The isfet are the single greatest threat to human life in the Erde system. Nobody knows where they came from, or why they do what they do. All anyone knows is that they're monsters; that their existence defies every natural and physical law, and that they won't stop until they've killed every last human.

For Aaron Wilder, a freshly-trained solider in the Bulwark - humanity's defence against the isfet - the future seems simple. He's going to raise his kid sister, he's going to support his partner as she rises through the Bulwark's political ranks, and, most importantly, he's going to fight to keep people safe. But one day, after getting himself injured in the most un-heroic of circumstances, things change. All of a sudden, he can create and control the same unnatural substance that the isfet are made of. He starts to bleed oil and mist. And, though he still feels like himself, there's an ever-growing part of him that wants, more than anything else, to utterly obliterate anything that stands in his way.

As he struggles to keep his new abilities under wraps, Aaron is caught up in a sinister plot by higher powers that threatens the futures of not just him and his loved ones, but every person living in the system. Though he may bear the colours of the enemy (so to speak), one thing is clear: he's humanity's only hope.

TO BEGIN: A BEDTIME STORY

Back when the world was salt and glass, and your papa and I were your age, there were monsters.

Why?

(Ah, here we go.) Why what?

Why was the world salt and glass?

The world was salt and glass because the monsters had destroyed it, my little man. They destroyed it as they destroyed everything. That's what they did then, and it's what they do now.

Everything?

Everything. Well... people most of all. They especially love to destroy people. But, in my experience, they're not particularly fussy.

But why do they destroy everything?

...Ah, well, the truth is, I don't know. No-one does. A lot of people have a lot of different ideas, but we don't know for sure why they do what they do. We just know that they do it.

That's mean.

...It is.

What are they like?

The monsters? Oh, little man... I- I don't know if you really want me to-

I do! I do!

...(And see, when he gets nightmares, who will they all blame?) ...Okay. Okay, well, people used to call the monsters 'chaos', because no one word was more fitting. But nowadays, we call them 'isfet', which is an old word that has the same meaning-

I know what they're called, ama! But what are they like?

(Smart little...) ...It's difficult to explain. And not because I'm doing it on purpose. The isfet... they have common features, but they are always different. I suppose the best way to describe them is that they are like ghosts of things we know. They might resemble a snarling dog, or a giant insect, or a man... but then, when you stand in front of them and search in your mind for a comparison, you won't find one. It's... difficult to describe. And it doesn't help that they keep changing whenever you look at them! When they snarl, they grow new mouths to do it, and the drool that comes out-

Ew!

Ew what? It's natural, even for the unnatural! Now, when the spit comes out, it can be hot toxic liquid that eats away at you, and then before it hits the ground it will have turned into something solid that chills you to the bone. And that is just one example I can give you - every one will be something different, and can become something different from that even as you fight them. That's why they're monsters.

Drool is gross.

Oh, is it now?

Ah! Ew, ama, ama, stop!

Hah-hah! You're just like your father. No stomach for the little things. But don't worry - I love you both anyway.

Hmmph. So? The monsters?

Yes, yes, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, the monsters. Like I was saying, they're never the same. I've seen ones that were viscous, and ones that were necrotic-

What do those mean?

Ah? Viscous means wet and slippery. Necrotic is... deathlike. I suppose.

Deathlike?

Deathlike. Like death. Rotting, and empty, and melting back into the earth.

That's gross too!

Monsters are gross.

But what are they?

Aside from all that I've told you? I don't know. Well- hmm. I guess I would compare them to... perhaps germs. Or maybe mushrooms. Not that they necessarily resemble either of those things, but in the way that they are alive, in a sense, but not alive in a way that we can really understand.

Huh.

Mm, yes, it is complicated-

Are they like plants?

I... well, I suppose, yes, you could say they are like plants. Although I personally wouldn't make the comparison.

Why not?

Ay... well, I grew up back when the world was salt and glass, like I said. There weren't many living things at all. So in places like where we live now, where there are plants everywhere, I can only be glad at all the life that's around me. So you could make the comparison, like I said, but I like the plants much more than I like the monsters.

...Mm-hmm.

That being said, your father - he can get very hung up over his invasive species. I think if you asked him, he'd happily compare kudzu to a monster.

What's kudzu?

...I'll explain another time, my little man.

Is kudzu a monster?

(Oh, great.) Kudzu... ah, as I understand it, it's a type of vine that grows fast and steals all the sun. your father knows more - you can ask him tomorrow if you want. But I wouldn't compare it to a monster. As far as I know, it's just trying to survive. Like how meat-eating animals eat plant-eating animals, and plant-eating animals eat plants. They don't do those things because they hate the things they eat. They're just trying to live.

And... and monsters aren't like that?

Not the ones I've seen. The ones I've seen - they don't care about anything else. They don't even care about their own survival. All they want to do is kill. Kill humans - kill us. Extinguish all life wherever they find it. And they... they don't even care if they live or die, just so long as they take you with them. That is what makes them monsters. Do you understand?

But... but why? Why do they do that?

And here we are again. Like I said, my little man, no-one knows. Well, I don't think anyone knows. Maybe someone figured it out, but I've been around the worlds, and no-one told me anything.

...You really don't know?

...I don't. But hey, don't go spreading that around, ey? I have a reputation.

And they're really out there? The monsters?

Yes.

...I don't like this story.

Mm.

The monsters. They're- they're scary. And you said they're real-

Oh, oh- come here. I'm sorry. Yes, they are real, and that's why I wanted to tell you this story, but- but you know what else is out there?

...Who?

Me. And while I'm around, no monsters are going to hurt you. They're not going to harm even one hair on your head.

...You promise?

Oh, my little man, I promise. Here, here. You feel this?

Feel what-? Ah- ama, that tickles!

Woosh. That is my breath? And you see this? Ah- don't touch! You see with your eyes!

What's that? A knife?

It's the tip of my favourite spear. You see it?

Yes.

Now... you feel this?

...Yes.

What is it?

It's your heart.

My heartbeat. Yes. Now, if you see and feel these things, you have nothing to fear. Would you like to know why?

Why?

Because I promise this to you, in perpetuity. For as long as there is breath in my body, and a blade in my hand, and a beat in my heart, I will protect you.

...Whoa... What's perpetuity?

Good pronounciation-! It means, forever and ever.

Forever and ever?

Yes.

That's a long time.

Yes. It... it matches how much I love you.

...I love you too, Ama.

...Oh, my boy... I love you more.

No, I love you more!

You love me more than I love you? Simply impossible. My love for you knows no bounds.

Ohyeah? Well, I- I love you this much?

Well, I love you this much!

Ama, your arms are longer than mine!

Exactly!

That's not fair!

Ahaha! Like I said... I love you more. But don't be sad - I'm your mother. It's my job. ...Now, you'd best get to sleep, because if you stay up too late, your papa is going to be annoyed.

At me?

At me. Goodnight, my little man.

Goodnight, ama. ...I love you.

...I love you too.

PROLOGUE: THE DEAD MAN

It doesn't take long for the man to realise that he's dead.

It's not immediate, on account of him not being surrounded by stereotypical death imagery. There's no call to the white light; there's no jolt of his consciousness returning to the cosmos; there's no unending and lifeless void. Instead, he can still see and hear and feel. Something feels different, of course, but it's not a dramatic different. Instead, it's subtle enough to make him think that he's just woken up from an unintentional map - or, maybe, like he's been hit on the back of the head. Disorienting, yes. Enough to alert him of as dramatic a transition as death? No.

However, the first thing he does is turn around. And the first thing he sees upon turning around is his own body, collapsed on the cold floor like a puppet with its strings cut. His eyes - his body's eyes - stare lifelessly up at the ceiling above them. And, as he takes in his own body, the memories of his own death come rushing back to him.

Well, he supposes, feeling surprisingly calm about the whole situation, that's that.

If this is death, he supposes it could be worse. He looks around the room again. Maybe he'll be able to stay. Remain in this plane of existence, like a ghost. There's definitely an appeal in hanging around.

He tries to view himself, and finds that there isn't really a 'himself' left to see. Despite not feeling very different, his corporeal form has been replaced by a wispy light, hovering off the ground and humming with energy. As he watches, it changes shade, colours rippling across like choppy ocean waves.

Is that... him?

Is that his soul?

He isn't sure what to make of it.

He looks back down at his body. Perhaps his easy acceptance of the fact that he's dead is helped by how distinctly not alive his body looks. It's beaten up, and dirty, and slightly too rotten to still be living. His - his body's - skin is pale, and clammy, and the bags under its eyes are pronounced. Its position is awkward, too. Anyone with feeling still in their limbs and neck wouldn't lie on the floor like that. Its hair, always too short to be tied back and too long to be neat, looks scraggly and threadbare.

Despite it all, he finds himself missing it. His body. It's a classic case of 'you don't know what you have until it's gone', and he knows that, but he misses it all the same.

He's drawn out of his thoughts by a voice.

"Hello," it says, "don't be scared."

He turns back, and sees something else now. It looks like him, or how he is now - a smoky floating light. But this one is larger than he is. And it is grey, with no other shades of colour in sight. And it has an aura about it that makes his breath hitch in his non-existent lungs.

"Are you... death?" he asks, speaking for the first time. His voice sounds higher than he remembers, but perhaps that's just fear.

"Not as how you would have imagined," the other spirit says. Their voice is a muted cacophony - hundreds and thousands of voices merging together into one. "But, in many ways, yes."

He hesitates. "Why are you here?"

"For you," they say.

"Why?"

"I am here to take you."

"Take me where?"

"On."

He does not like how 'on' sounds in his ears, how it rattles around his heart. 'on' is too vague. 'on' could mean anything.

"Do you have to?" he asks. To him, he sounds like a petulant child, and is embarrassed as soon as the words leave his mouth. If this spectre of Death thinks the same thing, however, they do not indicate as such.

"Not straight away," they instead reply. "Eventually, yes. But we have time, if you would like it."

"Time?" he echoes. There are too many implications. "Time for what?"

"To talk." Their form flickers, and suddenly where there was once just ashy light there is the form of a hand. Not a skeletal or decrepit one, as he would have associated with death, but what looks to be a real flesh-and-blood hand. There is no colour, as though someone has sketched it in greyscale, but the fingers open as it beckons to him in an unmistakable gesture.

He isn't sure how he could take the hand anyway, given that he doesn't appear to have his body anymore. But even if he could, he does not think that he would.

Instead of accepting the outstretched hand, he drifts a little way away before turning back, staring at his body still on the floor. The hand vanishes, and his visitor follows.

"What do you want to talk about?" he asks.

"Anything you want," the reply comes.

He's not sure what he expected the answer to be, but it hadn't been that.

He has no idea what to say.

"Do you do this for every person?" he asks, eventually. "Every soul?" Because suddenly, what he wants more than anything else is to know. To know what, and how, and why.

"When I can," they respond. It is an answer that leaves him with more questions. He remains silent for a little while. Pensive.

"Are you sure," he eventually ventures, "that there's nothing you want to talk about?"

"I would like to hear your story." They don't sound as though they had to think hard about their answer. In fact, that sound almost eager. It strikes him as the strangest part of dying so far.

"My story?" he echoes, dumbly.

Their voice grows just a little bit softer. "If it is not something you are comfortable with sharing, I will not force you."

"I- no, it's not that," he assures them. "It's just..."

"...why?" They finish the question before he can. He nods, the motion instinctive even though he doesn't have a neck and a head anymore. He is conscious of his spirit bobbing up and down a little.

They shift, their wisps of energy twisting up and down in the air with the motion.

"Your story is what you take with you," they say. "It is the part of you that lives on after your physical death. And it's what makes you you." they sound as though they are smiling. "I have never before heard a story that wasn't unique."

He snorts, in spite of himself. "There's just nothing better to do, is there? When you're collecting souls all the time."

Death's correction is soft, yet firm. "There is nothing more worthwhile."

He has no response to that, and so he remains silent for a little while. Pensive again. Then, he takes a final look at his body. A residual stream of the energy that killed him arcs up his arm and spits into the air with a crackle. Even now, it's surreal to see.

"Alright," he sighs. "Where do you want me to start?"

"Wherever you are comfortable," they tell him. And for the first time, instead of being confused by their demeanour, he's soothed by it.

Just a little.

CHAPTER 1: THE GREAT TRAFFIC WARDEN-ING INCIDENT

Aaron Wilder had never set his sights on becoming part of a city-centre checkpoint security detail.

It wasn't that actively disliked the role. He had nothing, on principle, against stopping and frisking company convoys. The problem was that when he'd enlisted, it had been because he'd wanted to fight on the front lines. And this was... well, about as far away from that as was physically possible. Like, the only way he could have been further from where he wanted to be was if he'd secluded himself in the Cube. Or maybe dug a hole to the planet's core.

He'd complained, of course, but no-one had cared about it bothering him. Hell, the posting was designed to bother him. The whole thing was a punishment detail from that vindictive Sargeant Moore, who'd always had it out for him, and who'd finally found an excuse to get him shipped halfway across the planet after he'd run his mouth one too many times. Which, even at the time, had struck him as shortsighted. Sure, he could see why his running commentary on every order he'd ever been given might had gotten old over time. But it wasn't as though he'd actually disobeyed an order. Surely the fact that he'd never hidden how little he enjoyed being told what to do shouldn't have mattered as much as the fact that he usually always did as he was told all the same?

Well. It hadn't mattered to Sargeant Moore, at any rate. So now he was here. In the centre of the biggest and safest city on Theia. Wishing he was anywhere else.

...No. No, he didn't wish he was literally anywhere other than here. But he did wish that he was out there, keeping civvies safe and fighting the good fight. It was all he wanted - all he'd ever wanted. Part of it was personal; borne of the loss he'd received at a young age and the subsequent resolution that that no-one else would ever feel that kind of pain under his watch. The other part of it was just plain old common sense; if inexplicable chaos monsters were trying to destroy humanity, it felt like the smart thing for him to do was stand his ground and destroy them right back.

So, he'd enlisted in the Bulwark. And he'd gotten through the training fine. Well- there had been a couple of hiccups, but he'd done enough to ensure his entry. And then he'd spent a few gritty, but totally fulfilling months out in the borderlands of Theia's northern continent, where the towns were small and the protection was thin and the isfet was thick. It'd been a lot of logistics and annoying hiccups mixed in with bouts of life-threatening battle, but there had been no doubt in his mind that he was keeping people safe and destroying the isfet. Despite all the difficulties, he wouldn't have traded it for the world.

Except then he'd pissed Moore off. And now he was right back here. Deliberately crap posting, miles away from the action, no idea when he'd be allowed to return.

Sighing unhappily and leaning on his unit-assigned plastic shield, he fruitlessly wiped at his brow for what was probably the tenth time in as many minutes.

Maybe, he mused to himself, I'd have a little more time for this assignment if I wasn't packed into a triple-layered security uniform while the locale was going through a crack-sweat-inducing heatwave.

It was the height of summer, and the city was caught in the kind of heat that made you feel as though you were frying and melting at the same time. It was the kind of heat that fossilised leaves while they were still on the tree branch, and liquified any cars unlucky enough to be left out in the open, and turned solid metal railings so molten that anyone who leant on them would leave behind handprints and flesh in equal measure.

Okay. Maybe not in a literal sense. But that was damn well how it felt!

Aaron, for his part, was a 'warm-weather person' who normally fared quite well in the heat, but here even he found himself under duress. Not only was the heat oppressive, and his uniform stifling, but the nature of his posting meant that he was standing around, outside, for hours at a time every day. As this point, his stupid sticky uniform was probably the only reason he hadn't picked up third-degree burns just yet. The whole posting had to count as some kind of war crime.

The honk of a truck dragged him out of his ungenerous musing. Startled, he jerked his head up from the shield he'd been staring at and ended up getting an eyeful of sun. He let out a hiss of annoyance, and pain, but mostly annoyance, and averted his gaze, blinking heavily and trying not to sneeze.

"Wilder!" A voice called from out of his peripheral vision. Unfortunately, Aaron recognised it nonetheless. It was the voice of his current CO, one captain Cliff; a gangling man fresh out of whatever particular training officers did who clearly could have used another round in the metaphorical kilm before being released into the chain of command.

Or maybe not, Dante mused as he turned to face Cliff directly. If that's what officer training turns you into, another round might make him actively worse.

It wasn't that Cliff was the worst officer in the Bulwark, or even the worst officer that Aaron had served under. He was just...

"Wilder!" Cliff ordered again, pointing at him with a bony finger attached to a reedy arm. "Stop staring at the sun, you absolute peasant, and get into formation like you're supposed to!" He then looked at his wrist, swore, and began to rub something off of the watch that he'd worn every day Aaron had known him.

...like that. All piss, no vinegar. Too wrapped up in the material. Probably hadn't even fought isfet up close.

...Maybe it was overly-judgemental of Aaron to assume such things. But it had been a long day.

Aaron spared captain Cliff a glare before stepping away from his former position (ignoring the uncomfortable feeling of his sweat-soaked socks unsticking themselves from the insides of his boots) and falling into line with the rest of his squad. It was standard procedure when dealing with vehicles that had clearance as high-level as this - threat was to be assumed until verification was complete, which meant that Aaron and his unit had the fun job of tensely surrounding the truck and defensively holding their shields up until an all-clear was given, the truck could move on, and they could all get back to baking alive.

With another weary sigh, Aaron settled in for a couple of minutes' worth of standing in a slightly different position to normal.

And then, something happened.

Captain Cliff stepped round from front of the truck and walked towards the back, signalling to two members of the unit to go to the front in his stead. He looked a great deal more nervous than he had a second ago, Aaron mused, watching as he tugged at the ID badge he wore around his neck like it was a noose.

"Scan the vehicle," he ordered, with a voice that shook just a little bit.

Aaron raised an eyebrow. He... hadn't expected this. At this level - this close to the Cube - everything took ages to verify, and everything was always in order. That was the routine. No-one was ever disorganised enough to get this far without their paperwork in order, and no-one was ever stupid enough to actually try and flub their way through.

