Barnes Air National Guard Base

April 4, 2011

Danny didn't actually drink as often as he used to these days. Though things were… better, between his daughter and himself now in the aftermath of Winslow, he still found himself fumbling from time to time, and it didn't help that he only saw her on the weekends at the most now. The commute between Brockton Bay and Westfield wasn't an easy one, even with the Air Force very generously reimbursing him for fuel spent. Oh, he could have flown, this was true.

But Danny Hebert was not a man that enjoyed flying. Far from it, in fact. He had gone Coast Guard auxiliary for a reason, which made his Taylor's current course in life all the more ironic. Annette would have found it absolutely hilarious, and he was man enough to admit that it actually was pretty funny.

The moment he'd gotten the news about what had happened, he had booked the first flight he could. Seeing his daughter's sleeping form laying in a hospital bed once she'd gotten out of surgery had been spectacularly fucking far from funny, but it had been an immense relief when she'd briefly woken up several hours later. It was only then that he believed that his little girl was going to be alright, despite the fact that she'd fallen back asleep again shortly afterwards. If he'd lost her too, the last true thing he'd had of his Annette...

That had been two days ago. He'd spent the time since alternately quietly raging, worrying himself sick, and wondering if he should have perhaps attempted to push her towards the PRT and the Wards after all, despite their shared apprehension to the contrary. Logically, he knew that if anything, being under the guidance of the military as a JROTC cadet was safer than even being a Ward was supposed to be, especially in a city like Brockton Bay. Hell, they hadn't even been allowing Taylor to practice the vast multitude of her capabilities or even fly, something which she had been grumbling about at least twice during each of his visits. But he had to quietly admit to himself that he wasn't exactly broken up by that. What if she crashed or was attacked by some lunatic despite being under the protection of the Air Force? And to top it all off, there was something strange about his daughter's surgery, that much he knew from the odd tension at the base's hospital. That and anyone would have noticed the sudden increase in security around the entire base and at the hospital in general. That much, he could agree with.

And of course, right when she was supposed to be at her safest, on a fucking school outing, she and her classmates get attacked by one of the craziest of assholes there was simply because they'd been between him and the poor bastards that he'd been chasing. He wanted to regret the fact that his Taylor had been forced to kill to protect herself and her classmates, he really wanted to. Yet he would've given his right eye that very moment to put a bullet into the aptly-named Bastard Son's head himself, and to hell with what the PRT thought about that. That his Taylor and one of her friends did so... he felt oddly proud by that. One less monster in the world, and his little girl had helped do it. It was one of the things that gave him solace when she'd dozed off in her hospital bed clutching his hand.

He was also really, really, really curious about the burned glob stuck to the kitchen ceiling, but wasn't going to poke at her about it. Not yet anyway. He needed to build up some proper Dad material first, just to make sure that he had something good when he finally did.

Being dragged out for a few drinks by a few of his little girl's instructors to get him to relax before she was released wasn't how he expected to spend his third night on base, especially not rubbing elbows with a bunch of zoomies, but after the stress of the past few days he damn well needed a good, strong drink or three. Or five. And if it wasn't here, it would've been back in Brockton Bay in the company of his fellow dockworkers. Better to unwind before his Little Owl was cognizant enough to realize just how stressed he was by the entire ordeal. And he wasn't the only parent coaxed along on the impromptu 'relaxation session' either. There'd been a number of children hurt just as bad as his Taylor had been, one actually even worse. Luckily, all of the kids were expected to pull through. But the stress of knowing what their kids had gone through, what they were still going through, wasn't easy to deal with. And then there were the moronic knee-jerk protesters that somehow came to believe that the Air Force had caused the entire nightmarish mess to begin with.

For the first time in a while, Danny's knuckles itched with the urge to punch someone's teeth right the fuck in. How dare anyone accuse his little girl of murder?! What the hell gave them the right, when most of them cower like sheep the instant something bad happens?!

... Oh hey, a fresh drink. These particular zoomies definitely weren't so bad after all.

