In case you want a background track, the first half of the chapter immediately follows 2.7, and was written to Video Killed the Radio Star. Many thanks to Undead_Robot for never giving up on me and pushing me to write.

Tango 2.8

There was no explosion. One moment, the grenade was plinking off the asphalt; the next, Bakuda, the unconscious ABB member who'd lost his leg, and the jeep containing Uber and Leet where all trapped within a thin, transparent bubble. The three capes had just enough time to yell in surprise(or in Bakuda's case, horror) before the bubble material rapidly deflated, pulling itself tight to every surface within. Chaos erupted, and with a thought from me the ABB scattered.

Tattletale swore, loudly and fluently. She dived for me, her face white as a sheet. "We have to save her!" she said, grabbing for my empty knife holster.

Bitch intervened, pushing her roughly off of my barely-standing body, moving to defend me in case of attack. A part of me was touched by the gesture, though most of me was too busy trying not to collapse after the assault, offloading my senses almost entirely to the few parts of my troupe still in earshot.

Tattletale stumbled back and started babbling, gesturing wildly. "There's a deadman's switch, didn't know in time to warn you! If her heart stops, they all go off, every bomb she ever made! Grue, help!"

Grue still had my knife, and at her words he burst into action. Bakuda was ineffectually clutching at her throat, one hand cupped and the other stuck to her grenade launcher, the membrane crushing down on her slowly in its quest to be airtight around every surface. Grue reached her, grabbed her head with one hand as she struggled to shove him away, shoved it as far back as the membrane would allow, and pressed the knife into the seam where her mask met her face.

"It's not cutting!" he yelled after a moment. "I'm gonna try to hammer it in, poor-man's tracheotomy," he told the cape. She nodded desperately, a low noise of fear in her vocal cords, bracing herself. He put the knife dead-center on her throat with his left hand, and brought his right in for a powerful palm strike. I'd seen him move our punching bag a foot with one of those; here, it only knocked Bakuda to the ground, her feet glued flat to the pavement, her throat crushed by the blow. I felt her fall unconscious a moment later from the combination of pain and lack of oxygen, Grue crouching down to try sawing where stabbing had failed.

"Bitch, help me get Earworm onto Brutus," Tattletale said in an undertone. "I don't think we're going to make it out of here otherwise."

As they both grabbed me and I jerkily climbed Brutus's bone spines, the reality of the situation finally came crashing down on me. I could feel every single struggle as Uber and Leet silently choked for air, the membrane pulling tight to their skin so that their faces were pale and sickly blue, their bodies desperately cutting back on consuming oxygen like swimmers stuck underwater. All around me, civilians who hadn't ever wanted to fight hugged each other and cried, knowing or suspecting their final moments were near.

"I didn't know," I said lamely, using every ounce of my strength just to hold myself close to the back of the dog as Bitch climbed up behind me. I had no way to know, the other options had been death or worse, and Bakuda had been a monster of the worst kind. But I'd been the one to decide that becoming a killer was the only response to being cornered by a monster, and so I'd become a killer. I had compromised my principles, and everything that came from that decision was my fault.

We were hopping the fence on the south side of the facility when it happened. A rapid staccato of sounds rang out from behind us, and a few seconds later an answering report rang out from the city in front of us. The night was filled with sounds both conventional and esoteric, gunshots and thunderclaps mixing with banshee wails, high frequency tones and warbling chimes, echoing back and forth for a few seconds between the northern mountains and the downtown skyscrapers.

Then there was silence for a few seconds as the city fell into shock. I barely heard it; the sudden lack of a swarm sent all of those repressed responses to pain crashing back in like a blinding torrent of fire and blades, and I finally, mercifully lost consciousness.

I woke up slowly. In part, this was because I was warm. In part, it was because quiet, soothing classical music was playing from a radio nearby. But mostly, it was because my everything was currently resting at a dull ache, with occasional throbs of pressure and slow-motion stabbing that felt like a full-body migraine. This, combined with the somewhat familiar, floaty feeling of morphine, made it very hard to move or do anything that could distinguish reality from nightmares of the past and present.

