Timber Wolf and Dawnstar

Brin woke up that day, a couple hours before dawn, and couldn't figure out what had gone wrong. So he lay still in his heap of blankets and pillows and mattress on the floor and thought about it.

Things had been working out, for once. The Legion had been all geared up to fight the last big fight; the finale to the great conflict. From his talks with the other Legionnaires, he knew that that was how it went. A new threat showed up, you found them, you collected information, you hunt them down, there's a final fight.

And then you win.

But the Legion had been losing, and that wasn't how it worked- and then out of nowhere, the next day, the old threat had been murdered and there was a new one.

And not just any new threat. It was a friend, a friend who had had something go horribly wrong somewhere. So the pattern got compressed into the space of three days; and everything started to fall apart. Everyone was falling apart.

So the Legion went into battle and lost.

But the threat-

Brin clenched his jaw and forced himself to think the word- Brainy; he was still defeated.

That thought had knocked him out of any comfort he'd had in the nest-bed he used. It seemed to confining; and he kicked the blankets off.

He needed to move while he thought. Kitchen time.

Maria was used to being up before dawn, but something was different today. There was too much tension for her to sleep, both within and without herself.

On Starhaven she had grown up around people who had known everyone for generations. Everyone knew how everyone else felt. You couldn't escape it. If a couple people had an argument, everyone knew and everyone got a little irritable.

She was used to gauging other people's reactions. Gauging this reaction was not pleasant.

So she had gotten up and left the building; flying off into the gray light of false dawn, headed for Shuster Park. It was the largest green space in the city, miles of nothing but carefully manicured parks on the outside that gave way to pure wilderness.

Maria needed something that felt like home, and the forests of Shuster Park was the best she was going to get.

The movement provided by the kitchen wasn't enough. He had taken out all the things he needed to bake for hours: cakes, cookies, muffins, pastries, whatever. He had begun to pre-heat the ovens, mix the ingredients, checked and double-checked the recipes, all while pacing around the kitchen with a mixing bowl cradled against his ribs.

He growled and dumped the ingredients for bread dough into his bowl and mixed furiously.

If only their latest problem could have been beaten like what he did to ingredients when he cooked. You add the right things in, you follow the instructions, things turn out just the way they should. No uncertainties, and you knew that if something went wrong, it was your fault. It was easy to place blame, and then you just dumped the mistake out and started over.

But you couldn't just dump people out and start over, or bundle up time and dump that into the trash and try again. And it wasn't easy to say exactly whose fault anything was in life, either.

Oh, sometimes it was easy- certainly his father was the only one to blame for his current condition. But who, exactly, was to blame for Brainy's condition?

Brin knew he'd been firm in his support of his teammate's right to stay, but he wasn't actually sure how he felt about the whole situation.

Some people blamed Brainy, like Kell had. Some people couldn't stand the thought that it was his fault, like Shrinking Violet.

But Brin had been a Legionnaire long enough to know that, deep down, the sort of people who became Legionnaires blamed themselves for any failure.

And it was easy for him to see how people could be blaming themselves. Saturn Girl, for not noticing that a teammate's mind was slipping when that was what she did. Shrinking Violet, for not noticing. Triplicate Girl and Chameleon Boy, also for not noticing. Maybe Invisible Kid, and even Shadow Lass, whom he'd heard had been good friends of Brainy's, for not being around.

And Cos, definitely, because he blamed himself for everything.

Maria touched down in a slightly cleared area of Shuster Park, just before the true wilderness began.

She walked into the trees, enjoying the resemblance to the woods around her home on Starhaven.

Suddenly a horrible wave of homesickness hit her and she sat down on a thick protruding root.

Her brothers and parents and old friends- she realized she didn't know if they had been on the planet when the crisis was happening. She didn't even know if Starhaven had been one of the planets digitized.

She sought for something to distract herself with and thought of the reactions her brothers likely would have had to the news.

Her oldest brother, Aidan, with the Havenite name of 'Greatfire', would stay calm, as he always did. He'd walk around to the other people nearby and reassure them, gathering anyone who wished to fight against the threat.

Iphron, the second-oldest brother, had been in religious training the last time Maria had heard from her family. He would be obliged to go the rounds with his older brother, offering spiritual condolence to go with his brother's physical reassurance.

