When Coil Met Kayden

Coil dropped the other reality and steepled his fingers. Kayden was definitely not easily impressed, and his cheek still stung where she'd slapped him in a reality that now had not happened. After Max Anders, monied CEOs were not the type that would sweep her off her feet.

While he could recruit Tattletale to assist, being stuck with a timeline were she knew his play was too great a risk. She would certainly deduce his civilian identity, and she hadn't outlived her usefulness yet. This problem he would sort for himself, just as he had before he had acquired her.

It meant he would have to arrange long periods when he could use his power strategically over days, rather than short-term split decisions. Dating was complex and the effects of one decision may not show up for some time. He had to be sure he could start over with a blank slate.

Attempt 2
As Brockton Bay went up in a blaze of white fire, Coil ended that reality and made a hasty note. Never threaten her child.

Attempt 6
Coil ended the timeline. It seemed whatever motivated Purity it was not money, and for some reason she seemed deeply sceptical of his claim to want to improve the Bay. A cape to cape approach seemed doomed to fail, but he had ideas and everyone had their price. He just had to find the right leverage.

Attempt 8
He ended the reality where the inside of Coil's base was rapidly filling with metal. It seemed Purity had had enough of supervillains, and his one attempt at approaching her had led to Purity leading Kaiser himself to his door. However he now had confirmation that Kaiser was indeed Max Anders, from the base cameras and their tinkertech scans. An incident that never happened was not the proof he needed for his schemes, but the intelligence would be invaluable.

Attempt 10
Supervillains it seemed were not Purity's type. He would have to focus on Kayden Russell, single mother, and her return to the dating pool.

Attempt 11
The flowers received a polite smile, and he had thought he was getting somewhere, only for it to lead nowhere. Maybe she did not like carnations?

Attempt 12
Roses?

Attempt 13
No, Asters.

Attempt 14
She likes flowers. She does not like being given flowers on the street by a strange man.

Attempt 18
Does not accept lifts in the rain.

Attempt 19
Or help with shopping

Attempt 20
Carries industrial pepper spray, military-grade variant.

Attempt 25
He ended the reality. Kayden was a kind soul who would help a man with a broken down car in the rain. Unfortunately she did it by calling AAA and staying out of reach while making it quite clear her guard was up. He did not get her number. He did get soaking wet, a blister, and filthy. A more professional approach was needed.

Attempt 27
Hiring her to redesign his new penthouse apartment had produced a wonderful interior layout that even Accord would have considered nearly to his own standards, but no progress. Kayden was utterly unimpressed by wealthy clients, and was expert at shutting them down when they hit on her.

Soothing his bruised ego, Coil smiled thinly. Thawing the ice queen would be all the sweeter.

Attempt 29
The working lunch he had thought went well. The coffee the next day did not. In twenty-four hours she'd had him background checked, discovered the PRT links and shut him off completely. The naked calculation in her eyes when she'd spoken to him was enough to abandon his plans. He had to have the upper-hand in this, not her.

While the flaw in her thinking was clear, in that she thought tactically not strategically, she took enough precautions that she could adapt to most things on the fly. She was well-prepared, cautious and nearly sufficiently paranoid. He could almost respect that, if it was not making his life so difficult.

Attempt 31
He had tried twice more, and it was clear an introduction through work produced a professional relationship with no opportunity to grow further. He closed the reality, reflecting on yet another hard shut down.

At his desk, behind his mask, Coil's eye narrowed as he updated his profile on her. If he could recruit her to his cause, what an asset she could be.

Attempt 37
What was Hookwolf doing involved in Kayden's dating life? It was on Max Anders' orders Calvert was sure, and an unwanted complication. He closed that reality, preferring the one where he was eating in the PRT mess hall to the one that was mostly pain.

Attempt 39
Calvert dropped the reality where Coil was in his base on the phone to Tattletale for one where he was eating a healthy boring dinner at home. Asking her to get involved as an experiment had gone exactly as badly as he had expected. It seemed even requesting a profile of Kayden was sufficient for Tattletale's power to fill in the gaps.

However, he now knew what Tattletale shocked into sputtering speechlessness sounded like. It had not lasted, quickly becoming what could have been hysterics or hysterical laughter: "You want to screw Max Anders, no, Kaiser's ex-wife? Because she's Purity. And you're bla-" He'd ended the reality when her power led her onto his characteristics.

While utterly unhelpful, it had been amusing. The next time he questioned her in a discarded reality, he would have to keep the question in reserve, just to see if the silence could be repeated.

