Chương 13: To Heel

I should have said no to the pizza. I should've just said to call Tancred and get us back to base. But no, I needed something else to eat, I guess. The pizzeria had absolutely everything made out of linoleum or fake marble. Places are alive, and this one seemed downright suicidal with how morose and grey it was.

"You were really reckless with doing that-" May was just making noise at this point.

"-your first foray to be without a team?" I wasn't even able to parse most of it. The pizza tasted okay. I still felt a pang of disappointment that real food didn't excite me. It tasted good, but it still just felt like fuel for the tank. After another minute of scolding, I finally interrupted her.

"Look," I said, her voice stopping halfway into my lone word.

"If we called the team and had to wait for them, which could've taken precious time, people would have gotten hurt. We also might have needed approval or something. Or even worse, they'd make us wait for another superhero to do it, which is even more time wasted. We did something that saved a lot of lives, and you can't tell me it wasn't fun to do actual superhero shit and not just saving cats from trees or changing smoke alarm batteries or something." She watched me.

Was she trying to see if my face was betraying what I was saying? I had no idea, I couldn't see how my face looked, none of the windows were reflective because they were all caked in the dried grease left by kids slapping at them. Finally, she spoke and knocked me out of the mental image of how long it would take to clean them.

"I've done real superhero stuff. I've stopped some muggers and I de-escalated a fight." I clicked my tongue and replied without a moment's hesitation.

"You did shit cops can do. Cops can't fight talking tree-people. When someone needs to throw tons of lumber at more lumber or to set it on fire from sixty feet away, they're not asking for a cop. This was superhero shit." I finished my slice of pizza, wiping my hands off with a napkin.

"I mean, yeah, I guess, but we can't be putting ourselves at risk so easily. What if my heat vision didn't burn them? I saw vines growing out of their stumps. What if one grabbed you and shoved those vines down your throat and suffocated you? The situation could've been so much worse!" I squinted.

"Why is your hypothetical just your powers not working but mine is about me getting killed?" She shrugged as she took a bite out of her pizza.

"Just the first things I thought of. But that's not an answer to my question." I rolled my eyes.

"Then we still would have at least stalled them for enough time for the rest of the team or another superhero to come. The point was saving the people in the park, which we did." A long, frustrated groan came from her before she spoke.

"Fine! Okay, we did do good there. And then what, we just keep doing things without approval from the team or the Super Commission?" I shook my head.

"Not always. But if things happen in the moment we gotta just do what's right instead of what's in protocol. And again, I think you're forgetting the part where I could tell you had just as much fun as I did." May slumped back in her seat.

"... Kind of, I guess. It felt good to be saving people but how are we going to explain this? They're gonna know fast. And what if we end up online? They might get pissed because we didn't do any public demo." I shook my head again.

"The people here in Charlottesville got a preview. Like a... movie trailer." I thought the word might have been trailer. Sounded right.

"They know there's new superheroes in town who can put in some real work. They're gonna keep an eye out now. I bet Perry'll be drooling when he finds out we accidentally gave him a marketing opportunity." It was easy to hear that she nearly choked on her food from that, but seemed to recover.

"Okay, fine, maybe that's the case. I just don't wanna lose out on a good thing when it's all I really have right now." I pursed my lips as she ate in silence. I had already finished my food, so all I could do was watch out the window. The glint of the light through it as the sun came closer to setting stirred a thought in me. I looked back to her.

"Hey, actually, I got a question." She made an inquisitive sound through the chewing of her food.

"When you lit the tree guys on fire... I didn't see any light. I thought your power was reflecting light and stuff." Swallowing her food, she let out a quiet exhale.

"I did, it just... wasn't visible." My head tilted in confusion. One of these days that motion was gonna put me in a sniper's line of fire or something.

"The light spectrum goes past our vision, and in one direction, the one where things get really hot, like ultraviolet-" Ridiculous word. Is it just more violet?" -you can't see it but it's still hot enough to burn wood. I just focused a bunch of ultraviolet light through my eyes and right onto the opening in the stump. I try to avoid the heat vision because of the fact people can't see it. But it did come in handy there." I nodded.

"So you could just set people on fire and they wouldn't even know." She shook her head.

"Only kind of. Skin can't really ignite from ultraviolet light, I'd burn them but no fwoosh." She brought her hands up, gesticulating a plume of flame.

"Clothes, especially cotton materials, could go up in smoke though. But that's way too lethal for me to do. I prefer to stick to the stuff that's easier. I can turn normal light into a harder shape and that works like a good cudgel. It's like my eyeballs are a baseball thrower if I go weak with it, and like you saw with the tree guy I can put out way more force." Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. Following along, I nodded.

"Is there an upper limit, or...?" May shook her head.

"Not at all. It's just making more of a focus through the lens. I'm not exerting anything when I do it, it's kind of like imagining a sound in your head. You can make it as loud as you want but it doesn't hurt your ears." N ever pondered the fact I could do that. I experimented with a cacophony of internal screams, and none seemed disruptive. I wasn't actually sure if cacophony was the right word. Lots of noise.

"That's how my focusing does. My only real hold-up is technically how dry my eyes get but I get a lot of Vitamin A in my diet. And also I have this special technique to keep my eyes from drying." She looked at me, saying nothing. The dreaded head tilt returned.

"Well, what is it?" She just kept looking, her lids dropping occasionally.

"I'm doing it right now." I shrugged.

"That doesn't mean anything to me." She then rolled her eyes.

"I'm blinking. For someone so observant I'm shocked you didn't pick up on that." It was a bit sad to admit but I really should have thought of that.