Surprisingly, Danny had found himself having fun as he, the other few parents that tagged along, and their children's instructors had all began trading stories about just what the kids were like and what they'd all been up to. He was well aware that he was giving his daughter's instructors ammunition for later, but hey. Embarrassing your kid was a rite of passage. His only regret concerning said rite was that he likely wouldn't be around to savor that particular harvest in person. But that's what that glob on the kitchen ceiling was for.

Seriously, how in the hell did Taylor even do that? What was that even supposed to be anyways? And most important, was he going to have to pay to have whatever it was scrapped off the kitchen ceiling? All very important questions as he drank on the military's dime.

The last thing he had expected to happen was to end up in bed with one of said instructors. He'd thought maybe earlier that she might've been giving him the eye, but clearly he had been drinking too much and just imagining it, or so he'd thought, and it had been nice to talk with her but he hadn't honestly expected anything to come of it, even though she'd made it a point to make sure that he'd gotten back to Taylor's on-base housing safely.

And then the next thing he'd known, there'd been bare skin. Quite a lot of bare skin in fact.

As it turned out, he hadn't been imagining her interest after all.

He was still wide-eyed and breathless.

After almost three years, it still sort of felt like he was cheating on Annette. Dishonoring her memory. Shaming what they had had together.

But then he remembered just who he had been married to, and knew with absolute certainty that she would've found the situation absolutely hilarious. He could almost hear her breathless, wheezing laughter.

"Mmm… what's so funny?" He turned his head just enough to peer into the blue eyes of the naked, extraordinarily fit and surprisingly curvy woman that was still effectively wrapped around him.

"Hmm. Oh. Sorry. It's… this is probably stupid of me in a lot of ways, but I was thinking of my wife. She would've found me ending up like this again funny as hell."

"... Again?" Danny couldn't help but chuckle, and gave a half-hearted shrug.

"Yep. Annette and I go back to when she used to run with Lustrum and her movement, before it all went horribly bad. Carried a torch for her for the longest time, but I never made a move. Partly because I was absolutely convinced that she was a lesbian and that I might get my ass kicked up around my ears if I did, or worse lose one of my best friends at the time. Then one night, we're out drinking together, and the next thing I knew, we… well…" Danny paused and blushed at the memory. Then laughed. "Turned out she was just bisexual. And after, she told me that I was such a thick-headed idiot that she figured she had to very obviously 'stake her claim' before someone else beat her to it."

The woman that he'd just slept with, or perhaps more appropriately, had almost literally thrown him onto a bed and mounted him like she was breaking a horse, snorted, then buried her face against his shoulder and giggled helplessly. She paused to catch her breath, took in his bewildered expression, then laughed even harder.

Just when Danny was starting to wonder if he should feel bad, Staff Sergeant Karrin Murphy sat up and brushed her shining blond hair back over her shoulders before grinning wickedly down at him.

"Your wife was right, you are an idiot, Danny Hebert," she said with laughter in her voice as she straddled his middle, then leaned down to press her ample chest firmly against his own. "But I think I can see what she saw in you. Now, let's see if I can get you trained up again, Squiddie! Be a shame to let all of her hard work go to waste!" Danny's eyes went as wide as saucers as she pinned him to the bed again.

"Again?!" he squawked out semi-frantically. "I don't think I have it in me to go a third time!"

Her counter-argument was to shut him up and prove him wrong by pressing her mouth against his. It worked. It had been a while after all, and though he'd been trying not to notice, it was kind of hard to ignore a beautiful woman's interest, especially when she beat you over the head with a clue-by-four. He really should have known better than to try and argue with a noncom.

And as it turned out, he actually did have it in him.

Well, the other way around technically.

Danny wasn't that adventurous in bed, despite his deceased wife's efforts to the contrary.


April 12, 2011

Brockton Bay

The cell phone rang.

There was only one person who had the number to that particular phone, and everyone present knew exactly just who it was, as evidenced by the deep-throated growl that began rumbling out of either Brian or Rachel's chest. It was hard to tell just which of them it was, given how Rachel all but sat in his lap. Those two hooking up wasn't anything that Lisa could have predicted, but then, she wouldn't have guessed when Lung had been slowly torturing the Undersiders to death with his fire, he'd cause both of them to Second Trigger, either simultaneously or so close to it that it was near-pointless to wonder which of the two had Second Triggered first.

