PROLOGUE

Was that his name?



The syllables making it up didn't come to mind, they were like void, something insubstantial, forever out of reach, what little he could make out didn't seem like it fit, it was like words in a language he'd never learned, with a phonetic alphabet so very foreign to him.

Or maybe that was exactly what was happening. Maybe he wasn't.

He didn't, couldn't, something about this situation -him waking up he hadn't been asleep on a sofa in a strange house, in a foreign space, in a-, a different life he realized, but it slipped away the more he tried to grasp, to understand it.

He was seventy-five 2000-something years old.

He was a conqueror, a Viltimite, a soldier, a warrior, a- an engineer?

He was on Earth-Viltrum-New York-Chicago.

He was, he'd been in-

The numbers, the calendar meant something, didn't it?

Or was it just noise, fragments of a dream of a life dissolving in waking confusion?

His head pounded, yet did not, ached yet felt far away, contradictions not bearing any weight, the impossible weight of being no one and everyone at once, one and two, 75 and 2000, of having lived and not lived, of existing in a way that made no sense at all.

He'd gone to sleep, gone to sleep… on February 20th something, 2078. He remembered that clearly. The date only added to his list of things that didn't fit.

But now he was here, in this body, younger, stronger, alien, it's not me with memories -so much blood, how will I ever be clean, should I jump in a bath of acid? That would clean dissolve my skin, no?

Memories, memories, memories-

He punches his cheek, oh it ached, sweet sweet burn tapering into a dull sharp thing.

He cupped his cheek, index passing over his upper-lip-

"A moustache ?" he murmured voice full of wonder.

His hearing was the second thing he'd noticed.

The first had been that it was night, that he was in a stranger's home, that he was too many horrible -oh sweet mama Jesus- things to ever accept being.

He wasn't was a soldier

Hearing. Too sensitive. Too overwhelming.

He'd come to awareness to the sound of breathing, two sets -and so many so far away but why were they less important? why was his hearing so-, deep and regular, coming from somewhere else in the house. Not in this room. The living room he'd played so many board games with his family in, he'd later understand. Debbie and Mark, the photos would tell him.

But before the photos, before the names, there were the other memories.

Years of war played in his mind like a corrupted mp4 file, glitching and making buzz, buzz in a way that captured his attention like a moth to a light.

Campaigns across worlds he'd never imagined never thought he see with eyes that were ,had been?, human.

Human. He was supposed to be human.

Service to a holy empire, to the Viltrum Empire, to a cause he felt in his bones was righteous, had been though brainwashed trained to believe in make a part of his very self. He remembered believing in Viltrumite might with a fervour that terrified him.

He'd been a soldier. A warrior. An alien.

He was learning- a part of him never belonged anywhere, was only there to hurt.

But no- oh he cared, cared and was cared for but he couldn't, couldn't-

Except he also remembered being human. Being a failure, being alone.

Being old.

He blinked, though of his life, thought of his youth, that girl Greta something voice echoing in his mind, 'You stole my dreams'.

And they had been hadn't they? In both lives.

Why was he so alone? No children to call on holidays. No grandchildren sending crayon drawings. Just him and the TV in a one-bedroom apartment where the thermostat was always set too high because his joints ached in the cold. The kind of solitude that came with outliving your friends, with never quite connecting, with the fluorescent lights of a grocery store at 3 PM on a Tuesday being your main source of human interaction.

The cashiers knew his face but not his name. Knew his quirks yet wouldn't care if he just-

He shook his head like a dog, banishing the thought. He couldn't wouldn't allow himself the opportunity to-

Re-centering.

His youth, the end of his childhood tapering off during-

COVID-19.

The world stopping.

The stress of choosing a career path when all seemed hopeless, dark grey, worthless, dim, distant like a half-remembered dream. It was-

Witnessing the bulk of the twenty-first century unfold, had been something he'd taken pride in, not giving up, like so many had in his situation. Living through that mess. Growing old in it.

Two sets of memories, two lives -one that wasn't really a life, one where he was never thought to be anything more than a weapon despite what had once felt like freedom, occupying the same brain.

Neither felt more real than the other.

What a lie he told himself.

His face went blank, the image of the cartoon dog sipping tea in a burning house, a chipper "Everything is fine." in a speech bubble.

I got isekai'd into an alien body and now I have two different sets of trauma competing for space in my head, spawned in his mind.

"That could be a bad fanfic or light novel title," he grumbled as he stood up with too much ease.

With ease that was inhuman.

He wasn't fucking human.

He walked towards the kitchen, a half-conscious glance at the fridge's blank surface, he imagined an insta meme he must have stumbled on too many times to count, before AI made the platform unusable. An image of a cat bundled in a fluffy blanket, holding a coffee cup with existential dread crazed in it's eyes, a sharp unable to be ignored "COFFEE: Because questioning your entire existence is easier with caffeine." under it.

He'd found the paper calendar just under where he'd been looking after a blink, small notes dotted it's squares. Mark's vacation started in two days, one note reminded him, reminding this Nolan? -was he Nolan? Was his name Nolan? That's such a shit name, at least it's better than that Musk kid with a weird ass name, poor guy changed his name the moment he acquired emancipation- not to forget, even if he didn't care to remember school holidays, hadn't even when he'd been a kid.

The handwriting was feminine, well he assumed it was with how rounded and applied even the shortest note was, Debbie's, according to the signature under a message written on a post-it.

The next day, because a god wanted him to appear and have an existential crisis before midnight, he'd spent hours with the family photos. There were boxes of them, and frames on every surface. A baby held by a man with a moustache, a man he slowly, reluctantly acknowledged was him, because why the fuck not?, or rather, as the body he now inhabited. A note on the back, in that same feminine handwriting 'The first time Nolan hugged Mark - July 21st, 2001'.

Mark. The boy was Mark. Born in 2001. Which made him seventeen now, if his maths was right, which it was, because damn it quick mental maths had been a big part of his carrier, it did not mean he was too lazy to type it on a calculator damn it, Debbie.

Oh fuck…

He couldn't use that name like that anymore, his wife -shit he had a wife- was called Debbie.

And seventeen years old.

The boy was seventeen years old.

Seventeen, still a goddamned child.

His child apparently.

He'd ruin the child-

What will he say ? 'Oh, hi! Btw, I'm still a piece of garbage' despite acquiring a retired human's memories?

Which meant he'd been here -Nolan had been living here, in this where had he- oh Chicago. Why Chicago of all places? - for over a decade. Living this life. Being a father. Being a husband.

Over a decade, nearly two, of memories that should exist but didn't, or rather existed, but only as imprints in the dirt, like half-formed impressions of someone running away from a hunter, blurring all marks despite leaving an easy trail to follow, this, whatever it was, felt more like an educated guess than actual memories.

He set down the photo where he'd pulled it out of the photo album, his eyes didn't leave the picture, tracing the still image of Mark at maybe -toddler age ? no a tad too big for that- , gap-toothed and grinning, held aloft on Nolan's shoulders, and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

The pressure helped.

Briefly.

It didn't do shit.

I don't know them, he thought and damn it did the admission made something twist painfully in his chest. I should know them. I'm supposed to know them. But I don't.

It was like trying to debug code written by someone else, no comments, no documentation, just spaghetti logic and undefined variables everywhere.

Error 404: Family.exe not found in memory banks.

He should be Nolan, had clearly been, a part of him was.

A shitty traumatized part that masked like his existence depended on it. A part that worked like running a system with two conflicting operating systems simultaneously, both throwing critical errors, both demanding priority access to the same fucking hardware when you had only run one.

Os : 'Lonely_Old_Man_v75.0' and Os : 'Alien_War_Criminal_v2000.legacy' not compatible with the current runtime environment of 'Suburban_Dad.exe'.

What the fuck was his life? A DLC expansion pack no one wanted yet came preinstalled, a shitty thing called 'trauma and emotional unavailability' that automatically unlocked the Marriage, Have a child and Become a suburban dad achievements?

Status: Critical system failure.

Kernel panic imminent, BIOS fuckin' corrupted, be fucking proud chum you just bricked a perfectly working computer. No backup fucking available. Please contact your system administrator- oh wait ! There isn't one, he thought cheerily, because apparently whoever designed this clusterfuck of an existence never bothered to include failsafes.

Two lifetime's worth of psychological damage, now available in one convenient meat suit! Buy one existential crisis, get the second free.

The fridge hummed, low and constant until the compressor started its cycle.

He also noticed he'd been standing still for forty-seven seconds, had been counting each tic of the analogue clock in the neighbour's house.

He needed coffee.

The thought arrived with the clarity of a system alert, Caffeine levels critically low. Performance degradation imminent.

He moved to the kitchen, his feet silent on the tile floor despite his size. The cabinets yielded coffee grounds easily enough, but when he looked for the espresso machine his muscle memory seemed to expect, he found only a standard drip coffee maker.

Filter coffee. Basic. Pedestrian.

Well, it will do, he thought, measuring out grounds with hands that moved too precisely, too efficiently. The Viltrumite part of him didn't care about coffee quality, the body, it, his body barely registered the need for caffeine at all. But the old man's memories craved it, that morning ritual -even if it was only starting to get dark- that had been one of the few reliable pleasures in a life of quiet isolation.

He watched the dark liquid drip into the carafe, counting drops because he couldn't help it, because his brain was processing everything at a speed that made waiting feel like punishment.

Forty-seven seconds until the pot was full enough to pour.

He poured himself a mug, black, no sugar, because both sets of memories agreed on that much at least, and took a sip.

It was terrible.

Weak. Watery. The kind of coffee you made when you bought the cheapest grounds at the grocery store and didn't particularly care about the result.

These weren't cheap grounds, he just wasn't human enough to register the taste-

He took another sip anyway.

This is fine, he told himself, channelling that stupid dog meme again, because apparently that was all he could muster at the moment. Everything is fine.

The coffee was bad, he didn't know his own family, he'd nearly punched a hole in the wall earlier when he realised the dosage needed to be upped, and he was having an existential crisis in a body that could probably definitely bench-press a car.

But the coffee was warm, and it was something to hold, and for now, that would have to be enough.

It wasn't the worst, far from it-

A ringing sounded, it came from his pocket. Nolan pulled the object out, it was an odd gold bracelet with an ugly red disc.

He reacted before he could think.

One moment he was standing in the kitchen, mug halfway to his lips, the next he was moving, a blur of motion that should have been impossible but felt as natural as breathing.

Upstairs.

The bedroom he shared with Debbie. His hands were already pulling open the closet, slowly, soundlessly, a glance was shot her way on instinct, as if he was afraid to wake her. Hand reaching for something that should have been there, that was there-

A suit.

Red and white, sleek and form-fitting, with a design that screamed comic book superhero in a way that made him cringe.

This wasn't an instinct from either set of memories, not the elderly man who'd spent his twilight years alone, not the Viltrumite warrior whose recollections were all violence and conquest.

This was, this was something else.

Something from the years Nolan had spent on Earth, the decade-plus of life that existed only as impressions and half-formed shadows in his mind.

Was he a superhero?

The question was tinged with a strange sense of detachment, like a disquieting realisation that was behind a veil of dissociation, like he was far away, observing someone else's revelation. But his hands were already moving, stripping off his clothes with efficient precision, pulling on the suit that fit like a second skin.

It felt right. Wrong in every conceptual way -what the hell kind of life had Nolan been living?- but physically, tactically, it felt like coming home, like a ritual, preparing for battle. It felt like before every break ended during campaign, during advances, it was the quiet moment before violence, it was when you checked your yourself over one last time and steeled yourself for what came next.

It was when you prepared yourself to have your blood pumping in your veins, adrenaline sharpening every sense, the weight of expectation settling over you like armor. It was the moment before the doors opened, before you stepped into whatever chaos waited on the other side, and you had to be ready. In every way that mattered.

Because if you didn't, because if you faltered… You didn't have your place amongst the Viltrumite anymore.

The bracelet on his wrist, the red pulsing with light, began vibrating more insistently. He moved to the corridor, softly closing the door behind him and touched it without thinking, and a voice crackled through, urgent and clipped.

"Omni-Man, we have a situation. Alien invasion, Shanghai. Multiple hostiles, class-four threat level. We need you there now."

Omni-Man.

The name settled over him like a weight, familiar and foreign all at once -and what the fuck Omni-man the alien conqueror guy that massacred superheros during the first episode?!

"Copy," he heard himself say, his voice steady despite the chaos in his head. "En route."

He moved to the window, opening it with hands that knew exactly what to do even as his mind scrambled to catch up. Shanghai. China. Halfway across the world.

How am I supposed to- oh, that easy?

And then he was flying, flying without having to pay any particular attention to his body, to his movements, flying with the same mindedness that it took one to just stand on his two feet, in a way it was the most familiar feeling, the most freeing thing he'd lived, done, since coming to awareness in this body not an hour ago.

He flew higher first, breaking through the cloud layer where the air thinned and resistance dropped to almost nothing. Up here, the curvature of the Earth was visible, the planet spread out below him like a map, and he could see the distance he needed to cross.

The Pacific Ocean was a dark expanse beneath him, sunlight catching on waves that looked frozen from this height and speed. He pushed harder, faster, feeling the air temperature rise around him from friction that would have incinerated anything less durable.

His body didn't care. The heat was nothing. The speed was nothing. He was built for this, it was horrifying, it was fact.

The Americas disappeared behind him.

He'd crossed the international date line without noticing, crossed into Asian airspace without clearance or concern, because who was going to stop him? What could stop him?

Minutes later, Shanghai's skyline emerged from the blue hues of the horizon ahead, but it was wrong. Smoke rose in the sky, dark clouds of dust rising in the air, stark against both city and sky.

When he came closer, close to the origin of the disturbance, he saw a giant crimson portal, a swirling vortex of alien infantry pouring through like a bleeding wound in the sky. Other superheroes were already there, clustered into what his eyes registered as two distinct groups, local heroes perhaps, -this world seemed to work with a logic close to DC comics- their costumes a mismatched collection of colours and designs that screamed that's-all-I-had-on-hand and another team that moved with more coordination, more precision and wore tailored uniforms.

Seven of them, formations practised, their movements synchronized in a way that told him they were used to working together, could anticipate the other's movements with ease.

He didn't know who they were.

Didn't recognize them as the thirty of so comic book superheroes he knew of the top of his head.

Didn't know their hero names, didn't their powers other than the most obvious ones.

He didn't know what they called themselves.

Nolan dearly hoped it wasn't some sort of Justice League variant. Really hoped this wasn't DC or Marvel.

Not that he'd know, most of his knowledge coming from fanfiction and whatnot.

He just knew that they were there, and they were fighting, and he was supposed to help.

Because he too was a hero conqueror-protector of a planet fated to Viltrum's collection.

The aliens were insectoid in appearance but did not posses a hard shell, disgusting beings that fell in their dozens, sent thew the air one by one by the heroes, their bloodied armor gleaming under the city lights as they poured through the portal in seemingly endless waves. They wielded weapons that crackled and hummed with some kind of energy he couldn't identify, couldn't classify against any technology he knew.

They moved in tight coordinated swarms, formations disciplined and deliberate in a way that reminded him of Earth's ancient Greek phalanx formations, overwhelming their opponents through sheer numbers and relentless forward advance, pressing their advantage with mechanical precision.

One of the more coordinated heroes, the green mace glanced up as he descended, her expression flashing with relief before she turned back to the fight.

"About time!" she shouted over the cacophony of battle. "We could use the help!"

Nolan didn't respond. Couldn't, really. His mind was still catching up to his body, which had already moved into action, fists connecting with alien armor with a force that sent bodies tumbling through the air like rag dolls, sending a trail of blood in their wake.

His Viltrumite side stirred, recognizing the rhythm of combat, the efficiency of violence, and for the first time since waking up in that body, he couldn't think.

Buildings crumbled. A chunk of concrete the size of a car broke free from a tower's facade. Nolan caught it mid-fall, fingers punching through rebar, and hurled it towards a large group of invaders crushing the aliens in it's wake.

"Fashionably late!" someone shouted.

Nolan barely looked at them.

An energy blast streaked past his ear.

He twisted, dodging the ray, caught the shooter by the throat, and drove them into the pavement hard enough to make it's head explode on impact.

"Could've used you five minutes ago!"

The words reached him. Didn't stick. His fist was already connecting with another target, then another, bodies tumbling through smoke-choked air, red droplets splashing him and the surrounding area.

He frowned when one fell into his eye, he didn't feel it only saw the red red red red red vision of one of his eyes, red like blood, red like conquest, red like everything he was, a bloodied warrior, telling him, showing him all his wrongs, bringing hundreds upon hundred or massacres and genocides conquests he'd committed don't think about it don't think about it, and somewhere beneath the steady rhythm of his breathing, beneath his perfect control over his Viltrumite body, a body that didn't flinch, didn't panic, didn't care, there was something screaming, something human and small and terrified clawing at the inside of his skull, but his hands kept moving kept killing kept fighting because that's what this body did, that's what it was for, red red red filling his vision like a promise like a warning like the truth he couldn't escape.

A building groaned, steel twisting as its facade began to crumble.

Nolan was there before the first chunk of concrete hit the ground, arms outstretched to catch a woman clutching a child. The impact should have shattered her ribs, his speed, his momentum would have caused their death, but he adjusted his hands, microseconds, to slow down just enough that she she'd survive, perhaps bruised.

But alive. Alive for her child.

He set them down three blocks away, on stable ground, before they'd even registered what happened, their synapses' signal transmission and their civilian reaction time not allowing them to even react, their breathing paused by the violent acceleration through the air..

Back.

Another building.

An elderly man frozen at a windowsill, hands gripping the railing, eyes bulging as the floor buckled beneath him. Nolan caught him mid-fall, cradling him like glass, like something precious that might break if he squeezed too hard. The man's heart hammered against Nolan's chest, rapid and terrified, breaths gasp like things, Nolan murmured something, something that may have been reassuring, he didn't remember the moment it left his lips.

A flash of blue in his peripheral vision.

One of the heroes, young, inexperienced, stepping directly into the path of an energy blast that would crackle with lethal intent, the light travelling faster than sound would.

Nolan moved, hand shooting out, fingers closing around their uniform, yanking them backward -he felt the cloth tear around his hold- with just enough force to clear the blast's trajectory. The beam seared past where they'd been standing, close enough that Nolan smelled burnt ozone of the blast despite all the smells around him.

"I've got you," he said, tone firm, solid, carrying a surety he would not feel the moment he stopped moving.

The young hero stared, stared for a fraction of a second, eyes wide and mouth agape, fumbling over a phrase of thanks.

Movement above attracted his gaze.

Another spandex wearer plummeting from the sky, body limp, shoulder smoking and leaking red ichor, life blood, arms windmilling uselessly as they lost control of their flight.

Blood across their face, through cracked lenses seeping in their eyes, blinding them. An arc of red painted through the air, behind them.