Except, of course, one of those things seemed to be happening now.

After a commanding nod from Cliff, two other members of the unit stepped forwards, stowing their shields and withdrawing the scanners that were standard-issue for members of a security detail such as this. While they began to scan a side of the truck each, Cliff himself approached the truck's rear and stepped up to its secure lock, swiping his badge through it and watching as it flashed green, accepting his clearance. That done, he stepped away again.

A few moments later, the other members of the unit came back, scans complete.

"No explosives or unidentified life forms detected, sir," said one. "But we're picking up some unusual energy readings."

"It's like I said," someone added in a monotone from near the front of the truck. "It's part of my cargo. I'm making a delivery-"

"Yeah, yeah," someone else cut in. "You said that already. So why aren't your papers in order?"

The driver? Aaron peered around to see, but couldn't get a very good look at them from behind the other members of his unit standing in the way. Blast it!

"You two," said Cliff, and it took Aaron a moment to realise that he was one of the two - him and the only other unassigned member of his unit. "You'll do a full interior search." He wiped his hands on his uniform. "Better safe than sorry," he added in a low voice.

Buoyed by the captain's confidence, he and the other unit member approached the doors, each pressing against one door, gripping a handle, and bracing, because those scanners hadn't picked up any explosions, but, as Cliff had intoned, it was better to be safe than sorry. One- two- three-! They wrenched the doors open, turning to avoid any blasts, but nothing happened.

Thank goodness.

Following that, Aaron stepped through the open door and into the back of the truck, conscious of two things: one, the presence of his fellow unit member on his left, and two, the fact that the truck's interior had air conditioning. Straight away, he flipped up the visor of his helmet, gasping, before deciding to take it a step further and pull his gloves off, leaning his shield on the truck's interior wall as he did so. He could feel his colleague staring at him from behind their own visor - presumably giving him a dirty look - but they didn't actually say anything, so neither did he.

Once that was done, he took another deep breath of refrigerated air, marvelling at how much more alive he felt than he had a matter of seconds previously. Then, with an acknowledging shrug to the teammate who was still eying him, he reclaimed his shield and straightened back up. He could be professional. Totally.

The interior of the truck looked like some kind of miniature science lab, with small fluorescent lights in the ceiling illuminating pristine white walls and boxes of expensive-looking equipment. Wordlessly, he and his teammate began to look through the boxes, checking over everything that was stored to see if anything was out of the ordinary. He had to admit, a lot of what he was seeing was stuff that he barely recognised, and was probably going over his head; and that bothered him. Sure, his job was to make sure that nothing obviously dangerous slipped the net, but what if he let something malevolent pass unhindered just because he didn't have the technical know-how to recognise it as a threat?

This was why, he thought to himself with a harrumph, he shouldn't have been assigned to this unit, Moore. He wasn't properly trained for this!

He was drawn out of his internal grumbling by a glint of light that caught the corner of his eye. Turning his head round, he saw, packed into one of the boxes, a smaller, transparent, probably-plastic box. And inside that box was the interesting bit - what looked like a large cut gemstone that someone had taken a pickaxe to. Some of its edges were circular, with a smoothness to them that you only got from something that had been refined after it was dug out of the ground, but others were chipped and ragged like broken glass, caving into the smoothened gemstone like a ragged bite taken out of a piece of food. It was a curious sight, to be sure; why was it in such a state? And what was it doing in a truck packed with scientific bits and bobs?

Aaron stepped over to the plastic box surrounding the gem and picked it up to examine closer, reasoning that he could pass his curiosity off as him diligently performing his search. Its colouration was noteworthy too, he mused to himself. It looked bright purple, which was strange enough, but even as he watched, the colours seemed to... move. Melding, meshing, merging stripes of faded colours swirling under the gem's surface, like water going down a plughole, and clouds of pure black that looked like squid ink blossomed like flowers in a timelapse. It was beautiful, but it left him with a strange sense of foreboding. Like watching a storm approach on the horizon.

He kept staring. It hummed with an energy that he could feel, even from the inside of its container, that made the hairs on the back of his neck feel like they were standing up.

Logic dictated that he put the box, and the gem within, down. Instead, he absent-mindedly played with the box's catch, and kept staring. Were his eyes playing tricks on him, or did the gem's surface look...? Well, he didn't really have a word for it. But it didn't look like it'd feel cold and rigid, like a regular crystal.

He kept staring.

CHAPTER 1.5: BEFORE THE STORY PROGRESSES ANY FURTHER, IT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE THE FOLLOWING:

As advanced as the human brain is, it is still fully capable of reverting back to baser instincts at any given moment. Such occurrences most commonly occur in times of crisis (for example, the famous 'fight or flight' threat response), but a loss of critical thinking and a takeover of baser urges can occur on other, more random occasions as well.

Perhaps it was the bright colours of the gem - colours that might have triggered a similar instinct as a nutritious fruit, a poisonous insect, or some other natural occurrence that would require a person's attention. Perhaps it was the gem's low glimmer, and the way it in that moment resembled any other diamond or precious metal that was considered socially desirable. Perhaps it was an impulsive moment of rebellion against captain Cliff, and Sargeant Moore, and the heat, and the uniform, and every other tiny little detail that had contributed to Aaron's foul mood.

(Perhaps it was even, deep down, an ineffable thirst for excitement and adventure on Aaron's part, and the unexplainable yet unshaking sensation that this was the start of something much grander than he could possibly imagine.)

Whatever the cause and whatever the explanation, the long and short of it was that, in that moment, the gem was perfectly situated to pique that mischievous little spark of human curiosity that works wonders to override a person's senses and sensibilities.

As such, Aaron could hardly be blamed for not simply putting the gem's container back into the larger box and leaving it well enough alone. He could hardly be blamed for instead popping the catch that he'd been fiddling with (it hadn't even been locked! It was practically asking to be opened) and reaching into the container. And he could hardly be blamed for, after only a moment's hesitation, brushing a curious thumb over the crests of the gem's most jagged edges.

Wow, was the last thing Aaron thought to himself. I was right. That doesn't feel like a regular crystal at all.

CHAPTER 1.9: FORCED PERSPECTIVE

You know nothing. You don't even know how much you don't know.

Your struggle is against the inevitable. It has happened before. You will change nothing.

But that's not my problem.

You are an accident. An unplanned variable.

And now, you are mine.

CHAPTER 2: THE LAND OF THE LIVING

"I think it's best you step back. If he really is waking up, then it'll be beneficial if he sees me first - and besides, you really think I'm going to leave now? After how long I've waited?"

There was a small stretch of time between Aaron waking up, and Aaron awakening. In this small moment between realms of comprehension, he vaguely registered pain, a dark room, voices, and being enveloped in some kind of container.

What in the most crooked of spades had happened to him?

He tried to force his eyes open, but all he managed was a flutter of the eyelids. When he tried to raise a hand to his face, the best he could do was a lethargic twitch of his fingers. He tried to say something (something inquisitive and witty, of course), but all he ended up doing was make a noise with his mouth that sounded vaguely like 'muh'. That wasn't even a word!

Thankfully, even a small noise appeared to be enough to get someone's attention, because right after his attempt to speak, he heard the same person as before mutter:

"Oh my Gods."

Then, there were footsteps. He couldn't track them by sound - there was a ringing in his ears that wouldn't let him - so he made another attempt to open his damn eyes. It still didn't work. Frustrated at how his body didn't seem to be obeying his commands, a sound somewhere between a moan and a sigh escaped him.

He felt another hand slip into his.

"Aaron?" he heard a voice call desperately through the ringing. "Aaron, can you hear me?"

The sentiment wasn't one he could express in a non-weird way, but the hand was... familiar. Testing the limits of his strength, he squeezed, and felt it squeeze back. A good sign. Unless he was wrong, and the hand was unfamiliar. That would just be awkward. Though probably still preferable to death or a coma.

He tried again to open his eyes. They felt grim; crusted with sleep and like he hadn't opened them in a lifetime, but he forced them open nonetheless. And this time, they actually obeyed his commands.

Ah.

As it turned out, his prospects weren't quite as sinister as he'd first assumed. For one thing, the room had only been dark because his eyes had been closed. For another thing, the 'container' around him that had felt so restrictive when he'd first awoken, now that he could see it, looked a lot like a thin white bedsheet. Thirdly, and most importantly, the hand that he'd been holding had been familiar. Or, to be more specific, it had been attached to a very familiar person.

A person who was looking at him like she was about to cry.

"Aaron," she breathed. Her voice was soft, and hesitant - like he was made of glass, and if she spoke to strongly, she'd shatter him to pieces.

For one terrifying instant, all he could remember was her name. That was it. Just the word 'Plue' and then a big metaphorical question mark. But then, he remembered. Reminded himself. Roommate of almost five years, and romantic partner of almost as long as that. Studying to lead the entire Bulwark someday, and would do a great job once she got there. Creative. Compassionate. But also firm, and just, and ambitious. She'd be... she was...

She looked like a mess. He barely managed to keep the comment to himself, remembering basic politeness at the last moment, but it was true. Her hair was loose and unkempt, out of its usual ponytail and strewn across her shoulders and behind her back like a collection of loose rags. The bags under her eyes were way more pronounced than normal. And her regular stoicism was gone - replaced by shuddering breaths and eyes that were pooling with tears.

He'd seen her in worse states, of course - it was part and parcel of knowing someone for as long as they'd known each other - but the sight still sent a jolt through him strong enough to make him feel awake for the first time since he'd woken up.

He tried to reach out to her face, but the attempt was made with the hand that she was still holding; she misinterpreted the movement, and held onto it tighter.

With that not an option - the other hand wasn't on the right side for comfortable tender face-caressing - he could only hope that his voice wouldn't fail him again.

He cleared his throat, and her eyes widened.

"For what it's worth," he rasped, thanking Lady Luck that his voice was holding out, "I promise that barely any of this was intentional."

Plue's grip on his hand tightened.

"Aaron Wilder," she said, emphasising his name in that way she always did when she was saying it with any sort of feeling, "I'm not sure I've ever had a more stressful experience than loving you."

He coughed; half laugh, half awkward sound. "Good to see you too," he said. "Let me guess: something happened."

She, too, let out a noise that was somewhere between a laugh and... and something else. "That's an understatement," she revealed. "It..." she paused, and made minute motions with her jaw that indicated she was biting her tongue. A nervous tic.

"Plue?" he prompted, feeling his own nervousness increase, as if in sympathy. She blinked.

"It was touch and go for a while," she revealed. "You... you were really in danger. We were worried."

Aaron's heart sank a little. "How much danger are we talking?" he probed, trying to get more information. The way Plue was talking about it, it almost sounded like...

"Mortal peril," came a new voice from the edge of the room. Plue turned her head, and Aaron craned his neck as best he could while still lying in bed.

A man stood in the doorway to the room. He was gaunt, and stood with a slight hunch, but his frame was hidden under a bulky white coat that was fully done up and seemed to wrap around him like a shield. A pair of circular glasses were balanced precariously on his nose; through them, a sunken pair of eyes seemed to blaze green like giant emeralds surrounded by desert.

"Your survival was uncertain for days," the man continued, stepping forward into the room- had he been standing outside the whole time? Had he just arrived? Aaron wasn't sure. "To be honest, even now, there is a lot we cannot yet be certain of." He came to a stop a little way away from the other side of Aaron's bed, tilting his head slightly as he stared at Aaron through his glasses. "The fact that you're awake so soon... unexpected."

Plue's lips thinned as she pursed them. Aaron squinted at the man.

"...Doctor Aedifo?" he eventually asked, and was met with a nod in return.

It wasn't what he'd been expecting. Albert Aedifo had been a leading figure in the Bulwark for decades, and his scientific renown was nothing to scoff at - he was considered by many to be the greatest living mind on Theia, if not in all of Erde. For his part, Aaron must have caught sight of him in person once or twice during his time at the Bulwark Training Academy, but they'd never actually had a conversation before.

Which begged the question...

"Why are you here?" he asked. The question sounded like more of an accusation than he meant, but Aedifo didn't look bothered. Instead, he just kept staring at Aaron.

"What's the last thing you remember?" came his response.

The fact that he was answering a question with a question didn't feel like a good sign.

"I remember..." Aaron frowned. What did he remember? "...It was a really hot day."

Aedifo frowned.

"That's all?"

"No." Aaron shook his head. "Just- getting my bearings. It was hot, I was on guard duty... there was a truck." The memories returned to him a little more piecemeal than when he'd remembered Plue, but they were returning all the same. "We searched it... something about strange energy readings. And there was something inside." He looked up at Aedifo. "I... there was a crystal."

"There was a crystal," Aedifo curtly confirmed. "A gem. It was the source of the energy readings that your security force picked up on." Hidden behind the glasses, his eyes narrowed. "The same energy that we can now detect from within you."

"From me?" Aaron jolted up in his bed, unease giving way to full-blown fear. "I- what- what is it? The energy?"

Aedifo paused for an uncomfortably long moment. Then, he took off his glasses in a movement that reminded Aaron of a mourner removing their hat at a funeral, cleaning them slow and purposefully as he maintained the silence. Then, he lifted his gaze up to meet Aaron's properly for the first time.

"We don't know," he said.

Aaron blinked.

"...What do you mean?" He turned to Plue, wanting to see if she could elaborate in any way - but she just shrugged her shoulders, helplessly.

"The gem," continued Aedifo, "was a unique specimen. It was found by a team during an expedition into the Fringes, and was quickly determined to not only emit a form of energy we'd never seen before, but to do so at an extraordinary rate. It was our hope that, with further study, we could not only identify the energy and its properties, but harness it in some shape or form."

It was a story that Aaron would have found interesting in any other context. "I can't help but notice your use of past tense," he instead said, uncertainly. "Does this have anything to do with..." he gestured vaguely with his hands - well, one of his hands. Plue was still tightly holding the other one. Thankfully, Aedifo seemed to understand the gesture anyway.

"Yes. Once it made contact with you, it stopped emitting the energy. And you started to."

"I started to..." Aaron echoed, looking down at himself. He didn't feel any different - but who was to say whether he would or not, if this was really a complete unknown? "So- you really have no idea what it is? What it could be? I mean, what if it's-" he cut himself off as he felt Plue squeeze his hand. She must have meant it to be reassuring, but he could only think about the fact that if his body was emitting some freaky unknown energy, direct contact couldn't be safe.

He tried to pull his hand away, but Plue held it tighter. When he looked up at her to protest, his words fell away at the sight of the steel in her gaze.

"I'm not going anywhere," she insisted, before inhaling sharply and softening a little. "You've been in here for days. Specialists such as Aedifo have been monitoring your condition and there's been no indication that you're a danger to anyone." With her thumb, she began to rub circles over the back of his hand. "And you could never hurt me."

Overwhelmed by emotion, Aaron bit his lip.

"And you call me reckless," he tried to deflect, but Plue just shot him a wry smile and kept rubbing circles.

"Love makes you stupid," she said, with purposeful nonchalance. "It's a whole thing."

Aedifo cleared his throat, and Aaron reluctantly turned his attention back to the matter at hand. Not the hand that Plue was holding, of course. Ba-dum tshh.

"Now that you're awake, it's in our best interests to run some further tests," he said. "While you were asleep, your body was emitting the energy at a constant rate-"

"But you don't know if it'll do the same thing now that I'm back in the land of the living," Aaron filled in as he realised where Aedifo was going. A moment too late, he realised that interrupting someone mid-sentence like that was generally considered to be poor form - but once again, Aedifo didn't seem bothered at all. Instead, he simply nodded.

"Your being conscious is a new variable, and needs to be accounted for," he declared. "Beyond that, there are still further initial tests that we were hoping to run. While there's yet no sign that you're in, or that you constitute, any danger, we're still working with a lot of unknowns."

Aaron nodded understanding, sinking back into the bed as he let Aedifo's words wash over him.

"Better safe than sorry," chimed in Plue, a long-time subscriber to that particular theory of lifestyle. Historically, Aaron himself had always been more interested in taking risks, but he wasn't going to bring that up now. He was pretty sure that not being 'safe' was what had gotten him into this whole mess in the first place - even if it seemed pretty disproportionate that popping one little safety cache on a scientific specimen should end up with him knocked unconscious and turned into some kind of human battery.

"How long d'you think I'll be here?" he asked, instead. Now that he was fully awake and processing the situation, his body was beginning to tell him how much it wanted to be up and moving around. It was incessant like that.

Plue grimaced, and Aedifo opened his mouth to answer.

CHAPTER 3: ONE OF THOSE WHIMSICAL JOURNEYS OF SELF-DISCOVERY

"Three weeks!"

"I know."

"And they didn't even find anything!"

"I know."

Aaron all but ripped his coat from his body and threw it at their flat's little coat rack, gritting his teeth when it missed and instead sank sadly to the floor. An insult to injury. Before he could move, Plue swept past him and gathered it up in her arms before safely depositing it onto its peg. Defusal.

"And now," continued Aaron, determined to remain in his huff, "because of that damn traffic, we don't have time to pick Ana up from the Adalwins' until tomorrow, and-"

"Hey. Hey." Plue's hand found his cheek, and pressed softly but firmly on his jawbone, and then he was looking into her eyes. "Wild Thing. Breathe."

Aaron exhaled like an angry bull, but the cool feeling of her palm on his cheek seemed to override everything else. He felt his anger begin to slip away from him like a handful of thawing ice.

"If we can't pick her up until tomorrow, then we'll pick her up tomorrow," Plue continued. Her voice was slow and clear - has she been practicing her oration? It sure sounded like it. "That's as complicated as it has to be."

Now, Aaron's exhales felt more like sighs. "At least one of us is keeping things together," he ventured to joke - only to get a frown in response.

"I'm as frustrated as you are," Plue said bluntly. "This is just out of necessity. Tonight, we get everything in order that we can. We phone ahead to the Adalwins, apologize profusely for the inconvenience, explain the situation, and then we rest. Tomorrow, we collect Ana, and then we take a day or two to deal with..." she gestured to Aaron. "Everything."