The change in Brian's powers had allowed him to selectively suppress the powers of any Parahuman within the area of effect of his thicker and heavier smoke, and then copy their powers. But Rachel? She gained the ability to empower people as she did her dogs. In doing so, she could comprehend such people as she did her dogs, but it changed them mentally almost as much as it did physically. Yet stranger still was the odd power feedback loop that the two Second Triggers had caused between the two Capes, letting them all tap Brian's power through Rachel's to some extent, and from there, each other's. It had been too much to handle. Both Brian and Rachel had gone berserk almost immediately… then so had Alec and Lisa mere moments later.

Rachel had given them the ability to survive their injuries that night. Brian had pushed that ability even further, by layering Lung's stolen power on top of it.

Only the arrival of Armsmaster along with half of the Protectorate had been enough to keep a doubly-empowered Grue and Rachel from literally beating Lung to death, not after he'd killed all three of Rachel's dogs. Oni Lee hadn't survived the fight once his powers had been suppressed, and Lisa had been deliberately avoiding dwelling on how many of the ABB might have died before the four of them had finally snapped out of their power-induced bloodlust.

That had been two nights ago, and Lisa didn't dare let her grip on Rachel's power relax. It kept the pain of her burns away, and more importantly, kept her wounds from being infected while they slowly healed underneath the thin, somewhat human-looking bestial shells that each of them wore.

A part of Lisa wasn't entirely sure that any of them were still entirely human underneath the shells of meat and muscle that they'd already been wearing for far longer than Rachel's dogs ever had. And that wasn't the only downside. She... couldn't quite focus on just what those downsides were, but she knew they existed. They all did. She knew that if she relaxed her grip on Rachel's power, her own would let her know. But that was Brian's call to make, not hers. He was the leader of their pack now in every sense of the word. A very tiny part of her, deep inside, was screaming in horror, but it was getting so much easier to ignore it.

The phone still rang.

"We all know who it is," Alec said where he slouched on the sofa with a gamepad in hand. Not even being empowered by Rachel's altered power gave him the ability to be more than a lazy bastard. But he wasn't quite so unaffected anymore, or maybe he was just easier for Lisa, for any of them to read now, given the way his remaining ear was flicked back against his skull in irritation. "Also, when are we gonna kill that asshole anyways?"

It hadn't taken long for the others to realize, via their use of Lisa's power, how their boss had been using them, and that he very likely had deliberately abandoned them to Lung's nonexistent mercies. It didn't help that all of them now suffered from Rachel's difficulty comprehending human interaction while they used her powers to get around their injuries. Paradoxically, that also let them all understand Rachel in a way that none of them ever had before, and by extension each other.

Case in point. The soft chuffing noise that Brian made without baring his teeth caught her attention as he sat up a little straighter, and he calmed Rachel's quiet growling with a clawed hand lightly resting on the back of her thick neck as he met Lisa's eyes. And obediently, Lisa averted her eyes, nodded, and reached for the phone.

"Tattletale, I have-"

"What do you want, Coil," Brian curtly interrupted. He growled as he spoke, a sound like the rumbling of a very, very big truck's diesel engine and given an eerily echoing quality by the thick black smoke that briefly billowed out his mouth as he spoke.

"... Grue. I suppose I should have expected as much," Coil smoothly said after a moment's pause, though Lisa's hearing was now sharp enough that she could hear the faint, wary caution in his controlled tone. "First, I would like to express my-"

"What. Do. You. Want." With Grue's growing irritation, he drew on Rachel's power. The effects weren't quite so extraordinary without Lung's power as well, but he still visibly grew three inches by the time he'd finished speaking, and the short sleeves of his t-shirt were suddenly stretched thin around his much larger biceps and the bristly black fur that spread across them. There was another pause from Coil, longer this time.

"We need to talk, face to face. Clear the air, as it were."