Nolan, tensed his muscles, shot upward, caught them before they hit the pavement, felt the crack of bone, the wrongness of their weight, the scream that spawned from their very core. He felt a too loose, too shattered, body, ribs grinding against each other in ways that made his stomach turn.

Their head lolled against his shoulder, consciousness flickering as they groaned in pain.

He touched down near the triage zone, lowering them on a free gurney with the same impossible gentleness he'd used for the humans civilians. A medic rushed forward, already shouting instructions, and Nolan's hands came away slick with blood that wasn't his.

He wiped them on his costume.

I feel like a damn clown.

Then he was back in the fray, moving, always moving, because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant confronting what he was doing, what he was, what he didn't want to to become, not again.

What he didn't want to return to.

What hadn't really been him.

"Omni-man!" A voice called making him turn his attention towards them.

Paf!

Smoke in his vision, quick to dissipate.

An energy blast had hit him, an impact to the side of the head, as if taken by long ingrained instinct, his head snapped towards the trash that had dared to shoot him, his mind blanked, his hand was on the green invader's face, holding it meters up by its cranium.

A squeeze.

The alien's limbs jerked uselessly, fingers clawing at Nolan's forearm, nails digging into his costume's fabric, legs kicking at nothing.

A sharp pop, of bone fracturing under the pressure he exerted. The skull giving way after little resistance, barely a fraction of a second where the bone buckled, fractures forming along the plates that made it, not even making the skin of Nolan's fingertips give before it collapsed inwards, blood vessels spider-webbing turning green skin a dark purple around the points of pressure as it did so.

Most of the skin stayed intact, until it wasn't, green skin turning purple in places, staying green in others, as it tore.

The grip tightened, barely, desperately.

Huh, still alive?

There had been a moment, a terrible drawn-out thing, where the alien's, the invader's eyes bulged in its sockets, the positive pressure exerted on the skull building with nowhere to go. Then the orbital bones fractured with a series of small, wet clicks, and the eyes seemed to edge forwards, advancing, escaping the collapsing cavity they occupied.

Where the twitching worsened, lost coherence, losing all purpose, merely muscle reflexes, fingers grasping at air like it would save the thing.

Then finally, as if to finish a macabre piece of art, the thing gave all at once, it's structural integrity failing under the power a Viltrumite of his calibre-

Nolan willed the thought away, banishing it, banishing this sense of superiority that seemed to want to crush the human he had been, had once been.

The eyes popped out, forced from their sockets by the building pressure within the collapsing skull, trailing stringy optic nerves that stretched and then snapped with wet, fibrous tears. The ocular organs didn't fall cleanly, they hung, hung for a moment, suspended by those last threads of tissue, before gravity and momentum sent them tumbling down the creature's face, leaving dark trails against green skin.

It caved it like a crushed can, sending warm cerebrospinal fluid coloured red by its blood, it was a sudden heat, a sudden wet spreading across his palm, between his fingers, through his skin oh my god oh my god oh my god, resulting in a misshapen, grotesque thing he promptly dropped.

He dropped it, dropped the thing's body, its arms slayed at odd angles, joints no longer tethered by what the central nervous system ordered it, its remains, the invader's falling to the ground as if dragged by a leash, trailing droplets of red and flesh behind it.

A whip like movement of the hand, chunks of tissues, red blood and viscera was sent through the air in an arc, a parody of what he would have preferred.

The trash hit the asphalt with a wet thud, crumpling on itself.

Nolan stared at it, then at his hands.

His breathing hadn't changed all throughout, heart-rate still the steady thing it had been earlier.

This really doesn't change a thing, huh?

Killing.

Somewhere, deep inside, buried by the situation at hand, something was screaming.

---

A voice cut through the unceasing sound of battle, sharp and commanding.

"Omni-Man, left flank!"

His body was already moving before the words fully registered, punching through three invaders in a blur of motion. Their carapaces cracked like eggshells.

"We need to push them back to the portal!"

He didn't acknowledge. Didn't nod. His fist connected with another alien, sending it careening into two more.

"Red Rush is exhausted! Someone help him cover his sector!"

The words floated past him, meaningless. His hands caught an energy pike mid-swing, crushed the shaft, drove his elbow into the wielder's face.

"Can you reach the ones on the buildings?"How did they even get there, Nolan thought brows twitching, the things can't even fly, "We're dealing with the ones advancing along the main street!"

He was already airborne, tearing through the swarm clinging to a collapsing tower. Bodies fell like rain.

"Omni-Man, status?"

Someone was waiting for a response. He could feel their expectation, hanging in the air between explosions and screams. His mouth didn't open. His focus didn't shift.

A green being lunged from his blind spot, energy pike crackling. His hand shot out, caught the thing mid-thrust. The metal crumpling in his grip. His other fist drove forward, punching through chitin and viscera in one smooth arc. The creature was dead before it could process what happened, sent as it was towards other beings like a ball at a coconut-shy.

"Nice shot!" someone called out, but there was an edge to it. Not quite irritation, but something close. Like he'd early stepped on their toes without meaning to.

He caught the slight tightness in the woman's voice when he'd pulled a civilian from danger she'd been moving toward.

The way the man in dark armor had to redirect his team around Nolan's movements rather than with them.

Small tensions, barely there, like static electricity.

Let's hope Nolan wasn't the hydrogen in the situation.

It reminded him of something. Something from his life on earth, his life amongst the other Viltrumites.

Children bickering over who got to sit in the front seat, petty and quickly forgotten when the destination mattered more than the friction.

He was already moving to the next target, and the next, and the next, ignoring the others as much as they were him.

Somewhere to his left, that same batman wannabe, black cape flowing, movements precise, was coordinating the others. "War Woman, high ground! Aquarus, contain that fire! Martian Man, hit them from behind!" There was a pause, barely perceptible, where Nolan knew an instruction for him should have been. It didn't come.

The names meant nothing to him. The tactics the man spouted were sound, but he wasn't a part of their formation, he noted once more, and they accounted for it.

The invading insects were retreating, Nolan shot forwards the retreating green-skinned trash scattered in all directions before scrambling trampling their fallen brethren towards the nearest portal after he impacted a few of them, asphalt cracking beneath the exploded bodies, bone shattered and fleshy innards spilling out.

One stumbled, its weapon clattering against pavement, and was immediately crushed beneath the boots of those behind it.

Nolan stared, a part of him horrified another used-trained to expect such behaviour from those who dared resist against Viltrum.

Another portal collapsed the sound it made suddenly disappearing felt like void, like absence, like relief, trapping a cluster of stragglers on this side.

The last few turned to send last potshots, before turning back, trying to escape, but War Woman's mace found them first.

The sounds of screams, grunts felt like music to his ears

Above, Martian Man phased through a squadron attempting to regroup, his intangible form disrupting their flight patterns. They scattered like startled birds, diving for the remaining portals.

Nolan hovered before one of the remaining portals, he couldn't see through its red swirling opaque center. But Nolan was certain of one thing, that beyond the gate way there were more of theme, thousands, millions, an entire planet's worth.

An entire planet, an entire world wanted to invade what was his to claim, to conquer.

Nolan didn't want Conquest to come anywhere near earth,near the family he was rediscovering.

His fists clenched.

He could do it. Could plunge through that portal and end them. Every last one. Tear through their world the way they'd tried to tear through his-

No. Not his.

Nolan tilted his head, staring at it.

No. No, that's not- that's not right. These are people. Sentient beings with lives, families, homes-

Earth was his to conquer.

His mission.

His purpose.

These insects had dared to invade what belonged to Viltrum, what he was here to claim in the Empire's name.

They're not insects. They're not. They may be aliens but they have eyes, hands, they feel pain- he fucking felt the skull collapse, give under his fingers, felt the life leave-

The rage -what even was he feeling?- that surged through him was clean, pure, right. It would be so easy. Follow them through. Show them what a real invasion looked like. What happened when you touched something that belonged to the Empire.

No, it's not right! It's not- it isn't right! Slaughtering an entire planet because they dared to exist, because they tried to invade your planet- that's what monsters do, that what some humans wished but damn it Nolan wasn't human he should be above that. He was supposed to stop them not, stop the invaders not-

His body tensed, ready to shoot forward-

Please don't. Please, he didn't want to do this, he didn't want to be this, he was not- he was never- he couldn't-

Then the portal he was aiming for collapsed, winking out of existence with a wet pop that left only smoke and the smell of ozone.

The decision was made for him.

Thank god.

Thank god thank god.

Silence fell over the battlefield, broken only by crackling fires and the groans of the wounded.

They had won.

All the portals collapsed inward, closing, one after another, the scattered few left behind were dealt with swiftly. And sooner than he realized -how long had it been? Tens of minutes? An hour? Hours?- the emergency, the battle, the incursion was dealt with. The tensions dissolved from the air, forgotten in favour of the bigger picture; they'd won, and that was what mattered, but they all knew.

This wasn't the last fight.

He returned to the group, flying through the air at a slow leisurely pace, landing, feet barely making a sound as he landed, among the heroes as they regrouped. They were battered, bloodied, several supporting injured teammates. One, that batman wannabe, had a gash across his chest that was already starting to heal, though the blood remained.

Nolan was barely winded, standing straight and untouched.

He could feel their eyes on him, assessing, perhaps grateful, perhaps something else. He didn't know these people. Didn't know if they were friends or just colleagues. Didn't know what Nolan's relationship with them had been.

"Good work," the man bearded man said, costume black blue and yellow, extending a hand. "Thank you for the help Omni-man."

Nolan looked down at his hands, something cold twisted in his chest, in his gut, in his very marrow.

The gruff gratitude in the man's voice. The relief in the others eyes, both teams eyes.

They thought he was their ally.

They thought he was their friend.

A protector of this world.

But he wasn't.

He was Nolan Grayson. A Viltrumite. Here to conquer this planet, because that was what Viltrum did. That was what he was for.

No matter what this borrowed- it's not borrowed it's yours it's ours- mind wanted to believe.

The woman with the mace stepped forward, wiping blood from her face. "You okay? You seem... off."

Questions. They were going to ask questions, and he couldn't… he couldn't-

"I'm fine," he said, the words coming out too fast, too sharp. "I have to go."

He didn't wait for a response. Didn't wait for the confusion or concern that was already forming on their faces. He just launched, shooting upward so fast the air cracked behind him, leaving them standing in the wreckage below.

Let them think what they wanted. Let them wonder. He wasn't their friend, wasn't their teammate, wasn't whatever they thought Omni-Man was supposed to be.

He was a conqueror.

And the sooner he remembered that, the- the better.

He nodded at her again, not trusting himself to say much.

His hands were steady.

His heart rate was already returning to baseline.

The other heroes around him had looked like they'd been through a war.

Because they had.

And he'd barely felt it. because he wasn't like them anymore.

---

He flew back barely paying attention to the journey.

The sky blurred past him, clouds and stars and the curve of the Earth reduced to meaningless streaks of colour, the Pacific darkening into night beneath him as he flew. His mind wasn't on the flight. Wasn't on the wind caressing his costume pulling the still wet blood along the fabric, it wasn't on his knuckles.

He was here, he was on earth-

Not protect. Not save. No, conquer.

The disjointed thought, muted, it sat in his chest like a stone, cold and immovable, and he couldn't think around it.

Couldn't process it.

Couldn't, couldn't, couldn't- couldn'tcouldn'tcouldn't-

The house was dark, quiet.

Both Debbie and Mark were asleep.

He landed in the garden, his feet hovering above the grass before he hovered above the ground as he moved through the air towards the door window.

His hand reaching for the vertical latch with a kind of mechanical precision that felt wrong, too deliberate, too different from the force he'd have had to exert in his human body, in his 75 year old body.

The lock clicked open, click too loud in the quiet house, and he slid the window up.

Cool night air rushed in, carrying with it the smell of grass and distant rain. He breathed it in, letting it fill his lungs, grounding himself in the sensation of it.

The sounds from outside grew sharper now, unfiltered. That dog still barking. A car passing on the main road. Somewhere, wind chimes.

He stood there, one hand braced against the window frame, and stared out into the darkness of the suburban night.

Before he knew, he stripped the suit off in the bathroom, peeling the bloodied fabric away from his skin with shaking hands.

The suit fell to the floor in a heap, red and white now stained with dark ichor that smelled of copper and something else, something wrong. He left it there, couldn't bear to look at it anymore.

Couldn't bear to look at the blood covering the thing that had felt like second-skin.

He washed his hands for what felt like an eternity, hands under the spray of water, unmoving as his gaze met his reflection's.

He studied his face in the mirror.

His moustache, his nose, his blue eyes, features he was learning to recognize as his own.

The reflection was familiar, and yet he was still expecting an old wrinkled face, his old human self's face, piece by piece, quicker than he expected, like furniture in a new house that gradually it, his face, stops feeling odd.

His eyes darted to a small scar at his hairline, a barely visible thing unless you knew to look for it.

The moment he noticed it, the moment he traced it with a wet finger, the memory surged to the fore of his mind, sharp, immediate.

A battlefield.

An assassination attempt from a weak Viltrumite.

A thousand years ago. 195 years after his parents died.

His scalp had been nearly torn off, peeled back by a fellow recruit's hand. The pain had been excruciating and the scar that remained was a testament to how close he'd come to-

To what? Death? No, Viltrumites didn't die that easily.

But to be written off as weak, to be scorned by his peers, to lose what little favour being a full-blooded Viltrumite brought him… what a fate it would have been.

Failing to prove your strength.

Being seen as a sinner. A shame.

Being wrong.

Meant being fodder.

An Nolan? He was anything but weak.

Every test, he had passed.

He had beaten every challenge.

Hadn't shown weakness nor hesitation, not before, not before-

Earth.

His lips parted, the memory came in a blinding flash, synapses firing all at once, a 'strength assessment', a culling of the weak, Nolan had survived him, proving his strength, had proved he had a right to exist.

A thousand years of scars and battles, the remnants of which could not be seen on his skin anymore, that were as much a part -one he felt he could deny- of him as the face staring back from the mirror.

He traced the scar with his fingertip once more, feeling the faint ridge of tissue that had healed centuries ago. This body had a history, his history.

This is mine, he thought, meeting his own eyes in the mirror. This is who I am.

Nolan ignored the hand trembling under the water faucet.

---

He walked to the bedroom, their bedroom, his and Debbie's, on autopilot. His feet made no sound on the carpet. His hands were still trembling.

Debbie was asleep, curled on her side, her breathing slow and even. The covers were pulled up to her shoulder, her hair spilling across the pillow.

He slid into bed beside her, careful not to wake her, and curled around her like she was an anchor. Like she could keep him from drifting apart.

His lips pressed together so hard they ached. His fists clenched in the sheets, knuckles white, trembling despite how hard he tried to still them.

She stirred, making a soft questioning sound that resembled his name, half-awake.

"Alien invasion in Shanghai," he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

She hummed, turning around in his arms, facing him, a hand moving up, cupping his cheek. A gesture of comfort, automatic and unthinking.

She pressed her lips against his, falling back asleep in his arms.

He curled around her, his body trembling despite how tightly he held himself together. His lips pressed into a thin line, his fists clenched in the sheets until his knuckles went white.

This was the time, alone in the dark, with only Debbie's sleeping form for company.

If he was going to break, it should be now.

There would be no consequences for falling to baser needs here.

Not with Debbie.

Not on earth.

He didn't want to hurt anyone, the thought screamed through his mind, desperate and raw, desperate and raw because whist he had chosen, had decided- He still needed to grieve. He was not human. Why was he not human? Why was he isekai-ed into Omni-Man? Why was it so hard to accept what he had to do?Why did he miss the uncomplicated life he had as an old lonely man? Why could he just not feel? Nolan didn't want to-

The questions spiralled, each one cutting deeper than the last, and he trembled even as he held Debbie's soft body in his arms, trying to not hug her closer, fearing to lose control, fearing to hurt his wife. Her pyjamas did nothing to shield him from the warmth of her against his naked chest, against his bare legs.

The intimacy of it felt wrong, like he was violating something sacred by being here, by existing in this space that belonged to someone else, that belonged to him.

He wanted to cry. Needed to cry. But tears didn't fall.

Because he was Viltrumite.

Viltrumites didn't cry.

No release, no catharsis, just this building pressure behind his eyes that had nowhere to go.

What came instead was a sound, a high-pitched keen that started low in his chest and clawed its way up his throat. He tried to smother it, pressing his face into Debbie's hair, his hand clamping over his mouth.

Tears fell.

Oh did that make him feel weak, make him hate what he was.

Hated that part of him, that human part, that needed to express-

But the whine escaped anyway, thin and broken, the sound of something dying.

His wife, Debbie stirred against him, her body tensing slightly, and he froze, terrified that he'd woken her, that she'd see him like this, this weak, falling apart in the dark like the human child he'd never been allowed could not remember being to be.

But she only mumbled something incoherent, her hand sliding up to rest against his chest, a soft questioning sound that made him hold her closer, and settled back into sleep, in his arms.

He held, another of that broken sound still caught in his throat, and wondered how long he could keep it together.

Nolan closed his eyes, breathed in the smell of rose scented shampoo.

And before he knew it-

Sleep came like a shutdown, mechanical and inevitable.

His last conscious thought was of Debbie's warmth against him, the steady rhythm of her breathing, and the terrible knowledge that he didn't deserve this comfort.

That he was lying to her just by being here.

Then darkness swallowed him whole.

___

A/N:
If this story tickled your brain, you're welcome to leave a comment (I'd love if it's some type of constructive critisism) that challenges my persepctive on what I wrote /(°w°)/!!!

CHAPTER 1

He woke to the shift in her breathing.

It was subtle but he was close enough to catch it in his near unconscious state. The change from the deep, steady rhythm of sleep to something lighter, more conscious. Her body stirred against his, a small movement, her hand sliding across his chest as she stretched.

For a moment, he kept his eyes closed, listening. Her heartbeat was picking up, slow but steady, moving from rest into wakefulness. The rustle of sheets. The soft sound of her breathing becoming less even.

Then she moved again, turning in his arms, and he opened his eyes.

The room was still dark, the first hints of dawn just beginning to lighten the edges of the curtains. Debbie's face was inches from his, her eyes still half-closed, hair messy from sleep.

"Morning," she murmured, her voice thick and drowsy.

He tried to respond, but his throat felt tight. Instead, he just pulled her closer, his arms tightening around her like she might disappear if he let go.

She looked at him, concern or maybe even confusion in her eyes, her hand came up to cup his face. "Nolan? You okay?"

"Yeah," he lied, his voice barely above a whisper barely hiding his sense of loss.

She didn't believe him. He could see it in the way her thumb brushed across his cheekbone, searching his face like she might find answers written there. But she didn't push, didn't demand explanations he couldn't give, and somehow that made it worse.

Who was he, who did he want to be? He didn't voice. Who was he to her?

The sound of an alarm rung on Debbie's side of the bed. She turned in his hold, trying to shut it off only to be stopped by his arms, he loosened his already loose but not loose enough hold, letting her do so.