Attempt 41
As he ran down to the PRT briefing room from their armoury, Calvert silently planned Piggot's exceptionally painful death in an ever-increasing number of ways. The blind date had been going so well, and then his PRT emergency pager went off and Kayden abruptly lost interest. Damn it.

He closed the reality, and went to tactical use of his power in C&C to keep himself too useful to be on the front lines.

Attempt 42
The blind date had not, in fact been going so well.

Attempt 43
Uppity? What the hell did she mean he was uppity? He was charming.

Attempt 44
Scratch blind dates.

Attempt 45
Coil closed the reality without even starting the planned encounter, staring at the downpour on the weather news that the forecast had completely failed to predict.

This project was taking time, time that Coil had not expected to spend. It was an interesting exercise in finding his powers' limitations. If he could re-run the same day over and over until he got it right, this would be easy. If he could manage branching timelines instead of having to restart each time he alienated her, that would be a far more efficient use of time.

He was one of the strongest Thinkers in the Bay, with a power exceptionally hard to work round or defeat and he was being stymied by a women with no Thinker power at all. It was infuriating and, he allowed himself, intriguing. With a few taps to the keyboard he adjusted his planned timeline to extend this project into its allowed overrun period.

Attempt 47
Calvert did not close the timeline, even though the date attempt had failed before it started. Instead he held his coffee up to his hoodie and listened to a carefully worded and beautifully ice-cold dressing down of an ex-husband. It was a fascinating insight into the woman he wished to date, as she was perfectly polite while making it perfectly clear she was not going back. She was careful, cautious in her words, and while she wasn't afraid of Max herself, she was afraid for someone else. Her sudden taut face as she looked down at her baby, Aster, made it quite clear who.

Very rapidly she had resorted to telling him to talk to her lawyer, no matter the question, no matter the words Max said, her answers was the same; sweetly, regretfully, and very sincerely that he needed to speak to her lawyer. Anders broke remarkably quickly, and ended the call. Calvert chuckled. He could have told him just how tough Kayden was to crack. As she stalked out of the cafe, head high like a Valkyrie with a stroller, he was tempted to keep the timeline. That would have been self-indulgence and he had better self-control. He closed it and kept the memory.

Attempt 51
Calvert dropped the reality where he had attended the Mayor's gala as the CEO of Citadel for the one where he had kept a lower profile. It had been an informative evening, and gratifying. Move among the movers and shakers whose strings he pulled as if he was one of them and not their unknown puppet master brought a degree of respect that he rarely received. It also brought condescension, and he made a note of which people he could manipulate more easily with what he had learned. The affairs only mattered to politicians, but the CEOs were more vulnerable to their private and criminal preferences being aired, and the celebrities and artists were protecting their images rather poorly. He had gained so much from being there and seeing all their private interactions.

He had also gained a seething dislike of Max Anders. People dared to say the two of them were alike. Calvert was entirely self-made, even to the extent of his powers, fighting his way up from poverty to an empire he had built from nothing, over the bodies he had killed to get there. Max Anders was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, got powers from his family, inherited his wealth, and the only person he'd had to kill to be at the top was his sister. They were nothing alike.

A shame Kayden had looked torn when he said more of that to Max than was wise. The man had got under his skin and he hadn't been planning to keep the reality, so his caution slipped slightly. She wasn't leaping to defend Max but Max Anders getting his comeuppance from a black man left her uncertain what to say. Her inner conflict was obvious, and it gave him another lever to use when trying to woo her.

Coil smiled. The next time he faced Max Anders like that, he'd have Kayden on his arm: a subtle, satisfying, message to the man that there is nothing you want I cannot take. Then he would take everything else.

Attempt 62
He had her bag snatched. She came out of her mother's group every Tuesday and Thursday at 14:00, walked down the Boardwalk and turned into the little cafe on the corner to get a coffee before going home.

Calvert was seated at a table outside, (the one his men had been holding for him as they used it to observe her movements) in a suit and tie, professional attire and utterly respectable, as different from her idea of Brockton Bay's underclass as he could be. Fredericks, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, German, was dressed as that riff-raff, making his way down the shop fronts in a meandering pattern that had been timed to the second.

Kayden went into the shop, and he watched the clock on the watch-shop opposite as she bought her coffee and emerged, juggling coffee, purse, bags, and stroller. Fredericks cut in cleanly from the left, snatched the bag off her arm, did not go anywhere near the baby as instructed, and tore off into the crowd.