"Ouch," Aaron remarked. The gesture wasn't unwarranted, and he'd be the first to admit that - but still. Ouch.

Plue rolled her eyes.

"I say this with all the love in the system: this is on you and your lack of impulse control," she told him, before frowning and pulling her phone out of her pocket. It was buzzing. She pursed her lips, held up a finger, and answered the call.

Nodding, Aaron turned away to kick off his shoes, tuning the conversation out as he focused on his own thoughts.

The past almost-month had been... frustrating, to say the least. He'd though his Moore-assigned guard duty had set the bar pretty low, as far as dreary nightmares of not doing anything went - his mandated hospital stay, however, had gone so far under that bar that it had crashed through the metaphorical floor. Weeks of staying in the same isolated ward, watching his own readings remain consistent. Weeks of people in medical outfits coming to visit and observing the consistent readings, writing notes and thoughtfully nodding before turning to one another to agree: 'yes, those readings are pretty consistent'. Weeks of watching and waiting and feeling as though every hour of every day he spent trapped inside was causing him physical agony.

Even now, when he was hypothetically free and ready to re-enter the world, he had to stay under what was basically house arrest for another couple of weeks, with one of Aedifo's assistants checking on him and his condition every couple of days. It was almost worse than the hospital; the promise of freedom, and its tantalising possibilities, made unattainable by his own four walls. It felt like some kind of cruel and unusual punishment.

He was drawn out of his self-pitying musings by hurried footsteps, and then a rustling. Turning back around, he saw Plue frantically yanking her coat off of the coat rack, muttering to herself.

"...now he thinks to call me, now he thinks to- stupid cussing things-" instead of undoing and redoing the laces on her shoes, she crammed her feet as far in as they could fit and then slamming her toes against the floor to force the rest of each foot in.

Frowning, Aaron wandered over.

"Do I want to ask?" he asked.

Plue's jaw was tightly clenched. "Duke," she all but spat, "wants me to accompany him. To an 'extremely important meeting'." Aaron could practically hear the air quotes around her words.

He paused, hovering by Plue's side. "Ah," he said, stalling for time as he tried to figure out how best to approach the situation. In most households, speaking ill of Duke Abernathy, Plue's uncle-stroke-mentor, would be borderline heretical. The man was the head of the Bulwark, and the consequent ruler of most of the Erde System. In the household of his chosen successor, however, this was not the case - as evidenced by said successor currently glaring at the phone clenched in her hand as though she was trying to melt it through sheer willpower.

"Bad enough that I have to attend at all, worse that he's only telling me now!" she complained, kicking the floor hard enough to garner a wince from Aaron as she finally managed to get one of her shoes back onto her feet. "The shuttle's outside- I don't know why he wouldn't give me a heads-up if it was that important-"

Aaron glanced at her free hand, which was beginning to drum out an agitated beat against her thigh, and decided that it would be best to step in.

"Any idea about the scheduling?" he prompted, trying to figure out whether there were any concrete details about the affair she could fashion into game plan. "How long it is, who else is involved, what you'll have to do when-?"

"Nope!" said Plue in something of a snarl as she shoved her phone into one of her jacket pockets. "Just that I have to be there, and that I have to be there straight away." Apparently ready to go, she spun on her heel and began to stride for the door. Aaron grabbed her shoulder, stopping her in her tracks, and he weathered the frenzied look she sent his way for a moment before her gaze flickered with recognition and she relaxed a little in his grasp.

"Do I need to tell you to breathe?" he asked.

Plue let out a soft snort and ducked her head, evidently picking up on where he was going straight away. "No."

He gave her shoulder a squeeze. "Then you're faring better than me," he assured her, both joking and not.

She sighed, covering his hand with her own briefly before slipping away from him and stepping over to the door. "I'd rather fare together with you," she told him. "If only..."

"If only 'supervisory medical quarantine' was more compatible with a top-secret Bulwark meeting?" Aaron finished. "You and me both."

Plue rolled her eyes at his summary, but didn't say anything to disagree. Instead, she opened the door, letting in a blast of evening air, before turning back to face him. Despite it all, Aaron couldn't help but take a moment to appreciate the sight of her - silhouetted by city lights, hair caught in the momentary breeze. It didn't seem right that a person should be so obviously frazzled, and yet look so damn beautiful.

sAnd yet...

He took his own brief steps towards the door, stopping short just in front of her. Then, quickly and determinedly, he leant forwards and pulled her into a kiss, keeping his lips tight against hers for just a couple of stolen seconds before pulling away. He felt, more than heard, her breath hitch.

"Just for that little bit of extra luck," he told her, before stepping back and folding his arms, trying to keep a confident smile in place for as long as she needed.

Plue, for her part, flushed rose-red, muttered something that sounded like "back-whenever-love-you-goodbye", and then was gone. The door slammed shut.

And just like that, Aaron thought, idly running his tongue over his lips, I'm feeling somewhat cheered up.

Part of him still felt like it was buzzing with angry energy, but he clenched his fists and did his best to dispel it. Plue was right - what was done was done. The best thing he could do now was get some rest, and savour, at the very least, being back home in an environment that he both knew and could control. Plus, it was warmer indoors than it had been outside. The veins in his arms still looked dark from the cold air.

Suddenly, Aaron's stomach rumbled, and he remembered that he hadn't eaten anything other than hospital food for far too long. Thanking his inner workings for the cue, he meandered to the flat's kitchen and grabbed a bread knife and some ingredients. Time for a sandwich.

With no-one to talk to, he mused as he worked. While the energy that he'd been emitting had never become more tangible over the course of his hospital stay - that is, it had never had any measurable effects on anything, and it had never responded to attempts to interact with, or influence, it - it had never stopped or even slowed down. It was like a switch had been flipped, and he was now the human equivalent of a broken tap, which was... concerning. What was he a conduit for? Where was it coming from? What could the consequences be? He'd been forced to give up so much of his time, and had received so little in the way of answers...

Ouch. He hissed, and shook his thumb. Too deep into his musing, he hadn't been focusing, and the knife had cut him. He raised his hand to inspect the wound, only to see-

Something... something was wrong.

Whatever was seeping out of the small cut on his thumb, it wasn't blood. It should have been, by all rights and logic, but it wasn't. It couldn't be. Blood didn't leave an icy chill behind on the skin it touched. Blood didn't look like oil. Blood didn't have bright highlights of colour that seemed to burst into being like exploding pustules. Blood didn't emit a low whining noise that sounded somewhere between a snarl and a scream. And blood didn't fill the air with the stench of ash and salt.

A drop of the not-blood fell from Aaron's thumb onto his palm, streaking down his wrist. As if in response, the veins in his hand pulsated like they were trying to burst out of his skin, and a sickly glow began to emanate from them.

Dimly, Aaron realised that no cold he'd ever been in before had made his veins look darker than they were now.

The effect spread across his hand, and the not-blood began to spread across the surface of his palm before his eyes, coating his fingers in itself; solidifying, calcifying, mummifying. What was close to a liquid turned to something that felt rock-hard but still moved with the shocked flexes of fingers; overwhelming itself and running out of room, small chunks broke off and fell, turning into puffs of white smoke that dissipated before unbelieving eyes. As the hand shook, the fingers hunched and elongated, rocky talons growing over nails and half-decayed spikes jutting out of once-smooth knuckles. A single tongue of purple flame belched into existence between the ring and middle finger, burning cold for a moment before vanishing as suddenly as it appeared.

As an act of mercy, it stopped at the base of his wrist, and spread no further.

It wasn't happening. It couldn't be.

The... stuff that was coming out of him... the energy his body had been producing all along...

Isfet.

It was isfet.

(Isfet is a substance and a species and a dark promise all at once, and Aaron knows it in the same way a man who's been beaten knows the feeling of his attacker's knuckles on his flesh. He knows darkness and crowds and flames; he knows watching the best mother in the world stumble out of a fireball, walking dead, meat on legs - a final, futile act of defiance.

Sometimes the isfet are the featureless creatures, with molten cores and gaping maws, that tear humans to pieces. Sometimes the isfet is the aftermath of an attack - the residue that drips from the top of a destroyed home and freezes before it hits the ground, the fine ashlike layer over what was once soil that can support a tank one moment and crumble under a butterfly the next. Sludge and webbing and spittle and bone and dying breath. Sometimes the isfet is nothing more than the storm clouds on the horizon - the ones that are too far away to worry about, but that a person will stare at regardless, brows furrowed, recognising that the night belongs to something inscrutable.

The isfet does not represent death. Death is universal. It can be cruel, and it can be kind, but it is ultimately fair. The isfet is something far worse than that: it is targeted. Decades upon decades of existence, and it has never done anything more or less than eradicate any human it comes across. When there are none in its immediate path, it seeks them out. It cares not for its own survival; only that its prey dies with it. And it has never stopped.

When Aaron looks at that hand, now - at himself - this is what he sees.)

'May the falling stars miss their graves', Aaron thought to himself in a stunned stupor, 'how did no-one notice this?'

Perhaps it wasn't a totally fair point - he had plenty of experience with the isfet, after all, and he hadn't noticed anything until now either - but it was all that his shell-shocked brain could give him to focus on. It didn't feel fair. They'd run blood tests in the hospital, and they had looked- it had looked- normal. So normal. Nothing, nothing like this.

Experimentally, he tried to move his fingers. They clenched into a fist as he commanded them, though pieces fell away in puffs of smoke and they made a noise like scrap metal being thrown into loose gearing. When he unclenched them, they fell away with an ominous hiss and a crackle. Increasingly disturbed, he shook his hand to try and shake some of the substance off, but it stuck fast to his skin. Either that, or it was his skin.

Maybe it was just a could thing he could still move them - that they weren't independent of himself, and that they weren't already reaching for his throat.

But to what extent, then, did he have control? He had to know, he had to... he made to drop the knife that he was still holding, and reach for it with his free hand - his good hand - but then pulled back. What if he couldn't control it? what if it spread? Feeling a bead of sweat trickle down his neck, he instead adjusted his hold on the knife, fingers locking around the hilt in a death grip. If he couldn't stop it, and if it began to spread further... well, he still had the one hand spare.

No, no. He could still move his fingers- could move the whole hand! Whatever this was, it was coming from him. He could... he wouldn't have to do something like that. He stared at the isfet, as though he could erase it through sheer willpower.

Go away, he pleaded. Please go away.

For far longer than he was comfortable with, nothing happened. But then, as he took a calming deep breath, the isfet began to retract off of his hand, flaking into nothingness like a bad dream and slipping away from his wrist to reveal him underneath. The skin was pink, like it had been squeezed too hard, but it was still there. It was still him. He resisted the urge to both laugh and cry.

Getting the rest of the isfet to dissipate was like breathing. Slow motions, in and out, inhaling and exhaling. At times, it seemed to stall, or even move forwards again, but Aaron forced it back. It wasn't through conscious thought, or his wish that it would go; instead, it felt uncomfortably... innate. Like it was some kind of internal muscle that he was using, and that he'd used all his life. His "grip" would slip every now and then in the same way that someone who hadn't ridden a bike for a long time would have their feet slip off the pedals a little at first, but other than that it went smoothly. Too smoothly - and it felt ridiculous to complain about how easy it was to get the isfet to go away, but the fact that he could control it like this... it wasn't a comforting thought, either.

Eventually, the last of the isfet had disappeared. Some of it had faded away, and most of it had retracted back into his body through the open wound on his thumb. Unfortunately, the actual cut still looked all wrong, like a chasm that led into some kind of nightmare, and it still made a tiny rumbling noise that made Aaron think of thunder on the furthest horizon. Without any other options, he rummaged around in the flat's cupboards until he found a plaster, and then gingerly wrapped it round his hurt thumb.

It was odd, he mused as he fiddled with the plaster, but there was part of him that would have preferred to have no control over the isfet at all. That was the outcome he had expected when the situation had first presented itself, and it would have... well, he wouldn't have enjoyed it, but it would have made sense. Instead, however, he'd demonstrated to have at least some amount of ability to manipulate the isfet that his body was apparently producing. The questions it raised made his guts twist around inside of him - could he do it again? How much could he produce, and control? What would happen when people found out about it?

The last question gave him pause. Would people find out? Of course they would. He lived with Ana, and with Plue, and he remembered Aedifo saying something about how they were going to send a specialist to check in on him every couple of days immediately following his release from hospital. No way he could hide it from everyone. Especially not from people he cared about.

Except... what was the alternative? If anyone - anyone - found out, he'd be... it'd be- no. No, he couldn't. The isfet... it had never been anything like this before. Anything other than a senseless killer. If he- if- no. He clenched his now-human hand into a fist. He wouldn't let himself be a monster. No matter what it took. But he was still scared, because if anyone thought they saw isfet... there was only one possible conclusion they could come to. Hell, he knew he was still him, and he was struggling with... with the idea that he was still him. Visions of being killed, or perhaps imprisoned and dissected, flashed through his mind, and he shuddered. His veins pulsed again.

He couldn't tell anyone.

No, he couldn't.

He had to keep this a secret.

Yes, he did.

He would protect everyone.

And he would keep himself safe.

CHAPTER 4: SUPPORT(ING CAST)

It was a new day, and Will and Ana were taking a slow walk down a long street. The sun was stark above them, in a cloudless sky, whitewashing their surroundings and forcing Will to squint at the pavement ahead of them like he was the world's most short-sighted man trying to stare at a billboard ten miles away. The houses they were walking past were painted pale colours - to reflect the city's intense summer heat - which had the unfortunate side effect of making traversing the area feel like walking past an elongated lighthouse beacon switched on at full blast.

"-an' then you hit 'em in the jaw! Like, bam!" Ana made a punching motion with her awkward child's fist; bobbing to the side like an inflatable punch bag that someone had just taken a swing at. "And then they go right down, like that!" She mimed what was presumably a person dropping to the floor, although the high-pitched whistle and the shaky sideways motions of her hand made it look more like a crashing plane. The truth was, it wasn't the best attempt she could have made, even at that age. She was a little slow in pulling her guard back up afterwards. But Will didn't want to spoil her fun by telling her as such.

"I mean, I feel like I should emphasise that there's no one-hundred-percent guarantee that it'll work," he cautioned her, instead, "but that's the general idea."

He hadn't had a reason to take her back to her home, but he had volunteered to do it anyway. It was the nice thing to do. A simple act of goodwill. He hadn't expected it to feel like this much of an odyssey. But they were almost there, now.

When he looked at her, mostly to avert his gaze from the shining houses they were walking past, she was looking at him like she was a stargazer and he was the celestial heavens.

"So cool...!" she hissed, enthralled.

Will laughed, awkwardly. The attention was... well.

Most people, when discussing William Adalwin, couldn't say all that much about him. There were the basic, public-record things: he was a soldier in the Bulwark, he'd trained at the Bulwark Training Academy (BTA) as a member of Dorm Omicron, and he'd been stationed under lieutenant-general Blake Fisher at the battle of the Mothermouth. Then, there were the visual quirks; the beige fedora hat that he always seemed to be wearing, and the dark green streak dyed into his wet-sand-coloured hair. They were normally enough to create something of an image in people's minds - something to connect a face to the name.

Beyond that, however, there wasn't much that most could say. When it came to engaging with others, William was very content to play his cards close to his chest. He talked without ostentation, he was nonconfrontational, and he didn't enjoy the spotlight. A person could hold a ten or fifteen-minute conversation with him, and be hard-pressed to remember a single opinion, or personal factoid, that he might have revealed in that time. As a matter of fact, very few people even knew that he preferred to go by 'Will', and not 'William'. And, as far as Will was concerned, that was just fine by him.

It was why spending time with Ana Wilder was so surreal. She thought, in some measure, that he was... cool.

"I still can't believe that- ah- Aaron hasn't told you about any of this himself," he admitted, pausing mid-sentence to avoid a lamp-post that he'd been about to walk into. Between the environment and the fact that he hadn't been actively looking where he was going... Eyes on the road, Adalwin!

Ana harrumphed. "He never tells me anything."

Will was sure that 'anything' was an exaggeration - although, he wasn't going to henpeck.

Folding her skinny arms, Ana continued: "He hates it when I want to hear about this stuff."

"Ah, come on," Will felt obligated to say, trying to chide her without coming across as too dismissive. "I'm sure he doesn't literally hate it..."

He knew that there was some manner of truth to the girl's words. Aaron was passionate about his own role in the fight against the isfet, but he was almost as passionate about his sister staying far, far away from it. And Will understood his friend's perspective - Ana was his last living relative, and he'd spent the past several years being responsible for her upbringing. Additionally, the sentiment of 'making sure that a ten-year-old child is not too interested in marching herself off to war' was a generally agreeable one.

Still... Will had to wonder if Aaron wasn't going a little overboard. After all, wasn't it the case that any time you tried to dissuade a child from doing something, they became all the more eager to actually do it? And Ana obviously thought the world of her brother - it wasn't a coincidence that she insisted on keeping her hair short. (At least, Will didn't think so.) Maybe it was possible for the two to reach some kind of middle ground?

Ana, meanwhile, was busy shaking her head with all the vehemence that a ten-year-old could muster.

"He hates it," she said again.

Will wasn't going to convince a stubborn ten-year-old of anything, and he knew it. So, he let the matter drop.

The rest of their walk down the too-lit streets passed by in a silence that was only mostly comfortable. 'Mostly' on account of how Ana seemed to still be stewing in her brother's opinions, and on how Will knew he was stewing over what had happened to Aaron - how he'd been injured in the first place.

The first time Will had gone to visit Aaron in intensive care, the sight had almost scared him away from any and all future visits. His friend, normally so full of energy and passion, had been as still as a corpse in his bed. The sight had jarred Will beyond belief.

It had taken him a long time to go and see Aaron again, after that.

But, eventually, in due time and due course, he had. And things had gone much better. Aaron had been awake, and coherent, and on the mend, and it had almost been enough to make Will forget the sight that he'd been so haunted by. Emphasis on almost.