---

Nolan was sat at the counter, dressed in a grey t-shirt and jeans, staring at the cup of coffee Debbie had placed in front of him. Steam rose in lazy spirals, dissipating into the morning air. The kitchen smelled of brewing coffee and something sweet, pancakes, maybe, or waffles.

Normal.

Domestic.

Something straight out of an American movie.

He wrapped his hands around the mug, feeling the heat seep into his palms. It didn't burn, couldn't burn him, but the warmth was grounding somehow.

Debbie moved around the kitchen with practised ease, humming something under her breath. She was already dressed for the day, her hair pulled back, makeup done. She looked worried, about him, sending him glances here and there as she prepared a plate for Mark.

"You sure you're okay?" she asked again, glancing at him over her shoulder as she flipped something on the stove.

"Just tired," he said. Another lie, easier than the first.

She didn't look convinced, not one bit, but she nodded anyway, turning back to whatever she was cooking, still turning towards him, sending him concerned looks. The sizzle of batter hitting the pan filled the silence between them.

Mark would be up soon. Their son, his son, would come down those stairs any minute now, probably still half-asleep, and Nolan would have to look him in the eye and pretend everything was fine.

He'd have to pretend he knew how to be a father to a boy who was half-human, half-Viltrumite, and entirely unaware of what that really meant.

"Nolan, you aren't usually this subdued," Debbie started, plating pancakes, she turned to the toaster, the bread jumping up not a second later, "You can talk to me."

Nolan stayed silent, not wanting- no, rather he didn't want to say anything.

She set the plate down with more force than necessary, the clatter of ceramic against counter-top sharp in the quiet kitchen. "You've been off since you got back last night. Did something happen?"

He looked up at her, meeting her eyes. She was watching him with that expression she got sometimes, the one that said she could see right through whatever mask he was wearing.

"Nothing I couldn't handle," he said, which was true, technically.

"That's not what I asked." She crossed her arms, leaning against the counter. "I asked if something happened."

He wanted to tell her. Wanted to explain that he didn't know who he was anymore, that the man she'd married felt like a stranger wearing his skin, that every time he'd looked at an image of Mark he felt like an imposter playing at fatherhood.

But the words wouldn't come.

"Just a lot on my mind," he said finally before taking a sip.

Debbie studied him for a long moment, her expression softening. "You know you can talk to me, right? Whatever it is."

"I know," he said, he stated. Because he did, he knew.

The sound of footsteps on the stairs saved him from having to say anything else. Mark appeared in the doorway, still in his pyjamas, hair sticking up at odd angles.

"Morning," their son mumbled, shuffling toward the table.

Nolan felt the beat of his heart quicken at the sight of his son, his son, safe, at home. With him and his mate wife.

"Morning, sweetie," Debbie said, her attention shifting immediately. "I made your favourite."

The boy- Mark brightened slightly, sliding into his chair. "Thanks, Mom."

Nolan watched them, watched as Mark took a bite of the food his mother prepared him, watched as Debbie sipped her own cup, watched the easy way they moved around each other, the casual affection.

This was his family.

His family.

He just had to figure out how to deserve them.

He was sad.

Nolan smiled.

His hands around his warm mug, grounding him, distracting him.

---

Mark looked up from his pancakes, fork halfway to his mouth, and stared at his father.

Something was off.

His dad was smiling, but it wasn't the usual smile. It was too wide, too fixed, like someone had told him what a smile was supposed to look like but hadn't quite gotten it right.

"Dad?" Mark said slowly, setting his fork down. "You okay?"

"Fine," Dad said, still wearing that strange smile. "Why wouldn't I be?"

Mark exchanged a glance with his Mom, who was watching his dad with that same concerned expression she'd had since Mark came downstairs. She gave a small shrug, like she didn't know what was going on either.

"You're just... acting weird," Mark said carefully. "Like, way weird, weirder than usual."

"Weird how?" Nolan asked, and his voice was too casual, not blinking once, like he forgot humans needed to blink, forgot he'd been trying to blink as much as a human, like he was trying too hard to sound normal, Dad never tried to sound normal, not like that at least.

"I don't know, just..." Mark gestured vaguely at his father. "You're being all... ugh…" his fork danced through the air as he searched for the correct word, "Intense? Idon'tknow. And you keep staring at us like you've not seen us in a millenium."

Dad's smile faltered, just for a second, before he smiled again, it looked forced, like he didn't want to smile. "I'm just tired."

"Yeah, but you don't get tired," Mark pointed out. "You're Omni-Man. You can literally fly into space and fight aliens for hours without breaking a sweat."

Dad's smile disappeared completely now. Dad looked down at his coffee, his jaw tight.

"Mark," Mom interrupted him quietly, a warning in her tone.

"What? I'm just saying-"

"It's fine," his father interrupted, his voice flat, before he stood abruptly, his chair scraping against the floor. "I should go. There's... I need to patrol."

He left before either of them could respond, the back door closing with a soft click behind him.

Mark stared after him, then looked at his Mom. "Okay, seriously, what's going on with him? He didn't even go upstairs to put his suit on."

Mom sighed, setting down the spatula. "I don't know, honey. But your dad's…" She frowned looking at the front door, "He has something on his mind, he will talk about it when he's ready, Mark."

---

Mid-evening, Nolan was somewhere in the middle of Chicago, walking mindlessly since the morning, not stopping his walk, without any particular direction in mind, people watching. His ugly bracelet buzzed, something made sound in his pocket, an earbud, he slipped it in his ear.

"Omni-Man, we need you in Hong Kong. Now."

"What is it?" Nolan asked, his voice steady despite the turmoil still churning in his chest.

"There's a dragon. A big one. It came out of the harbour about twenty minutes ago and it's tearing through Kowloon. We've got local heroes on the scene but they're not making a dent."

A dragon. Of course.

"I'm on my way," Nolan said, and accelerated east.

He flew back to the house, dressing quickly in his clean spandex-like costume. The other one, the one he'd left crumpled in the bathroom yesterday, was gone when he'd checked this morning.

Debbie must have taken care of it, washed it, folded it, put it away perhaps.

Perhaps this was that very suit.

Cleaned, had been folded, not covered by viscera like it had been the day before.

Nolan should have flown in orbit, burning the organic material off of it, should have flown fast then stopped brutally, deceleration enough to pull the gore off, to clean the suit- but he hadn't.

He shook his head.

This was another small kindness he, Nolan, didn't deserve, another reminder of how Debbie was his wife, his partner.

The flight to Asia took less than five minutes. He broke the sound barrier twice, the sonic booms echoing across the ocean below. By the time Hong Kong's skyline came into view, he could already see the smoke rising from the city, thick black columns against the morning sky.

The dragon was impossible to miss.

It was massive, easily two hundred feet from snout to tail, with scales that gleamed like polished emeralds in the sunlight.

Its wings were large and leathery, torn in places by the heros attacking it. The creature moved through the streets with a lack of care, its tail whipping out to demolish buildings, sending cars flying at escaping civilian and building, uncaring of the damage it made as it passed.

Nolan descended rapidly, coming in low, barely two stories above the water, surveilling the harbour.

He watched, surveyed scene, the situation, the people fleeing in every direction, cars abandoned in the streets, emergency vehicles trying desperately to evacuate civilians from the dragon's path.

The police and emergency services were redirecting people away from the danger zone, trying to form a perimeter around the rampaging dragon.

Nolan flew quickly, faster than he knew the human eye could follow. A vehicle sent flying by a flap of the dragon's wing hurtled through the air toward a fleeing family. He intercepted it, two palms pressing against its hood, stopping it just before it hit them. The metal denting from the momentum that had carried it forward as it he brought it to a halt mere feet from a woman clutching two small children. She stared up at him, eyes wide with terror and relief.

"Get to safety," he told her their eyes locking for an instant, his voice steady despite the chaos erupting around them. "Head down that street. Away from the dragon."

He could see her nodding frantically in his peripheral, scooping up both children and running without looking back. Nolan set the car down carefully, then turned his attention back to the creature.

He turned analysing the two local heroes that were trying to flank it from opposite sides, one wearing purple and black with what looked like energy blasts coming from their fists, the other wearing green and yellow, goggles covering his eyes, seemed to be moving with enhanced speed -slow too slow to have the speedforce more of a quick silver than a flash then-, slower than the red flash wanna be from the day before.

Neither was making much of an impact.

The dragon batted the speedster aside with a casual swipe of its tail head turning towards the other ray sending hero, sending him crashing through a storefront window, or well would have if Nolan hadn't caught the person.

He set the pitifully weak hero down, setting them sending them a kind look, "Focus on evacuation and getting your friend out of the dragon's sight," he smiled, small and tight lipped, "I'll take it from here."

The hero straightened, they had quickly found their balance after stumbling once trying to find their footing, two feet planted on the ground.

They gasped when they saw him, quickly nodding, a tad frantically, at his orders, staring at Nolan with the starry eyed look he was used to be the target of -it sickened him, that human caring side, to remember younger Viltrumites looking up to him, the conqueror of hundred of worlds-, "Thank you sir, Omni-man sir," they said a tad too quickly before they turned to run off to save their friend and rejoin the evacuation effort.

Nolan stared at the green and yellow blur before he shot forwards, a blur of white and red against Hong Kong's buildings, he felt the pleasant caress of the wind against his hair at the sudden acceleration, flattening them a bit more against his scalp.

The dragon's head swivelled in his direction, a roar sounding out, near deafening Nolan, it's massive eye not yet focusing on him when his knuckles connected to it's cheekbone, the force of the impact made the bones and flesh of the creature's head ripple, buckle. A thunderclap and a cracking sound emanated from the point of impact, as if telling all how weak it was, how it's scaly skin flattened, cellular membrane rupturing, the blood filling the capillary veins of it's demurs leaving it's intended paths, colouring it's green a red tinged yellow.

The thing's neck snapped sideways, cutting off its roar as its massive legs buckled as its center of gravity shifted to the side, its four legs, it's four clawed feet losing their footing, each confused stomp making the earth rumble and the asphalt crack.

The dragon crashed to its side despite trying to use a bat of a wing trying to counter it's fall.

It resulted in the joint of its wing popping as it dislocated, a sharp, too loud disorienting roar sounded from it, making Nolan's ears ring, made him stumble, losing his grasp on his flight capabilities, gravity briefly retaking it's hold on him.

He turned spun in the air, staring at the downed dragon beneath him, did not give himself time to pity the thing, did not give himself time to consider that small voice in his head. This creature had dared attack the humans the people living in this city.

The dragon lunged at him, pushing itself off the ground with it's body, tail slamming on the ground destroying what little intact windows there were, long neck reaching up to him, maw open, fire building up in the back of it's throat.

Nolan was faster, he flew thorough the air in a horizontal 'U', building up speed and hitting it through the underside of the jaw, teeth snapped as slammed its jaws shut before flames could erupt. its head, its neck whipping back from the force of his blow. The dragon thrashed widely, turning on its back, legs slamming into a building, curling in on itself.

Nolan, Omni-man, waited a beat, a second, then appeared at its back, "I'm sorry," he mumbled as hand, fingers sunk into the base of its still intact wing.

It tried to open it, to shake the Viltrumite off, tried to stand.

But Nolan pulled.

Skin, muscle, tendons and arteries tore.

The sound was sickening as he wrenched it from its back.

Blood sprayed across the street, across the dragon's back, on Nolan chest.

The dragon shrieked, whined, the sound piercing, disorienting Nolan, messing with his inner-ear.

He let go of the wing, hand going to his ears and stumbled backward loosing his footing as the dragon streaked trying to strand back up.

Disoriented as he was Nolan jumped down to the ground- ignoring the feel of his ankle nearly giving beneath him, landing forcefully standing straight, moving his hand- fists down to his sides. He shook his head, trying to clear his vision, but another shriek sounded.

It cut through the air again, making Nolan's vision swim. He forced himself to focus, blinking away the disorientation as the creature writhed before him, blood still pumping from where its wing had been ripped out.

It lunged forward despite its injuries, survival instinct overriding pain. The ground shook with the weight of its massive body, the tremor nearly throwing Nolan off balance.

Its jaws snapped toward him, movements slower now, increasingly sluggish from blood loss. Nolan sidestepped its attack, feeling the rush of fetid air as teeth the size of his torso closed on empty space where he'd stood a heartbeat before.

He couldn't let this drag on.

Nolan shook his head.

He couldn't let this drag on.

Every second the creature could struggle, every second it remained alive, was another second it had to damage the surroundings, one more second it could potentially ruin people's lives.

Nolan shot upwards, gaining altitude, his vision still swimming a bit, then he dove straight down, aiming for the dragon's head, fists extended. He let go of his restraint, and accelerated, tension that phantom like muscle that helped him fly, propelling himself forwards nearly fast enough to breach the sound barrier.

The impact drove the dragon's head into the pavement, it's bones shattered, skin tore, the structure of it's cranium giving.

Nolan sunk into the creature, traversing it all at once, all the way through. The asphalt buckled, split under his fists, letting them lodge inched beneath the surface, hugging his forearms.

One fist was pulled from the ground gravel following it, shooting towards his face, then another.

Nolan pushed himself off the floor, fingers pressed on what remained of the asphalt, letting himself float away from the asphalt, the inside of the remains of the dragon's head visible as he slowly rose in the air.

It was slow, it was gradual, once free from the head, the hole he had made through it, he spun in the air, righting his position.

Blood dripped down from his hair to his face, to his neck, to his suit. It was red red red, red like part of his suit.

Nolan shook his head like a dog, dislodging bits of flesh from his now messy and still matted hair.

He hovered there, feet high, perhaps 2 stories up, still in the air. The sudden silence deafening, despite the still ringing sirens of emergency services.

Nolan's jaw tightened, he frowned, looking around slowly, ignoring his trembling hands.

He could have dealt with the dragon so much more quickly. Why had he hesitated? Why did he try to avoid killing it?

He looked down at his suit, his now completely red suit.

Would Debbie wash it this time also?

The thought came unbidden, unwelcome, because Nolan didn't know.

He looked back up, he could feel the eyes on him. That Fury wanna-be's eyes on him as a team of what seemed to be SHIELD like special forces in full body armor appeared out of thin air, securing the perimeter, guns pointed around the dragon, waiting, watchful.

One approached, scanning the creature.

Nolan felt an unnatural shift in the air and turned looking behind the armed team.

There, an old man, younger than he is, younger than he had been, with long white hair and a growing balding problem.

Next to him was a younger man, blond, balding, glasses wearing, perhaps forty, a crisp grey suit.

A part of Nolan told him this man, this man was dangerous, was- was something, was like Waller in DC comics. The older man with the white hair stood with military posture despite his age, while the younger held a tablet, fingers already moving across its surface.

The white-haired man stepped forward, waving off the armed personnel who immediately lowered their weapons. He looked up at Nolan with a calculating expression, one that suggested he'd seen things far stranger than a man hovering in the air covered in dragon viscera.

"Omni-Man," the older man called out, his voice -the same as the one that had called him to go to Hong Kong not an half an hour ago- carrying authority that made something bubble in Nolan's chest. "It's not your best work, You've been more efficient."

This- this made Nolan grind his teeth.

The blond man beside him, adjusted his glasses, studying Nolan with an analytical gaze that felt uncomfortably thorough. He murmured something to his apparent boss, who nodded slightly.

Nolan descended slowly, his boots touching the blood-slicked pavement with a wet sound that made his stomach turn, made him want to clean himself off. Up close, the old authoritarian seeming man's face was weathered, scarred on one side, with a severe look in his eyes.

A look that said 'I know everything and if I don't yet… I will soon'.

The man too something out of his suit's inner pocket.

"Nice work," the man continued, not looking up from lighting a cigarette despite the blood-soaked scene around them. He gestured at the dragon's corpse with the unlit cigarette. "Messy, though. Not your usual M.O." He finally looked up at Nolan, one eyebrow raised. "Something I should know about?"

Nolan's jaw tightened, teeth inter-locking.

The question, the question felt- he tightened his hands into fists, trying to stop the incoming trembling.

"The dragon is dead," Nolan says flat, flatter, deader than he had intended to, the words felt like ash in his mouth, it wasn't because he had killed it, not because of the civilians that had dies he couldn't care less about them, he did care tho, It was- it was- "The civilians are safe. That's what matters"

The old man takes a drag of his now lit cigarette, eye meeting Nolan's, "Sure. That's what matters," the old man says with smoke leaving his mouth, gesturing at the dragon's remains, "But you hesitated. Multiple times. I've got video footage, satellite footage of you playing with that thing for nearly three minutes when we both know you could have dealt with it in thirty seconds."

Nolan doesn't answer, he wanted to answer but knew, knew a growl would be all he'd vocalise in this moment, in this moment where he felt his anger self-hatred rising.

The blond man with glasses spoke up for the first time, his voice clinical, measured, "Your combat efficiency has decreased by approximately forty-seven percent over the past two days. Response times are down. Collateral damage is up." He says tapping on the screen of his tablet. "The data suggests-"

Nolan interrupted the man, he didn't like being questioned, being seen as weak, "The data suggests nothing," he said tone hard, tone harsher than he had intended. He didn't like feeling this- this fear. Something the anger he had barely forced back coiled in his chest, burning it's way out- "I neutralised it. End of story."

The old man took another long drag of his cigarette, Nolan could feel the man studying him, studying him like a ticking time bomb -But isn't that exactly what you are?

"See, that's where you're wrong, Omni-man. It's never just 'end of story' with you. You're Earth's most powerful protector. When you start acting off, when you start hesitating, when you start looking at your own hands like they don't belong to you-" Cecil gestures at Nolan's everything. And Nolan knew, knew his every movement these last two days had been studies, had been examined by this man, this man's organization, "-that becomes everybody's problem."

"I'm fine," Nolan says calmly, as calmly as he could. Tone a tad forceful.

"Exactly. So why'd you hesitate? Why'd you treat it like it did?" the old man said his scarred face stretching, pulling into a semblance of a smile.

Nolan could see the blood on his costume in his peripheral, could feel it sink into his skin, could-

A slow blink, a return to a semblance of control.

The pause stretched, Nolan keeping quiet, not reacting to the old man's words.

"Take a week," the old man said finally, crushing the cigarette beneath his heal"Get your head on straight. We'll handle things stateside."

"I don't need-"

"That wasn't a request." the old man's voice went flat, cold. "You're no good to anyone like this. Take the week. Talk to your wife. Sleep. I don't care. But figure out whatever this is, because next time, people might not be able to afford your hesitation."

The two suits turned to leave, the younger blond falling into the elder's steps, already typing something on his tablet. An account of the confrontation?

The armed personnel continued working, moving with practised efficiency, helicopters hovered up above, lines dropping slowly, ready to be secured around the corpse.

The old man paused, looking back over his shoulder. "Oh, and Nolan? Clean yourself up before you head home for dinner with your family. You look like shit"

Then they were gone, disappearing through some kind of teleportation effect that left Nolan standing alone.