"Some things just slip by me, I guess," I confessed. It had happened before, like the tree man punting me into the air. She just nodded.

"Well now I know your Achilles' heel."

"Hercules."

"Huh?" she remarked.

"Hercules, not Achilles. That's what they're going with for my name." She demonstrated her special technique of blinking for a moment.

"Do you... not know what Achilles' heel means, or?" I shook my head.

"I know what Hercules is because of the movie." She squinted.

"I thought you didn't watch movies?" I shrugged.

"I saw that one before I got my powers." She sighed.

"Achilles is a Greek hero who fought in the Trojan War, this big international shit-show caused by the king of Troy kidnapping another king's wife." I interjected, "How'd he get past the king's guards? Did he not have any?" Her head shook side to side.

"He was there on a diplomatic mission. The king had to leave for something, and he kidnapped his wife and brought her to Troy. They went to war over that. Anyways, one of the guys who fought in the war was Achilles. Achilles was a warrior who was seen as invincible; no one could hurt him. The claim was his mother feared for his safety as a baby, and she dipped him in the River Styx to make him immortal, but she had to hold him up by his heel, ankle area. So his heel was still vulnerable.

He died when an arrow got him in the heel." I just nodded.

"Sounds like a super with a known weakness." She nodded in turn.

"Yeah, so it's a pretty common turn of phrase, especially for superhumans."

"I never heard of it," I admitted. She rolled her eyes.

"You spent half your childhood staring into space! And I doubt the thugs you were beating up were very articulate." I shook my head.

"No, they were honestly really bad at that. Worse than me, which says a lot." Her face scrunched.

"I don't think you're inarticulate. You're just... limited in vocabulary. And usually pretty quiet." A smirk crawled on her face.

"But now I see we've gotten you out of your shell. Turns out you just needed to play lumberjack for the day." I rolled my eyes.

"I'm talking because you're talking to me. If someone talks to me, I'm going to respond." She shook her head, leaning forward on the table with a smug look.

"Before we got out of that tunnel you could barely even say a thing. Here you're convincing me about how good our heroics were and how we helped people and how the gangbangers you beat up weren't good talkers... I think you just haven't had a chance to live in your element while having some luxuries like pizza after an ass-kicking session. If Christian saw this I think he'd be insufferable." A frown trudged onto my face at the same speed a smirk had climbed onto hers.

"If you tell him, I'm throwing you into the nearest river." She burst into laughter at that.

"Leo's scared of having a good conversation with Chris! The big ol' lion's actually a scaredy cat!" Without a moment's hesitation I shook my head in refusal.

"No, I'm not." The chuckling didn't stop from her, she must have found this to be a riot.

"You totally are! But actually that made me a little curious." I begged my head to not tilt, and it ignored my prayers like a negligent god.

"About?" May leaned back in her seat.

"So you've been in foster care until you were 18, right? No parents or anything?" I nodded.

"Since I was two, according to my foster folks." She nodded in turn.

"So you might not have been named by your birth parents." I nodded again.

"My foster folks did; I know that much." She hummed in thought.

"Did they ever tell you why they went with Leo? And is Holt their last name?" I rubbed an itch off of my face.

"No, they picked every unnamed kid's full name with a specific order. If they had a date of birth, they used their star sign for the first name, and the last name was the first name they picked out of a newspaper dated their birthday. Otherwise they picked a random date for both. I was born in August, and my last name came from an article about an Australian politician named Harold Holt. Apparently it was talking about unexplained events and Holt had one day gone swimming in the ocean and never came back."

Her eyes told me I struck a very confusing chord. Unfortunately, I was tone deaf and had no way to realize it until it reflected across her face.

"And you... never found that even mildly bizarre?" I denied it.

"No, it's not like they said I was the reincarnation of him. They just picked a last name at random. I was just lucky it wasn't an article about World War 2." She snorted, her eyes clenching together as she held back laughter. She then let out a loud exhale.

"No, no, you're right, you're lucky it wasn't. But hey, I've learned a bunch about you now, like where your name came from, that you have actually seen a movie, and you secretly have a thing for woodworking." I shrugged innocently.

"Guess we all have hidden talents. So, when are we calling Tancred to pick us up?" She nonchalantly just leaned to her left.

"Oh I already did when I was ordering the food. He's been watching you at the table behind us this entire time." The goddamn windows didn't have reflections so of course I didn't fucking see that mustached asshole. I snapped around only to see... nothing. He wasn't there.

"Got you," she said with a laugh. I turned around, and I think my exasperation did bleed through on my face as her laughter slowly petered out.

"You can't do that to me. I'm too on edge for that. He's the only guy I've ever encountered who I genuinely couldn't even think of a way to beat, and he's just some middle-aged guy with a gun. He didn't even look like he was in good shape." She shook her head.

"Sorry, sorry. And yeah, Agent Tank is kind of intimidating when you think about it. Apparently he wasn't always with the Auditors. He was... it might have been CIA? I can't remember. I just remember asking him if he was always with the Super Commission and he just kind of barked out 'was at the company too,' which I think is a sort of euphemism for the CIA. Or the FBI. One of those two. But it would explain why he feels like this kind of specter, occasionally. You don't even see him coming sometimes."

There was the shadow of a person cast over her as she spoke. A hand touched her shoulder. Suited arm. A similar hand touched mine. A distinctly growly voice spoke.

"You are goddamn right you don't see me coming. But you're gonna be seeing me drag both of your foolish asses back to base, now." I should have said no to the pizza.