(There was a part of him, he was beginning to reckon, that wouldn't ever forget the sight. Even now that Aaron was back home, under what was essentially a clean bill of health. He'd really thought that his best friend had been dead for a moment there, and he never wanted to experience that again.)

He shook his head, blinking in the bright light, doing his best not to dwell on it. Aaron was out of the hospital - or, as he'd called it during one of Will's later visits, the 'gulag' - and the worst looked to be behind them.

Stepping into the building that housed their destination, and traversing no small number of stairs, was easy after having to deal with the sun's harsh rays. The stairs were multitudes, and finnicky, and the dusty shag carpet that coated them was prone to sticking up and deviously tripping a person at any given moment. Still, Will was happy to deal with it all in exchange for some shade. He plodded upwards, doing his best to keep up with Ana as she bounded up the stairs two at a time, thoroughly ensnared in her own excitement.

And then, just like that, they were outside Aaron and Plue's flat. The door was as well-worn as ever, with the scuffs and stripped varnish around the keyhole telling of years of consistent use.

He didn't need to knock - he had a spare key. Using it, he swung the door open and ushered Ana inside before stepping in himself. An unfamiliar voice, however, cause him to pause in the doorway.

"Everything seems to be in order so far, though I obviously place a lot of emphasis on the 'seems'."

Another voice, this one more familiar: "You think there're, like... hidden depths to this, or something?"

The first voice snorted, as Will stepped forwards, not quite letting the door shut behind him. "Please. Unidentifiable energy signature found in a unique gemstone that comes in contact with a human and then starts to emit from said human? I know there are hidden depths to this." A sigh. "Not that I actually know what any of them are, of course..."

At that moment, Ana finished kicking her shoes off and ran away from the door, into the room where the voices were talking. "Aaron!"

"Ana!"

Will heard a huff as Aaron stood up and, presumably, caught Ana as she flung herself at him in a hug. His presumption was affirmed as he stuck his head into the flat's main room and saw Aaron spinning his sister around on the spot, giggling.

"You're back, you're back!" Ana was cheering.

"I'm back!" Aaron confirmed, playfully poking his nose into Ana's before bringing his spinning to a stop and sending a wry grin across the room. "With a couple of asterisks attached, right?"

"Mmm. Yes. Asterisks." Said the first speaker, in a tone so intensely sceptical that it said far more than their words did.

Will stepped fully into the room to see the other person - the one that Aaron had been talking to. He wasn't sure who, or what, he'd been expecting. They sound as though they're questioning Aaron about his physical condition, he'd thought when he'd first heard them. Perhaps it's a medical specialist of some kind? The person he saw sat in a chair on the other side of the room when he went to look for himself, however, looked more like she'd wandered off of a construction site. She was clad in a high-viz orange jacket, and baggy trousers that were covered in more pockets than Will would have known what to do with. Unexpected.

"Hey, Will!" Aaron adjusted his grip on Ana, just about managing to keep hold of her with one arm while using the other to wave. "Good to see you!"

"Good to see you too - and to see you out and about, no less!" Will said, only to receive a frown for his troubles.

"Ehn, that might be a bit of a stretch." Admitted Aaron. "This is technically a- what did they call it, doc?"

"Supervisory medical quarantine," said the woman, standing up and turning her body to face Will, even as her gaze and attention remained on Aaron. "Though, just as a disclaimer, I'm not technically a doctor."

"Well, that's comforting," muttered Aaron, sotto voce, before raising his voice to make his next comment: "Hey, Will, sounds like you two'll get along great - turns out she's also a hideous pedant!"

"Great," Will deadpanned, "thanks."

The woman turned to face him for the first time. He stepped forwards, and held his hand out for her to shake - after a moment of what appeared to be contemplation, she also stepped forwards, and grasped it in her own.

"It's Will, right?" she asked him, shaking his hand up and down the exact polite number of times before letting it drop.

"Will Adalwin," confirmed Will. "And you're...?"

"Kaylori Armstrong." The woman - Kaylori Armstrong - grabbed the lanyard hung around her neck and held it out so that Will could peer down at it and confirm that her name was, in fact, Kaylori Armstrong. "I work with Doctor Aedifo."

Will nodded acknowledgement. "Good to meet you."

"And you," she replied, before checking the watch on her wrist and hissing. "Ah, I really do need to go." She brushed past Will and turned the corner to head out the door. "I'll see you in two days, Mr. Wilder!"

"Lookin' forward to it!" Aaron said, with enough volume and enthusiasm to almost sound genuine. The only response he received was the sound of the door slamming shut.

As the noise finished ringing out through the flat, Aaron let Ana drop from his arm and all but folded back onto the sofa he'd been sitting on with a groan of such abject misery it was almost comical. Almost. Will possessed an ounce of empathy, after all.

"That bad, huh?" he remarked, not sure what else he ought to have expected from his friend but still somehow surprised by the reaction.

"Actually, some of that was just because holding you-" here he ruffled Ana's hair, "for so long was tiring. You're getting way too big."

Ana giggled, self-satisfied.

"But," Aaron continued, with a lengthy breath, "yeah. It was kinda rough."

"How?" Will asked. Not intentionally unkindly, just... curious. "Doesn't seem as though it could have been..." he trailed off, realising he wasn't quite sure where he was going. "I mean," he tried again, "you've already been through the most strenuous stuff at the hospital, right? Isn't this now just generic check-up stuff? What's so bad about it?"

Aaron sighed again, and shifted uncomfortably on the sofa; like there was an irritant right beneath him that was refusing to let him find the right position.

"Just annoying," he said in a voice so low it was almost a mutter. "I've been through enough of this stuff already. I'd rather just be done with it already."

It felt like a bit of a vague answer - and the repeated use of 'already' stuck out, pedantically enough - but it worked to sate Will's curiosity. At the very least, he could completely understand it. Impulsive, energetic Aaron, stuck in his house? Forced to sit down every couple of days to assess a condition that hadn't changed him in any observable way, but was still a scary unknown? He could feel his own self become miserable at the thought of it.

"I'm sure it'll get better with time," he said.

"Hopefully not too much time," Aaron said in an uncharacteristically dark tone, before seeming to remember himself and grin at Ana and Will in turn. "But, enough of that," he continued, light and breezy and very clearly trying as hard as he could to put on a brave face, "who's hungry?"

Ana couldn't have eaten more than a couple of hours ago, but her hand shot into the air with another laugh all the same. With a chuckle, Will held up his own hand, endeared. While Aaron's effort was obvious, it was a welcome sight all the same. He was finally back at home with his family; everything else could come later.

Hopefully, he thought, this is a sign that things are getting back to normal.

He certainly hoped so. For the Wilders' sake.

CHAPTER 5: CATALYST

Okay, so, in hindsight, Aaron really deserved some credit. Because he really, honestly, hadn't been planning on doing anything silly about, or with, the fact that he was apparently now a part-isfet abomination. In fact, he'd all but resigned himself to a life in quiet solitude; watching sports reruns on the television and knitting socks for his - totally hypothetical! - grandchildren. He had to admit, some parts of the vision were appealing. He especially liked the part where nobody ever found out about his little isfet situation, and he never got killed or used as a living cadaver. He was also a big fan of how he never got anyone else hurt with is all-new 'essence of evil'-extract blood.

But there were also parts of this new idle fantasy that were deeply, severely unappealing. Namely, the part where he never got to leave his flat, never got to fight isfet again, and never got the chance to do any good - to do anything - in the world at all.

Still! You had to take the bad with the good. The cloud with the silver lining. And, really, what was a man to do? Aside from be super depressed, of course, but that had never really been Aaron's style. For one thing, his brain always seemed hard-wired to do something - anything - all the time. Difficult to really sit still and contemplate long enough to get properly sad about things with a brain like his.

For another thing... well, he wasn't an idiot. He knew that despite how much things sucked, he still had a lot in his life to appreciate. It was easy to keep this in mind as he sat on the sofa in his flat - the one that fast felt as though it was becoming his home within a home - with Ana snuggled into his side, and Plue's arm draped over his shoulder. Because hey, he'd been in far worse situations than sitting around in a comfy flat, sandwiched between his two favourite people and watching a mildly lame film on the TV. As much as he'd enjoyed his time out on the frontier, there had been a lot off things trying to actively kill him. He didn't necessarily miss all that that entailed.

Still. For all that he knew, he still felt a little restless. Especially when the film cut out, and was replaced by ad breaks, and he changed the channel to dodge the ad breaks, and he ended up on a news channel, and the news channel was running updates on the movement of the isfet across Theia.

Said updates were grim. Burning town this, colony going dark that. Nothing that Aaron hadn't seen before, but that didn't make it any funner to gurn at from the safety of his little flat. The Bulwark was maintaining its ground - humanity was no longer on the back foot in the same way that it had been when the organisation had been founded - but still. It wasn't victory. It was an uncomfortable, ever-moving stalemate, and it was costing the lives of more and more people every day.

Plue shifted at his side. Could she sense his internal turmoil? She probably could. They were in sync like that. At least, he liked to think so! The intimacy that he'd appreciated only a moment ago now felt constrictive, and it took all the willpower he had to not just stand up and begin to pace around the room. He settled for reaching over and beginning to give Ana a vigorous scratch on the back. She loved those. A sister after his own heart.

It was just that... there was a whole world out there. A world that had things happening it. People were living, and people were dying, and he wanted to be out there. To fight, to help. Wherever and however he could. But he couldn't. Because of his stupid house arrest and the stupid rock and his own stupid self. And it ate away at him, because he'd spent so much of his life working to fill the mould of a trained and able soldier. He'd believed in the Bulwark and its cause for about as long as he could remember believing in anything. And now that he was that man, he was stuck here, in his flat. What use was all that time and effort, here?

Of course, on top of all that was the fact that he was part-isfet, or his body was making isfet, or... or whatever the absolute hell was going on with him, there. Finding out, and living with it, had been nothing short of an existential nightmare. He'd been careful to not reveal anything of the little cut on his thumb to Plue and Ana, and he'd especially careful to not hurt himself again and risk a repeat showing with a live audience. Every day - every hour - he'd checked himself in the mirror, to make sure that his face hadn't started melting, or that he hadn't transformed into some freak of nature. Thankfully - thank-fucking-full-lee - whatever was going on with him seemed to all be internal, for now.

Not that that had stopped his worries.

Or the nightmares.

The fact was, hiding whatever this thing was from Plue and Ana meant that he hadn't actually had much opportunity to explore it, experiment it, or do anything more with it than pretend that it didn't exist. Which... was a problem. Burying his head in the sand was a short-term solution, and if this thing didn't go away by itself, he'd have to figure something out. He knew that.

Perhaps... perhaps it would be a good idea to get some time to himself, and actually... figure out whatever the hell was happening to him. What had changed, what hadn't changed... that sort of thing. It wasn't outside the realm of implausibility; Ana went to school on the regular, and Plue was spending more and more time outside of the house as she trained for her role leading the Bulwark.

All he had to do, he figured to himself as he kept sitting in front of the TV and the world's most depressing late-night programming, was wait for the perfect opportunity.

That perfect opportunity manifested quickly; specifically, the following day. After waking up from where he'd fallen asleep on the sofa, and had stretched and massaged out the worst of the cricks in his neck and back - stars above, was he aging that quickly? - he'd found a note from Plue.

Dropping Ana off bc you're sleeping and I don't want to wake you
Will be back usual time
Love you <3

The usual time, in this instance, was sometime in the middle of the afternoon. Considering that Aaron wanted some time alone to figure out the whole isfet thing, this suited him just fine.

Lucky him.

The first thing that he needed to do was figure out what made the isfet appear to begin with in the first place. Not in a 'what was the source' way, because it pretty obviously had something to do with that gem he'd touched. More in a 'what had activated it' way, because he'd spent all those miserable weeks in hospital and nothing remarkable had ever happened to him in there.

The sequence of events, he remembered, was that he'd cut his finger, and then isfet had come out instead of blood, and then he'd willed it back into the body. So... would it appear whenever he injured himself? There had to be more to it than that - he'd been on IV drips and stuff in hospital. If all it took for the isfet to appear was his skin being broken, it would have happened before then.

Y'know. Presumably.

Too bad that nothing really seemed presumable, at the moment.

Going off of that, the second thing to do was to try and make the isfet appear. If he couldn't... well, that'd be a mixed situation, but all things considered, he'd kinda prefer that. In times of crisis, there was a comfort to be found in having absolutely no agency.

He remembered how he'd been able to make the isfet recede, however, and he suspected that it wouldn't be the case.

Still! Best to get on with finding out, one way or the other. He knew who fortune favoured.

The cut on his thumb has basically healed, and he stared at it critically. It didn't resemble the ominous chasm it had when he'd first gotten it. Had it ever looked like that, or had that been his reeling-from-coma brain shoving imagery into his head? Was there a tinge of pale grey to the wound, or was he just imagining things? Man if this existential crisis stuff wasn't exhausting.

"C'mon," he muttered to himself, and to whatever now lurked within him. "Get out here."

Maybe it was voice-activated, because the next thing Aaron knew, he was holding some kind of ball of energy in his hand. It was about the size of a tennis ball, but that was about where the comparison ended. Tennis balls weren't a white so bright it hurt to look at, and they didn't vibrate like an overclocked electric razor. They also didn't send out spittles of - well... stuff was the only real word for it. It was the consistency of isfet, alright; a sharp shard of something flew up and into the ceiling, while at the same time, a gross glob trickled through Aaron's fingers and hit the floor with a depressed splat.

Okay. He'd re-manifested the nightmare. Brilliantly done, ten out of ten, no notes. Now if he could just...

He flexed his fingers, experimentally. The ball crackled, angrily. Whether it was angry at his attempts to control it, or it was angry at some other faucet of its existence, or he was just giving it personality in his head as a coping mechanism, he couldn't say. But, with a hiss that sounded like a whine, it gave, and winked out like a broken lightbulb. And then, there was nothing again - except for a faint smell of ash, perhaps.

Aaron nodded. To himself, of course, because who else would he be nodding to? So, he didn't need to physically harm himself for this stuff to appear. That was... good to know.

Though, it begged another, slightly painful question. Moving before he could second-guess himself, he wandered over to the kitchen area, grabbed a knife, and made a tiny cut appear on one of his fingers. Unfortunately, much the same thing as last time happened; his blood still looked like oil, and the area around the injury still began to calcify and transform into... something else. Thankfully, this time, it felt much easier to tell the isfet to get back in its box and leave him looking mostly normal, but it was cold comfort to him.

Well, that's that, Aaron thought to himself as he put another plaster over this new war wound. Just gotta make sure that I never get remotely hurt in front of anyone. Ever again.

Considering how many times he'd banged himself up doing something that Plue or Will would always diplomatically call 'ill-advised', he didn't fancy his chances on that front. But what other option was there?

Tell them, he reasoned to himself. But then, a disgusted impulse flew through him. Tell them what; that he was a freak? That he was turning into some sort of manifestation of everyone's collective worst nightmare? No, no, no. That couldn't happen. It wouldn't happen.

It was an oddly vehement thought, and when it had passed, he frowned, surprised by the strength of his own feeling on that one. Alright, he thought, like he was placating some kind of tantruming child, except the child was him. Won't do that.

Maybe it was just the horror of the situation. Or maybe he was just hangry.

Whatever. He cracked his knuckles. He was still alone. Time to get a wriggle on.

The rest of the day was fruitful - as far as Aaron could feel like anything he was doing was bearing fruit. It was kinda hard to put a positive spin on the, frankly, numbing horror of the whole situation. But he was doing his best, because what else was he gonna do? So, he sat down, and continued to practice manifesting the isfet intentionally, and wrote down anything that he thought was worth writing down. Only vague references, though - between the partner who was way too good at noticing things out of a defined norm, and the sister who was way deep into that phase of 'pick up everything that isn't nailed down and doesn't belong to me', he wasn't gonna assume that someone other than him would read these notes at some point. Better to not just write 'I am now part isfet' in block capitals and wait for the fireworks.

Well, y'know, he could've. But why would he?

At least the whole testing process left him feeling as though he had more of a sense of what was what. Aside from his skin being broken, it didn't seem as though the isfet would appear, or manifest, or whatever it did, without him consciously doing it. Which was a relief. And his testing was as thorough as he could make it - diving off of sofas and rolling his way down the stairs, trying to discombobulate himself enough to lose control of his faculties. Who knew what the neighbours thought was going on, but ah well.

Another thing he was surprised by was how much fine control he had over the isfet. That first - second? - time, he manifested it in the form of a ball in his hand because that was just the first thing he'd thought of. But it turned out that he could get more specific with the shapes. Much more specific. First it was the ball again, then it was a cube, then it was a twenty-sided polyhedron because he'd played strategy games with his dorm back in his academy days and that die was the first shape he'd thought of that was 3-D and had more than four sides.

It wasn't just shape, either - it was, like, the isfet's very form. Its default was to be everything at once, and changing constantly. But it turned out, if he wanted to, he could make isfet be a specific thing. For example, he could make things all solid, or all liquid. First he created a lump in his hands like a rock, and just kinda willed it to be solid, and then experimentally tossed it about in his hands and watched as not a single piece of it dissipated or exploded or anything. Then, he willed it to become liquid, and then it was, falling through his fingers and onto the floor. And then, when he willed it to raise up back into his hand, it did.

At that point, he had to stop and anxiously chow down a bag of almonds.

When he'd recovered from the existentialism of the moment enough to return to testing, he got a bit more creative. He experimented with the intricacy of the shapes he could make, which turned out to be 'exactly as intricate as he could visualise'. That one was proved by him creating a book out of isfet - there weren't any words, because he hadn't envisioned any, but he could run his finger through the pages in as fine a detail as he could with an actual book.

Freaky as anything? A little. But, as much as this fine control over the isfet was scary in some ways, it was also... reassuring. It was a comfort to know that he probably wouldn't kill his block of flats by sneezing, or something. Plus, if he was being honest, it was just a little bit good for the ego. I mean, who else could claim that they'd woken up with the forces of entropy at their command and just been able to roll with it like this?