"Yeah, we do need a face to face. I've been imagining what yours is going to taste like for two days now." All four of them grinned in bestial anticipation, and even though Alec's attention was still mostly on his game, his lips still pulled back to reveal two rows of teeth as he wet his lips in anticipation. It made Lisa think of what she liked the most about Alec's power. It'd let all four of them enjoy the experience of ripping Coil apart from multiple perspectives simultaneously.

"I understand that the four of you are feeling especially vindictive about how things played out in the aftermath of the Ruby Dreams heist, but unfortunately I hadn't left you to your own devices that night by choice. A prior obligation.." He paused, then let out an irritated sigh. "Alright. Fine." And that's when something in Coil's voice made Lisa realize that wherever Coil was, he wasn't alone, and that he was taking orders from someone else and didn't like it. The others picked up on that only a moment after she did, given their lack of experience with her power, and the thought of Coil getting jerked around by someone else just positively tickled her pink to her stomach. "As an apology, I'm prepared to, as a start, pay you ten million dollars. Each. As well as sign over assets to you, Grue, in your civilian identity that would vastly simplify you gaining legal guardianship over your sister."

That was enough to snap them all out of their growing bloodlust, especially Brian. And for a moment, Lisa felt a pang of nausea at how excited she'd been getting at the thought of literally eating another human being. Again. They could all hear it in Coil's voice that just offering that much almost literally pained the man, and it was a genuine offer. Moreso, it would make the Undersiders truly independent… not that they couldn't have just taken what they wanted from the ABB now, since all they had left was Bakuda and she was already desperately trying to cement her hold on the gang with Lung half-dead in PRT custody and the Empire 88 already smelling the blood in the water.

"... Alright Coil," Brian said as the beast in him faded into the background. "You've earned a reprieve. Somer's Rock, tonight at ten."


?

"Wake up, Hebert."

I tried my best to ignore the voice. Everything hurt, and I just wanted to sleep a little longer. Just a few more minutes. Was that really too much to ask?"

"Damnit... On your feet already, lazy ass! You waitin' for breakfast in bed or somethin'?!" the voice screamed at me, and I jerked upright with a startled yelp. I opened my eyes and prepared my very best glower, because damnit, I honestly thought I'd earned some fucking peace for a few hours at least! The words caught in my throat. I wasn't in my bed anymore. I wasn't even in my hospital room anymore. I wasn't anywhere I'd ever seen before.

"About fucking time," the woman staring down at me said in the gruff and rough tones of someone that had long given up on being anything remotely close to pleasant and had spent at least a decade chain-smoking, but I still recognized it as the strange, whispery thoughts that had been in my head more and more lately. Scuffed combat boots that had seen better days crunched broken gravel and ice as she strode towards where I lay sprawled on the ground, but I couldn't feel the cold that turned my breath into puffs of steam. At first she was just a dark silhouette against an impossibly dark sky over the blasted and ruined remains of a strange city, over which thick and ugly dark clouds spiraled with increasing speed as they shed icy rain and violent bolts of lightning with equal ferocity.

She crouched to stare at me, like something lean and dangerous, all wiry taut muscle underneath a tattered and bloodied flight suit that was opened to the waist to reveal a battered tactical vest. A gas mask and two sets of battered dog tags hung loosely around her neck, and the cherry of the cigarette that hung from her wide, thin mouth revealed a scarred ruin over half of her heavily-lined face that was filthy with soot, and stringy unwashed dark hair that was going heavily gray more from stress than age with a blatantly artificial eye half-hidden by locks of said hair. She.. she looked like mom, if mom had lived through about fifteen different flavors of Hell and then asked for a second go around, just for shits and giggles.

"It's about damn time," she told me with a smirk. "On your fucking feet kid. We've got a D̷̰͎̞̖̓̃͒e̸̡̺̫͉̓̆ş̴̄̾t̶̙̱̄r̵̪̒̿̄̿o̷̢̲̱͚͌y̵̛̙͔̿̀e̶̙̒r̵̜̣̭̒͘͝ to kill."