Leaving Nolan to thing, to try to remember who he was supposed to be.

He looked down at himself. His white suit was completely red, saturated with blood and viscera. Steam rose from the dragon's corpse behind him. The destruction stretched out in every direction.

He wondered how many clips of this, of him hovering there, drenched head to toe in gore, trembling hands clenched at his sides, were already circulating online. How many angles had captured the moment he'd punched through the dragon's skull. How many slow-motion replays would dissect every second of his hesitation.

How many people were watching him fall apart in real-time.

Nolan took a shaky breath and rose into the air, leaving Hong Kong and its wreckage behind. The wind at altitude did nothing to clean the blood from his suit, just dried it into a stiff, cracking shell against his skin.

He didn't go home.

Instead, he flew aimlessly high above the atmosphere, further, higher than the satellites, oceans and continents under him, trying to outrun the feeling that something inside him had broken when he'd woken up the day before, trying to ignore that he didn't know how to fix it.

Trying to outrun the question that echoed in his mind with every mile:

What do I want?

By the time he finally turned toward home, the sun was setting over the American Midwest, painting the sky in shades of red that reminded him uncomfortably of the dragon's blood.

Debbie was going to ask questions, and Nolan… Nolan, he didn't have answers.

And for the first time in longer than he could remember, Nolan wasn't sure he could lie convincingly enough to make them go away.

---

She heard him before she saw him. She'd learned long ago to recognized when he was home.

The displacement of air in the backyard then the sight of him through the window above the sink, oh… him staring up at the house, a lost look on his face. His suit, the usual red and white kitchen light cast on it made it apparent to her-

Oh, Nolan what happened?

His suit was stained pink, not torn, just saturated pink, like he'd made a cursory attempt at seeming presentable, clean… and had failed.

This… lapse.

Most people wouldn't have thought much of it… wouldn't have noticed, but she'll learn to recognize over 20 years, when Nolan wasn't acting like himself.

Her Nolan was home and he was hurting.

She'd seen him hurt at times, it had happened but it was rare… and it never made him look like this. Being physically hurt always angered him, made him want to get back up and-

But this look, this hurt that couldn't be physical, was never never physical, that hurt that one shoved deeper as one tried to ignore the thing way no amount of Viltrumite invulnerability could shield one from… It was the kind of hurt she'd always known him to have, to carry, the hurt he'd always shoved deep, deep enough he could ignore it and wouldn't stare at their home like he was looking through glass.

She carefully set down the now filled kettle on it's base, soon enough the water started to bubble.

Nolan wasn't himself, hadn't been himself since yesterday.

Debbie looked at the clock. He'd arrived later than his text had promised, but that wasn't unusual. Superhero schedules were unpredictable by nature. She'd made her peace with that long ago. Her gaze returned to her husband, a tightening sensation around her heart, a heavy feeling in her stomach.

What happened Nolan?

He wasn't moving, hadn't since she'd first seen him after he landed.

It, the sight scared Debbie.

The twist in her stomach felt heavier, tighter, more present. That feeling she been… had tried to bottle up since this morning, since yesterday, yesterday night. When he'd wakened in the middle of the night, holding her in his arms as he'd cried, his arms, always so gentle, tightened around her, making it a bit harder to breathe.

But that look, the one he'd had yesterday night… He hadn't said a word, had tried to keep quiet, had cried head buried in her hair, small keening sounds leaving him, small sounds he'd tried to quiet as to not wake her…

She dried her hands on the dish towel and moved toward the window again, unable to stop herself from checking on him one more time. He was still there, standing motionless in the backyard, staring up at the house with that lost expression that made her chest ache.

This was their life.

This was what they'd built together.

She turned away, forcing herself into motion, drying her hands on a dish towel. "Mark!" she called up the stairs. "Set another plate, honey. Your father's home."

When she looked back through the window Nolan was still standing there, in their backyard, staring unmoving, like he didn't know if he was allowed to come inside. Like he was afraid of what he might bring with him.

"Nolan," she said softly, moving through the kitchen to the back door. She stood there, still for a second, observing her husband of twenty years, hand on the opening mechanism, slid it open and stepped out into the cooling evening air. "Honey?"

He blinked, his gaze finally focusing on her, eyes wider than usual. The lost look didn't leave his eyes, but something shifted in his posture, a slight straightening, like he was remembering the role he was supposed to play.

"Sorry," he said, his voice rough, lacking it's usual assuredness. "I was just-"

"Come inside," Debbie interrupted gently, sadly, worried about this big oaf. "Dinner's ready and Mark is setting the table."

He nodded, but didn't move immediately at her prompting. His eyes drifted back to the house again, to the warm light surely spilling from Mark's window, and for a moment she thought he might refuse, might turn and go fly in the high atmosphere like he usually did when emotional but not wanting to show it.

Might even tell her he couldn't do this, even unlikely as it was, maybe even tell her he couldn't sit at that table and pretend everything was fine.

So instead she decided to redirect the conversation in a way that would let him regather himself, "Rough day?"

He opened his mouth briefly before closing it and nodding, not looking at her.

"Go take a shower," Debbie said gently, a small smile on her lips as her eyes met his, reaching out to touch his hand, "Mark and I will wait for you."

He nodded, finally breaking free of whatever spell had held him frozen. As he moved past her toward the house, she caught his hand briefly, squeezing it once before letting go.

I'm here. Whatever this is, we'll figure it out together, Nolan.

A few seconds later, she heard Mark's voice from upstairs, bright and casual. "Hey Dad! Finally done saving the world?"

"For today, at least," came Nolan's muffled response, his voice carrying that same rough quality.

"Cool. Dinner smells awesome, Mom!" Mark called out as he hopped down the stairs, the soft stomp of feet hitting wood a reminder of her joy in life.

Debbie wiped her hands again, smoothing down her shirt, composing her expression into something warm and teasing, "Ready to set a plate for your father?"

Mark gave her a quick grin, already moving to grab the extra plate from the cabinet. "Yeah, yeah. I got it."

She watched him work with practised efficiency, setting Nolan's place at the head of the table where it always was, and felt that twist in her stomach tighten again. Upstairs, she could hear the shower running, the pipes humming through the walls.

Whatever was happening to her husband, whatever weight he was carrying. She'd help get him through it.

They'd weathered twenty years together, raised a son, built a life.

They could weather this too.

---

He could hear dad walking down the stairs.

Mark couldn't stop grinning as he pulled back his chair, practically bouncing on his feet. His phone was face-down on the counter where Mom had made him leave it, house rules during dinner, but he could still see it in his mind's eye.

The videos. The comments. The dragon.

His dad had taken down a dragon. In Hong Kong.

That was so cool.

And everyone was talking about it.

And why wouldn't they Mark had the best dad.

"So," Mark said a tad louder than usual wanting his dad to hear him, unable to contain himself as he slid into his chair, "Hong Kong looked pretty intense."

His Mom shot him a look from where she was bringing the serving dishes to the table, that not now look she sometimes got, but Mark was too excited to not talk. Because, come ooonnn, dragon.

"I saw the clips," he continued, facing the living room waiting for his dad to visible. "That thing was massive. Like, building-sized."he spread his arms above his head trying to really communicate the size of the thing, "And you just-" He punched the air. "Right through its skull. That was so cool."

Mark looked, like really looked, at his dad when the man was suddenly there, pulling back his own chair, his enthusiasm fell when he looked at his Dad's face, "You okay Dad?"

"Fine," Dad said, his voice flat. "Just a long day."

"Yeah, I bet." Mark couldn't help himself. "That dragon looked insane. How tough was it actually? The Reddit thread was saying its skin was probably harder than tank armor, and someone calculated that your punch speed had to be-"

"Mark." His Mom's voice was gentle but firm as she set the casserole dish down. "Let your father sit down first."

"Right, sorry." Mark grabbed the serving spoon, loading his plate. But he couldn't stop the words from tumbling out. "It's just- I mean, it's not every day you see something like that. And the way you moved, Dad, it was like you knew exactly what to do. No hesitation."

Something flickered across his father's face at that, something Mark couldn't quite read. His dad reached for the serving dish, movements careful and measured.

"There's always hesitation," Dad mumbled as he served Mom first, looking at her silently asking her if she wanted more.

Mark blinked. That wasn't the answer he'd expected. His dad never talked like that, never admitted to doubt or uncertainty. His Dad, Omni-Man didn't hesitate, never hesitated.

"But you handled it," Mark said, trying to recapture that excitement, that pride. "Everyone's saying so. You saved thousands of people."

"Did I?" He said tone neutral, controlled, so different from the look in his eyes. It had made Mark feet something cold settle in his stomach when he saw it. "Or did I just..."He clenched his jaw, frowning before continuing quieter, more sombre, "go through the motions?"

"Nolan," his Mom said softly, reaching across the table to touch his hand.

His dad blinked, seeming to snap back to himself. He nodded, setting his hand on Mom's for a short instant before picking up his fork. "Sorry. Long day, like I said."

Mark pushed his food around his plate, was this Dad's default excuse today? His earlier excitement now tempered with confusion and worry.

His dad never acted like this.

Never seemed so... hollow.

"Well," Mark said, trying to inject some levity back into the conversation, "at least I've got something cool to tell you."

Both his parents looked at him, his Mom with curiosity, his dad with what might have been relief at the change of subject.

Mark took a breath, unable to keep the grin from spreading across his face again. "So, uh... funny thing happened today at school."

His Mom tilted her head. "What kind of funny thing?"

His dad's fork stopped halfway to his mouth, a teasing look in his eyes before he smiled, a real one not like this morning. "Finally asked William out?"

"What dad? No!"

I got my ass beat by the school's jock dad!

Dad shoved the fork in his mouth, chewing thoughtfully before swallowing. "I'm just saying, you two are close. It wouldn't be a problem if-"

"I'm not gay, Dad! Why would you even think-" Mark felt his face heat up, hand covering his face.

His dad shrugged, something almost like amusement flickering in his eyes. "You two spend a lot of time together. I just thought-"

Mark slammed his fork on the table cutting Dad off. "Well, you thought wrong." Mark turned to Mom, desperate. "Mom, you don't think I'm gay too, do you?"

Mom's lips twitched, clearly trying to not smile, "Honey, I don't think anything. Don't pay attention to your father, he's just teasing you."

"Is he though?!" He exclaimed frantically glancing at his parents, his dad looked proud of himself and Mom just kept smiling at the two of them. Mark leaned against the back of his chair, crossing his arms, "William's my best friend," he insisted, "That's it. That's all it is."

He must have said it too quickly, or in a way that seemed to resemble an excuse with how Mom laughed and how Dad smirked at him.

"If you say so son." Dad said in a forcefully calm tone, wiping the smile off his face and stared at him with complete calm.

Shit.

---

Nolan was really acing that Dad thing, he though an arm around Debbie, his wife, and oh did it feel unbelievable, to finally have a person filling this role in his life, lives. To finally have a mate.

Outwardly, that was.

At least he hoped.

Teasing Mark with what little information he could remember from the Invincible show earlier had been… Nice. Natural even, it was the light teasing his own dad, his human one had subjected him to during his youth, it was the light teasing that couldn't, wouldn't have it's place on Viltrum.

Not when-… If those words had been said there… Nolan daren't think of it.

For a moment there, watching his son's -And how incredible was that? He hadn't thought he'd have one in either lives, and here he came to, one near out of Viltrumite infant-hood- face flush red, the indignant protest, the genuine embarrassment, it had felt real. Natural. Like something he'd done a thousand times before…

And yet.

Nolan couldn't remember any of it…

The problem hadn't gone away. It still sat there in his chest. Like a stone, a rock, one so big nature itself had yet to find a way to move it, that disconnect between what he should know and what he did know, was still there.

But for those few minutes, watching Mark squirm, he'd been able to pretend it didn't matter.

Pretend that he was an amalgam of both his lives, one that had found peace, one that was no longer so… empty. Void of purpose, of anything other than to continue surviving living.

A blink.

A recalibration.

Analysing, recalculating, shoving that thought process down, down down.

They were on the couch, him, Debbie, Mark. The three of them. His family. One he knew he loved without having ever learned to. One he was proud of without the recollection as to why. One he wanted, desperately wanted to see survive and flourish, to watch grow and thrive, to be at their sides living in the moment, unburdened by that terrible, devastating knowledge that they would die all too soon.

One he would one day have to let go.

His eyes burned.

His eyes remained dry.

It was inevitable, inescapable…

One day.

He would be alone again.

More alone than he was in this moment, far from all he knew, close to those that knew a part of himself that remained a stranger to him.

A blink, eyes refocusing on the screen.

Mark had picked the movie, some animated thing about a superhero dog, one he vaguely remembered from the show he watched in that other world.

As if prompted by this knew knowledge, by this new stimuli, the knowledge of that barely remembered show's arcs came to the fore of his mind. It came fragmented and disjointed, the quality different for each piece, like old medieval stained glass, the lead holding them together having already succumbed to gravity.

He had forgotten so much, had expected to really, it had been a show like any others one he'd slowly forget and he had. Even now he could barely recall more than a few scenes, more than him beating his child, Mark, his son so much so so much

too much like how his own parents had done with him, too much too inhuman.

It pained Nolan to recall that, to know that this had happened, would perhaps happen.

He recalled a small purple child, one his counterpart had had with a bug like being, one that was more insectoid than that population that seemed to have its eyes on earth.

Nolan knew what would happens to that child if it were to ever exist if Viltrum ever found out Nolan hadn't respected Viltrum's reproduction directives on top of-

Deserting his post…

A blink, a breathe, a glance shot at Debbie, at his mate.

Something heavy pooled down in his stomach, a heat blossomed in his chest, it was searing it burned it hurt.

Every breathe felt painful.

Nolan stopped breathing.

But it didn't stop the pain.

Nolan couldn't desert his post.

Nolan was loyal to his empire of provenance.

Nolan…

Nolan-

Nolan was lying to himself.

Nolan couldn't-

His eyes refocused on the screen. Back on the animated movie Mark had chosen, back on the room, back on his mate, his child, these beings the mere thought of hurting hurt deep in his chest despite the void memories where his memories of them should be.

Eyes following the dancing images, the bright colours, the rounded animation.

He smiled when Debbie looked at him, he kissed her crown.

Nolan let himself lean on her the tiniest bit.

Nolan didn't let himself breathe.

___
A/N:
If this story tickled your brain, you're welcome to leave a comment (I'd love if it's some type of constructive critisism) that challenges my persepctive on what I wrote /(°w°)/!!!

CHAPTER 2

"Don't fall, uwaaa," a voice pierced through Nolan's sleep - distant, muffled, trying to be quiet. The pure blood Viltrumite's eyes snapped open, his sensitive hearing, his training already making him parse through all sounds he could hear. The voice sounded juvenile, not in the way a child did but in that the being, male, had not yet passed their second decade be they human or Viltrumite.

Nolan slid out of bed, silent careful to not disturb his wife. The voice was familiar, not familiar in that he knew that voice, but rather that he knew it, had subconsciously categorized it as important. Like something primal had been struck-

Mark?

The name, the question came to mind even as his body moved on autopilot, following human instincts from that short, too short life where he hadn't been Nolan, where he had been human, a life where the concept of being immortal only brought bad jokes to the fore of his mind. Instincts of that short, sad pathetic husk of a human man driven by logic and a distaste for suicide. His hands found the panel, sliding it upwards before letting himself hover, stare for a second remembering who, what he was here. Not the monster in his memories, not the one that followed cruel orders, culled populations-

A blink, a breath.

The beat of his heart calmed.

He opened the window, the panel sliding upwards, the chill of the night air not as biting as he expected, not as and flew outside. He was greeted by laughter as he closed the window behind him.

The wind blew, temporarily deafening the sound of-

Laughter.

Pure, unbridled, joyous laughter that made the stone in his chest crack just a little bit more.

And then he saw him.

His son. Flying.

Mark's form was silhouetted against the moon, bathed in silver and distant artificial yellow light that seemed to emphasize his youth, his humanity, his vulnerability even as he defied gravity itself in that awkward, clumsy way only new fliers had.

Mark's form was silhouetted against the moon, bathed in silver light that seemed to emphasize his youth, his humanity, his vulnerability even as he defied gravity itself. The boy, his boy- his son - when had Nolan started thinking of him as a boy instead of a hybrid, a half-breed, a tactical asset? Had he ever seen the boy as one? Perhaps in the beginning… Nolan didn't know, wouldn't for a while if ever. Nolan hadn't been feeling like himself, not since he woke on this planet, in this country in that house, since he got that pathetic human's memories- Stop circling over the issue, Nolan-

Nolan.

Nolan-

Nol-

Mark wobbled, - Nolan's eyes widened, his body tensed, readying himself to catch Mark - through the air with all the grace of a newborn fawn learning to walk after being born.

It was cute.

It was awkward.

Nolan relaxed.

It send pride in his chest.

Fear in his veins, chilling his blood.

Nolan watched, watched as his son, this being that was half-him, half Nolan. How wondrous, never in the last thousand years had he thought he'd ever make the choice to have an offspring. An heir.

Nolan watched, partially hidden from his son.

Nolan remained suspended in the air, chill caressing his skin through cotton sleeping garments, instinctively positioning himself far enough back that Mark wouldn't notice his presence, but close enough that he could intervene if his son's inexperience led to a fall. The calculation was automatic, born of something, something inherently paternal he'd never imagine having, had never thought a Viltrumite could feel, perhaps it came from that human life? Nolan couldn't tell, wasn't sure there was a difference anymore.

Human. Viltrumite.

Mark is flying.

The thought, the miracle and disaster of a thought reverberated through him like a shockwave, carrying implications that cascaded through his mind faster than he could process them. His son had manifested his powers. His Viltrumite heritage had expressed itself, had proven dominant enough to overcome the human genetic material, had transformed Mark from a fragile mortal into something more.

Exhale.

Nolan…

Nolan-

A blink and he found himself retreating.

Something so uncharacteristic for Nolan, Nolan blinked, a scene appearing in his vision.

Of being in Mark's place, smiling at his father, pride in his small chest. Warmth for a being he didn't remember the face of. A being he knew was important. A being he knew he had to make proud-

A being that he logically knew was not someone he'd known after-

The phantom feeling of harsh hands gripping his arms, him fighting "Mom! Dad!" "Nolan! No-!"

"Take- …" "Yes son." "Ar-" "Yes sir."

A blink, the blurry cloudy scenes disappeared.

Nolan clenched his jaw.

His eyes turned back to the young flier.

Mark.

Mark's flight was clumsy, unpractised. He dipped too low, then over-corrected, shooting upward with a yelp that became more laughter. The sound carried across the night, unburdened by the weight Nolan carried, by the knowledge of what those powers meant.

What they would mean to Viltrum.

What not having them meant-

Nolan's hands clenched at his sides. In the show, in that other world where all of this had been fiction, Mark's powers had been the catalyst, had appeared in the first episode.