I didn't feel like opening my eyes, but I vaguely recalled that I was supposed to be practicing using my own senses, so I eventually worked up the will to crack an eyelid. The lights were dim and the TV was on, its volume quiet and its tone tense, an early morning national news bulletin showing pictures of devastation. From the familiar layout of nests and burrows in the area, I gathered that I was at home, bundled up on the couch sometime after dark. In the kitchen, a quiet conversation was going on, a mixture of somber tones and brief cheer. A brief glance around confirmed that the person sat on the far end of the couch was indeed Alec, out of costume, watching the images with a vaguely interested expression.

My team was in my house, then. I wasn't sure how to feel about that. The pit I felt in my stomach as I thought wasn't negative, not entirely, but it wasn't exactly positive either. I would have liked to keep the two parts of my life as separate as possible; letting Dad get too close to my 'work' would be a risk I couldn't afford; but I'd been injured, and the thought of my dad sitting at home without word for days while I recuperated was too cruel to dwell on.

Exactly how I'd been injured came floating back to me at that thought, and I suddenly felt wide awake. I moaned a bit as a way of communication, catching Alec's attention.

"Hey there," he said, "Welcome back to the land of the living. Well, mostly, anyway," he said, nodding at the TV.

"How bad," I mumbled, waking up a sparrow to get a look for myself.

"It's not great, but it could have been worse too," he said flatly. "The city's still reeling. It was late enough that most of the victims were home or at work for the ABB, so there's entire buildings that are gone or impassable, but not as much widespread damage. The bitch had bombs set in other buildings too, so half the city is out of power and the services are down. Lise was getting word out to the PRT about it, but they haven't said anything yet on the news."

I sent the bird swooping up to the somber notes of Beethoven, getting a look at the Docks. I was hoping Alec was being blunt, but if anything, he was downplaying it a bit. The Docks were scarred. Familiar buildings were dilapidated rubble at best, teetering ruins held up by luck or strange effects as a norm, and zones of clearly hazardous aftereffects at worst. The targets were seemingly random outside the apartment complexes that dotted the area; I could see a pub I passed on the way to the Boardwalk on some of my runs, its facade turned to some kind of bubbling and glowing green sludge that looked cartoonishly radioactive. Downtown was completely dark, and the northern Boardwalk was either burning with bluish-purple fire or putting off UV-emitting smoke, possibly both. How many had died? Maybe a thousand? A few thousand, including secondary effects and radiation? It could be much worse, but it was still worse than it had to be.

"Fuck," I said quietly, putting as much invective in the word as I could manage. Which wasn't much, honestly. I mostly felt numb, and it only had a little bit to do with the drugs. People weren't set up to process things of this scale, and if part of me was upset about the situation, it was as much because I didn't feel as bad as I should.

Alec hesitantly spoke, like he was trying out the words. "Hey, dweeb?" I cracked my eye again. He continued in the same tone, quiet enough that only I could hear. "This shit? This isn't on you. I was planning to do the same thing, you just beat me to it."

I sighed, letting myself focus on the soreness of skin pulling taught over my ribs to push away some of the fuzziness. "There had to be another way," I responded after a moment.

He thought about it, staring at the television for long enough that I thought he might have decided not to answer. When he did, it was with a conviction I hadn't heard in him before. "No. Some people are broken beyond repair, and you can either run from them, or make sure they can't find you ever again."

"I just took the easy way out," I said dismissively.

He turned to give me his full attention, his brow furrowed ever so slightly, a mixture of frustration and confusion in his tone. "I know I'm a little fucked in the head, but even I can see that that's bullshit. The easy way would have been to cut and run, let her keep making more suicide bombers and kill more people. Trust me, I know that shit firsthand. You did the right thing."

