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September 18, 1998

"I'm sorry."

David Turner was getting a little bit unnerved. William was someone who didn't get riled up easily in the first place, but surely firing him should have engendered some reaction. He had mentally prepared himself for anything – curses, violence, crying, or mere casual acceptance – anything but this utter apathy.

"Listen, Will," he said hesitantly. He tried to keep his voice as gentle as possible. "I think... I think this is part of the problem. You don't seem to care very much about whether or not you have this job." He almost added 'any job' before stopping himself. "If you want to succeed in life you'll have to put in some sort of effort. Show people that you're passionate about something. You coast too easily."

No reaction. He sighed. The rest of his day was not going to be easy; he couldn't waste his time and energy on this disinterested young man. "You'll get severance pay, of course," he said, handing over the relevant documents. "Take these to Jessica in HR and sign them."

"Is that all?" Will asked. David nodded, resignedly; Will stood up. "Goodbye, Mr. Turner," he said, and left the room, giving no outward indication that the conversation affected him in any way.

David sighed and lifted the phone from his desk, dialing the next number on a depressingly long list.

As Will left the office, he felt a sudden absence. Of course, he thought to himself. The strands connecting him and his coworkers had been building up inside for weeks, now; they must have snapped during the conversation with his boss. So who will it be? he asked himself in idle curiosity. Mike. Lauren. Jenn. Dmitri. A half-dozen others whom he knew less well. He shrugged as he headed to HR. Nothing I can do, guys, sorry.

He was the first to be fired that day. It was inevitable that many more would follow. You can't fight Fate.

December 15, 1998

"I'm trying to get you to appreciate your gift," said Sean.

Will gave his roommate and fellow cape a sidelong glance over the top of his bowl of cereal. He showed no irritation at being distracted from the newest episode of Buffy, merely giving the tinker an incredulous look. "What's so great about it?"

Sean continued his prep work, which for him meant rolling a joint. For some unexplained reason he could only go into his creative frenzy while high, and the irony of a hero having to break the law every time he wanted to use his power was never lost on him. If he joined the Protectorate they'd probably be able to get him some kind of waiver, but he was never one for working on a team, much less following rules and filing paperwork. "What's so great about it?" he asked. "You made two million dollars selling your dot-com stocks before everyone else!"

Will shrugged and turned his attention back to the television. "What do I need with money?"

Sean made an exasperated noise. "Look. You treat your power – you treat yourself – as some sort of plaything of Fate. You don't have to look at it that way. Maybe you're not just 'the first person everything happens to'. Maybe you actually cause it to happen to everyone else."

"What's the difference?"

"Because then you can control it! Pay more attention to those... those 'strands' you keep babbling on about. Strands of fate, right? Maybe you can predict when they're about to snap. Then you can make sure that what you do when they snap is something for the good of everyone else instead of whatever random thing happens then. Keep a winning lottery ticket in your pocket and cash it in when you feel it's about to trigger. Go out and buy a new car. Go on a hot date! Wouldn't it be awesome if everyone around you, and by that I mean your long-suffering and I emphasize dateless roommate, got to do that at the same time?"

"Eh."

It was very irritating, frankly. Will's power was a blessing for those he bothered to warn, and being Will's best friend and roommate meant Sean got the heads-up more often than most. Advance notice meant you could savor the best and mitigate the worst, even if you couldn't avoid the latter entirely. But Will seemed so reluctant to actually use his power in any active sense. He was so fatalistic about it it drove Sean crazy. He seemed to have no desire to try and take control of his destiny. Maybe it was the natural side-effect of having any soothsaying power. Maybe the power happened to land on somebody whose personality already fit it perfectly. Maybe Will's personality played an active role in deciding what power he'd have in the first place. But Sean suspected it was simply because Will wasn't very creative (for God's sake, his pseudonym was his own initials!), and enjoyed riding the wave, not having to think for himself. Will, for his part, always insisted that there was nothing he could do, but Sean knew his friend well enough to know that he'd never tried.

"Or maybe – or maybe you can choose which strands snap. I didn't get fired three months ago, just your coworkers. So it's not everyone in your life. Maybe if you try and hold on to a couple of those strands, you can make sure that next time it's only the ones you don't like that get fired. Or that only your long-suffering and I repeat dateless roommate goes on that hot date."

Will gave a noncommittal grunt.

"Okay," said Sean, lighting up the joint and preparing to work. "You're not hopeless, not yet. Give me ten years and I'll extract some sort of emotion from that brain of yours, I swear."

May 8, 1989

Unexplained or unusual circumstances surrounding a trigger event are a dime a dozen. The incident with the Arkansas Street Bus is just one on a very long list, and the fact that it just might have been a coincidence meant that nobody was ever sure how much importance to ascribe to it.

Not everyone could get powers, that was almost certain. Experiments with trigger events conducted by less-than-ethical scientists in both government and private industry would prove this within a year of the phenomenon's being recognized. But when a water main burst directly under the #53 and sent it careening off the top of a ten-story parking garage, Brockton Bay didn't end up with the expected twenty dead and just maybe one new cape.

Every single person on that bus walked away a parahuman.

It might just be a coincidence.

As the bus plunged screaming through the air, time seemed to slow down for the sixteen-year-old boy sitting in the seventh row. He had a vision of something completely incomprehensible – and then snapped back to reality. The vision would be forgotten; whatever it was can't have been that important.