Then, while shaking his hands around to try and get some of the nervous energy out, he'd accidentally sent a rogue mug - probably Plue's - flying off of a table and towards the floor. He reached out - his hand was too far - he closed his eyes and braced for the sound of shattering porcelain - he heard nothing. Cracking an eye open, he saw... it was difficult to say. His first, slightly disgusted interpretation was that his arm had extended itself to catch the mug, because his forearm looked twice its own length; extended with isfet to impossibly catch the mug. But that didn't quite... feel like what had happened. He willed the 'arm' to recede. It did, crumbling back in on itself as it edged towards him, bubbling with purple sparks of energy amidst the eerie white. And just like that, it was all gone, and he was holding a mug in his innocent-looking hand as though it had never been there to begin with.

Aaron studied at the offending limb, absent-mindedly tossing the mug to his other hand to hold in the meantime. What exactly had happened to him, there? He willed the isfet to return as it had, and it did, immediately coating his hand in a substance that felt like every material he'd ever touched at once. Then, he willed a small patch of it on the palm of his hand to vanish, and it did. He looked down, staring closely at it.

It wasn't as though he was actually transforming - it was more like he was creating a... a coating of the stuff around him. He wasn't warping himself physically. The realisation was, admittedly, a comforting one.

It left him with a quick quesh, though: to what extent could he control that coating?

From there, it was off to the races. First it was about giving the coating a single solid consistency, then it was about extending it out, then it was about seeing how far it could go. The answer to that one turned out to be 'all over his body', although he drew the line at covering his head in the stuff. Even if he could make it recede with a thought, it was still... yeah, he wasn't ready for something like that. But all the same!

He could also, it turned out, make it translucent - leaving him able to see himself underneath the still-solid material. Which... was nice, really. Reassuring. There was a metaphor in there somewhere, he was sure.

How solid is this? he wondered, before figuring that, once again, the answer was probably something along the lines of 'how solid he wanted it to be'.

And then, once he'd let all the isfet on his body receive and was back to just bouncing balls of stuff around, he hit on a real winner. He thought, almost absent-mindedly, if it was possible for the isfet to not actually look like isfet. It was something he'd basically done already, between making what he was creating consistent in material and making the stuff he'd coated himself with transparent. But still, it was kind of a shock to see the practically-snarling ball of isfet in his hands warble and crackle into something else. All of a sudden, it was like he was holding a ball of light. It ticked his skin.

"Whoa," he said out loud. It was still isfet - he could tell, he could feel it rumbling under the surface through some ineffable instinct - but, sure as stars were stars, it didn't look like it.

He kept his gaze fixed on the ball, almost in wonder. Before - when it had obviously been isfet - the underlying dread of the situation had put a dampener on the whole 'creation of matter' thing. Because who'd be excited about being able to make the stuff, or some variant of the stuff, that had haunted humanity for generations? That had killed so many? That had killed his own beloved parents?

But this? What he had now... it was an illusion, he knew that, but it was- it was a good illusion. The sight of it let him believe, just for a moment, in magic.

He stared at the innocent-looking little ball of light. He wandered what it would look like if it was orange - his favourite colour.

It turned orange.

He kept staring.

And then, he had a really bad idea.

CHAPTER 6: THE PAWN AT THE EDGE OF THE BOARD

Plue Abernathy's sword arm ached, and she wished (not for the first time) that she was actually using it to hold a sword.

Every aspect of her training was difficult - that went without saying. She wasn't about to dismiss any part of the work that she was putting in to become the next Supreme Commander of the Bulwark. But she also wasn't about to pretend that some aspects of the role came more easily to her than others. Exhibit A: she would happily train her swordplay for another two hours than endure another half-hour of her uncle's etiquette guidance.

This was not to say, of course, that she was willing to dismiss etiquette outright. Long had she understood, from an objective standpoint, the importance of knowing exactly what the right and wrong thing to do was in any given social situation. Influencing people and winning them over was an important part of any person's life, and she was not just any person. One day, she knew, she would be given command of the largest military and political organisation in civilised space. And when that day came, she was going to have to know exactly which fork went where on the table, and what posture it would be best to assume so as to avoid looking too weak or too unapproachable in any given situation. She understood that.

But she was never going to like it.

In a sudden and very explicable moment of being willing to risk it all, she let her head bow and lean towards the propped-up and waiting palm of her hand - only for said hand to be swatted.

"Ow!" she hissed, nursing the injured appendage. Uncle Duke - the offender - withdrew his baton - the offending instrument - and pulled himself back from the way he'd been leaning forwards to reach her.

She glared at him.

"It was just for a second!" She knew her words would not move him - on these sorts of matters, he was as stubborn as she was - but it was therapeutic to complain all the same.

"You'd be surprised how much can go wrong in a second," he said. It was one of his less common maxims, but she'd heard it enough that she had to resist rolling her eyes all the same.

"Sure," she said. More words threatened to spill out of her mouth - she pressed her teeth down against her tongue to stifle them. The sensation of solid enamel against her fleshy tongue blotted out all the thoughts that were knocking around in her mind like pinballs in an overclocked pinball machine; letting her focus on a single sensation and drowning out everything else she could think and feel in the moment.

"I appreciate you holding your tongue," said Uncle Duke, stealing back her attention, "but you'd want to be less obvious about it with anyone other than me."

Another critique that she'd heard before. As good as she'd gotten at smothering her words, she still couldn't hide her feelings. Not if her life depended on it.

(It didn't help that she didn't particularly WANT to hide them in the same way. Something about stifling any indication as to how she felt about something felt... it was a complicated feeling, and one that she'd never in her life managed to fully describe. The best that she'd ever been able to do was say that it didn't feel wrong, but didn't feel RIGHT, either.)

"I know," she said. She'd said it before. A lot.

It wasn't a lie. She DID know.

Knowledge and action, were, of course, extraneous of one another.

"It's because I'm with you," she continued, "and not anyone else, that I'm being obvious about it."

Her uncle was not the only one who could repeat clever lines until a person was sick of them. In this, she liked to think to herself, they were alike. (It's like they were related, or something.)

Sometimes, on days where the weight of the world felt a little bit less on their shoulders, Uncle Duke would laugh or smile at such a response. Today, if his frown was anything to go by, wasn't one of those days.

"More and more," he said, slowly, "I'm going to need to see that this is something you can do. At the moment, I just have your word."

Plue wanted to ask if her word wasn't enough for him, but didn't. She didn't want to get into a fight with Uncle Duke over this. She knew where he stood; he knew where she stood. There was no use in butting heads with him over it if they weren't going to get anything meaningful out of it. So, she stood, silently, and nodded to show that yes, she understood what he was saying, even if she wasn't going to pretend that she liked it.

Uncle Duke nodded back. He got it. That was what was special about him - he always got it. Well, maybe not LITERALLY always, but enough of the time that it FELT like always.

"For now," he said, moving on from the discussion (which was a great relief for Plue), "we need to address other matters." He leant back over the desk, supporting his torso with both hands, staring her down head-on. She did her best to meet his gaze and ignore the perturbing feeling that came with staring into someone's eyes.

"And by 'other matters'," she prompted, "you mean...?"

She was hoping for swordplay. She knew that her hope was in vain - swordplay was not on their schedule for that day - but she hoped all the same. It was nice to imagine.

Uncle Duke frowned at her. Like he could tell what she was thinking. He probably couldn't, but it was still uncanny.

"I mean," he said, slowly, "your formal acknowledgement as my successor."

Ah!

This.

Again.

Plue rapped her fingers smartly against the table, taking the usual solace in hearing the rhythmic clack-clack-clack of fingernail on wood. (To think, a few years ago, her nails would have been chewed so short that them hitting the table BEFORE the flesh of her fingers would have been unthinkable. She liked the sound of it. It reminded her of how far she had come.)

"That," she said, stretching the moment out.

"Plue," said Uncle Duke, "it has to happen."

"I know," said Plue.

"And it's going to have to happen soon," Uncle Duke continued. He folded his arms.

"I know," said Plue.

She'd heard the reasons already. Uncle Duke had rattled off the reasons already. She didn't think that either of them were particularly interested in hearing said reasons all over again. But her uncle was the sort of person who put a lot of stock into repetition, and into re-emphasis.

"A lot of people know you exist," he said. "Command knows; The Board knows; just about anyone you could call a member of the top brass knows that I've chosen my successor. But none of them know you."

Plue bit her lip. "I know."

"I know you don't want to be pushed into the limelight," said Uncle Duke. "To be frank, I don't want it for you. But the sooner it happens, and the sooner all these people get a chance to understand who you are, the more time they'll have to get to know and trust you, and the smoother the transition of power will be when it happens." He shifted, like he was about to unfold his arms, but then he didn't. (Did he change his mind? Did Plue misinterpret? She wasn't sure.) "There are a lot of people who aren't going to like the fact that you'll be the one leading the Bulwark, and not them. If nothing else, I'd like there to be some time between your debut and my resignation, just so I can deal with that lot myself."

Plue laughed. It wasn't a forced-fake laugh, because she didn't do those as a general rule of thumb. That said, it wasn't a totally genuine laugh, either. It was something in between; a laugh of convenience. The kind of laugh that a person would let slip when the other person had said something (that could tenuously be considered) funny, and there was no other good way to respond.

She didn't think that Uncle Duke appreciated it, so she tried to think of another response, but the only thing that she could think of to actually say was:

"...I know."

Uncle Duke looked away from her to stare down at the table. He bit his lip. She saw it snag as the canine pressed against it. Normally she wouldn't notice something like that, except she did the same thing a lot.

"I'm not going to pretend to like the prospect," she continued. "But... but I know that it has to happen. I understand that. And I'll..." she did the vague gesture. "Get there."

"You'll get there," said Uncle Duke. He was still looking down at the table.

Something in the tone of his voice made Plue's gut lurch. She had to say something else. Something better.

"Who needs to know first?" She thought to ask. "Like- on a scale of importance. Most important to least important. Who really, REALLY needs to know that I'm your successor?"

That, at least, made Uncle Duke look back up at her. "What are you thinking?" he asked, quickly.

That was a very valid question. What WAS she thinking?

"Um," she said, because she was mentally and verbally coherent like that. "I mean- how were you planning to, uh, announce me? As your successor? Because maybe instead of just revealing it to everyone, we could tell people a few at a time, or one at a time." She rapped her hand on the table again. Faster, now. Expelling the energy that here body was throwing out with nowhere to go. Better into her fingers to drum on the table than into her legs that might just walk her away from the conversation. "Start small."

Uncle Duke stroked his chin.

"Hmm," was the first noise that he made, which was neither strictly good nor strictly bad and thus had Plue feeling unsure as to what, exactly, she was supposed to be feeling.

She watched, and waited, as he thought.

"Hmm," came the noise again, before Uncle Duke's hand fell away from his chin. "Alright. I see where you're coming from, on that." He leant on the table again. "Ultimately, I don't think you'll be able to avoid a widespread announcement," he told her. "Much as you may not want to hear that. It's not plausible to introduce you to the entire Bulwark one by one, and if I'm being honest, it'll probably be better for you if it gets done with all at once."

Plue nodded. She understood.

"That said," Uncle Duke continued, "some sort of trial run may not be a bad idea. A way for you to get used to the idea of introducing yourself to people as my successor, without having to introduce yourself to EVERYONE at once." He smiled. "Give me some time to think of people I trust. A day or two, perhaps. I can throw together a list, and then we can go from there."

That sounded good to Plue. She quickly nodded.

"Okay."

Uncle Duke nodded back, encouragingly. "Okay?"

"Okay," said Plue again, letting out a heavy breath.

Walking around the table, Uncle Duke passed her by and gave her a solid pat on the shoulder, squeezing it with his weathered hand. She leaned into the touch.

"Class dismissed for today, kiddo," he told her in a low rumble of a voice. "You can head on home."

Home.

The thought was enough to make her smile with relief.

"Yessir."

CHAPTER 7: THE HOME FRONT

He could do this. He could totally do this. There was no reason why he couldn't do this.

Oh, the voice in his head that sounded a lot like Plue said, there are so many reasons why you can't do this.

Still. She wasn't here to be his impulse control in real life, and he wasn't going to let the small matter of his subconscious' disapproval stop him now.

The impulse was deceptive in its simplicity, and it went as thus. He had powers - powers that, it was becoming increasingly clear, were limited only by his own imagination. Near as he could tell, if he could think of it, he could create it, and shape it, and control it. He also had no chance of returning to the front lines in the near future - no chance that he could take the fight to the isfet like he wanted. Instead, he was stuck in a massive city. A city that, surely, had problems other than the isfet.

What if - he thought to himself, only a little frantically - what if he used these powers of his to become some kind of superhero?

Really, the logic was so simple, it was almost embarrassing that he was thinking it through. He wanted to fight the isfet. He couldn't. But he could fight other evil things. He had the combat training to be effective. He also technically had the qualifications that came with that training, but that was going to be less important, because he was planning on doing this in secret. He was still stuck in this whole quarantine thing, after all. And besides, everyone knew that superheroes had secret identities. That was just a no-brainer.

Would keeping a secret identity be difficult, considering that he lived with two other people and also was expected to not leave his flat? Yeah, sure. Would it give him more stuff to hide from that lady? Aedifo's assistant? The one who was assigned to come visit him on the regular? Also yes. Would it be a lot of work, not even including the whole secrecy angle? Hoo boy, yeah. And would it be dangerous? That would be a four-for-four yes.

Huh, Aaron thought to himself, suddenly envisioning a million horrible things happening to him at once. Where was I going with that, again?

Ah, right! The fact that his idea made total sense. And wouldn't go wrong. It could - of course it could! He wasn't above admitting that. But the first step to pulling off a plan of this magnitude was gonna be confidence. Confidence, and self-belief. He would forgo the identity of Aaron, the guy stuck at home - and also, if he was being totally honest, 'Aaron' was a kinda meh name anyway - and become... well, he wasn't sure what his secret identity was going to be called, yet. Names could come later, once things were a bit more tangible.

Aaron stopped dead as he realised that he was pacing up and down the flat. Probably wearing a hole in the floor. He stepped away from where he'd been pacing, hit with a sudden flash of nerves and guilt.

Okay. If he wanted to be serious about this whole superhero thing, he was going to have to be a damn sight subtler than that. Blasting air out of his mouth with an exasperated huff at his own circumstances, he did his best to stand still, get back on track, and clear his thoughts. He needed a plan. He needed steps. This was- this was serious. Did he really want to do this?

For a moment, reluctance gripped him like it was a physical force. He faltered, fidgeting dying down, as... as realisation hit him. Not realisation of what he was doing, or anything - he'd known that from the outset. He wasn't that big of an idiot. No - the realisation in that moment was more about the concentrated effort that he was going to go to. The fact that he was going to have to hide it from everyone. Including his favourite people.

Would he have to hide it from everyone? Even them? part of him wondered. The rest of him, however, knew that it was his only real option. Will had his wildcard moments, of course, but that didn't change the fact that he was fundamentally opposed to the kind of stunts Aaron liked to pull - no way he'd swallow this. And for all that Plue would probably have his back on a personal level, her obligations to the Bulwark were only getting more and more all-consuming. If she found out about what was happening to him, she'd probably have to tell Duke Abernathy, at the very least, and that... that would be the end of it.

As for Ana? Well... Aaron pondered. She wouldn't rat him out, that was for certain. But she was ten. It wasn't about not trusting her, it was about not wanting to get her involved. He wasn't a fan of how keen she seemed to be in the Bulwark, and in fighting the isfet - she'd probably get way too enthusiastic about this, too. And the last thing that he wanted was for her to get into any sort of danger.

The isfet took ma, he thought, and it took pa. No way it's taking her, too.

And that was always going to be his stance on that.

Though, of course... he regarded his hand again, distastefully. That was going to be a bit more complicated, given that he now was isfet. Kind of.

Didn't matter. He dismissed the thought. Still wasn't gonna happen. Not on his watch.

So, uber-secrecy it was. He wondered how he was going to pull it off. He didn't consider himself that bad at keeping secrets, all things considered. He'd flubbed his way into school without having an actual adult to vouch for him, and he'd kept the fact that Plue was Duke Abernathy's niece on the DL for as long as he'd had to, back when that secret had been nobody's but theirs alone. But this... this was different to anything he'd done before. Way different.

Aaron turned his gaze up to the ceiling, and to the stars that lay beyond.

Oh, Lady Luck, he thought in a silent plea - and what did it say about the state of things, that he was already hoping to win over fortune's wicked wiles? Do me a solid. Please not let this all go tits-up straight away.

A knock on the door. A welcome distraction. Without pausing for a moment, Aaron hurried - nay, hastened - across the flat and to the entrance. He was aware enough of the time that he didn't bother to check who was outside. Instead, he flung open the door to the welcome sight of Plue and Ana. Ana hugged his legs without a moment's hesitation; Plue grinned wryly at him.

Aaron knelt down, returned his sister's hug, and looked up to address Plue. "Thanks for picking her up," he said.

In leigh of being able to take Ana to and from school himself, thanks to his stupid quarantine, other people had had to step in. Today, that had been Plue, despite the fact that she'd supposedly had an important training session that day.

"I should be the one thanking her," Plue responded, grin not budging from her face. "I got to leave training early."

Ah. That would explain it.

"Well, come on in!" he said loudly without any further ado, shuffling to the side - he and Ana were still hugging - so that Plue could actually fit through the doorway and back into the flat. "I've just been..." he trailed off, realising that 'planning to violate my quarantine order and also any laws we have about vigilantism to use my secret isfet powers to become a superhero' probably wouldn't go down well as an answer. He let the sentence trail off.

Thankfully, Plue either didn't pick up on his hesitation, or didn't think that it was anything worth bringing up. Instead, she wandered past, doffing her coat and walking over to the table, laying her bag on it and beginning to methodically unpack.

"How was your day, anyway?" asked Aaron. Deflecting? Only a little. "At least, before you had to cut it so tragically short."