Maria smiled as she imagined what her mother would say to Iphron, known locally as one of the most laid-back people anyone had ever met, almost to the point of apathy.

"Greybird, you get out there with your brother and help!"

It was something she had been used to hearing before she had left for the Legion.

Brin slammed the pan down on the counter.

He had started half-a-dozen baking projects besides the bread, the dough of which was currently rising in a deep pot.

Every single thing he'd tried besides that had turned out wrong.

He seized the pan and dumped the contents into the sink, turning the water on to wash away the worst of the inedible muck.

Footsteps creaked farther up the building, on the edge of his hearing. Checking the time, Brin found it was now past dawn.

He thought suddenly of his time on Raul, all the times he'd run through the thick woods as dawn broke, running just to do it.

There were woods nearby.

Brin abandoned the ingredients and supplies of his baking work and dropped out the first window he came to.

Dawnstar had risen from her tree root and was busy distracting herself by tracking a small animal.

She had found scat traces half an hour ago, just after dawn, and had noticed the slight traces of passage through the undergrowth.

This wasn't a time to use her powers. This was a time for manual tracking.

There was a slight bit of fur caught in the dense, whippy branches of a brushy tangle. Rather than risk her wings, Maria walked around it and picked up the trail on the other side.

A faint partial outline of a footprint there, a few disturbed, rotting leaves here…

Brin had gotten well into Shuster Park before he thought of the possibility of tracking Brainy.

He knew already that Dream Girl and Dawnstar had refused to do any such thing, citing promises made before the traumatized Legionnaire had left. But he had no such obligations.

The traces should still be fresh enough, and he knew Brainy's scent well enough that even with the fading over time it wouldn't be hard to pick up any trail he had left behind. The city wasn't even a problem- a few years ago, when Brin joined the Legion, he wouldn't have been able to track anything through the city, not even a cruiser full of onions. But he'd had practice now, and could scent a teammate coming from a couple city blocks away, more if the wind was right.

It was something to think about.

The wind rustled the leaves of the trees and a warm, moist scent wafted into his nose. It made his mouth water before he truly managed to register it.

Sternly, Brin commanded himself to stop thinking about the joys of hunting, but his body wouldn't listen and his stomach growled in defiance, rebelling against the lack of breakfast.

There was no one else around. He could slip, if he really wanted, just this once…

Maria crouched behind a screen of branches at the edge of an overgrown clearing, watching the bobcat she'd been tracking stalk a squirrel. It stepped silently across the debris littering the floor of the clearing.

She carefully left the protective cover of her wild-growth screen and ghosted behind the bobcat, keeping close tabs on the wind to make sure her scent didn't reach the wild animal.

Suddenly the squirrel sprang upright. The bobcat froze as the squirrel did. The clearing was silent for a moment before the squirrel bolted, disturbing the silence with the skittering of displaced leaves as it leapt at the nearest tree trunk.

The bobcat kept its frozen position and Maria heard the carefully quiet noises of a larger something out in the woods. She had thought that there were no large predators in the woods of Shuster Park, but apparently she had been mistaken.

What species were native to this part of the planet, anyway? Bears? Mountain lions?

Would the city even tolerate such wild animals within its limits?

Quickly she appraised her means of escape. The tree canopy here was too dense for her to fly out safely; even if she used her flight ring instead of her wings her feathers would likely get caught and torn on something, becoming useless.

A great crash signaled the arrival of the predator in the clearing and Maria had a quick second to hope that she faced a poacher, or a licensed hunter. Something human, or close to it.

The bobcat snarled and ran for cover.

Timber Wolf shot past her, skidding on the damp, rotting remains of last year's leaf fall as he tried to stop.

She lunged forward and grabbed him, spreading her wings to steady them both before her teammate could plow into a tree.

"Is it bobcat-hunting season?" she asked as Timber Wolf righted himself.

"Is there even a season for hunting bobcats?" he replied.

There was a growl from his stomach.

"If you had caught that animal it could have been constituted as poaching," Maria told him. "You would have been prosecuted."

"I'm hungry," he growled. "And don't tell me to go back to HQ and eat. I can't stand it in there right now."

"I know how you feel."

She considered the situation for a moment.

"Do you drink coffee?"

Timber Wolf blinked at her. "Wha-no. Can't stand the smell. Or the taste."

"I prefer tea myself. Would you consider going out for breakfast?"