Here too they were the beginning of the end of this peaceful lie Nolan had been hoping he'd live.

His counterpart had used it as an excuse, hadn't he? To finally begin the conquest. To stop pretending.

Would Nolan do the same?

Could he?

The questions felt hollow because he already knew he didn't want to. That realization should have terrified him, it was treasonous, it went against everything he'd been taught, conditioned to believe, bred for- but instead it just made him tired.

So very tired.

And angry.

It felt like fire in Nolan's veins.

Mark looped through the air again, this time managing a complete barrel roll before losing control and tumbling briefly. He caught himself, righting his position with visible effort, and pumped his fist in triumph.

Nolan found himself smiling despite everything.

Eighteen years.

That's how long he'd been here, the least possible time he'd spent on this pitiful rock. Eighteen years of pretending, of playing house, of being Omni-Man instead of a Viltrumite conqueror- Eighteen years Nolan couldn't remember.

The wind shifted, carrying Mark's voice clearer now. He was talking to himself, giving himself instructions, encouragement. "Okay, okay, just like Dad described. Lean into it. Don't think about falling, think about where you want to go-"

Nolan's breath caught.

Like Dad described.

When had he taught Mark about flying? He must have, at some point, in preparation for this moment. But the memory wasn't there, just another void where something precious should have been, something precious he only felt the echos of.

No it had to simply have been him answering a child's questions, his son's.

Another piece of his son's life that existed only as absence, or perhaps not absence but as a shadow casted on the wall Nolan couldn't but face. His only medium to the forgotten part of the life he must have lived.

He could see Mark getting more confident now, his movements smoother. His boy flew in wide circles, testing his speed, his control. Still wobbly but less than before by a small yet no less consequent margin.

The joy, the happiness, the wonder that permeated his movements was palpable, infectious.

And temporary.

Because Nolan knew what came next, or rather what could come next. The training. The gradual revelation of what Mark was, what he, Nolan was on Earth for. The moment when Mark would have to choose between the empire in his blood and the planet he'd called home.

The moment when Nolan would have to choose what role he would play in that decision.

Conqueror.

Or father.

Nolan's son had gained his powers.

The thought, unbidden as it was, should have filled him with pride, and it did, truly did, somewhere beneath the layers of confusion and displacement and fear and conflict-. His son had manifested his powers.

Around the same time his other universe's show's counterpart of the child had.

Seventeen.

Watching Mark wobble through the air, laughing with pure, unfiltered joy, Nolan felt that stone - that weight of knowledge of consequences and choice - in his chest grow heavier.

Denser.

More crushing.

This changes everything.

Because it did, this moment. This manifestation of Mark's Viltrumite powers. It meant Nolan did not have much time left before things changed.

It meant this existence, this lie he was still learning he'd woven , was still pretending he knew-

The board will change, and Nolan-

Nolan-

This changes nothing.

The thought came unbidden, desperate, a lie he wanted so badly to believe it hurt. Because in another sense, it changed nothing at all. Mark was still Mark. Debbie was still Debbie. This family, this life, this bizarre domestic existence that felt simultaneously foreign, and pathetic - and disgraceful for a Viltrumite of his stature. Oh stop lying to yourself - and precious - it was all still here, still real, still his even if he couldn't remember claiming it, making it.

The only thing that had changed was the timer.

The countdown.

The inevitable march toward a reckoning Nolan could feel approaching like a freight train in the distance, growing louder with each passing moment, unstoppable and catastrophic.

He hung there in the night sky, suspended between two worlds, two lives, two versions of himself that couldn't seem to reconcile.

Watching his son fly. Watching him laugh. Watching him experience pure joy in a moment that should have been simple and perfect and uncomplicated.

Knowing it couldn't last.

Because it hadn't lasted for Nolan.

Mark having his powers meant his son, this child with a part of him that yearned to help others, humans. The weak. A part of the boy, Nolan should know as his father, a part he only knew through another life he simultaneously felt he'd lived yet not, one in another world, through hazy memories of an animated series, a fictional series.

One made to entertain.

Something, someone, a higher being had brought Nolan here, something wanted him to doubt Viltrumite superiority, and Nolan, Nolan Nolan-

Nolan watched Mark attempt a landing on a nearby rooftop, overshooting it by several feet and having to circle back.

This boy, his son, was laughing at his own mistake, completely unaware of his father's presence, of the weight of worlds pressing down on this single perfect moment.

Tainting it.

Darkening it.

Nolan stayed back, hidden in shadow and distance.

Paralysed.

Let Mark have this. Let him have tonight, this discovery, this pure uncomplicated joy before everything would become complicated.

Before Nolan made it so.

Before Nolan figured out who he was. Before Nolan figured out how weak he was. Before Nolan realized he'd gone native.

A blink.

A held breath.

Thoughts near deafening as he watched, surveyed, no don't say that like your son is a mission Nolan- Everything I do is for Viltrum. He was loyal to Viltrum. He was loyal to humanity. To the idea of it. Nolan was a Viltrumite.

Nolan hung there, in the air, uselessly. Likely observed by the Shield wannabes. His every move documented. Analysed.

His fist clenched.

His brow furrowed.

Nolan was battling himself. Nolan hated himself. This weak part that just wanted to lay down, abandon the mission Viltrum had given him. Hated that part that wanted to go to Viltrum and destroy that which he served for millennia. That part of him that was weak, human, pathetic.

He didn't want to do this.

Didn't want to be the conqueror, the harbinger, the destroyer of worlds.

Nolan huffed at the thought, half remembered comics of another life lived coming to mind. "Galaxus, Darkseid, Brainiac," and so many others.

Nolan's eyes fell on the garden, on the tiled parts of the backyard, to the kitchen then back to the room he shared with Debbie. He didn't want to look at his son, didn't want to look and see a weapon, a Viltrumite that had yet to be forged. Didn't want to look at his wife, his mate a woman he adored and was curious to find out why he did, and see a temporary distraction from his true purpose.

The mission that had sent him here.

Nolan didn't want to look at this planet, this planet he called home yet not and yet still saw as just a resource to be claimed.

He wanted, God, what did Nolan want?

His son's flight was clumsy still, unpractised as he learned to fly, he shot upwards, up to the atmosphere, laughing all the while. It sounded like small bells muted by distance even as Nolan watched his son become a mere pinprick in the distance. It was unburdened, unburdened by the weight Nolan felt on his shoulders.

The Viltrumite's jaw clenched.

When he'd first witnessed this moment, in that other life, with that distance you could only have with a character you were persuaded was mere fiction, it had felt like a catalyst.

And now Nolan felt the same. This was a catalyst. What would start everything. Had his counterpart welcomed this moment, this growth? Or had he felt as if he too did not have much time left? With the eyes of Viltrum on him as they no doubt were on Nolan in this world.

It felt like a weight.

A punishment for something Nolan had yet had not done.

The moment Mark became Invisible…

He shook his head.

Fingers somehow ending up tangled in his hair as he looked over his son worriedly.

Stomach twisting with nervousness.

He gulped.

It hurt.

Had that other Nolan seen the apparition of Mark's powers as permission to finally drop the pretence, was it a pretence?, to stop playing human and return to what he was?

Is that what I'm supposed to do?

His eyes remained fixed on the dot the was his son, zooming through the air. Unknowing, ignorant of what layed ahead- that his father, the father that couldn't remember raising him.

Nolan was a fraud.

Is that what I want to do?

The questions felt wrong even as they formed.

Hollow.

Because somewhere beneath two thousand years of service- beneath millennia of absolute certainty that strength was everything, that conquest was purpose, that loyalty to the empire was the only truth that mattered-

Somewhere beneath all that, he already knew the answer.

He didn't want to.

The realization sat in his chest like lead. Heavy. Undeniable. Treasonous.

It should have terrified him.

Should have triggered every alarm system drilled into him through centuries of loyal service, through cullings and strength assessments and the constant brutal winnowing that defined Viltrumite culture. Weakness was death. Hesitation was failure. Doubt was-

But all he felt was tired.

So very, very tired.

Mark executed another loop, this one smoother than the last. His control was improving by the minute.

Natural talent combining with Viltrumite physiology. He'd be combat-capable within weeks. Within months, he'd be formidable.

A perfect soldier.

The thought made something in Nolan's throat close.

He watched his son laugh, pure, unburdened, joyous, and he felt the weight of what he had to do pressing down on him. Multiple timelines, multiple possibilities, all converging on this single point in space and time.

"Am I Atlas, holding up the sky?-"

Mark flying. Nolan watching. The moment before everything changed.

Or didn't change.

Because Nolan didn't know. Couldn't know. Didn't remember the last eighteen years, couldn't access whatever decisions his past self had made, whatever path he'd chosen or been forced down. All he had were impressions. Feelings. The ghost of love for a family he couldn't remember building.

And fragments of a show that might or might not be his future.

Mark attempted a sharp turn, overcorrected, windmilled briefly before catching himself. He whooped in triumph at the recovery, completely unaware he was being observed. Completely unaware of the war he would be forced to join in the future.

Viltrum will expect a report.

The thought came automatic, instinctive. A thousand and eight hundred years of protocol and service asserting itself.

Mission updates.

Status reports.

Confirmation of genetic compatibility.

Proof of concept for the re-population initiative.

Had his past self chosen to hide his son from an empire that would see him only as a resource to be utilized.

Why? Why not?

The questions echoed through the void where his memories should have been. Why would a loyal Viltrumite warrior, after a near two millennia of faithful service, suddenly decide to conceal critical mission data?

What had changed?

What had broken?

Had earth's culture done this to him?

Had he gone Native?

He did-

Nolan's hands clenched into fists at his sides. His Viltrumite physiology meant the gesture was meaningless. Nolan could shatter mountains with these hands, what did tightening his grip on empty air accomplish? But the human part of him, the one that had lived 7 decades on that other earth, the part that remembered being seventy-five and dying alone in a one-bedroom apartment, the part that understood futility and helplessness and lonely-

Loneliness-

Hands on him, pulling him away, "Father!" hand extended towards a figure wearing white a metallic- a sword piercing his chest, blood covering it "Nolan!" "Mother"

"Cease this weakness Nolan. You don't want to end up like them." "It was just a nightmare-" "don't be weak" "I won't."

"good. us orphans have to stay together." "We can't use that word Jord." cutting the elder boy off, the fabric at his waist whipping through the air as he turned to snap at the other orphan "You can." "I can't." He snarled "You're a full blooded Viltrumite Nolan. That has to mean something." Green eyes staring at his, full of misplaces conviction. 'It doesn't, Jord'

An illusion of control.

Mark was climbing higher now, testing his altitude limits. The boy's laughter had faded to concentration as he pushed himself further, faster. Learning his capabilities through trial and error, hoping not to fail, hoping you won't be seen in a moment of weakness, the way all young Viltrumites did.

The way Nolan must have, though he couldn't remember that either.

Two thousand years.

The number kept surfacing, kept demanding acknowledgement. Two thousand years of being Viltrumite, of living and breathing and being the empire. Two thousand years of identity, of purpose, of absolute certainty about his place in the universe.

How could eighteen years seventy-five compete with that?

How could Seventy five years of memories as a human competed with that?

How could this brief flickering moment of domesticity - this pretence, this lie - possibly outweigh millennia of who Nolan was?

It shouldn't be possible.

It wasn't possible.

And yet.

And yet here he was, hanging suspended in the night sky above his suburban home, watching his son fly for the first time, and feeling his chest crack open with something that had no name in Viltrumite language because Viltrumites weren't supposed to feel this-

This terror of losing something precious.

Of losing what because your reason to live.

This desperate, clawing need to protect rather than conquer.

This absolute certainty that if he had to choose-

Empire or family, Viltrum or Earth, conquest or this-

He didn't know what he would choose.

He had to choose.

Mark started descending, his movements showing fatigue now. The boy had been flying for nearly an hour, impressive for a first attempt, but he'd need to build his endurance. Would need training. Guidance. Would need his father to teach him how to use these abilities properly.

Would need Nolan to prepare him for what came next.

The thought settled like ice in his veins.

What does come next?

Nolan didn't know. Couldn't know. The show had been entertainment, fiction, a narrative constructed for dramatic effect.

This was real.

His son was real.

His family was real.

The choices he made would have real consequences that couldn't be undone by narrative convenience or plot armor.

Mark landed - rough, stumbling, but successful - on their back lawn. The boy stood there for a moment, staring at his own hands with wonder, before letting out a quiet laugh of disbelief.

Then he looked up.

Nolan froze.

For one unending moment, he thought Mark had seen him. That his son's gaze had pierced through the darkness and distance to find his father watching from above. That the pretence was over, that he'd have to explain-

But Mark was looking at the stars.

Not at Nolan. At the sky beyond. At the infinite expanse of space that held Viltrum somewhere in its depths. At possibilities Mark couldn't begin to imagine and futures Nolan desperately wished he could prevent.

His son looked hopeful.

It made something in Nolan's chest compress so violently he thought his sternum might crack.

Mark stood there for another long moment, then turned and flew, clumsily but deliberately back toward his bedroom window. Back to his normal life, his human life, the life he'd built without knowing what he truly was.

Let him have this, Nolan thought desperately. Let him have tonight. Let him have tomorrow. Let him have as much time as possible before-

Before what?

Before Nolan had to make a choice he couldn't unmake?

Before Viltrum came calling?

Nolan didn't move.

Couldn't move.

Hung there in the sky like a satellite in decaying orbit, pulled between competing gravities that would eventually tear him apart.

His son disappeared through the bedroom window.

The night was quiet again.

And Nolan remained suspended between earth and stars, between duty and devotion, between what he was supposed to be and what he was desperately, impossibly becoming.

Still watching.

Still unable to look away.

Still not breathing.

__

"Did a fly land in your coffee or what?"

Nolan's head snapped up, blinking at his son in confusion. "No." He managed after a second.

"Could have fooled me," his son continued dropping on a chair like a sac of potatoes, elbow on the table holding his head up with his hand he yawned.

"You should cover your mouth or you'll be the one eating flies, Marc."

"Ha. Ha. Very funny Dad."

"You're father is right," clink a plate of pancakes is places in front of Marc by Debbie, "Now eat while it's hot, you'll need the energy for school." She pat him on the back, rubbing him back and forth on the shoulder before leaning back on the counter sipping her cup of coffee she picked up from the table, sending Nolan a small smile.

Marc mumbled something before eating a few bites then fell face first in his plate making Nolan pause, widening his eyes, watching his son for a second, then two.

"Uhm. I'll make him a cup of coffee."

Nolan pours a cup in a clean cup he takes out of the cupboard.

"you have school Marc." Nolan said after placing the steaming cup next to his son's head.

"oh, let him sleep Nolan, he's gonna need it." Debbie said

"fine." Nolan says returning to his chair.

minutes passed.

"You know," Debbie started, she had that particular tone that felt like a trap, "Cecile called."

Who?

"And what did he say?"

"That you're on vacation."

"Am I really?" Nolan said something worming it's way in his voice, it felt like the ash that settled after a world was conquered. His voice had been flat, measured in a way that made things sound like facts.

His wife set down her coffee cup, ceramic meeting the counter with a soft click that managed to sound deafening to Nolan's viltrumite senses. "Cecil seemed to think so-" she paused, searching for the right words, "He said you needed a breather. That you'd been stressed-" Nolan's gaze meets her eyes, "-lately."

He stared at her for a beat, then back down at his coffee, not making a sound before seemingly coming back to life and taking a small sip from his mug. He set it on the counter before picking up his cutlery, "Thank you for the breakfast dear."

"You don't sound happy," oh no, Nolan thought hearing the tone the words were said in, she sounds worried.

A soft grunt left his son's lips, making the pure blooded viltrumite look at his progeny as the boy shifted, cheek raising from the plate full of food to be laid on his arm.

"Nolan, most people are glad to get time off-"

"I'm not most people Debbie-"

"-And I'd be glad to go to France, eat at that nice restaurant you told me about." His mate finished, making the man pause.

"I-" He near spluttered, "We…" He slid the chair back, standing up, "Could do that."

Debbie's expression softened, a smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. "Really?"

"Really," Nolan confirmed, though something in his chest tightened at the hope in her eyes, at how easy it was to make her happy with such a small promise.

Small promises… Wasn't that what a human life was made of? Tiny accumulated moments of affection and commitment, stacking like sediment into something they called meaning. Birthday dinners and school pickups. Coffee shared over breakfast tables.

Trips to France.
Nolan smiled, leaning forwards. Debbie as if reading his mind rose to her tiptoes meeting him halfway, lips pressing against lips, soft, compassionate, loving.

When they parted, Debbie was smiling - a genuine, unguarded upturn of the lips that managed to make butterflies flutter in Nolan's stomach, making him feel as if he were letting himself free-fall towards a planet's crust, pulled by gravity. She touched his cheek, thumb caressing his cheekbone softly before returning to her coffee.

That brief touch, that small contact…

Felt like waking up.

Felt like forgetting his anxieties for the briefest moment, made him forget his situation, his dilemma.

It felt like making a choice.

To his surprise, as Nolan sat back in his chair, pulling it to the table, he found himself smiling, a genuine smile that felt like peace, mind quiet, unbothered by that impossibly corrosive divisiveness he'd been feeling the day before.

Mark stirred again, lifting his head slightly, pancake residue stuck to his cheek. The boy blinked groggily, reached for the coffee cup without really looking, and took a long sip before his face contorted.

"Ugh, still hot," he mumbled, setting it down.

"That's generally how coffee works," Nolan said, the automatic response coming easier than the spiralling thoughts.

Mark managed a weak glare before his head drooped again, though he at least kept it hovering above the plate this time.

"Late night?" Debbie asked, amused.

"Couldn't sleep," Mark said through another yawn.

Nolan's fingers tightened imperceptibly around his fork, the peace momentously shattered. Because you were flying. Because your powers finally manifested. Because you're becoming what I am, whether you understand what that means or not.

"Stressed by exams?" Nolan asked, "You know you're at an age where the grade you get define how you'll live the next couple of years of your life."

Mark's expression shifted slightly, becoming more guarded. "Yeah, something like that." He took another careful sip of coffee, eyes not quite meeting his father's.

"Mark, it's just to say…" Nolan's gaze rose from the table, "I know how it feels to hide how afraid you are of failing," being in line with other children, being assessed, those around him falling because they were too much of a failure to be considered redeemable, of having to stare forwards, hide the relief the boy felt as the boy was directed towards those with most potential, carefully not thinking about the boy once named Jord laying dead on the ground immobile a fourth of his head missing, blood, pieces of his skull and brain matter splayed on the smooth ground in a macabre continuation of the line his dead body made on the ground. "It's just to say…"

The lines had been straight. That's what he remembered most clearly. Perfectly straight lines of children - three-quarters Viltrumite, seven-eighths, fifteen-sixteenths, the fractions that supposedly mattered - standing in the training grounds under a sun that felt too bright, too hot with even with his still nascent powers.

Numbers had been called.