Plue sighed. "Actually, not bad," she admitted, which was a pleasant surprise. The fact that her uncle had been ramping up the intensity of her training since their graduation from the BTA had, he knew, been a strain on her over time. A lot of stress; a lot of long days; a lot of unhappy Plues by evening. To hear that a day hadn't been the regular affair of intimidating admin schlock...

"Oh?" he asked out loud, finally squeezing out of Ana's grip enough to stand up. His sister, of course, still insisted on clinging to his leg like a dang limpet. Good thing he didn't really mind - he was still feeling kinda touch-starved after his weeks in the hospital.

He ruffled her hair, affectionately.

"Yeah," confirmed Plue, sounding almost as surprised as Aaron felt. "Yeah, uh- Duke introduced me to a couple of people."

Aaron raised an eyebrow. "And that went well?" He was happy for Plue if that was a case, but it was surprising to hear. Introductions, he knew, could be... difficult. At least, they could be for her. Less so for him, but hey, that was a him thing.

But Plue turned back to him and nodded. She looked... almost giddy.

"He introduced me," she said, breathlessly, "as his successor."

Oh. Oh, shit.

He was careful not to say that bit out loud, of course - Ana was both ten years old and in the room - but still!

"That's happening?" he asked, feeling his excitement come through in his voice. It was a dumb way to phrase the question, but thankfully Plue got what he actually meant by it.

"It was an idea I had the other day!" she explained, also sounding excited. "Duke can introduce me to people a few at a time, so that they know who I am sooner and so that I can get myself used to the whole concept of- well, of introducing myself as the future leader of the Bulwark." She spun the pen that she'd just taken out of the side of her backpack around in her hand, and Aaron watched as it clattered back and forth across her knuckles.

Ana rapidly slapped her hands on Aaron's legs. She still only had a limited understanding of the Bulwark and Plue's to-be role in it, but it was clear that she was picking up on the excitement in the room.

"Aces!" breathed Aaron, darting over to Plue and not quite hugging her - she was still busy unpacking. He gripped her shoulder hard, and let her lean into the solid touch that he knew she loved.

"Yeah," agreed Plue, breathlessly. "It was- well, it felt..." she hunched a little and leant on the table, gripping it hard. White-knuckled. "It felt good, kinda."

She sounded so surprised by the concept. Aaron almost had to laugh.

"Sounds like it was a weight off your shoulders," he remarked. Plue blinked and then turned to him like he'd just unlocked the secrets of the universe.

"It was!" she gasped. "That's what it was!" She angled back away from him, staring down at the table and the half-unpacked backpack. "I figured it would be more of a, uh, a weight on my shoulders," she explained. "That it would make the fact that I'm going to take over the Bulwark some day more real. And- it did make it feel more real, but... but that didn't..." Her fingers rapped the edge of it so fast the sound kinda blurred together in Aaron's ears - it was like she was writing some great thesis before his eyes.

He leant back, letting go of her, and watched her search for the right words. He loved her deliberation - the way that she always thought so hard about her words. What she said, and what she meant. Aside from it being - in his opinion - sexy as hell to have a partner that always put genuine thought into putting her sentences together, it was the kind of deliberation that would - he wholeheartedly believed - make her a great leader one day.

"It feels like - it felt like - more pressure," she said, slowly and firmly. "But it doesn't feel as bad as I thought it would." She inhaled, sharply. A smile, wobbly yet unrelenting, crept onto her face as she turned back to him. "It feels real."

Aaron could only imagine how she felt. She'd been preparing to lead the Bulwark for a long, long time - longer than he'd even known her. It sounded like today had been a big step.

"Wow," he breathed.

"Yeah," agreed Plue. She shook her head, minutely, and something in her gaze sharpened, even as her smile remained wide. "I mean- it was still terrifying. Obviously. Having to actually stand there and watch these guys realise that I was gonna be the new Supreme Commander-"

Aaron saw her full-body shudder at the memory, and he grabbed her again without really thinking about it. As before, she leaned into it.

"Yeah," she murmured again. "Not looking forward to doing it again. And again, and again, and..." she shuddered a second time. "To be honest, I could happily go another decade or two without actually taking the reins."

"Hah!" Aaron rubbed her arm vigorously. "You could handle it."

Plue shrugged. "In a sense? Yeah. In another sense? Absolutely not."

Aaron had no good answer to that off the top of his head, so he settled for continuing to rub her shoulder as she got back into the rhythmic routine of unpacking all her supplies.

"Reins?" Ana interjected herself into the conversation with all her wide-eyed curiosity. "Like a horse?"

"Yes," said Aaron, while at the same time Plue said:

"No."

The two turned to stare at each other.

Plue was quicker on the draw with her explanation. "It's a saying. I'm not going to be literally taking any horse's reins."

Aaron, of course, wasn't going to be outdone by anyone. Not even Plue. "But it is reins like a horse," he said. "You know. Grammatically." He waggled his eyebrows.

Plue rolled her eyes. "Yeah, but the reins in this instance aren't literal, and there aren't any actual horses involved. It'd be disingenuous to say 'yes, reins like a horse' when it really isn't."

"But you are talking about reins", Aaron insisted. "And horses also have reins."

"Tangential," chirped back Plue, finishing her unpacking and turning to face him wryly amused expression across her face. "Don't think it counts."

"It absolutely counts," Aaron protested, but Plue's mind was already made up. She shook her head, still grinning.

"Let's not confuse Ana," she said, adjusting her gaze so that she was looking past Aaron and at the Ana in question. "I'm not sure she knows what 'tangential' means yet."

Ana, as was the case whenever her capacity to do anything was called into any sort of question, huffed. "Yeah I do!" she protested.

Personally, Aaron didn't think that she really did know. He wasn't gonna call her out on it, though. And neither, it seemed, was Plue, who just rolled her eyes and began to unbutton the formal shirt she was wearing. As the buttons gave way, revealing the thin t-shirt she wore underneath, she sighed.

"Feel better?" Aaron asked. She nodded, silently, and he smiled. She had to put up with a lot of uncomfortable things in her role - including the textures of buttoned shirts.

Still silent, but with satisfaction evident in every languid movement of her arms, she shimmied out of the formal shirt altogether, letting it rest, crumpled, on one of the chairs tucked under the table.

Aaron had to laugh at the sight. "You're so cute," he said - and then, he stopped. It was like having an out-of-body experience, floating above himself and looking down, seeing his own actions with some kind of clarity. This. This. These people - he was lying to them. He'd continue to lie to them, if his plan went according to... well, to plan. Could he really just do that to them?

The answer felt like it should have been obvious. He couldn't. Of course he couldn't. What was he thinking?

But then, he was back in his own body, and Plue was looking at him with love in her eyes, and it was like that moment of clarity had never happened. The memory was already fading.

"Thanks," giggled Plue. She was atrocious at taking compliments, but they always made her so damn happy. "You're not so bad yourself, you know."

All Aaron had to do was open his mouth, and start a conversation. It didn't have to be an immediate, isfet-shaped bombshell. He just had to get Ana out of the room and have a good sit-down with Plue. Or- well, Ana probably wouldn't stand for that. But they could wait until she was asleep, surely?

It wouldn't be much. Just one person - just one person to talk to. To let in on this.

So why couldn't he?

Maybe something of what he was thinking was showing, but Plue furrowed her brows at him.

"Hey," she said, voice soft. "You doing okay?"

All Aaron had to do was open his mouth.

He opened his mouth.

All Aaron had to do was start a conversation.

He closed his mouth.

"Oh, love." Instantly, Plue was striding over to him, wrapping her arms around his sides tight, like the world's friendliest physical restraint. "I know this is difficult for you."

She's wrong, Aaron sadly thought to himself as he leaned into the hug. She's so close to getting what the issue is, but she doesn't.

Because you won't tell her, he reminded himself, harshly. But he couldn't. That had already been established- it was- it was for them, it was for their safety, it was because it would be better for everyone if he didn't let them in on whatever he was doing, as if he even knew what he was doing-

Ridden with guilt, he pulled away. Plue's arms grasped for him even when he was no longer in them, and she took a step forward before realisation fully struck. When it did, she backed away, respecting his unspoken wish, even as the hurt was clear in her eyes.

"You can... you can always talk to me," she said. "You know that, right?"

He did know that. He would never forget that, and he would always appreciate that.

"Yeah," he said, raising an arm to rub the back of his head, trying to play the moment off. Trying to make it out to be some awkward, vaguely uncomfortable thing, and not the instant of profound grief that he'd just experienced. "I know."

Plue smiled, sadly. She wouldn't push him on this - he knew it. "Love you."

"You too," he answered back, automatically. "I, uh- yeah." It almost felt embarrassing, how he couldn't even get the words out. But if he couldn't get himself to tell her what was going on, then this was all he could do. "Sorry," he added. "I guess... I guess it was a long day."

"Metaphorically." Plue added, corner of her mouth quirking up in a wry smile, scar over her lips twitching. "Metaphorically long."

He could always count on that pernickety streak of hers.

"Yeah, yeah." He waved her off. "Metaphorical. Sure. Let's not pretend that this whole thing doesn't suck for me specifically."

"Hah!" Plue laughed. "Gods. I wish we could switch places, sometimes."

"It would suit," agreed Aaron, nervously, even though he knew that he wouldn't trade places with anyone anytime soon. Sure, he'd found a way to be proactive within his circumstances, and he was going to get on with it, come hells or high waters, but that didn't mean he'd wish his powers on anyone else. For all that it felt under control now, the stress of realising that he'd literally had isfet at his fingertips... it hadn't been fun, to say the least.

Sorry Darl, he thought to himself, but it definitely WOULDN'T suit. Figure that drastic of a change wouldn't go down well with you.

Ana, of course, interrupted his thought process by hopping up onto the table, which kicked off a decade's worth of protective instincts and prompted him to raise his arms before he really thought about what he was doing.

"Hey!" Ana said, indignant and rightfully so - he would've hated that kind of babying at that age. "I'm not aboutta fall off!"

"I know," Aaron said, forcing his arms back down to his sides. "I know."

"Hey!" Plue, with a smile still on her face, stuck a finger up in the air so she could waggle it, sarcastically, at Ana. "Lay off your brother. He's a nag, but he's a loving nag!"

Ana, of course, stuck her tongue out at both of them.

"A nag's a nag," she retorted, before sliding off the other end of the table and running away - right into a wall.

Yep, she was his flesh and blood, alright.

"Well," remarked Plue, as Ana - no worse for ware - picked herself up and scampered away. "I guess it's good that she's gotten over the novelty of you being back."

"Ouch," remarked Aaron.

Without missing a beat, Plue reached over and patted his chin with a soft smile. There was such a tender expression on her face, that when she opened her mouth, Aaron braced himself to hear something heart-rendingly romantic.

"Any plans for supper?" she instead asked him. It was such a hell of a contrast that he couldn't help but laugh.

"Nah," he admitted, once the chuckles had died down. "Nah, I- I didn't think about it." He'd been too busy thinking about... well, about everything else.

Plue nodded, clearly adjusting her perception of how the evening was going to shake out. "Leftover surprise it is, then."

"Leftover surprise." Their term for when nobody had made or bought anything, and supper was down to whatever you could find in the fridge that you wouldn't hate. Aaron nodded. "Sounds good."

Already half-turned away to go raid the fridge, Plue stopped and looked back at him with one more soulful gaze - like she was desperately searching for something wrong, but couldn't find it. The affection in her eyes ached. A shiver ran up and down his spine. But then, the moment passed, and, with a final smile, Plue turned away - leaving Aaron to his own thoughts once again.

His own thoughts. Hmm.

He was beginning to suspect that he'd spent too much time alone with them already.

CHAPTER 8: THE SCEPTIC

Will had been having a good day. He really had.

He'd spent a shift at an admin centre within the Cube; managing civilian matters in the surrounding city of Invictus. It hadn't been glamorous work - it never was - but it had been good. Not that frontline work hadn't had its benefits before he'd been relegated, but... well, that was all moot now, anyway. The important thing was that civilian admin made him feel like he was having a lasting impact on people's lives. It wasn't just blasting away the immediate threat. It was helping people work through day after day, and making things better in a way that would last. It was an opinion that he would always keep to himself, lest anyone accuse him of being pretentious about it, but it felt like the kind of work that futures were made out of.

After his shift, he'd stepped out to take a walk along the riverfront. The Glory river carved its way through the whole city, snaking in from the north and splitting into two massive forks as it reached the south of the city. There was no shortage of riverbank to walk beside, and as far as Will was concerned, it was the perfect way to unwind after a hard day's work.

Lowering into the horizon, the sun's rays weren't as harsh as they'd been in recent days. Rather than slamming into Will and feeling like a hot brick to the senses, they washed over him like the waves of an ocean. Or, perhaps, a warm bath. The sky was scattered with golds and purples, and Will found himself slowing down as he walked, just to take it all in. Squinting into the breeze that had spun up, he brushed his hair out of his face, and reached up to affirm that his hat was firmly on his head, in its usual place and position.

It felt perfect. It should have been perfect - it was primed to be perfect.

And then, above the whispers of the wind and the faint sound of the river lapping against the shore, he heard a voice.

"Mr. Adalwin!"

He all but jumped out of his skin at the sound. Who on Theia was-?

Looking around, he soon saw the person who'd said his name. Hard to miss her, really, given that she was striding right towards him.

She was wearing a pale coat that, unbuttoned, flew backwards in the wind. His gut instinct was that she was familiar. He couldn't say where from, but he knew that he knew her. Still - just because he wasn't a stranger didn't mean he enjoyed the prospect of his coveted alone time being interrupted like this.

"Hello," he greeted, stiffy, as she reached him. Then, just to be sure, he added: "We've met, haven't we?"

She tilted her head at him like an affronted bird.

"We have," she said, cooly, like it bothered her that he didn't remember more.

Will waited for her to speak further, but she didn't. It took him a few seconds for him to clock that she was waiting for him to fill in the gaps on his own, and he sighed.

"Look," he said, apologetically, "I definitely remember... you." He gestured to her, standing there on the riverbank with him. "But I'm drawing a blank on the specifics. I'm sorry."

With a put-upon sigh, the woman rummaged around in the pocket of the cargo pants she was wearing and pulled out a well-used lanyard.

"Kaylori Armstrong," she introduced herself, holding up the lanyard and giving Will an incredible sense of deja-vu. Yep, they'd definitely met before. "I'm Aaron Wilder's case worker-"

"Oh, right!" Will interrupted her, snapping his fingers, as the specifics came flooding back to him. "You were in his flat that one time!" He chuckled, remembering how Aaron had called them both 'hideous pedants'. "Right, sorry, I remember now."

Kaylori Armstrong still looked thoroughly unamused.

"...Quite. Well, Aaron is what I wanted to talk to you about."

Will felt his amusement wash away like a crumbling sandcastle on the beach.

"You want to talk to me about him?" he asked. "Why?"

Kaylori turned a little, looking past Will to stare out over the same riverside vista that he'd just been admiring. Her face caught the sun's glare, giving a glimmer to her eyes and making her cinnamon-toast hair shimmer like a desert mirage. It made her look very striking - though the effect was somewhat spoiled by the fact that she stared at the view like she had a personal issue with it.

"I think he's hiding something," she said. It was so to-the-point that Will needed a moment to process.

"You- I'm sorry?" he said. "You think he's hiding something? Aaron? What do you think he's hiding?"

She scoffed. "If I knew that..."

The sentence went unfinished, but Will wasn't so dense that he couldn't pick up on a context clue when he heard it.

"Right," he said, rubbing the back of his head uncomfortably. "Okay, then."

Mercifully, Kaylori decided to give him a little more info to go on. "Whenever I talk to him about his condition, he's... evasive. He answers every question I ask him, and I'm not even sure that anything he's said is a lie. By technicality, at least. But there..." she gestured with one of her hands, grasping at the empty air like something was lost and she was trying to find it. "I just get the sense that there's more than he's letting on. More than he's telling me."

"Uh-huh." Will leant back, folding his arms. "And you're sure that he's hiding something? Maybe he just doesn't like answering your questions. Or maybe he's defensive because he has a problem with authority figures." Remembering Aaron's time in the Bulwark Training Academy (BTA), he repressed a snort of laughter at the memory of his friend's persistent rivalry with one of their instructors.

"But that's just it!" Kaylori gestured emphatically - then, she froze, and drew back into herself with a cough. Collecting herself after an outburst. "I- that is to say- that's why I wanted to ask you about it," she explained. "He's a stranger to me. But not to you." Straightening herself up, she puffed out her chest, suddenly looking very imperious. "Do you have any idea what he's hiding?"

Will almost didn't want to humour the question. It felt outrageous - bold, at the very least, to just ask of a person about their best friend!

"Okay," he said, deciding to draw a line in the sand before their conversation continued any further. "You're assuming that I also think he's hiding something - that I have any idea what he would be hiding." He huffed. "And then, that's the other thing. Aaron's my friend." Folding his arms, he stared the woman down. "He's the oldest friend I have. What I owe him, I could never repay. Even if I knew what you assume I know... what makes you think I'd tell you a damn thing?"

Kaylori's face contorted into a sneer.

"Don't insult me," she spat. "I didn't assume-" she emphasised the word like it was an expletive- "anything. I took a chance. Made a gamble." She eyed him up and down, like a trespasser trying to figure out if the guard dog in front of them was going to attack or not. "If it didn't pay off, then it is what it is."

Sighing, Will did his best to collect himself. Maybe he'd been too harsh. "Okay, look," he said, "I... appreciate your concern. I know you're just doing your job."

She raised an eyebrow, obviously sceptical.

He bumbled on all the same. "For what it's worth, I have no reason to believe that he really is hiding anything. You want my input, as someone who knows him well? He's sick of the scrutiny, and of being made to stay in the same place for as long as he has. Ever since I've known him, he's been bouncing off of the walls. That's just how he is. If you think he's being antsy..." he gestured, helplessly. "Well, that's why."