Her teammate scrunched in on himself. "I hate going out in public when I'm not in uniform. People stare."

"People stare at me, too. We are just too recognizable. But is it worth being stared at by some early morning breakfasters not to have to eat in Legion Headquarters?"

A fifteen-minute trek through the park and an equally long walk to an early-open café saw the two Legionnaires dining on breakfast foods in a mostly-unoccupied room where people were more interested in staying awake or planning an early-morning business meeting than paying attention to the novelty of Legionnaires.

Brin watched Maria over his drink and wondered if it was a good idea to ask her about what he was considering.

She noticed him watching her.

"Was there something you wished to say?"

"I was thinking a bit before I started chasing that thing," he admitted. "I thought that it would probably still be possible for me to track-"

He became very conscious of the other diners.

"-well, you know who. The trail isn't that old and I'm experienced enough with this city that it shouldn't be a problem. I just don't know if I should do it or not."

Maria put down her food and leaned back slightly in her chair, wings spread slightly to keep them from getting uncomfortable.

"I know that I will do no such thing because it would weigh on my conscious, trying to force a person down a path they might not have found themselves on otherwise."

"Ever have an issue with Dream Girl?"

She shrugged. "Not with her personally. I did ask, and she admitted that her powers work with the likeliest outcome of a situation. She said that she sees more things about people closest to her, since she knows them best. Things can be changed, you just must act entirely out of character, which is not easy for many. But that is not the point."

"That doesn't really give me an answer."

"Can you live with yourself if you do track him down? What will you do if you do find him?"

"Make sure he's okay," Brin replied. "I know he was really broken up when he left, and-"

He tapped his claws self-consciously on the sides of his glass.

"- I can empathize with that. Having your mind fail you, I mean."

"Would you make him come back?"

"We already decided we wouldn't try and make him, but if you mean convincing… I guess that would depend how I found him."

"What if he was in a bad way, but still did not want to come."

Brin was silent.

"These are the things you have to consider, when you have power- any sort of power. You have to use it in a way you can live with."

He raised an eyebrow. "That's- a different way to put it."

"Oh, were you expecting me to say 'in the right way'?" she asked mildly. "Or 'to help others'? Because that is the trap the heroes of old fell into, 'helping' people. They acted without thought to how those people they said they were helping thought of such actions."

"That's closer to what I'm used to hearing, is all."

"Your powers are your own. You act in ways that you can live with; is there any reason not to use your powers in the same way?"

Brin scowled at the table.

Maria stood and laid a hand on his shoulder.

"Just think about it before you act, Brin. I believe I shall return to the park. Perhaps I shall sit and admire the flowers, or attempt to feed the squirrels or the pigeons."

He looked at her.

"Attempt?"

She smiled. "Despite what people may think, animals do not much like me. I would not mind being able to sit on a city bench and have the birds hop around me, or swim around near the shore, waiting for breadcrumbs, but whenever I attempt to come near animals they hiss, or growl, or shriek, and then run away."

Brin eventually returned to HQ and found that his kitchen had been cleaned by some kind soul, the utensils and pots and bowls and pans stacked and cleaned, the ingredients put away.

He found his now-risen bread dough and punched it into submission, thinking.

He covered the dough again, to let it rise at least once more.

As it rose, he sat in the kitchen, door locked, and thought more, keeping Maria's words in mind.

Finally the dough was done for a second time, and he squashed it again, still not finished considering the situation.

Brin found the need to move again. He felt a decision coming on, but it was hiding in the back of his mind. He tried to his problem out of his mind and pulled out everything he'd need for cake and icing.

The cake was in the oven by the time the bread was ready to be baked, and once that was in the oven as well he set to work on the frosting for his impending cake.

The frosting was left to chill in the refrigerator and the oven timer beeped. He took out the cake and the bread, dislodging both from their pans. The bread went onto a wood chopping block and the cake went on a cooling rack.

As he cut the bread for easier storage Brin found his thoughts wandering back to his problem.

The answer hit him before he finished cutting the bread, but he forced himself to finish and package up the thick slices for later before he really considered it.

Then he took the frosting out of the refrigerator and let it soften while he sat back and turned his decision over in his mind.

I will not track Brainy.

Then Brin stood, took out a platter and a spreading knife, and made a cake in memory of happier times.