Forty-seven had cried. Nolan remembered that because it was the only sound in the silence, this wet desperate thing that made the instructors' faces twist with something like disgust. Forty-seven hadn't been fast enough in the strength trials and had known it. Weak.

Resources were finite. That's what they'd been told. Resources were for those who could become*.*

Forty-seven hadn't become.

"…that it's natural," Nolan continued, his voice steady even as his mind wasn't, even as he saw Jord's skull the wet crack sounded in his ears, deafening, final like it had been- "to feel pressure."

Eighty-three had been stronger. Had almost made it through the trials. Nolan had trained next to eighty-three for months. The boy had been quiet, focused, desperate in a way that felt familiar.

But almost wasn't enough.

The ground had been smooth where they'd stood. Smooth and easy to clean. Efficient. Everything on Viltrum was efficient.

"School's important," Nolan said, and part of him was there at the breakfast table with his son, with his wife's warmth still lingering on his cheek, and part of him was staring at that smooth ground, at the way blood looked almost artistic when it spread across polished stone, at how quickly the bodies were removed so the next group could be assessed… a part of him that small human part remembered school years fondly.

One hundred and twelve.

112.

Nolan's trainee number.

He'd passed. Had shown strength, speed his pureblooded blood granted him, had demonstrated the right level of brutality when ordered to demonstrate combat proficiency against ninety-six, who hadn't been fast enough to block.

Ninety-six had still been breathing after. For a few minutes.

No one had helped ninety-six.

"But it's not everything," Nolan finished, and his hand was steady on his fork, and his face was calm, and somewhere deep in his chest something felt like it was fracturing along old fault lines that had never properly healed.

Mark was looking at him with an expression Nolan couldn't quite read. Debbie had gone still by the counter.

"Dad?" Mark said quietly. "Are you okay?"

The line had been straight. The children had been resources. The weak had been discarded.

That was just how things were.

"Of course I am," Nolan said, and managed something approximating a smile. "Just… I want you to know that failure isn't the end of the world. Not with me."

Except on Viltrum, it had been exactly that.

You have the choice to be weak, son, he didn't say expression softening as he saw Mark and Debbie's worried faces.

__

The rest of breakfast had passed in a comfortable manner. Debbie asked Mark the day to come - what classes he had, whether he had a shift at that fast food place in the evening, if William was driving him to school.

Once the boy left, the clink of keys as he swapped them from the key-holder before slipping them in his pocket, Debbie turned to Nolan. Her expression shifting from maternal warmth to something more worried, searching.

"What was this earlier?" she asked.

"Nothing." Nolan said, reaching for his empty mug, he didn't have much hope of his response reassuring his human wife. Nolan had a feeling he'd need coffee for the conversation he was about to have.

"Nolan." Her tone was confirmation enough that this feeling was correct. Did Nolan have precognitive abiliti- "You know that doesn't work with me."

He set the cup back down on the counter, staring at the dried coffee stains in it. He considered deflecting again, maybe make a joke, talking about that French restaurant she'd brought up earlier. But his mate was watching him, waiting.

And maybe it was that human part of his soul that seecked to tell her something, anything. Let himself be weak.

Just this once…

With someone he trusted.

Debbie didn't deserve to be lied to. She deserved a good husband. A good father to her son, their son. Nolan's son.

"My childhood was…" he started, then paused, choosing words carefully. "Rough. You know I was raised in a-" He paused momentarily unable to think of the words to describe the environment he'd grown in. Viltrumite and human upbringings clashing, "strict- environment…" He trailed off.

Debbie's brow furrowed slightly, skin wrinkling above her nose. God was she beautiful. "You've always talked positively about Viltrum… Like it was perfect."

Nolan's jaw tightened, the sound of teeth scraping against each-other a reminder to loosen it, to calm himself. The suction like sound that echoed as he opened his mouth to talk made him pause. Anywhere is a utopia if you grow up being told it is, came from that small, buried part of him that had learned human history, had learned what tyrannises where like, had seen some come to life and fall be it first hand or through second or even third hand testimonies.

"It was- is," he said automatically. "Viltrum is… advanced. Peaceful. But when one grows up where I did. When one grows up- in an orphanage…" His gaze dropped to the floor as he admits this painful truth, knowing what it would sound like to a human that lived on earth in the United States of America, his voice quietened, "There were expectations, expectations that met every single time. And those who didn't meed them were simply-," He shook his head, eyes meeting Debbie's black ones, Let's not think about what didn't happen to me, he thought as he finished.

"Nolan," Debbie started, coming closer, warm had coming to his cheek, "what happened if you didn't meet these expectations?"

Her question rendered him mute, stealing his voice.

What did it mean to not meet expectations.

Flashes of red interspersed with dark strands of varying length filled his vision.

"They simply failed the program Debbie," he caressed the back of her hand, "It's just like on… earth, yes Earth. here if you fail a program, it doesn't mean much more than that."

"Nolan," she said face falling, "Yeobo, please don't lie to me. I know things were different on Viltrum, and I know there are some things you don't want to say, things you think I won't understand. I know you don't tell me things because you think I won't be able to help, but sometimes talking about it is all you need." Her fingers traced his jaw, her tough gentle, fleeting, as if she was ready to pull away, "If you don't want to talk about it it's fine, we're married Nolan, we're supposed to help each-other… and seeing you like this-" She pulls away, although he didn't let go of the weak hold he had on her hand, nor did she attempt to shake it off, "It's painful to see you like this."

Nolan's throat tightened. The words turned to dust just as quickly as they came to him, their residue pressing against the back of his teeth like ghosts, like they needed to be heard despite being no more.

Weakness is death. Vulnerability is failure. Emotions are liabilities. They all share something in common, 'they have no place in a Viltrumite's life'.

Nolan's throat tightened. The words caught there, sharp and jagged like broken glass. How do you explain that children died so you could live? How do you make that sound like anything other than what it was?

"Failure required punishment, Debbie." The admission came out rough, scraped raw. "They were... removed. From the program. From-" From existence. From mattering.

He saw her expression shift, saw the horror beginning to dawn, and something in him lurched forward desperately, trying to catch the words before they could fully land, trying to reshape them into something more palatable, more justifiable.

"It had to be that way," he said quickly, grip tightening on her hand, his other clenching into a fist. "You have to understand, Debbie. Resources were limited. The population had been decimated by the Scourge Virus; they couldn't afford to waste time and energy on those who wouldn't contribute, who couldn't become strong enough to help rebuild civilization." He said firmly, each word adding weight to his heart, making it the harder to breath unencumbered.

His mouth was filled with the taste of ash.

Debbie pulled her hand free, and whatever it was, whatever resided in the deepest part of his mind, that dark savage thing burned as it broke out, the world around him narrowed.

"Every child who passed the trials went on to become a guardian of peace. A protector. We've brought order to hundreds of worlds, saved billions of lives across the galaxy." His voice gained strength, conviction borrowed from centuries of repetition, centuries of service, of justification. "What we went through - what they went through - it made the survivors, it made us strong enough to prevent wars, to stop suffering on a scale you can't imagine."

If it wasn't necessary, then Jord died for nothing. Forty-seven died for nothing. Ninety-six bled out for nothing.

All these dead children he'd never let himself learn the names of.

If it wasn't the only way, then what does that make Nolan?

"The alternative would have been worse," Nolan continued, and he wasn't sure anymore if he was talking to Debbie or to himself. "Chaos. Weakness spreading through the population like a disease. Complete societal collapse." His voice wavered slightly, he'd long been unable to look her in the eyes. "These events taught us to be strong. That to be strong was the only way forward."

Debbie's face had gone pale, but Nolan pressed on, desperate now.

He took a step back, took a deep breath in an attempt to calm himself, let his hand go up in front of him in that supplicating posture he hated, in a bizarre, weak, half-hearted attempt at making her understand, "I know it sounds harsh by Earth standards." He started gentler, softer. "I know your species does things differently. But Viltrum brought peace to countless worlds. We've eliminated war, poverty, disease across entire sectors of space. Doesn't that justify-" He stopped, the question hanging incomplete because he couldn't bring himself to finish it, to try to convin-

Doesn't that justify anything? Everything?

Doesn't that mean it was worth it?

Doesn't that mean I don't have to feel sick when I remember the way the blood looked on that smooth ground?

-to convince his wife, his mate, the mother of his child, of something he didn't fully believe, of something he tried to continue to believe because it was the easy thing to do. The weak thing to do.

Nolan took another step back, then another, letting himself stumble back, letting himself fall backwards onto the floor. Staring at his feet, carefully avoiding to look at his hands.

The kitchen floor tiles were cold, cold in that soft gentle way he'd rarely known in his life as a human, cold in a way that felt like air. If it weren't for the pressure of his skin giving under his weight, of his fingers as they toughed tile, he would doubt their existence.

He couldn't breathe.

He didn't let himself breathe.

The blanket of distance, of numbness surrounded him, filtering the world around him. It felt slower, lesser, his awareness more sluggish, more awkward.

Debbie was speaking to him, her tone was worried, concerned, fearful - had he scared her? Nolan didn't want that. He watched as she knelt next to him, watched as she brought a hand to the side of his face. Watched concerned as she continued to talk to him. He tried to tell her something, to not worry, tell her he hear her words but only that they slipped from awareness the second a new one arrived. Tried to tell her his diaphragm would simply not move.

Tell her he wasn't really her husband, tell her he was barely the man she first met. Tell her he was 75 and 2000 and he didn't remember arriving to earth, didn't remember being assigned this planet, didn't remember falling in love with her but felt it all the same, didn't remember this family and yet fell apart the moment he realized the feelings he felt for them. Tell her he-

Weak.

Was Nolan shaking? When had that started?

Nolan looked at Debbie, she had a phone in her hand, to her ear. Who was she calling?

Nolan brought his hands up, let them be held by Debbie's, stared at them - these hands that had torn through starship hulls, that had reshaped continents, that had ended wars with their strength, and watched them tremble like leaves in a storm.

He couldn't make them stop. He couldn't make anything stop.

The world spun around him, he pressed his back further into the island's cabinet,heard the crack as the handle and wood gave under his strength.

His eyes widened as he froze in place.

Every attempted breath felt like something attempting to suction his chest.

His nose itched, tingled, burned.

He tried to pull his hands from Debbie's.

He sneezed, his violent movement an involuntary convulsion that sent him curling inwards before recoiling backwards, a desperate attempt at sparing Debbie from him then shoving. His head cracked against the counter with uncontrolled force, wood splintering and diorite cracking under the viltrumite's power. The shards of broken materials flew through the air.

The sound echoed in his deaf ear again and again as if his mind was an echo chamber, a pale version of Sherlock Holmes' mind palace.

A blink.

Nolan's nostrils flared.

He smelled blood.

His ichor froze in his veins. The cold irradiated from his heart as it clenched, as the stone that reminded him how human he had been - still was - human.

Debbie.

___
A/N:
If this story tickled your brain, you're welcome to leave a comment (I'd love if it's some type of constructive critisism) that challenges my persepctive on what I wrote /(°w°)/!!!

Chapter 3

Lids slowly slid over orbs as he turned his head towards the only other person in the house.

She, his wife, was still there, curled over herself, an arm braced over her face having protected her from any flying shard. Nolan watched as she opened her eyes, watched as she looked at him first before even moving. He watched as her worried look deepened then relaxed as his eyes met hers.

Watched as her body relaxed, watched as tears of blood blossomed from a light graze before it trailed down the side of her face.

The sight - the smell, the very odour of blood - her blood - threatened to unmoor that pillar he'd been desperately clinging to ever since he woke with memories of a human and missing near decades of memory, something cracked, splintered-

A blink. Had he blinked? That would explain the

A breath.

White uniforms. Trainee uniforms. Red, red redred covering the ground, spreading. Small bodies that stopped moving, part of their head missing. Images superimposed themselves, that of- of children, teenagers, adults, skin colour and hair colour ranging from all normal Viltrum colours to even colours that clearly denoted them as being less than ¾ Viltrumite with blue and pink hair.

He licked his lips. Tongue heavy, wet, pasty. Foreign. Tasting like coffee and saliva.

Air pushed through his lungs, the organs expanding, feeling tight, heavy, wrong. Didn't feel effortless as he'd expected. as he'd learned in that space faring life. Had forgotten how human panic was, how it made being hurt, made breathing a chore.

"-Ebbie?" the sound -the name - came from somewhere, buried, half slurred, tickling a tongue clumsy and numb from the tethers of that vail still clinging to him. "'Re you ok? -didn't hurt you, 'nid I?" he continued barely being able to hear his own voice, barely able to recognise his voice and what he was trying to convey.

Concern?

He was indeed concerned for his-

Debbie - his Debbie -, his magnificent strong Debbie, caught the hand he'd been reaching out at her with. It was warm. Solid. Pressing against his skin in a manner more real to him than his very concept of self.

The touch - her touch burned, burned with the cold of the arctic, the cold of space, the heat of a star - of love - as it anchored him back to his body. Brought him back to the body he was still afraid to wield, to own, to have. That felt too dangerous to be real.

Nolan stared at their joined hands. Hand. Her hand. Holding his hand. stared at the smaller, thinner fingers wrapped around his without hesitation, without fear, with trust he in him he could not mirror.

Why wasn't she pulling away? Shouldn'tshepullaway?

The warmth of her skin pulled him back-

There was blood trailing down her face, it was hisfault. his fault.

So why did she not-?

Why did she stare at him with eyes full of-

Undeserved-

Trust.

Trust that made him afraid.

Brown. Beautiful dark brown irises stared back at him. Debbie's eyes. Familiar yet all too foreign to the man he was. To the Viltrumite that had served, still served for now the empire he'd known for millennia. Too foreign to that lonely elderly man that had known retirement for a mere two years before waking up in the body of a god.

Despite his scattered attention, the brown that was no doubt fixed entirely on him, on Nolan. On the undeserving natural disaster he was, pulled at him, pulled him from this distant dull state of being in a manner more forceful than touch had.

She was still, stillstillstill touching him. Even though he'd- even when he'd-

He was a monster yet she loved him.

She doesn't know. echoed in his mind.

Trust.

That-

The word. The thought. Felt heavier with every repetition. Cutting through the fog. Made his eyes widen, made his eyes focus on that single radiant being. That woman. That human.

His mate, his wife, a being that belonged to a race he should consider mere amusing pets.

The image of Debbie, the vision of this angel, came in and out of focus. I love you Debbie, he thought.

"I know, I love you too Nolan. Please let me help you."

His eyes burned.

Help him? Nolan was destruction incarnate. His eyes burned, why did they burn?

His eyes still fixed on hers despite his attention having been drawn the sight of their hands in his peripheral vision once more, widened at the realization. His vision blurred, burned. Eyes widened as that person, who he had lied to the last two days, had most likely lied to the last twenty years, showed what he had not dared believed or imagine, showed him something he couldn't reciprocate, couldn't hold because if he moved his hands would start shaking and his heart would burn and they'd kill him for showing weakness.

Because even the third strongest of the empire was held to the highest standards.

Strength was everything. Strength meant survival.

Meant worth.

They didn't tolerate weakness- Not in body, not in mind, not in spirit. The empire did not tolerate, it expected.

Expected strength. Purged the weak.

- compassion was weakness and weakness meant death and he'd-

Even he- Even pure blooded Viltrumites- And he was amongst the strongest… out of the few that remained. He was one of the strongest of the empire.

Third. Fucking third, and he dearly hoped he still was because-

His Debbie was still there, still next to him. Talking to him. Saying words he couldn't hear.

Each blink felt like a return to awareness.

"Nolan? Honey, are you back with me?" Her voice felt like a blessing, heavy, pulling him back to awareness, blanketing- no smothering his thoughts.

Nolan tried to respond. Tried to form words that would reassure her, that would make her leave - because the less she knew, the less- … She still wouldn't be safe would she? -

Debbie's grip tightened. Not painfully. Not to something as inhuman as he. But with determination that gave him direction as much as an order from Viltrum ever had.

His vision blurred, his eyes burned - eyes were not supposed to burn - Viltrumites don't - He hadn't cried since- since…- wet, warm- burning trails carved themselves against his skin.

Debbie.

Debbie was watching him. She saw- was seeing- This wasn't like last night. His mate was awake this time-

The air shifted.

---

Debbie shifted forward, ignored the burning at her temple, ignored the blood sliding down the side of her face. Nolan needed her now. His eyes were on her, unfocused, his expression horrified as he cowered backwards into the broken cabinet, the kitchen island cracking as he pushed back making him freeze. His eyes watered, he started breathing again, shaken, a worrying too-quick staccato.

She shoved back the realization of what Viltrum really was, of what system Nolan had grown up in, that he clearly saw how wrong it was, how hurt he had been by it, and yet she saw how he couldn't bring himself from not believing in it still.

Her mind was racing but she forced it to slow, forced herself to focus on now, on the man in front of her who was falling apart. The man she'd loved for twenty years. The man who'd held Mark as a baby with such careful tenderness. The man who'd learned to make her coffee just right, who'd fumbled through human courtship with endearing earnestness.

That man was still in there. She could see him, drowning beneath something vast and terrible.

"Nolan," she said, keeping her voice steady, calm. The same voice she'd used when Mark had nightmares as a child. "Honey, look at me. Just look at me."

His eyes found hers but they were wild, unfocused. Like he was seeing through her to something else. Something that terrified him.

The cabinet behind him cracked further and she saw him flinch at the sound, saw fresh horror flood his expression. He was afraid of himself. Afraid of what he might do.

She shoved back the realisation of what Viltrum really was, of what system Nolan had grown up in, that he clearly saw how wrong it was, how hurt he had been by it, and yet she saw how he couldn't bring himself from not believing in it still.

"I -on't want to hurt you…" slipped out from Nolan's teeth.

---

"I know, I know, shhhh" Debbie said.

Had he said that out loud?

Nolan felt his lids repeatedly sliding up and down against his eyeballs, it wasn't painful - wasn't yet felt as if it could. A single lash was all that was needed to irritate his eye, no it wasn't, not anymore. Not as a viltrumite.

He rolled his shoulder backwards, trying to loosen the joint, trying to relax his damn body.

Treated wood snapped.

Nolan's eyes snapped back into focus, the view he had of the living room cleared it self. Debbie in his peripheral winced.

Instinctual.

The rest of the second passed at a snail's pace, his throat felt as if a heavy object had lodged itself in it.

His hand - his left hand, the hand opposite to where Debbie stood- rose to his t-shirt collar, he felt the short sleave around his upper arm. He always hated being hyper-aware. It gripped the fabric into a tight fist, seams straining, the cotton it was made of nearly giving. The t-shirt was already a tight fit, and the fabric pulled taut across his back and shoulders.

His sight blurred again. Burned.

Slowly. Gently, he pulled his right hand from Debbie's.

Something trailed down his cheeks.

Pads trailed his cheekbone, his fingers felt cold, impossibly cold against his face.

He pulled his hand back.



Nolan stared.

