through optical cameras far superior to the Mark One Eyeball. My ‘ears’ eavesdropped on chatter from Wold-Chamberlain, both unencrypted civilian and the few US Air Force and Air National Guard jets left.
I stood up straight, and the Suit stiffened, stretching its back out as if waking from a long rest. All the while, my real body was motionless, curled up in a ball.
The Suit was ready. I was ready.
I flipped a mental switch, and the Suit’s metal skin shimmered and faded away, vanishing from sight as visible and infrared light bent around it, obscuring it into full invisibility.
Small thrusters flared on my back, and the Suit lifted upwards slowly, completely invisible save for the faintest signs of jetwash that none could see from this distance. My jets were kept low, low enough to not scorch the rooftop too much, but just enough to overcome my Suit’s mass. I rose up, the dormitory dropped out from under me, and I was in the sky once more.
I moved out, hovering away from the nearest building, and flared my jets harder. My altimeter read three hundred meters, then five hundred, then a thousand. That was high enough for the next part.
My Suit’s legs twisted in mid-flight, slapping together and merging with a clatter of interlaced servos. My Suit’s arms spread out, pointing out at forty-five degree angles, and flattened. The torso shifted, smoothening some plates and withdrawing others. The human head elongated, pointing outwards.
The smaller jet thrusters cut out, and for a moment, I went weightless as I lost all acceleration… then gravity reasserted it's claim on my soul, and started dragging me down. I had less than twenty seconds before I was splattered across the pavement, my tons of futuristic power armor cracked like an egg across the Earth’s crust.
Then the Dragonsuit’s transformation finished, and the combined, much larger jet engine erupted to life with an enormous plume of jetwash in the air above the University of Minnesota.
I was no longer a humanoid mass of armor plate and weaponry. Now, I was a fighter-plane shaped mass.
The smallest jets in the world are still pretty large, at about ten meters in length. The US Air Force’s standard jets came closer to fifteen to seventeen meters. Compared to my Suit, that’s less than three times to a more than four times its height. Even an old prop-driven Japanese Zero was more than twice my length.
But Dragon was the greatest Tinker in the world, and even her mass-produced gear was lightyears beyond the work of normal hands. At three and a half meters, I wasn’t even the smallest Dragonsuit capable of this transformation, but I was one of the smallest that could still fit a human inside.
I rocketed straight upwards, uncaring of aerodynamic lift as I accelerated on pure thrust. In less than a second, there was a thunderous boom, and the sound barrier shattered. I continued heading upwards for a short bit, my altimeter soaring past five thousand meters and climbing with me, until I finally leveled off at around ten thousand meters.
Now, where to go?
I turned south-bound as I pondered, activating my satellite uplink as I did. My cloak would last longer, but it would be best if I didn’t pop up on air defense radars over my actual home city.
Conflict was almost constant these days. Somewhere across the globe, people were fighting and dying over some cause of other.
The question was, where should I go? I’d prefer to stay inside the continent, if only so I could get some sleep in a real bed tonight. London was less than four hours of flying away, but I’d need to fly back to the States afterwards, and spend who knows how long cruising around looking for fights. Plus, the Europeans were pretty trigger-happy these days.
I filtered out most parahuman conflicts. Capes knew the rules. Villains would be in-and-out within a few minutes to avoid reprisal from Dragonsuits, or they’d be prepared with some kind of physics-defying power that could ignore my armor and one-shot me.
The days of bragging villains, posing and monologuing as they relished the smallest power differential between them and the police, were no more. They’d died hard, taking countless lives with them, but they’d died nonetheless; a few of them even died to me. The survivors knew better.
The problem was, Suit engagements were always escalating. You could graph it out – the longer a Suit brawl went, the likelier odds that it either ended abruptly with one or both sides disengaging, or it grew even more destructive and violent as more Suits showed up to contribute.
The rule was ten minutes for Rookies, twenty minutes for Regulars, thirty minutes for Veterans. Any longer, and it was Aces only. The kind of fights that chewed up Suits in seconds. Expensive, lethal fights that ended long careers in the blink of an eye.
There was an enormous brawl going on in Sacramento, dozens of Suits reported already, two of the major factions going at it. But the fight had started nearly twenty minutes ago, and there were undoubtedly reinforcements burning for California as fast as they could.
Soon, the brawl would either de-escalate as one side tried to avoid getting swarmed, or it would escalate to a full out battle with hundreds of Suits getting involved. It would take me more than an hour to get all the way to Sacramento. By that time, it’d either be over, or half the city would be leveled. Neither option was appealing.
But that dynamic of escalation could be exploited.
If I was a criminal Pilot, then sure, I’d be staying as far away from California as possible right now. If I was on the east coast, then the Sacramento brawl meant little to me. But if I was in the sweet spot, just close enough for the factions to have sent off their fast response team, then there was a window.
I was well into Iowa’s airspace when my cloak dropped. This high up, moving this fast, I’d be drawing eyes quickly. Soon enough, I could be getting a couple new visitors from the Air Force.
Before I could worry about that, though, a new alert popped up in my HUD, flashing across my mind like a beacon.
A brawl in Kansas City. Multiple criminal Pilots spotted tearing into a corporate park, starting nearly five minutes ago.
The local response was non-existent. If any local Pilots had shown up, they hadn’t been spotted yet. The Kansas City Protectorate didn’t have anyone tough enough to tank 20mm shells. Frankly, the national Protectorate had less than a handful of capes who could. There was no point in sending heroes in to die against that much firepower.
I glanced down at my navigational display. I could get to Kansas City in a little under seventeen minutes, and get there right around twenty-two minutes into the brawl, if the enemy Pilots were even still there. I’d have potentially zero backup against an unknown number of enemy Suits, and I’d be well into the danger zone where only veterans flew.
Without thinking, my Suit banked ever so slightly to the right, diverting from my previously due-south course, and heading towards Kansas City.
The perils of a mindwave harness hooked into your thoughts, I mused with a slight smile.
Sometimes, the Suit reacted to your desires before you even knew them.