He felt something odd inside of him. Threads. Strands of some kind. One connected him to his brother seated beside him. One to the woman seated behind him. One to the man standing – now falling – in the aisle. Twenty-two strands in all, one for each other person on the bus. He wasn't sure how he knew this, but the strands seemed... ripe, somehow. How can a strand be ripe? What would that even mean? He felt as though they were being stretched, growing taut, ready to -

Snap.

The skin texture of the man in the aisle suddenly turned rubbery, and he bounced off the floor instead of hitting his head quite hard. The woman behind him began screaming as her body erupted in a flame that consumed neither her nor the seat she was sitting in. The driver put up his hands as though to try and stop the ground from hitting them – and something large, and white, and glowing, erupted from them, and caught the bus, gently letting it down on Arkansas Street, on the wrong side of the road.

Will had been the first to get powers on that bus. It was inevitable that many more would follow. You can't fight Fate.

May 15, 2011

Will stepped out of his front door into the chaos and panic of the streets. People on bicycles and on foot, even one idiot in a car, all joining together in a crush of bodies moving down the street from left to right, in the direction of the shelter. Will turned right, to join them.

A hand grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. "Where are you going?" asked Sean.

"The shelter," said Will, as though it should be obvious.

"Hell with that, you're coming to help," said his roommate, pulling out and lighting the emergency joint he always kept in his armored exoskeleton.

"Against an Endbringer? Are you insane?" The prospect of certain death, apparently, was enough to jar Will out of his perpetual apathy. "Did you forget what my power is? Or isn't?"

"The strands, Will. Where are they? What are they doing?"

Will closed his eyes and concentrated. "Taut. Very taut. Connecting to you, to... other capes. Lots of capes. And it's happening soon."

"And not to the civilians. Dude, you are coming with me, and you are helping us fight. You want all the other capes to end up hiding in a shelter like you while the city gets destroyed? Because if you go to the shelter, that's where you'll be and what you'll be doing when the strands snap."

Will snorted. "Yeah, so instead when the Endbringer kills me, I'll be dead, and all the other capes will follow."

"Fuck that, Will. We control our own destiny. Don't move." Sean charged back into the house and came out twenty seconds later with his spare powered exoskeleton. "Put this on. It won't fit perfectly, but it'll be good enough."

"Are you crazy?"

"You want to survive the Endbringer? You want to help save this city?"

"Who says I can?"

"I do," said Sean. "And I'm a stubborn ass who won't let you change my mind. Now come on." He pulled on Will's arm, headed left, against the crush of the crowd. Will resisted momentarily, but it only took a few moments for his natural apathy to take hold again, and he followed his friend.

"Take this," Sean had said, and gave him his single most powerful laser blade.

"You really are crazy. I don't know how to use it."

"Swing it and hit him with it. It's not that hard."

It was moments after the teleport. The flying capes were ferrying others to the rooftops; beside Will stood Sean in his exoskeleton, charging up the laser blades he held in each hand.

"I'm giving you my strongest weapon precisely because you're going to set the tone for this battle. If any of my blades is going to hurt Leviathan, that's the one to do it. And if you punch a hole in that bastard's stomach and the strands snap, you're setting the stage for every cape in the city to do it after you."

The rest of the assembled capes were organizing into lines around him, but Will felt utterly unsure of what to do, or of what he was even doing here. He could feel the strands pulling tighter and tighter, connecting him to most - but not quite all - of the parahumans around him.

And then Leviathan came at them. Fast. Will blinked, and for the second time in his life time seemed to slow to a crawl.

The monstrous being's claw came down directly on top of Sean.

"Ca... ra..." his armband began announcing, excruciatingly slowly. That would be Carapacitator. That would be Sean. He was crushed, right off the bat. He never had a chance to fight or even raise his weapons. Will felt the strands pulsing, being pulled tighter and tighter -

The monstrous being's other claw came down on top of a cape Will didn't recognize, so fast that the armband hadn't even reached the third syllable of Sean's name yet.

And then the tail came down towards Will.

Time slowed further, then stopped. Will stared up at the tail, inches from his face, and knew what was going to happen.

The tail would crush him. The powered exoskeleton would come nowhere near to protecting him. Not from Leviathan.

And then the strands would snap. Will would be the first to die in the battle. It was inevitable that many more would follow. You can't fight Fate.

But I don't want to die.

His body was frozen in time no less than Leviathan's. He could think but not move. In desperation he mentally reached out towards anything he could get a hold of.

Sean's strand.

In an otherworldly dimension where fate and free will and chance fight their eternal struggle for dominance, Will grabbed hold of one solitary strand of the dozens that were about to break.

He held on with all his might as time resumed and the tail descended.

The strands snapped. All of them at once, in a resounding crack across dimensions that only Will could hear.

That Will could still hear even as his battered and broken body was crushed beneath the weight of a nine-ton monstrosity.

That Will could still hear even in death.

But in that otherworldly dimension of fate and free will and chance, Sean's strand was still in his hand.

William Charles Macall was the first to die in the battle. It was inevitable that many more would follow. But Sean would survive.

You can fight Fate.

"WCM deceased, CD-5," reported the armband.