Wet.

His fingers were wet.

His vision blurred again. Why wasn't it, this leakage -weakness- stopping?

Wet.



Tears.





In front of Debbie…

His chest felt tight. His stomach revolted, liquid - coffee sloshing uncomfortably.

His right side felt warmer. Felt warm.

Debbie- Debbie.

His wife. A wife- he had a wife, he had family he wasn't alone- hehadlovematelovefamilymineminemineminepleasedon'tleaveneverleaveIdon'twantthecoldpleasestay.

His mate, his love, his wife, was there at his side, sitting next to him, back against a cabinet of the counter he'd broken-

Nolan-

Nolan couldn't think-

His right hand dropped to his lap.

His head tilted on his right shoulder, eyes fixed on perfect perfect Debbie, so beautiful so warm so loving-

His hold loosened.

He couldn't think-



He stopped breathing.

He stopped blinking.

The kitchen, the island he'd broken - all of it melted- no, washed away, like a water colour painting that had been thrown into water.

The red redredredred at the woman's temple was like a light house in the middle of a dark night at sea. Impossible to ignore, flashing by every few moments, telling him- he couldn't hear.

Warm.

He stared at this dark haired, fair skinned woman, trailed the faint crow's feet at the corner of her eyes stared at the lines born from a perfect nose that trailed down, a curved line that swept towards her chin. Traces- of a life lived, a life enjoyed.

A life of smiles.

The vision of this angle blurred, lava trailed down his cheeks.

His sight cleared.

He stared.

Just… stared.

Beautiful.

Her appearance- She- Her- Debbie, felt more real than- How- Why did her face, this woman, feel more real that his own self?

Every detail felt impossibly important. The way the morning -was it still morning?- light caught in her hair, how it emphasized that small crease between her eyebrows.

Worry? Why-

His eyes met redredredred.

It felt important.

Something in his chest constricted.

His body felt numb. His body was hypersensitive. His muscles were all relaxed.

Thump.

Thump thump.

Thump thump.

There was gentle pressure on his shoulders. His side felt colder.

Thump thump.

He didn't resist. His body moved at the woman's -hislovelovelove's- prompting, at her direction, following without thought, without any resistance.

Thump thump.

Suddenly, between a beat and the next, her lap was there. Solid and real and safe.

His eyes unfocused before meeting her eyes.

His back was to the floor. A chunk of the brocken counter was under his back. There. Reminding him-

Of what?

This position felt right. Right in a way that-

Oh.

Thump thump.

Fingers found their way to his hair.

Nolan's eyes closed.

The touch sent sparks of elation throughout his entire body. Gentle strokes that pulled small knots a part, sending ripples of pleasure-

He was seventy five and dead and so so alone and this tenderness, this remider of humanity's potential for connection that didn't just destroytearyouappart was… incomprehensible, foreign, was a forgotten dream, a jump back to childhood-

He was two thousand twenty something years old and this was the first time gentleness didn't feel like a test. A trap.

Homehomehomelovehomemine…

Fingers traced patterns into his scalp, branding him. Soothing. Rhythmic. Lovely.

Thump thump.

In Debbie's lap. In her gentle, tender touch. All of him loved her. All of him trusted her.







Nolan jolted upwards as something sounded -tooclosetooclose-

The vibration sounded again. Just a phone. His body relaxed.

_____

"You're not… going to work?" He managed, the question heavy on his tongue, his voice coming out as a tired, fractured, tired rumble.

"I took the day off," his lovely wife replied simply. Tone implying he shouldn't worry, saying she had everything under control. Her voice was clear, awake. Aware.

Nolan felt horrible, a sharp, bitter pang of guilt reverberating throughout his entire body. He felt small, felt infirm, like a beaten down child, unable to move without expanding great effort. He laid still as Debbie shed the clothes she'd intended to wear to work earlier that morning.

Between blinks, his eyes drifted to the alarm clock.

10:26 AM.

When she slid into bed besides him, the mattress barely shifted. She reached for him, hands cool and certain. Patient in a way that felt undeserved. Patient in a way he would have reveled in all those centuries ago as he was trained- With grace that felt incongruous with her size - Nolan momentarily letting gravity lose it's hold on him - she prompted him to move. Manoeuvring his dead-weight gently, as if he were to shatter at the slightest brisk movement.

Debbie -beautiful, magnificent, radiant- didn't just lie next to him; No, she claimed him, pulling his massive frame inwards until he was cradled against her chest.

Small.

Steady.

Found.

The sight, Nolan mused, must have been hilarious to anyone who could witness it- a man as tall as a standard doorway, built as a brick-house, cradled to her chest by a small, slight Korean-American woman.

Nolan let out a breath he felt he'd been holding since the counter shattered. He tucked his chin, pressing his face into the soft crook of her neck. She smelled like peppermint tea and the lingering scent of the lavender detergent. It was the scent of home - not the house with the broken kitchen, but the woman herself.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled, the words muffled against her breast. The fog in his mind gone, replaced by the rhythmic, tactile reality of her pulse against his cheek.

"Don't," she whispered, her voice a steady vibration he could feel in his own chest. Her fingers didn't stop their slow, methodical trek through his hair. She wasn't just petting him; she was untangling him, smoothing out the jagged edges of his psyche.

He felt the bed dip and groan under his weight, a reminder of his own bulk, but Debbie didn't seem to notice the burden. She adjusted her hold, her small arms locking around his broad shoulders with a strength that felt impossible, yet absolute.

"The counter..." he started, his mind trying to drift back to the violence of the dissociation, to the mess he'd made.

"Is just stone, Nolan," she interrupted gently, her thumb tracing the shell of his ear. "Stone can be replaced. You're the one that's irreplaceable."

Nolan huffed, "To hear you it's like I'm not even Omni-man."

The joke felt heavy. Brittle. It was a name- A title, that should carry weight, impossible weight and expectations in this still foreign world. It demanded invincibility. But in this quiet bedroom, in that American sub-urban house.

It sounded like a lie.

She didn't laugh, her breathing stopped before resuming in a controlled calm, fingers rhythmically stroking his hair.

A peck landed at the crown of his head, lips lingering there.

"Good," she murmured, sounding like she was whispering them directly in his ear, his senses still sensitive -foreign- despite having lived in this inhuman body for millennia. "Because I married you, Nolan. That man, new to earth and it's customs. A ridiculous man. You were like a newborn calf-"

"I don't think I was that bad," he paused, pondering the thought for a moment - remembering the fact this was his first such relationship, in 2000 years - "Was I?"

A genuine laugh escaped her, "Nolan, you were so cute," a snort, "remember how you uprooted an entire bush of roses because you'd just learned what gifting roses was a sign of love and courtship?"

"Hey-"

"You'd stand on my front porch," she continued, tone light and fond.

"It's what a respectful prospect would do!"

"-Like you were expecting a military briefing instead of a date."

"It was a formal occasion-" he tried defending that past self he couldn't remember being, pride giving way to a desperate, fumbling need to stay in the conversation. Human memories helping him more than the ones spent serving Viltrum.

"And the way you'd walk me to the door," Debbie teased, her fingers twirling around a strand as if to mark her point, before dancing through his hair. "You didn't just walk, you marched two paces behind me like a bodyguard. I thought for sure you were going to salute my father when he opened the door."

"I mean, it was your father-" Nolan started, his voice trailing off. He searched for a detail, a name, a face, but found only the white noise of his own panic. "He'd... have demanded no less- Right?"

"He was a mailman, Nolan," she said softly, though the humour didn't leave her voice. "He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and holding a spatula."

Nolan pushed himself up on his elbows, the sudden movement causing the mattress to groan under them. For a moment, the heat off Debbie's chest, the sudden cold -he wasn't cold, hasn't been cold since ending up in this body, hadn't felt cold since his powers woke- and distance made him feel adrift in space. "Exactly! The spatula of doom! It was a threat. I felt threatened. Really. Hey, stop laughing. That's no laughing matter, Debbie," he exclaimed, brows scrunched slightly trying to convey how offended he must have been.

Debbie's face radiated with humour, lighting the room with her amusement born from Nolan's embarrassment. Chest heaving as she met his eyes with teary eyes, remembering the beginning of their years together that were still out of reach to Nolan.

"Nolan," she gasped, "he'd been cooking when you came to pick me up for our date," she huffed out, reached up to tug playfully at his earlobe.

Nolan froze, corners of his lips tugging upwards.

Debbie's hand moved from his ear to his cheek, her thumb smoothing the skin just below his eye. Her gaze turned soft, the humour replaced by a fierce, quiet devotion. "You were, you are... Even back then, when you were marching two paces behind me like you were ready to catch me if I balance on those high heels… you were doing it because you wanted me safe. I saw that. I always saw that."

The guilt returned, a cold, thick, heavy tide rising in his throat. He didn't- He didn't remember any of that. He only knew the mission and the static of a life he hadn't actually lived but was now forced to own. He felt like a thief wearing a dead man's skin, reaping the rewards of a love he hadn't earned. he felt like a has-been, old and decrepit. 75 and 2000 trying to court a woman, a human that was too young now and had been even younger then.

Nolan had taken advantage of her-

"Debbie," he started, his voice cracking. He wanted to tell her. He wanted to say 'He was not the man who married you.' He wanted to say 'He was a conqueror, and a retiree who woke up in a dream in a mission that he doesn't remember taking.'

Nolan rolled off Debbie, back against the mattress. minutes passed, Debbie, tentatively caressing his chest, then his hair, soothing that part of him he was desperately trying to push away.

---

Cecil scowled as his eyes scanned the multitude of screens, sound of typing filling the room as agents coordinated with regional forces, tracking trends, anomalies and other factors they'd have to keep an eye on to keep earth safe.

"Sir," Cecil's head snapped towards the agent that spoke, "Class 8 incident, Brazil, Manaus, approximately forty minutes ago - we're getting confirmation lag from the regional relay."

"Those wanna be invaders again?"

"Yes sir. The very same," Donald pronounced with his usual professional aplomb. "Portals are the same as Shanghai and the Chicago yesterday. We've got three open simultaneously, city centre and two flanking positions approximately two kilometres out. Local emergency services have initiated evacuation protocol in the immediate radius."

"Sir, secondary portals appear to have spawned in the area," Charles said from the spectral analysis unit behind the bridge Cecil was standing on.

Cecil, didn't say anything, merely looking at the relevant screens. The satellite feed was clear enough. the sight of streets darkening with their ilk and the sight of explosions lighting them up like damn fireworks, sending smoke through the air, obfuscating sight of some spaces for the next few minutes.

The director of the GDA frowned, "Casualty count?"

"None confirmed yet, sir. But estimation is approximately 200 and rising," Donald replied after looking down at his tablet. "Portals are flanking the primary evacuation routes-"

"No superhero assets in the immediate area. Nearest registered with us is-" Amanda started, typing on her keyboard.

"Flecha Verde, in São Paulo," Donald finished for her.

"Sir, attack patters consistent with the two previous incidents." Said Clarice.

"Get her on the line. And tell her she better bring her 'team' this time," Cecil said, already moving towards the tactical display, "ETA?"

"Fourteen minutes sir," said an agent.

"Damn it, teleport her in. And what of the guardians?" He asked the room at large.

"Immortal is occupied by a class 7 incident in Bali," and agent said, "Darkwing is in Mexico City, confirmed ETA 34 minutes." Said the one next to the first. "Martian Man, available, ETA 12 minutes." "Aquarius, Unavailable." "Red Rush, unavailable."

"War Woman, confirmed ETA 9 minutes."

"Sir-"

"I know Donal. They won't be enough. Richards, give me an estimation of the forces we're facing."

"3000, sir. Tanks 45 and mounting, varied infant-"

"I'm not asking for an exhaustive estimate, Richards."

"Yes, sir. With how they've set up the portals…" Richard paused, the way one did when he or she was about to relay disquieting information, "we're gonna need a class 8 level powerhouse, sir"

The sound of keyboards being tapped resumed.

"Damn it, Three days after I gave the man a week off," he muttered, fishing his phone out of his jacket pocket. He'd glimpsed the list, all of the agents he'd have chosen were occupied with incidents of their own or recovering from previous incidents. He thought of these damn aliens attacking 3 times this week, seemingly getting better every-time. "Get Flecha Verde moving," he said. "Full GDA support package- satellite up-link, real-time tactical, evacuation coordination through the regional relay. She doesn't go in blind."

"Yes sir."

"What's our teleportation satellite coverage over the Manaus grid?"

"Relay Seven has line of sight," Amanda said, already pulling it up. "Deployment window is tight- we've got a seventeen-minute optimum, then the geometry degrades."

"Assets?"

"Field Team Six is on standby in Miami. They've been briefed on the previous portal incidents from Shanghai and were at the Chicago as support for the Guardians and Teen Team." Donald hesitated. "Sir, against a Class 8 with three-"

"I'm aware of what they're going up against, Donald." Cecil's voice was level. He was always aware, that was the job. "Get them suited and in the deployment bay. I want them through that window in five minutes."

Cecil Stedman looked at the screens again, "What's civilian density near the portal?"

"High. Market day, sir."

"They're herding them," Cecil snapped, "Get me local emergency coordinators on a direct line. And continue watching the portals, I want to keep an eye on those, we don't know what else will cross the portals. And I don't want anyone to end up as a lab specimen."

"Redirecting satellites 34b and 67a's cameras now."

Cecil stood with his hands clasped behind his back and looked at the deployment window counting down on the secondary screen. Looked at the casualty estimate ticking upward with the mechanical patience of a number that didn't care what it meant. Thought about Debbie Grayson calling the GDA's contractor line three days ago about kitchen reconstruction, and the call after that one, her voice carrying the particular quality of a woman who had decided something and was informing him of it rather than asking, telling him to pull the surveillance.

He'd pulled it.

He thought about Nolan, Omni-man's efficacy of four days ago, of how suddenly it had tanked.

He'd thought about that decision several times since.

He thought Of Omni-man's capabilities, of the projections they had made.

Still stronger than any other hero, still faster too.

"Casualty projection if current engagement pace holds for the next thirty minutes?" Cecil said.

And in a job where making the wrong decisions meant a body count with a lot more zeros than he had in his bank account…

The number that came back were the kind of number that made the decision for you, that was, if you let numbers make these decisions. Cecil didn't let numbers make decisions. Cecil made decisions and used numbers to justify them to oversight committees after the fact.

"This is not me walking back the vacation," he said. To the room maybe. To himself. To the operational record, if anyone was keeping one, "Note that."

"Yes, sir," Donald said, neutrally. Donald had been with him long enough to know what that meant and long enough to know better than to comment on it.

Cecil unlocked the phone and dialled the civilian contact line for the Grayson residence. He had it in his personal contacts, which was a security violation he had personally authorised because some assets warranted direct access and Nolan Grayson's wife was one of them. She'd earned it. Twenty years of knowing things she wasn't supposed to know and keeping them with a discretion that would have made half his senior staff look like undisciplined cadets.

Debbie picked up on the second ring.

"Cecil," she said. Not a question. Never a question with that woman. She had a way of saying his name that communicated she already knew why he was calling and was giving him the courtesy of letting him say it himself.

"I need to know if he can work," Cecil said. No greetings. No pleasentries. She didn't need it and he didn't have time for it. "Not at a hundred percent. Not even at seventy. I need to know if he can show up and not make it worse."

A pause. He heard her breathe once, controlled. "What is it?"

"Manaus. Same species, three portal clusters, coordinated herding pattern. Casualty projection is inside four figures if we don't get something there in the next ten minutes, and my best available asset in the region is a class 3 that's going to arrive to late to make a dent."

"Ask your question Cecil," Debbie said.

"Debbie, can he work?"

The pause this time was longer. Cecil stood in the middle of his operations room and waited, which was not a thing he did comfortably but which he had learned to do for a small number of people. Debbie Grayson was on that list for the same reason she was in his personal contacts.

"I'll ask him," she said.

"I need an answer in three minutes."

"Then you'll have one in five," she replied, and put him on hold.

Cecil handed his phone to Donald without looking at him and moved back to the tactical display. Flecha Verde was on comms, already briefed, waiting on the teleport lock. The deployment window was at eleven minutes. The casualty estimate had climbed another forty.

Three minutes and forty seconds later, the phone was handed back to him, Debbie Grayson had come back on the line.

"He'll go."

Her voice had her usual quality it had when she'd made a decision, stubborn and with no hint of second-guessing it.

"Send me the coordinates," she added. "He won't use the bracelet right now."

Cecil noted that and did not ask about it. "Sending now."

A beat.

"You pull him if you think it's necessary," she said, and under the words was something that was not quite a threat and not quite a plea and was entirely Debbie. Protective in the way she'd always been protective, the way that had occasionally made Cecil's operational planning marginally more complicated and that he had long since accepted as a fixed cost of having Nolan Grayson begrudgingly follow his directives for twenty years.

"Understood," Cecil said.

He handed the phone back to Donald and looked at the clock.

---

Five minutes later, a white and red blur appeared on one of the feeds, sending an entire green and gold squad of the invading aliens flying, bloodied bodies and dismembered bodies visible from multiple angles, local cameras, having been tapped.

The analysts at the back of the room didn't say anything. They didn't need to. It was obvious to anyone that had eyes to see. The next few seconds already wrote themselves in their collective minds, having already witnessed what that specific hero could do countless times.

"Omni-Man on site," Amanda confirmed, because protocol was protocol regardless of how the fact had already been made clear, and Cecil had built this organisation on calling obvious things out. Obvious thing that had a way of becoming disputed if not correctly catalogued.

Cecil watched.

Watched as formations broke, watched as tanks exploded.

Formations broke with the particular explosive manner of things encountering a force they hadn't been designed to account for. A tank went up. Another followed before the smoke from the first had fully committed to a direction. The gold-armoured infantry that had been pressing the southern corridor dissolved as a tactical unit in the space of seconds, became individual problems being solved individually, and Cecil watched the cascade of it with the detached attention of a man who had spent 20 years watching Omni-man fight and had gotten used to the sight of his peculiar brand of brutality.

Minutes passed, Omni-man carrying civilians in the hot zone to it's edges in between destructing enemy lines. Still less efficient than he had been a month ago. But this was still better than Shanghai, better than Hong Kong, but it was not the version of this man Cecil kept in his baseline projections.

Cecil kept watching.

"War Woman on site," sounded a beat later.

Cecil watched her come in from the north, the feeds clear enough to catch the arc of her mace before it connected with the nearest tank. The vehicle left the ground. It landed on a group of spear and gun wielding aliens that had been pressing toward the main evacuation corridor, agents directing the many panicking civilians to safety, and the evacuation corridor opened up.

Good.

"Martian Man, on site."

In the western cluster, visibly in support to Flecha Verde, the Guardian could be seen phasing, moving through surfaces that bodies were not supposed to move through. Flecha Verde had been holding the market district's western edge with the admirable, focused tenacity of someone operating significantly above their weight class, which Cecil had noted and which he intended to address in her next operational review in terms that were more complimentary than his usual register. She'd bought Martian Man the seconds he needed to orient. The flanking line along the market district lost cohesion in the way flanking lines lost cohesion when a variable they hadn't accounted for came through the middle of them from a direction walls were supposed to prevent.

