Interlude 1a: Danny
"Dad?" Taylor called, her approach making the stairs creak. "We need to talk."
Danny glanced toward the hall from the coffee table where I'd been signing work authorizations. "I'm in the living room!" he called to her.
Taylor emerged from the hall, and Danny felt his jaw drop. His little girl, who'd only two hours ago gone up after dinner, was wearing some kind of armor which seemed to shimmer silver, as though reflecting moonlight. In her right hand was a long spear, its tip shimmering blue, which she carefully held low to avoid slicing into the ceiling.
She came to a halt just inside the room. Danny Hebert stared, trying to find his voice.
"Don't worry," she said, and there was a laugh in her voice. "I have time."
"You're a cape." Danny felt the quaver in his voice even before it emerged.
Taylor nodded, her bushy hair bobbing where it emerged from the helmet like a plume. "Yes," she said.
"How?" he asked weakly. "When?"
"The locker," she said softly, and his heart froze.
"Oh, Christ, Taylor," he murmured. "I'm so sorry."
"Don't be," she said, and her voice was gentle. "It wasn't your fault."
Danny ignored that particular lie for the moment. "And you… made that?"
"Yes," she said. "I'm a tinker, Dad. I made my armor, and my spear… and my Rings." She knelt, carefully setting the long spear on the ground, before slipping her right hand over her left and pulling something off of her index finger. Suddenly he saw it—a small ring, made of gold, with a large ruby shining in it like a blood-red star.
"This is why you haven't been afraid lately," he realized. "This is why you've been so… confident, these past few days. You have powers. You can fight back."
"Fighting back," Taylor said, slipping the ring back on, "would be a very bad idea. At least if I did it directly. Before, the best they could do was punish me for fighting on school grounds. Now? I could get charged with assault with a parahuman ability. But that doesn't mean I have to take everything, either."
She fell silent, seemingly content to let her father take the affair in at his own pace. He tried to do so. His daughter, his sweet little girl, was a cape. A parahuman. A class of person who regularly threw themselves into life-threatening danger, whether for personal gain or for selfless reasons.
She'd been put under so much stress by those three monsters at her school that she'd come out changed. He'd known that already, but to have that change thrust before him in such a direct and concrete way was startling. Painful.
"So…" he stopped, trying to figure out what to say. "What are you going to do?" he asked.
"I want to join the Wards," she said promptly. "At least for now. I need allies, and my options there are the Wards, villains, or trying to start up my own team. I don't like the second option, and the third is too dangerous right now. The ABB will be gunning for me."
Danny tensed. "Why," he asked slowly, "will the ABB be gunning for you?"
She smiled wryly. "Because last night, I helped Armsmaster take down Lung," she said.
Danny thought his eye might be twitching. "You what?" he asked.
"I went out in costume for the first time on Saturday," she said quietly, evenly. "I stopped a robbery and scared off some villains. Then, yesterday, I ran into Lung and the ABB. They were going to kill kids, Dad. I couldn't stand by. So I got my hands on a phone, called the Protectorate, and distracted Lung until Armsmaster got there."
"You fought Lung?" His voice was hoarse and weak with horror.
"And I won, Dad." Hers, however, was firm. "I won. Sure, I only won because Armsmaster got there in time. But a win is a win. I'm strong—I can help people. I have to try."
Danny fell back against the couch, his core giving out, leaving him sprawled and spread over the seat. "Please, Taylor," he implored. "Be more careful. I can't lose you."
"Believe me, Dad," she said with a chuckle. "I'd prefer not to die, too. Which is why I'm going to join the Wards. It's the safest option for me, right now, if I want to actually contribute and not just hide away and do nothing. And I can't do nothing."
He met her eyes. She wasn't wearing her glasses, but her gaze still seemed sharp and clear. Part of her powers, perhaps?
"Just promise me," he begged. "Promise me you'll be careful."
She came forward and embraced him. "I promise, Dad," she said gently. "I'll be careful. I promise."
He held her, and she comforted him, and as nice as it was, he loathed himself because it was supposed to be him that was the pillar she could lean on, not the other way around.
But Annette's death had broken him, just when she'd needed him most, and their relationship had never set quite right. She'd been through eighteen months of hell before he even found out the details, and even then she hadn't told him the whole story.
No, that he'd only found out tonight. His daughter has powers.
What was he supposed to do now?
"I'm sorry," he said. He wasn't even sure what he was sorry for, exactly, but he knew it was true.
"I forgive you," she said, and he thought she understood. She pulled away and met his gaze. "I can't promise 'no more secrets,' Dad, you know that," she said quietly. "I'll have to protect secret identities, and even classified information. I won't be able to tell you everything. But I love you, Dad. Even if I can't tell you everything, I love you."
He sat up and embraced her, and this time it wasn't her hold him while he tried to pull himself together; it was the two of them, holding one another close, relishing one another's presence.
"I love you too, kiddo," he said. "You want to skip school tomorrow, take a trip to the Rig?"
She smiled against him. "That'd be great," she said.