"And if he's being evasive?" Kaylori pressed him.

Will sighed.

"That's..." he hesitated. He had to admit, if what she was saying was true, and Aaron really was being evasive in some way, then it was harder for him to brush off. His friend was brash, and opinionated, and when he got in trouble it was normally for saying something he shouldn't - not the other way around.

"That sounds unlike him," he eventually said. "Although- maybe it's not that he doesn't want to talk with anyone, so much as he doesn't want to talk with you specifically." He eyed her. "Representative of the Bulwark and all that."

Kaylori didn't take the insinuation well. Will didn't think she would.

"He's a member of the Bulwark!" she almost shouted. "If he reacts so poorly to a member of an organisation that he's a part of, then it certainly doesn't reflect well on him!"

Will held his hands up and ducked his head in a loose 'I surrender' gesture. "Please," he said, soothingly. "I get it. Believe me - I had to sit on the sidelines of so many shouting matches between him and our instructors when we were at the academy together." Even now, the memories made him cringe. Aaron Wilder: never a man to keep his head down, for better or worse.

"But," he continued. "That's also Aaron. He joined up with the Bulwark because he wanted to fight isfet - because he believed in their overall mission. That didn't mean he was going to be comfortable with every aspect of being a member."

Kaylori frowned. "I see that foresight escapes him."

Will was torn between pointing out that it seemed like a mean observation for a stranger to make, and admitting that it was one-hundred-percent true. He settled for another shrug.

Kaylori pinched the bridge of her nose. The wind blew strands of hair out of the bun it was done up in.

"Alright," she said, snappishly. "Well, if that's all."

Hoping that the matter was ended, Will nodded. "I think it is," he said.

With one final frown - and a stiff nod, which was presumably for the sake of not coming across as completely brusque - Kaylori Armstrong turned on her heel and walked away. Will watched as her form receded from view, and as she turned a corner and disappeared behind a building. Then, he turned back to the riverbank. Tried to enjoy the view. Found that he couldn't.

The conversation had been more unnerving than he'd expected it to be. It wasn't that he actually believed Aaron was really hiding anything-

Well. It wasn't like it was really outside the realm of possibility...

Will found himself reassessing. It wasn't as though, he decided, that Aaron was hiding something for no good reason. But could he be hiding something? ...Possibly. He'd been many different kinds of reckless, in the past.

Still - that was as much as he intended to think about it. He trusted his friend's motives, even if he didn't always rate his methodology.

And yet, if Kaylori was this frazzled about it...

Of two minds, Will was accompanied by uneasiness for the rest of the afternoon. Even as he looked out over the river some more - even as he made his way home - even as he fell into his parents' embrace with a sigh.

"How was today?" his mother said, when they parted.

"Good," said Will, not elaborating.

Of course, the first thing his mother did was nudge his father, conspiratorially. "Something's on his mind," she jibed. "He's got that look on his face again."

Recovering from the nudge - he was a great deal less stocky than her - his father rolled his eyes. "Our boy always has that look on his face," he groused.

"'M fine," Will protested, breaking away from his parents and beginning to head up to his room. "Don't worry about it," he assured them.

Remembering to kick off his shoes right before entering his room, because he'd just hoovered the carpet the other day, he stepped inside and shut the door with a sigh. It would normally be a relief to be back here, in the space that was his own. But today, it didn't feel as though the prospect had any lustre to it.

Maybe there wasn't anything wrong, and Aaron was just being his regular self. But maybe something was wrong. The uncertainty - the fact that he couldn't say for sure - felt like it was eating away at him.

He and Aaron had grown up together. Their parents had been best friends - they'd been close by proxy. And then, the village that they'd all been living in, Calamere, was destroyed in an attack by the isfet. For the next several years, he and his family had believed that all the Wilders had been killed - only to be surprised when Aaron and Ana had popped up, still very much alive, having survived by themselves all that time.

They'd reconnected. By now, he and Aaron were good friends again. But a guilt lingered in Will - had done ever since he'd first found out that they were still alive. What if he'd known? What if his family had known? Would they have been able to take care of Aaron and Ana? Keep them from suffering, and struggling by themselves for so many years?

It was a moot point, anyway. You couldn't change the past. And Will had been a child, as well! Realistically, there wasn't much he could have done, either way. But he knew that he'd always carry that sense of what if? with him. A weight around his neck, whispering in his ear in his moments of hesitation, telling him to do better. To be better. Especially when it came to the wellbeing of Aaron and Ana Wilder.

And now, something might be wrong with Aaron.

Don't worry about it, he'd said to his parents.

But worry about it, he still did.

CHAPTER 9: DATE NIGHT

Plue Abernathy did not like to go 'out'.

She wasn't spontaneous, she didn't have a lot of hobbies that took her much further than her bedroom, she had a hilariously limited taste palette, and she still wasn't one hundred percent sold on big romantic gestures.

Still. Sometimes, when you had a partner, and you loved them, you made sacrifices. Did things that you weren't normally inclined to do. And that was ESPECIALLY the case when they'd just gone through something that they really hadn't enjoyed.

It was Aaron's final official day of quarantine. He was still going to get regular visits from that woman from the Bulwark - Kaylori - for a while, but as of that day, he was allowed out of their flat. (Even if he wasn't being allowed back into active service, yet. Aaron didn't seem all that happy with that, but to be honest, Plue wasn't complaining. If he was here, then he wasn't in the field, and if he wasn't in the field, then there was no chance that he could get killed. That was a long-standing worry of hers. An occupational hazard of being a pair of on-the-ground boots, of course, but she worried all the same.)

Of course, the fact that it was officially his final day of quarantine meant that he wasn't supposed to actually leave the flat until TOMORROW. And yet, when she stepped through the door to their flat at the end of another hard day's work, she was greeted by the sight of Aaron in the kitchen. He looked like he was conspiring with Ana about something - his head was bent right down so it was close to hers, and she could just about hear them talking in hushed voices.

When the door closed behind her, both of them wheeled around to face her, eyes wide.

"Hey!" Aaron said, even as Ana ran over to hug her. "Hey, hey!"

Plue knelt down to hug Ana back. "Hey...?" she said. She could tell that something was going on, but she had no idea what. Best to just play along until things became clearer.

She'd have been worried, if she didn't trust these two more than she trusted any other person (except her uncle).

"Hey!" Aaron said, clapping his hands together.

The first thing that Plue noticed was that his hands were covered in something. The second thing she noticed was that there was a warm glow coming from within the oven. The third thing she noticed was the tray opposite the oven, piled high with baked-brown biscuits.

"Ah," she said, letting Ana go so that she could stand up and shrug off her bag (bag of rocks). "Baking?"

She was surprised. Cooking had always been more Aaron's forte. Baking, meanwhile, was hers. (Because baking was an actual precise science, while cooking was all eyeballing and spitballing feeling the correct measurements in your heart and soul. Not her thing.)

Aaron looked like he was about to say something, but Ana beat him to it, chiming in with:

"Not just that!"

Then, she pointed eagerly at a spread of food that had Plue's mouth watering.

"Oh, wow," she breathed. But then, trepidation hit her like a brick to the head. "What's the occasion?"

Aaron made his way over to her, and picked up her hands in his.

"Sorry for the short notice, I know," he said, "but I was thinking - rooftop picnic? Weather's slated to be clear."

Oh, gods, she'd really been looking forward to sitting inside and nothing else this evening. But Aaron was looking at her, and Ana was looking at her, and she was a good partner and guardian. She took a deep, steadying breath.

"Okay," she said. "Lead the way." She eyed the spread. At least she'd be eating food she liked. That was more than she could say for most of the surprise nights out she'd gotten in her life. "What do you want me to carry?"

There was a softness in Aaron's eyes that told her that he knew how much effort she was putting in, here, and that made it better, too. Sometimes you just needed people to acknowledge that you weren't doing you favourite thing, and to not try and make you pretend as though you were.

That was a great thing about Aaron, really. It wasn't as though they never butted heads (sometimes they annoyed the absolute piss out of each other, actually) but he wasn't a pretender. She could deal with that.

And besides, it was only fair. She'd enjoyed being more of a homebody than normal whenever she'd come back from her Bulwark duties, and she knew that Aaron hadn't enjoyed being stuck in their flat the whole time. It'd been her preferences for a few weeks, and now it was time for his. There was nothing she could really say to argue against that. So, plastering a smile on her face, she picked up as much as she could carry, and joined Aaron and Ana in ferrying it outside and up the staircase that led them to the roof of their block of flats. Normally, there was someone up there, doing something. But today, there was nothing. Lucky them.

"Did you make a reservation?" Plue joked.

Aaron shrugged. Then, he added to the joke: "Nah. Just went up and down the stairs with a blowhorn."

Her arms were still full, so all she could do was shove him a little by leaning into him.

"Thought you were still stuck in the flat," she jokingly chided.

"I-" Aaron stammered for a moment, like he'd missed a tick. Then, he recovered. "You got me." He turned to Plue with an easy smile. "I sent Ana out to do it."

"Hah-hah."

It didn't take very long for them to get everything set up. It also didn't take very long for Ana to get yelled at, by both herself and Aaron, for jumping up to the edge of the rooftop and walking along it with her arms outstretched.

"I don't know what we're going to do with her," Plue muttered, once they were done yelling at her.

Aaron, who was holding the aforementioned 'her' in his arms, shrugged. "Crash mats?"

The 'her' in question, who had working ears, wriggled indignantly in Aaron's grip. "Let me go," she complained. Aaron just held her tighter.

"Not until you promise to stop whiffing my life expectancy," he groused. "I see you up there, that's a month, gone. If you do it again? Another month."

Of course, Ana's perspective was a bit different to theirs. "You've gotta lotta months," she pointed out, before trying to wriggle out of Aaron's grip again. Aaron held her fast, pulling her in and rubbing his cheek against hers. It was all very cutesy sibling.

"Not that many!" he protested.

Deciding that life was too short for her to spend the next few hours watching them go back and forth, Plue decided to tuck in to the food. Evidently inspired by her example, Ana and Aaron soon got their acts together and followed suit.

And then, it was some minutes of blissful silence.

"So," Plue eventually decided to say. "Final day in the gulag. What're your plans tomorrow?" she stifled a laugh. "I'm guessing I'm not going to see you for, like, a week."

And then, there was that moment, again, where Aaron just... faltered. Like a skip in the record. And then, of course, he reared his head back and laughed like nothing was wrong, and that should have been enough to assuage Plue's worries, but she'd noticed, and she mentally filed it away. It probably wasn't worth the trouble, of course, and gods knew he was entitled to slightly weird behaviour, after being cooped up for months, but... it was something that she noticed, all the same. That was another thing you did when you loved someone. You noticed things. Even if you didn't do anything about them.

"Maybe two," Aaron joked, which was much more like him, and it helped her to feel less worried.

"And then?" she prompted.

"And then..." Aaron trailed off, tapping his chin thoughtfully, seemingly paying no mind to the way Ana was crawling across his leg so she could reach some assorted cheeses. "And then," he said again, "I'm not sure."

Now, that was a surprise. Plue raised an eyebrow. "You're not."

"No." With a sigh, and a swig of water, Aaron explained: "I haven't received anything from the Bulwark. No summons, no orders. I thought that that security detail I was on would've wanted me back, but..." he shrugged, helplessly. "Guess not."

"Hmm." Perhaps it was just an oversight. He'd been incapacitated for longer than he'd ever been on that detail by this point, anyway. She doubted he was going to be the first priority of whoever was in charge of that one.

Still, for all that she didn't feel all that bothered, it was clear that not being asked back was weighing on her love, so she spoke up. "Maybe it's for the best. You hated that posting."

She'd said the right thing. Aaron snorted, and his eyes flashed with genuine mirth. "I really did," he admitted. But then, his face fell again. "Mind you," he added, "it's not like I've heard anything from my old posting, either."

"The borderlands one?" Now THAT one was a bit more of a surprise to Plue. That unit was the first he'd been assigned too after their graduation from the BTA, and he had friends there. Sure, he'd been booted out, and into his ill-fated guard assignment, after a tiff with the sergeant, but that didn't change the fact that it was his home unit. His whole time in quarantine, he really hadn't heard ANYTHING from them? "You'd think Moore would've forgiven you by this point."

Aaron snorted again, but this time, it was a different snort. More sceptical. "Moore hates me."

Now, Plue knew sergeant Moore. Had trained under her at the academy, same as Aaron. And she wasn't so sure that the woman HATED him.

"Moore..." Plue thought about how to phrase what she wanted to say. "Moore respects you," she eventually said.

Aaron didn't even say anything to that. He just gave her a sceptical look. And, yes, maybe that was fair, but Plue wasn't done. "Didn't she listen to you at Mothermouth?" she reminded him.

"...Yeah?"

Their conversation was interrupted by a laugh and a squeal from Ana. For the next few minutes, Plue ate some more, and tried to avert her gaze as Aaron coaxed the grape out of his sister's nose. (Eww.) Once that was dealt with, she eagerly leapt back into trying to convince Aaron.

"Moore knows you've got good instincts," she said, "and she knows you're dedicated. She just... finds you annoying. And she probably can't suffer all the paperwork you put her through."

Now, Aaron just looked confused.

"I don't give her paperwork?"

Oh, right. RIGHT. This wasn't something that Aaron knew about in the same way that she did. "Okay." She adjusted her seating position, so that she was sitting cross-legged. She wanted to be comfortable, and there was a nonzero chance this conversation could take a while. "You know how the higher up in the chain you get, the more paperwork you have to do?"

Thankfully, Aaron knew THAT, at least. "...Yeah?"

"Moore," said Plue, gesturing emphatically, "is in the chain."

Aaron nodded. "Yeah," he said again. "But when you're a sarge, that's like... that's not a lot, right?"

Well, 'not a lot' was subjective. From a certain point of view, Aaron was a hundred percent right. But that didn't mean that Moore wouldn't have cause to find him irritating. She resisted the urge to chew on her fingernails as she tried to think of a good example that could illustrate her point.

"Okay," she eventually remembered. "Do you remember that time in the academy, when you and Ruby were-" she caught herself pre-swear-word, glancing over at Ana and remembering that not all language was for all ears. "Um. Were MESSING around with Kraken's sword while he wasn't looking, and the pommel ended up hitting you in the face?"

Aaron winced at the memory. "I mean, my nose remembers-"

Plue had heard all she needed to. "Fifteen pages," she declared, and watched as Aaron's jaw dropped.

"Huh?"

Now he was getting it. "Moore had to fill out fifteen pages of paperwork because you'd busted your face open on her watch."

She watched him lower the triple-layered-cracker that'd been halfway to his mouth. His brows furrowed.

"...Huh," he eventually said.

Time for the coup de grace. "And do you remember how, like, two weeks later, the exact same thing happened?"

Aaron winced again. "...Another fifteen?"

"Another twenty-five, actually."

"TWENTY-FIVE?" he was so loud, so suddenly, that Ana shrieked and then burst out laughing when it was clear that nothing was wrong. Plue had to resist the urge to laugh, herself, at the side of Aaron's eyes boggling. Clearly, the imposition of that much paperwork onto ANYONE constituted some crime against humanity, in his mind.

"Yep," she said, popping the 'p'.

"What even FOR??" Aaron demanded.

"Don't get me wrong, most of it's waffle." Plue took a bite out of a piece of bread, because she was hungry, but then shunted her mouthful of food into her cheek so that she could keep talking. "In that instance, Moore was basically explaining why your nose getting messed up twice in a month wasn't because of some egregious safety violation, or because of some kind of lapse in the chain of command." She swallowed the bread. "Basically, she had to explain that it wasn't all her fault."

Aaron folded his arms; he was on the defensive. "Wasn't it?"

With a giggle, Plue decided to allow herself a bit of gentle ribbing. "I think we can chalk that one up to user error, wild thing." To show that she wasn't seriously making fun of him, she reached across the picnic mat, and used her thumb to wipe a stray crumb away from the corner of his lip.

Aaron huffed, but she could tell that he wasn't annoyed. Not really. Maybe he would've been, in another context, but she knew that he'd been waiting for today (well, tomorrow, but semantics) for a long time. He probably felt bulletproof.

"So," she prompted, "you've... reached out to them?"

Maybe a dumb question, but it was always good to ask and be sure.

Unfortunately, Aaron nodded.

"Yep."

"And nothing?"

"Nope."

Plue wanted to believe that it was just the nature of cluttered bureaucracy stopping him from getting a quick answer. That someone, out there (either Moore or someone else) was going to get back to him any day now with a listing, and a set of marching orders. And, alright, it was technically PLAUSIBLE. But given everything that'd happened, she wasn't going to hold her breath.

"...So," she said again, trying to coax him into a frame of mind that didn't involve him worrying about something he probably couldn't control. "You've got some free time on your hands, and you're going to have free reign to do what you want with it. Maybe... maybe this is a good thing."

His sigh told him that she hadn't succeeded.

She couldn't say she didn't know where he was coming from. For as long as she'd known him, there had existed some... great, ineffable, burning drive inside of Aaron. He would look out over the horizon, and you knew that he was seeing something else entirely. And then his fists would clench, and you knew that he was shaping what he saw to his whims. (And hey, maybe someone else would have found that uncomfortable, but Plue was training to take over the reins of most of civilised space. If having a partner with big ideas had been a dealbreaker for either of them, he would've ditched her years ago.)

It was why he'd joined the Bulwark. Why he'd always been so dedicated to fighting the isfet. It was a simple fact of Aaron Wilder: he wanted to save the world.

And now, the avenue that he'd been going through had blocked itself off to him, and he was adrift.

She wouldn't say she couldn't relate. She was someone who loved structure, and knowing every step of HOW to do whatever she wanted to do. The thought of not having those support systems there, and, more importantly, not having that direction of purpose there... it scared her.