Shouting after him, Kayden looked between baby and bag helplessly, wanting to follow but unable to. Calvert was already on his feet in pursuit. He caught Fredericks and grabbed the bag, devolving into a quick scuffle before someone shouted the Enforcers were here and Fredericks dropped the bag and fled. He brought the bag back to her, treating the admiring views of the crowd as a necessary evil that he might as well enjoy.

She was grateful enough to buy him a coffee, but not to give him her number or see him again. Then she stopped getting coffee there so a regular 'accidental' meetup wasn't possible. Three wasted days later he dropped the timeline, grateful he had given a weeks worth of orders ahead in it, and annoyed about the wasted effort. He knew now that she definite responded well to being rescued, just not well enough.

Attempt 63
Scenario: Purse Snatcher was re-run, not that anyone but him knew it. This time he went for upper class casual clothes, more approachable, kept Fredericks the German as the snatcher because he had done it so perfectly, and again everything went perfectly. Until he chased Fredericks. The Boardwalk Enforcers were early, Fredericks thought on his feet, looked back and flung the bag at him in a passable imitation of panic. Calvert's feet tangled in the straps and he fell flat on his face.

As Fredericks made his escape people rushed up to help Calvert up. A handkerchief was pressed to his bleeding face, and he was helped back to the cafe, holding the bag like an injured, conquering, hero. The Enforcers ignored Frederick, closing on him instead, and Calvert realised that they were about to try to arrest him for convenience: he was here, the thief wasn't, and he was black. Either they were E88 or unforgivably lazy. He suspected the second. Only the reaction of the many witnesses, and the one who had just pulled a press badge, had stopped them.

Kayden was grateful and sympathetic, and stuck up for him to the Enforcers. She seemed to have a trigger about making the Bay a better place, and he had. Even if he wasn't the type of individual she desired in Brockton Bay, she liked the criminals less. He still did not get her number, but the dressing down she gave the mall cops, and her threat to inflict Max Anders' lawyers on them, made him smile. He was so close he could feel it.

Attempt 66
Purse snatching, last attempt. There were only two more mother's group meetings, and he needed to make them count. He was observing in PRT uniform that hid his face, as she walked up the Boardwalk towards the entrance. While she attended, he would change clothes to replace his men at the cafe, and be in position as she came out.

"Stop thief!" Heads turned, including his, but he didn't look at the shout, instead at the man in Merchant colours, legging it with an expensive and brand new Coach bag. No sign of the Enforcers, because his men were keeping them busy on the other side of the mall. His plan for today wrecked, Calvert snarled behind his faceplate. Might as well use this timeline for stress relief. He took off after the kid, easily sidestepping the people the kid had had to barge aside. The thief heard him, turning at the last second and Calvert crash tackled him to the ground. Flesh gave with a satisfying crunch under his armoured gauntlet as he punched into the kid's ribs. The kid gasped for air, turning his hips so Calvert's raised knee buried itself in his gut, not his crotch. Something impacted Calvert's side, and again, the familiar feeling of a knife failing against anti-Brute armour. He punched the kid in the face, breaking his momentum, and shifted weight to the knee in his gut to pin him. The third strike he caught the arm as the stab came in. His weight shifted and the kid flipped over, scrambling to get away. Calvert's knee dropped across his back, letting the kid's own momentum grind his face into the dirt as the captive arm twisted painfully. Twisting it brutally, Calvert enjoyed the noises as the elbow over-stretched, the scream from the kid as something gave. He forced the damaged arm down against his captive's back, upping the pressure as the kid screamed that it hurt. The fingers opened involuntarily. The knife fell free, clattering down by the kid's face as the boy's free hand clawed at the dirt. Calvert rabbit-punched him, and the boy went limp. In disgust, Calvert picked up the knife and tossed it away, with his free hand. The kid had barely fought at all and the fight had barely taken the edge of his frustration.

The Enforcers were coming, and he got ready to drop the reality, doing one final check first. Kayden, red-faced and breathless, was watching with her stroller, and without her bag. There was an expression on her face he hadn't seen before. Taking a chance, still pinning the kid in the dirt, he picked up the bag with his free hand and held it out to her.

"Your bag, ma'am." She took it gratefully, and a little flustered. As she thanked him profusely, he smiled, magnanimously saying he was just doing his duty and was delighted when she blushed. He should have guessed the way to Purity's heart would be inflicting police brutality on a Merchant.

He was still wearing his helmet, but if he could get her to see him as a person before it came off, the approach might be salvageable.

Four unfortunate Merchants later, it was.

Author's Note: A non-canon section of Forked Lightning, because people kept asking how Coil managed to date Purity.