-x-x-x-
He hadn't slept especially well that night. Who could blame him? His daughter was throwing herself headlong into one of the most dangerous professions in the world.
But he did sleep, and he work up, as usual, a little after six in the morning. What wasn't usual was that Taylor was already up, and merrily frying bacon and eggs.
She looked up with a smile as he came down. "Hey, Dad," she said. "Seems like I don't need to sleep as much anymore."
Danny raised an eyebrow. "Really?" he asked.
"Yep," she said, flipping a few rashes of bacon deftly with a spatula. "The Three seem to make me need only about four hours of sleep. Which is all I've been getting, the past couple of days, so I didn't notice."
Danny winced at the reminder. "Promise me you'll at least tell me when you're going out alone at the dead of night from now on?" he begged.
She smiled at him. "I doubt it'll be a problem," she said, "at least for a little while. I'll be a Ward, remember?" She pulled the skillet from the heat and turned off the gas. "Their patrol schedules are probably pretty regular, and I'm sure they'll make sure you know them."
He sighed. "I hope so," he said honestly.
She served two plates of bacon and eggs, set the skillet in the sink, and brought the plates to the table. "It'll be fine, Dad," she said gently. "I'll be fine."
He grimaced. "I'm just worried, Taylor."
"I know," she said. "And that's okay, but you don't need to."
"It'll take me a while to adjust," he said.
"I figured," she said with a light laugh. "It took me a while, too. I thought I was going crazy when the designs first started showing up in my head."
"Designs?"
She nodded. "How to make them—the Rings, and the weapons, and the armor," she said. "I thought I was hallucinating, or losing my mind. Apparently that happens to a lot of tinkers."
"They lose their minds?" he asked, startled.
She laughed. "No, they think they are," she said. "When the designs start coming. It's… I can't really describe it. It's like something half-remembered, out of a dream, or another life. But," she gestured with her left hand, and for a moment he thought he saw the red star on her finger again, "they're real. They're not a dream. I think that's why I started with the Three—they seemed so fantastical, so magical, that if they were real, it all had to be."
"You mentioned the Three before," he said. "The Three what?"
"The Three Rings of Power," Taylor said. "Sorry, I've just started calling them 'the Three' in my head. They're three of twen—of nineteen. They're the only ones I've made so far."
Nineteen, or twenty? Danny wanted to ask, but the look on Taylor's face convinced him not to. Instead, he took a bite of bacon and chewed slowly. Once he'd swallowed, he asked, "So, what's the plan for today?"
Taylor's face seemed to set slightly in determination. "Right," she said. "We need to get my armor into the car—preferably soon, before people really start to wake up—and we should cover it up with a tarp. Aeglos, too."
"Aeglos?"
"My spear," she said. "It means 'icicle' in Sindarin."
He blinked at her. "In what?"
She blinked twice. "Uh," she said. "Never mind. Like I said: something out of a dream."
He frowned at her. "Are you sure you're feeling okay?"
She chuckled. "I'm feeling fine," she said. "Maybe I'm starting to pick up a couple of languages that don't exist, but hey. Some capes have worse side-effects. Look at Case-53s."
He grimaced. "Fair enough," he said. "Yeah, we should probably load your stuff soon."
She nodded and stood. He suddenly realized that, through their whole conversation, she'd been eating quickly and had already finished. "I'll start bringing stuff downstairs," she said. "You finish up. Protectorate doesn't open until 7:30, and we should call ahead anyway, so there's no rush except to get my stuff squared away before someone sees."
He nodded, and she left, bounding upstairs with infectious energy.
He looked after her for a moment, and then tucked back into his food. As he ate, he thought about his wife.
Annette, he wondered. What would you do about this, I wonder? You always knew what to do better than I did.
He couldn't help but imagine that Annette would have known just how to help Taylor through Emma's betrayal, her trigger, her powers. Annette had been a natural mother, as though born to it. He just wasn't that. He'd never been that.
Looking back, how many of their fights were because he'd felt ashamed of not being a better father to Taylor? How many could have been avoided if he'd just gotten over himself?
If he'd been a better man, would that horrible, horrible day have gone differently?
"It's okay," Taylor murmured from behind him. He started, and looked over his shoulder. She was smiling slightly over the pile of armor in her arms. "It's okay," she repeated. "Today's going to be a good day. Tomorrow will be better."
Taylor seemed almost to glow, as if peering in as a ray of sunlight through a parting in the clouds. Despair fell away, shame receded, and all that was left was…
"Hope," she said lightly. "My favorite of Narya's powers."
"What is this?" he asked, and his voice was awed.
"Hope," she said simply.
"That's it?"
"That's it," she chuckled. "It's wonderful, isn't it?"
He laughed, and his voice was raw. "It really is," he said. "You shouldn't have to be my therapist."
She grinned. "I'm the one with powers," she said, turning and starting to walk out the door, her armor clinking in her arms. "Can you go downstairs and grab a tarp?"
"Yeah," he said, standing and taking up his empty plate. "Be right back." And as he set his empty plate in the sink, he smiled.