(It was something that she'd been grappling with more recently, as well. Her uncle... he was still strong. She saw that every time she met up with him. But he wasn't getting any younger, and he was going through a really busy period that was leaving him super tired, all the time. She'd see him lean back in his office chair and almost fall asleep after a few moments of silence, and it would remind her that, every time a second passed, that was one second closer to taking the reins of the whole of the Bulwark from him. And she would do it. Of course she would! But that didn't mean that the prospect scared her, and it didn't mean that she didn't like the idea of not having him there to help her. Seeing Aaron here, now, without so much as a word from the units he'd worked in... it made her think about being alone, and her heart went out to him and feared for herself at the same time.)

She reached over, and squeezed his hand.

"Aaron." She said his name, but she was speaking to both of them when she said: "It'll be okay."

He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Think so?"

She turned, and looked at the same horizon that he did. She couldn't see the same things that he was seeing on that horizon, but that was okay. The important thing was that they were looking in the same direction.

"You don't always have to save the world," she said, but that didn't feel right to say. It felt hollow. What alternative did she have to offer?

And then, she thought:

Horizons.

"I want to help people, Plue," Aaron said, sounding miserable.

"I know." It was all she could say.

"'M worried," he muttered. Plue didn't say anything then, or turned to him, but she stilled, because it sounded like the spoken version of those odd moments that he'd had earlier, where it'd been like skips in the record. It was like he was admitting, with his voice but not his words, that something was really weighing on him.

"About helping people?" she prompted.

"Mmm." She felt his hand tighten around hers. Only for a second. And then, it loosened so much that it almost fell out of her grasp, and she had to grab onto it to keep it there. It felt like she was losing him, and it scared her.

It was an old conversation between them, and it wasn't one that she wanted to retread. But she knew that, in Aaron's mind, helping people was totally synonymous with fighting the isfet. And sure, that made sense. The isfet were evil chaos monsters. Go figure.

It wasn't the same in Plue's mind, but of course it wasn't. She was training to become the Supreme Commander, and her brain was being filled with all the ways a society could be shaped. That was old hat; she and Aaron could talk about it until the cows came home (in a metaphorical sense). But here, now, she was seeing it become a problem.

"You can help people," she felt obligated to say, even though she knew that Aaron probably wouldn't want to hear it, "in ways that aren't about fighting the isfet."

She still wasn't looking at Aaron, and she didn't hear him say anything, so she had no idea how he reacted to that. It made her nervous, but she didn't want to put pressure on him by looking over at him, so she didn't.

She decided to be brave, and continued.

"And you know, however you do it, I'll be right behind you." Maybe it just sounded trite to him, but it was true, and she knew that it was true as she said it. That had to mean something. And then, she said: "I mean it. I know you."

She heard him sigh. He sounded helpless.

"I just want to help people." That idea, again. It was so abstract; it was so summative.

He was frustrated. She wanted him to know that there were other ways. (There had to be other ways.) How could she say that to him?

"Sometimes," she said, "it isn't about saving the world. Sometimes, it's about saving the day."

Nothing again. At least, not for a long time.

And then, slowly, softly, but surely, she felt Aaron squeeze her hand back.

CHAPTER 10: WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Sometimes, it isn't about saving the world. Sometimes, it's about saving the day.

Man. Sometimes, his girl was too prescient for her own good.

He was back on the roof of the flat, staring out over the city below him. It was deep into the night, now, and Plue and Ana were both fast asleep. He'd come up here, dressed in one of his less gaudy hoodies and a scarf to cover his face, to... well, he wasn't quite sure. Consider. Ponder. Ruminate, maybe?

For all his angsting, it was still a half-cocked idea, and he knew it. What problems existed in the city? What would he be needed for? He was a fighter, born and trained. Would he find fights in the heart of human civilisation?

...Okay, maybe it made him feel a little silly when he thought of it like that.

Would he find good fights here?

...What the hell was a good fight?

Great. Now he was overthinking. Sighing roughly, he ran his hands through his hair, pulling at it, like all the answers to everything were going to fall out if he yanked hard enough.

The city was too bright for him to feel like he was in the dark, and the sky was too dark to make him feel like he was in the light. Above him? A grey, blue, purple, black, muted abyss that, somewhere out there, housed the thing that wanted to destroy him, and everything like him, and everything that he'd ever known. Below him? A city full of people, and lights, and possibility. Invictus contained the Bulwark's seat of power - the Cube - and was the biggest, strongest, best-defended human settlement on the planet of Theia. At least, that's what all the tourism ads always said.

Looking down, he couldn't help the ugly feeling that rose up from within him. He'd never wanted to be here. He, and Ana, and Plue, had moved because they'd needed to, because Plue's Bulwark training had gotten more intense. More demanding. The people that lived here... they lived in comfort. Such comfort. Did they even know what was out there, in the world? Did they even care?

He wanted to help people - but this wasn't like fighting isfet on the frontiers. Did these people need his help, in the same way?

But then, he thought to himself, in a different tone, what might be going on here that he didn't know about? There were a lot of people, in a city. A lot of secrets. A lot of hidden depths. A person like him... they could right wrongs that no-one else even knew about.

...Uuuuuuuugh.

He was overthinking. He was being stupid. Standing up, Aaron leant backwards, giving his spine and arms a good crack and limbering up. His thoughts were just a place for him to get lost in. There was no point to letting them run on, and on, and on like a train. If he wanted to do anything other than stand here in the cold until the sun came up, he had to just stop thinking-

-and do it.

With a big leap, full of boundless possibility, he jumped right off the side of the roof.

See, he'd thought about this part ahead of time. If he could make stuff by imagining it, couldn't he just make, like, a platform, or something? He could catch himself in the air, and then transport himself around through the air by moving the platform with his mind, or something.

Unfortunately, for all the idea sounded good, it didn't quite turn out that way. First, when he jumped, he sort of imagined something catching him - but nothing happened. A second past, and he began to pick up speed, and panic hit him. He threw his arms out in front of him as the ground approached - he pictured a concrete, solid block of platform below him, made out of his isfet but coloured orange, the way he liked it, and then-

Wham!

So, the good thing was, he could make something solid at a thought. And it was even strong enough to catch him! The bad news was, of course, that even though he'd caught himself and stopped his plummet before things had gotten anywhere near close to terminal, falling face-first onto a solid block of stuff still hurt.

"Ugh," he mumbled, the sad noise falling out from under his scarf.

He didn't quite stand up, out of instinct and nerve, but he shuffled around until he was up and on his knees. The platform below him was maybe a meter along and the same across, and it was a bright, glowing orange. Solid, but also just a little bit see-through, and Aaron's stomach lurched as he looked down through it and saw the street, still dozens of meters below him.

Hooooo, boy.

The good thing - the very good thing - was that he wasn't having to, like, concentrate to maintain the platform's existence. It was like, now that he'd thought it into existence, it was quite happy to keep on existing of its own volition. He could feel a connection to it - like a small invisible tether - and he got the sense that he could will it to stop existing quite easily - but it wasn't going to take all his effort to just keep it there, as it was. So, yeah, that was good.

"Okay," he muttered, shuffling on the spot a little bit. "Okay... next up..."

Next up was moving the damn thing. If he could control it - maybe if he imagined it moving-

The platform shifted, just an inch or two forwards, in the air. Aaron's legs wobbled, but he stayed upright.

"Yes," he hissed, feeling that weird extrasensory tether connecting him to his construct tense up, like a pinprick on the back of his neck. Then again, a little louder: "Yes!"

It wasn't quite off to the races from there - if he'd tried to move fast enough to enter any kind of race, he'd have probably been thrown off the platform and ended up as a smear on the pavement below. But he got it to move, faster and faster, clinging on for dear life as he did so. Eventually, he was soaring through the air at a comfortable cruising pace, and felt secure enough to stop putting all of his focus into moving the platform, and spared a moment to appreciate the experience.

He raised his head. The wind fluttered through his hair. And he realised that he was flying.

He laughed. Joyously. Uproariously. Like no-one could hear him, even though he wasn't so high that he was out of noise range. He didn't care. He was flying.

Screw hovering, screw levitating, screw any amount of semantics. This was-

"Woooo-hoooooo!" Aaron cheered, forgetting himself for just that moment, raising his hands triumphantly up and into the sky.

Somewhere, far below him, an alarm went off, and he remembered himself. Because right, yes, he was doing this thing, and he was up in the air, and-

Yeah.

He nudged the block underneath him on, piloting it away from the noise and off towards the heart of the city. Not that he was really sure what he'd find there - it wasn't the boonies, where danger could've lurked around every corner - but convinced, by some good ol' gut feeling, that there was something to find.

It wasn't as though nothing bad or dangerous happened in cities. Maybe there's be some sort of heinous crime in progress - something that was actually worth stopping, at least, as opposed to some cheeky shoplifting, or whatever - and he could intervene. Or maybe some big collision, or disaster, would happen, and then he could swoop in and stop anyone from getting seriously hurt.

He wasn't hoping for anything like that to happen! Of course! That'd be totally macabre. But, yeah, if something were to happen...

Except, for a while - for a long while - it didn't.

Aaron sat there, hovering about on his little glowing platform, scooting from street to street and getting used to the view of looking down on everything from above. And there was, well, nothing really going on. That is to say, there was nothing interesting going on. There were lights, sure, and there were vehicles, yeah, and there were people, absolutely! But they were all just happening. Going on, completely normally. Boring old normally.

He sighed. He was all primed to help people out of crises, but what was he supposed to do when he was stuck in a place with no crises?

Well, he could probably always engineer some kind of crisis, if he was desperate. And also a sociopath. But he wasn't either of those, so where did that leave him, aside from up in the air, on a floating glowing block, waiting for something to happen?

Well, he reminded himself, there are far worse places to be.

He felt cynicism rise up in him, at the thought. After some of what he'd seen and been through, his tolerance for 'worse' was pretty high. But he did his best to ignore that wave of feeling - to ride it out and tell himself: Actually, no, I'm actually having a pretty nice time up here.

Even if he didn't have any people to save, or disasters to stop, he was still in the air. That wasn't something a poor schmuck - even a poor schmuck like him, who had connections - could say all that much.

And then, in the midst of Aaron's mostly-peaceful, mostly-cheerful, slow cruise around the airways of Invictus, he looked down, and saw...

Saw...

An old man, standing by the side of a street, looking vaguely impatient.

You're hardly saving the day, his interior monologue insisted, as he began to descend. You really call this a crisis?

Shut up, he told himself. Maybe it wasn't much, but sometimes it didn't have to be much, right?

Manoeuvring the thing was... easier than he thought it'd be, actually. Weird, but easy. With nothing more than a little bit of effort, he got his hovering block of energy to hover lower and lower, sinking down towards the pavement above like he was on a slow lift. It was easy enough, in fact, that he could lean his head back, and enjoy the feeling of breeze in his hair as Invictus' tall buildings rose back up into the sky, once again looming over him.

A bunch of loomers. That's what this city was. A whole bunch of loomers.

When he thought that he was low enough to be heard without having to bellow, he called out.

"Ho there!"

The old man jumped. He obviously hadn't been expecting to hear anyone, and he obviously had no idea where Aaron was calling from. Oh, stars, what if he thought he was losing his mind?

"Up here!" Aaron called, starting to wave even before the old man actually looked up. He urged his little platform to descend quicker.

It was just as Aaron was nearing the ground - he couldn't have been more than a storey up - that the old man finally looked up and saw him. He had to admit, it was kinda satisfying to watch the old guy's eyes get so wide. Though it was also a little worrying. What if he had a conniption, or something?

Careful not to fumble at the last moment and dematerialise his platform, he stopped it - parked it, really - at about the man's shoulder-height, so that he - still sitting down - wasn't that much taller than him.

"Hey." he said. Then, again: "Hey."

The old man boggled as he stared up at Aaron. "You..." he said, in a withered voice. "You're... what are you...?"

Aaron raised his hands a little, making sure that the scarf was still firmly wrapped around his face. "Me?" he said, suddenly realising that he might not have thought this whole thing all the way through. "I'm just a guy. Just a guy."

The old man - this really was an old guy, Aaron observed now that he was close enough to really get a good look at him, all wrinkles and bald head and thin white moustache - peered at him, perturbed, from behind a pair of thick glasses.

"Just a guy?" he echoed, not sounding that convinced altogether. Which... fair enough. He looked at Aaron's little platform. "W- how are- what're you doing?"

"What am I doing?" Aaron echoed, making it sound as though the question was only just occurring to him, and not as though he'd been asking himself the same thing for much of his life and especially this evening. "Mmn... just hanging around, I guess?"

Just hanging around. Kill him now.

The old man kept staring at him. Stared at him, silently, for long enough that Aaron realised:

Oh, he's not gonna ask anything else, is he?

Oh, I'm gonna have to take the lead here, aren't I?

Nothing for it!

"You know!" he said, confidently, but not aggressively. "Just..." he gestured to above him, up in the air, where he'd just spent that wonderful time. "Hangin' out. And, uh, I saw you down here-" he lowered his hand, not quite pointing it at the old guy but instead gesturing to below him- "and I wondered if you, perhaps, needed help with something?"

There! He'd reached his point!

...although, the old guy still looked pretty clueless, which didn't feel like a good sign.

Quick! Elaborate!

"I mean, you kinda looked like you were waiting for something," said Aaron, in a hurry. "Or maybe someone? Either way. I dunno, I just thought I'd come down, and say hey, and ask if you..." he stopped, realising that he was on the verge of repeating what he'd just said. "Yeah," he said, instead, lamely.

The old man was still staring at him, but now, at least, he looked much more puzzled than he did actually afraid. Aaron would take that.

Eventually, the old man raised his hand, and pointed a gnarled finger at Aaron's glowing orange platform.

"What's that thing?" he asked.

"Ah! This!" Aaron patted it, like he was totally confident in its stability. "It's... a thing I made! That's my power," he said, explaining, "I make things."

"You make things..." the old man echoed, now sounding more... thoughtful, than anything else. Rather than pointing, now, he reached out to the platform, and touched it, running his fingers across his surface with a furrowed brow.

The block he'd made was, Aaron knew, fairly neutral-feeling. It wasn't super cold or warm, it was just... solid. Solid enough, at least, that he wouldn't fall through it.

"I make things too, you know," the old man muttered.

Aaron raised an eyebrow. "You... do?"

The old man nodded, still caressing the platform, eying it like he was trying to understand it. "Mechanics," he eventually said, softly. "Machines. Tinkering. Understanding. But not like this." His eyes grew wide with something, and Aaron thought he might've recognised it as wonder. "Nothing like this."

Aaron didn't have anything to say to that.

Eventually, the old man pulled away.

"You thought I needed help with something?" he asked, now finally - finally - sound as though he was kinda relaxed, and not about to run away screaming from the guy with the floating orange block.

"I- oh- yeah!" said Aaron. He cleared his throat. "Yeah. I mean. If you don't, that's cool..."

The old man pointed, wearily, to a sign on the pavement behind him. Aaron followed where the crooked hand was pointing with his gaze, and saw a sign for a bus waystation on the wall. A sign that should have been full of automatically-updating electronic numbers, but was instead blank, except for flashing blinkered text that read:

PLEASE STAND BY FOR SERVICE UPDATES.

So, this guy was having one of those nights.

"Aah," Aaron said, sympathetically, and the old man nodded.

"This late at night," he said, "and the sign's blinkered. I have no idea when the next one will come." He looked up at Aaron, quiet and assured, but something in his eyes - behind those thick lenses - pleading. "Could you take me home? On that creation of yours?"

It wasn't glamorous. It wasn't exciting. It wasn't particularly large-scale. And it definitely didn't feel... important.

This is lame as fuck, was a particularly vicious thought that surfaced in his mind as if from nowhere.

But how could Aaron say no?

"Of course," he said, patting the block and making it lower right down to the ground, so that the old man could step on. "Ah- give me one second." He focused on his construct, making it bigger. Wide enough for two people to comfortably sit on, instead of just one.

Again, the old man stared. "How do you...?" he trailed off, but the end of his sentence was clear enough in Aaron's mind.

"Honestly?" Aaron shrugged. "Still figuring that part out. But it's perfectly safe." He held out his hand, bidding the old man climb aboard. "Cross my heart."

The old man accepted Aaron's hand, although the expression on his face made him look as though he was on the cusp of changing his mind, so Aaron gave him a not-quite-as-gentle-as-it-could-have-been-tug and brought him on board.

"And, up...!" Aaron said, out loud, for his passenger's benefit, as he coaxed the platform into the air. It was perfectly stable, but the old man hunched down on his knees as if they were a shuttle going through heavy turbulence.

Quickly, Aaron slung an arm around the man's shoulder. He didn't think it mattered much either way, but he knew the sort of reassurance that that gesture could give, so he gave it.

"C'mon," he urged, softly. "You're safe with me. Promise. And-" with his free arm, he made a sweeping gesture, pointing out the city as they rose up above it- "you've gotta check out this view."

It took the old man a bit of time to stop looking straight down. Then, as he shivered in the breeze that hit them as they cleared most of the city's buildings, it took him a bit more time to look all the way up. But, finally, he followed Aaron's urging, and Aaron knew that he would never forget the expression on that old man's face as the splendour of Invictus from above made itself known to him.

This, thought Aaron. This is what my power can do. It doesn't have to be isfet. I don't have to bring pain, or horror, or even violence. Look at this.

The old man turned to him with wide eyes.

"...Who are you?" he asked, again.

Aaron realised that he hadn't answered that question, the last time this guy had asked. And he realised, too, that he now had a decision to make.

...Agh, man, he should've thought of something earlier!

"I'm..." Aaron said, drawing out the word - stalling for time. He couldn't just say who he was! He had to say something else. An alias, maybe, or a codename. Something...

"I'mmmmm..."

Something...

Something-

!

Where the inspiration came from, Aaron had no idea. Maybe it was the storm of power that he knew was inside him, simply waiting to be unleashed. Maybe it was he hoped to create - maybe it was what he hoped to bring down. Whatever the case, he knew just what he wanted to name himself.

He smiled at the old man, then. The scarf hid his face, but not his eyes. He hoped the old man could pick up his expression from them.

And so, he said:

"I'm-"