"And how would you know?" I hissed, angry at him and myself both. I hadn't even considered the option of getting away in that moment, but even If I had, he was right. Bakuda would have just gone on killing, and even if I'd found out about the switch afterward, I would still be thinking the situation over just like I was now, looking for the one way it could have gone well. That didn't help my mood though.

The conversation in the kitchen stopped. Alec looked like he was about to say something, but reconsidered. "I'll tell you another time, maybe," he said instead, then leaned his head back and called out towards the kitchen. "Hey, uh, Danny? Taylor's up."

I wasn't done being angry, but I wiped it from my face before Dad reached my side of the couch. He opened his arms for a hug, thought better of it, and awkwardly rested a hand on my shoulder instead. Even with the jolt of numbed pain that came with the contact, I appreciated the contact. I decided that it was worth the pain to offer a hug myself, unfolding my arms from the blanket pleadingly.

"I was so worried about you," he said, crouching to let me wrap my arms awkwardly around his shoulder, too far away to hug tight.

"Me too," I mumbled lamely, holding on as long as I could before letting go. "How is everyone?"

"We're okay," Lisa chimed from Alec's end of the couch. "Our workplace is still standing, but the Boss has us all on medical leave until the whole team's back on their feet. Brian got out unscathed, the rest of us got grazed. When we realized you and Rache were closer to the blasts, we got you two to my dad's family practice. He patched us all up."

So that was the story? I guess I could work with that. I glanced at my dad. "The Dockworkers?"

He sighed. "I don't want to worry you, but I do have some good news. Kurt and Lacey had a close shave, something about a Chinese restaurant and not staying for dessert. They're doing fine, just a little shook up."

If he was only telling me something that grim as good news, things were bad. I decided not to push him on it; I'd find out over the coming days, one way or another. I doubted I was getting out of this without people I'd known, people who smiled when they saw me at Union potlucks and commented about how much I'd grown, left injured or dead thanks to my actions.

"Well, I guess we should be going," Lisa said, breaking the silence. Of course, dad was having none of that. You didn't need to save someone's life to get invited to dinner in the Hebert household, even if it was closer to an early breakfast at this point. As he and Brian went off to the kitchen to get that started, Lisa plopped down in my dad's favorite armchair.

"Well, I have more good news," she said. "The Boss checked out the facility, and he recovered most of the cash. He's rewarding us for hazards on the job too, so we're set for a bonus."

I didn't really care about the money, outside of how it helped me with legal fees. I knew she knew that, so I waited for her to get to the point. She sighed.

"What I said earlier, about him wanting us to heal up? Stuff is moving quickly. Empire's an anthill that just got stomped, and they're ready to swing at the whole city. Coil's got the firepower to hold them back to the south, but with the ABB gone, they're gonna spread north like wildfire, eating up territory and looting assets till they control the whole damn Bay."

"So he wants us to get well quick, then," I said incredulously. E88 had some of the strongest capes north of Boston on their permanent roster, and new capes were coming and going all the time. "We barely survived an encounter tonight, and he wants to have us, what, wage a war against the whole Empire?"

Lisa shook her head. "I don't think so, no. More that he's worried we might be caught in the crossfire of a citywide war. My hands are tied by our arrangement with him, but I know he has big plans. The Empire's gonna lose, one way or another, and we can factor into what comes after if we're willing to play ball." She smiled, but it was an ugly thing, her usual coyness threaded through with exhaustion. "The Boss wants us up and healthy, but we've earned a short break. Two weeks from now, we're going to meet him in person and talk about the future of the team."

A/N: I'm back! Last few years have been hell on my mental and physical health, but I finally broke through the blocks and wrote a bunch of stuff. My stories will be updating in the next few weeks(except Shangri-la, which is remaining on indefinite hiatus), and I'll at least do my best not to drop off the face of the earth before finishing an arc this time.

Also, if you want to help me out, I finally caved and opened a ko-fi, info in bio. Until I start posting original works, there are no perks. To those who donate anyway, you have my sincerest thanks.