On the adjacent screen, Omni-Man was already moving through the eastern flank in the way he usually moved and not like he had the two days before Cecil gave him time off. Which had been the answer to the question Cecil had been holding since he'd given the man leave - whether three days of whatever had been happening in the Grayson household had touched the part of Nolan Grayson and had fixed him, now it was just to hope that progress was permanent.

Six minutes and forty seconds into the engagement and the GDA had preliminary data.

"Efficiency assessment," he said.

Clarice was already running it, pulling metrics from the multi feed overlay her team used for agent field assessments. "Combat response time is down from baseline, sir. Approximately-" She paused, recalculating, rechecking numbers before pronouncing them aloud to the rest of the room. "Twenty-one percent below baseline. Up from forty-seven."

Twenty-one percent below baseline for Nolan Grayson was still a number that made everything else on the board look like a sternly worded letter of concern. Cecil didn't say that.

"He's improved," Donald said, something in his voice that wasn't quite surprise but was adjacent to it.

"He has his mind in the game now," Cecil said.

Omni-Man had hit the infantry feeding through it on arrival, before orienting to the main engagement. Cecil had watched the first three seconds of his movement and seen the decision in it, the field read, the priority assessment, the flanking portal addressed before the centre because leaving a flank active while engaging the centre was how you extended an operation that should have been shorter. That was sequencing. That was a mind that had walked in, looked at the shape of the problem, and solved it in the right order.

Tactical, not reactive.

Good to have a confirmation.

"Casualty count," Cecil said.

"Holding at two-fourteen, sir. Projection is revising downward."

He'd take that.

"Evacuation status?"

"Main corridor is clear. Secondary route, northern edge, still compromised-"

---

The three clusters of open, swirling portals had been visible from the sky.

In Shanghai there had been one.

Move, filled his mind.

His body knew what to do. His body had always known what to do.

Two thousand years of what to do, made muscle memory become facts, intrinsic of what he was, fundamental in the way he was a Viltrumite.

He punched through a tank.

The golden metal caved the way it always caved when Nolan pushed, the way everything he touched caved eventually, inevitably and totally.

Move.

A cluster of infantry - cluster… how, mathematical - had set up a kill corridor along the main evacuation route, funnelling civilians between two firing lines with the efficiency of beings that had done this before. Done this to other worlds. Other cities. Other people who hadn't known it was coming until the portals opened and the sky bled.

Nolan hit them from above, velocity converting to impact in a way that sent the nearest six into the air and the pavement cracking downward in a shallow crater.

He was back in the air before the dust settled.

A blink, a breath.

"A sigh," he mumbled, the words tinged with something he didn't have time to catalogue, distaste maybe, sadness maybe, the human part of him doing what the human part of him always did and commenting on things, offering opinions nobody had asked for including himself. Anger not far behind and disappointment never far behind, always precisely one step back.

He turned his head, his eyes focused.

There, a group of agents, geared and shooting at the green, gold-wearing insectoids from a rooftop. He gazed down, another group, this time baring a regional emblem on their shoulders, directing the pathetic humans to safety.

Fury.

Pathetic humans.

His lip curled.

How could Nolan think this way?

The thought, a rebuke of viltrumite selfhood he had momentarily fallen back into arrived in the same instant a sound hit him from the left.

Not sound like noise. Not something he had encountered in a long, long time. It was a directed thing. Focused. An ultra-sound weapon, he understood distantly, the kind of distant that was always your sole real companion subjugating a planet's population with the characteristic might - and oh how the use of these words burned - the kind that some of these populations had discovered too late to save themselves.

His inner ear had exploded.

That description felt imprecise. His inner ear, his balance-

He was Viltrumite. He should be able to withst-

Nolan hit the ground.

A roar left his lips, torn from him from somewhere deep and savage. It came from the part of him that had been hit. A part of him that was unused to be hit. A part of him that was still learning relearning to be human. Quiet.

The sound cut off.

He pressed one palm flat against the cracked asphalt.

Located the dancing streets with the peculiar attention of a mind attentive in battle and refused to buckle under outside pressure.

His sight was unwilling to cooperate.

Up.

His body didn't wait for permission.

It never did, trained as he had been since the Purge. That was the thing about two thousand years of fighting, about what two thousand years did to a body that had been trained to reached the pinnacle, to the carefully architected structure of learned reflexes and response - This was just like after the scourge virus, killing killing killing things that were not Viltrumi- human-, it meant that even with the world tilting at angles, even with his inner ear vibrating in a frequency that turned his skull into a bell, the body just moved.

Got up. Because the body - Nolan, knew that down was death and death was failure and failure was-

He was up. He was standing.

Vision swimming. He let it swim. He could function with swimming vision. He had.

He'd done worse than this.

He'd survived worse than this.

His eyes found the shooter, had already locked on the instant before the effects hit, had stayed on, as he fell. Nolan had snarled, a loud thing he did not hear over the ringing, a thing he felt deep in his chest.

Nolan cracked his neck, slow, careful, giving it plenty of time to hit him once more. A taunt.

Nolan bared his teeth.

Nolan rocketed forwards, tearing though the insects.

This felt wrong.

The first one didn't have time to register him before his fist drove through its chest cavity, ribs splaying outward along the path of least resistance, - a still human part of him wanted to close its eyes and ignore what his body was engaging in, this was a necessity, this beings had to be crushed for daring to- the sternum cracking clean down its centre seam, the organs behind it finding sudden, violent rearrangement. His momentum carried him through it, the body folding around his arm and then off it, the exit messier than the entry in the way these things always were.

The two behind it he hit simultaneously, a palm to each, the force transferring through their skulls in a way that compressed the bone inward before outward pressure corrected, fracture lines spider-webbing from the point of impact. They dropped.

He had caught two by their faces, squeezed. It had been as easy as squeezing a grape between two fingers.

One had fallen, Nolan stepped down on it's chest.

Nolan breathed, nostrils flaring. His heart felt heavy.

A pause, his eyes shifted downwards on the last remaining one. It was on it's behind, cowering backwards the was maggots did when they learned their ends were near, he appeared next to it, arm lashing sideways, crushing it's skull, painting the air with a crimson arc.

His vision still swam.

He turned, picket up the apparatus these insects had dared use on him. These insects that dared attempt invading a planet Nolan had claimed when they had already failed.

The technology was different than the guns he barely recalled of the past encounter he had had when he had first faced these presumptuous invading worms.

This wasn't the incremental improvement between two deferent deployments… this was blatantly different, the technological gap was obvious at a glance.

Nolan studied it, vision still twisting at the edges, nausea pushed down, down down because that was a show of weakness and weakness was sin.

Studied it with the keen eye of a curious engineer turned warrior of an empire - Viltrum is a great empire - precise and searching, incapable of dismissing curious improvements. The emitter housing was distinctly different. The resonance chamber geometry was different. The power cell configuration was different in ways that weren't about miniaturisation or material substitution but about fundamental understanding, about a design philosophy that had branched off-

Five days.

Five day.

And they developed sound weapons this effective.

This much improvement in five days.

Five days since he'd first seen these maggots pour through a portal with their phalanx formations and their energy pikes and their coordinated attack formations, and in those five days, on earth's side of the equation, they had achieved- He looked at the shattered buildings, at the still smoking tanks in the streets under, at the the human bodies being carried away from the center most of the action-

This.

His jaw tightened.

He put his fist through the emitter housing.

Nolan crushed it, sparks and oil flying, one particular spray hitting him in the eye. He dropped it, the materials warped beyond recognition, reverse engineering would be near impossible with this one, he whipped the black oil off his face, whipping his hand in a way that got all the liquid off, and launched off, tearing through dozens with every second that passed.

Soon enough they started retreating.

The logical answer came to Nolan.

The last open portal was closing.

The ratio.

Five days.

Time.

Nolan's body felt lighter than it had for the last few days.

gravitation.

The wind brushed his hair.

space.

If they developed more powerful weapons… Mark!

An energy plasma hit him in the side of the head. The culprit was torn in two before Nolan was able to blink.

His pai- human son.

A son, a part of him he had just learned and accepted and loved the existence of-

Mark didn't have the density yet. Didn't have the accumulated physical conditioning of years of training in powers that had been active since childhood, didn't have the instinctive threat assessment that came from having your life depend of being able to read the moods of a Viltrumite standing at the top of the most elitist, competitive empire to ever exist. Didn't have the scar tissue, the hastily developed reflexes, the specific education in surviving things that were constantly thrown in his face.

Mark was still weak. Mark was still soft. Still forming. Still far from the thousands of years he had yet to live.

And if the series held even a fragment of its trajectory, if any of those half-remembered scenes were going to happen in this world as they had in that show, Mark would be in the field, probably already was being recruited by the S.H.I.E.L.D wannabes.

Would be in a suit sooner than Nolan was ready to accept.

Would be standing in front of a similar portal, or several of these, with these maggots and their rapidly evolving hardware and their coordinated tactical doctrine and their apparent access to all the time in the world on their side of a spatial tear-

No.

The thought arrived not as a question, not as an anguished spiral, not as another voice in the crowded dissonant chamber of his skull adding itself to the debate about what he was and what he was supposed to be and what he owed to whom.

It was simple.

Clean.

No.

Because it was Mark.

Because it was his son, a boy who had flown in circles in the night sky laughing at his own mistakes, who had said just like Dad described about advice Nolan couldn't remember giving, who had sat across the breakfast table and turned red to his ears over a joke about William, who had looked up at the stars with an expression of pure hopeful wonder that had compressed something in Nolan's chest so violently he'd thought his sternum might give. That had accepted the pathetic excuse Nolan had spouted about the broken kitchen when he'd returned from school. The boy that was his, his in a way nothing had ever been.

---

The television had been on for background noise.

That was how it always started. Some mundane reason, the house felt too quiet, or Mark had flipped it on while eating lunch, or Mom had put the news on out of habit while folding laundry, or dad was out there saving the world.

The specific reason didn't matter later. What mattered was that it was on, and they were both in the room when the breaking news banner crawled across the bottom of the screen, white on red.

BREAKING NEW : MANAUS, BRAZIL FIRST APPEARANCE OF OMNI-MAN IN 3 DAYS

Mark's face split into a gring before he'd fully processed the words, "I could help, help dad from now on, I-"

"Only when you get your powers Mark."

"Well, eh, you see," he looked away from the screen, rubbing the back of his neck, "it felt wrong to say it when you know, dad was so…" He looked away, searching for the corect word, not finding it and settling on, "un-dad-" he paused, cutting himself off, "I uh I did," he decided on, grin softening into a small smile on his lips, eyes meeting his mom's.

In the corner of his vision, the footage on the TV was shaky at first, the way phone cameras were in such situations, the footage was swapped for sattelite footage, the presentators talked, discuseed.

She went very still.

The shirt she'd been folding stayed half-folded in her hands. She looked at him the way she looked at things she needed a moment to process, that particular stillness she got, the one that meant she was feeling several things at once and choosing carefully which one to lead with.

"Mark."

"Yeah," he said, voice shakier than he'd meant, setting the pencil he'd been twirling down on the table.

"Since when."

It wasn't quite a question. He knew by that tone, had been on it's receiving end about a million times now.

"Few days ago," he said, which was technically accurate and also vague, and from the look on her face she knew exactly what he was doing with that answer.

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at him for another long moment with that expression that always made him feel approximately nine years old regardless of how tall he'd gotten.

Then she set the half-folded shirt down on the arm of the couch, turned back to the television, and said, with remarkable composure, composure that felt very intimidating. In fact, Mark was certain even his dad would cave under that look, "We're going to talk about this."

"Yeah," Mark agreed.

"Properly."

"Yep."

"After," she said, and nodded at the screen. "When you're father gets back."

Mark turned back to it, the smile still pulling at the corner of his mouth despite himself, warm and involuntary and entirely his father's fault for being, that. And for the powers and for the William thing, actually. Finally asked William out? Mark's ears went pink just remembering it. Unprompted. Over dinner. His dad had looked so pleased with himself about it too, that small smug almost-smile, and his Mom had been absolutely no help whatsoever.

Really insinuating William and Mark were a thing, that was- that was just urgh.

The blur. That specific white-and-red smear at the periphery that resolved, for just a moment, into something recognisable before it moved too fast to be caught by the camera again. The commentators caught it half a second after Mark did.

"- that's Omni-Man, confirmed on-site, coming in from the northeast-"

"There he is," Mark said, and heard the relief in his own voice, uncomplicated and immediate, the same relief he'd felt every time since he was old enough to watch these things and understand what the blurs meant.

His dad was there.

It was going to be fine.

"Dad's really cool," he said to no one in particular.

Mom made a small sound of affirmation.

"Do you- do you need help mom?"

"I won't say no to a little help," she answered him, a small grin splitting her face.

Mark picked up one of his Dad's shirts from the laundrt pile and imediately had to reconsider his entire understanding of how big exacly Dad was. He unfolded it fully, held it up, helt it wider. Blinked. "Damn, these shirts are humongus! Are they really Dad's size? Does he really fit in these? We could put two of me in this! Comfortably, with room for William!"

"Mark."

"I'm just saying."

She was smiling though. He could hear it without looking.

They folded laundry that way for a while, one eye each on the television, the commentators cycling through analysis and speculation in that breathless way they had when something was actively happening and they didn't want to admit they didn't know much more than anyone else watching. Mark matched socks. His dad's socks were also enormous, which was somehow funnier.

"The aliens seem to be retreating after Omni-man's display of for-"

Mark's head snapped up, catching sight of a red and white blur, before the footage shifted again, the final portal was closing now, footage of his dad hovering there, facing it, watching it. If Dad was there, the n everything would be fine.

"-really, reall fucki-"

"Mark."

"-cool."

"Sorry Mom, but like, objectively, you have to admit. If he wasn't my dad I'd think he was the coolest person alive. But he is my dad, so." He considered this. "Still the coolest person alive, actually. I'm keeping it."

"Mm."

"Don't tell him I said that, he'll be insufferable."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

The aliens were retreating. Mark sat up a little straighter, satisfied in a bone-deep way that the last few days had made him realise he'd been missing.

His dad looked like himself again. That was the thing. That was the thing that had been quietly wrong all week, some essential dad-ness that had taken leave-

"Huh? What's he doing?

Dad moved.

The portal closed.

Dad was gone.

"Dad?" his voice didn't sound like his voice. "Mom-?"

He turned to look at her, she was looking at the screen, a horrified look on her face, a hand covering her mouth. She was so still.

His eyes burned.

---

Nolan moved through the portal.

Red all around him.

This was his crossing.

Mind silent.

He felt his moustache twitch.

A single directive guiding his actions.

Interlude - 1

Nolan wanted to rage.

He did not.

The restraint cost him nothing. He had held moons with these hands, had born the scream of atmospherical re-entry without flinching. Near two thousand years of discipline and Debbie Grayson… Debbie made him careful in a way no Viltrumite should be, had ever had to be.

He moved behind her. gathered her against his chest like something he was afraid to hold yet afraid to lose. He kissed her neck. She tilted her head and gave him more of herself in a way a Viltrumite never would, in a way that opened her defences in a way that woke that awe he had never quite managed to smother after that year spent unknowingly courting her.

A human, a soft-boned creature, his mate, his wife the mother of their child - leaning back against him, displaying extraordinary trust in him. A warrior. A Viltrumite. A being that could level this planet's largest mountain chain with ease.

Lips trailed down, caressing her skin.

He stopped.

Stopped a hair's breadth from the dip of her shoulder, cheek and facial hair tickled by her shirt collar.

The sigh came out without warning, slow and heavy. Not tired. Never tired. Nolan was never tired for Viltrumites did not tire.

"Debbie."

Defeated.

That was the word that best described Nolan's current state. The state he had been in since encountering that sorcerer-

She pulled away. Stopping the very fabric of reality as she did.

Turned. Awakening that part of him that ached for her every second that passed.

Her eyes trailed over his features, that peculiar look in her eyes he had slowly learned meant love and warmth and choice- that gaze that analysed his moods quicker than Nolan ever could.

"Nolan? What is it?"

Blue met love-filled brown.

He -, a man who had watched civilisations fall, civilisations fold under the pressure exerted by he and his people, slaughtered and conquered - had no words.

"I love you Debbie."

He watched as worry creased her brow, deepening that fold that was distinctly Debbie yet hated himself for putting it there. Hated, too, that he couldn't stop. That after everything - after the empire, the training, the cullings, the missions, that greatness that made him Viltrumite, that branded the empire's doctrine into his blood - he stood in a human kitchen, in a human house, on a lesser specie's planet, undone.

The empire called it weakness.

He had called it weakness too, once. Stood in front of Grand Regent Thragg in his mind, his leader's imagined words cutting, oh so Viltrum in their logic : attachment corrodes purpose. Love is an unnecessary weight. Cut it.

Nolan had not.

He had not realised that it had been there before the choice was taken, a small infant in his arms, making him open his eyes to that feeling he had had no words for, that pressed against his ribs like a wound he refused to close, warm and feverish and present. A feeling that felt more like strength than what Viltrum had taught and shown him.

His hand trailed down her arm, he felt that small smile quirk his lips, soften his features. A palm rested on her hip.

She was his sun.



And Nolan, who had flown through the hearts of stars, had never thought to be afraid of burning.







Until her.

---

"Yeah!" sounded Mark's small voice.

Nolan stood behind the fence arms crossed, glare directed at the 'game'. He was still uncertain what the human's obsession was with this pathetic play and knew he was very much unsuccessfully hiding his dissatisfaction.

"What are you doing?" Debbie asked, somehow appearing at his side faster than he had estimated she would, a soft hand laid on his elbow, thumb tip tapping his skin.

Nolan could see his son on the side lines, tapping it once on the ground, the sun reflecting on his red helmet, his wide gap toothed smile for all so see, balancing himself from the heel to the tip of his toes, clearly impatient for his turn.

He signed, "If i have to watch this 'game'," he looked up at a cloud, white and fluffy, "I'd have a better view from above."

"You know you can't do that, it's bad enough you're standing over here like a weirdo." her hands left him, "Come sit down."

"This is a waste of everyone's time," he near spat, "there's so much more I could be doing right now." He exclaimed, hand extanded as if to physically show his point.

"Go mark!"

"You're gonna miss it!"

Nolan saw his son shift his hold on the bat, saw him jog towards the place he had to go, Nolan still didn't know what they were called, a short crowched child behind him, that odd characteristic leather glove directed towards the pitcher. Nolan hated being confused.

"Look at mark." Debbie's hand was around his biceps now.

"Strike one!" said the man watching over the 'game'.

"You and I, we made him," she said soft, "He's ours. When he feels joy, we feel joy." he saw her turn her head towards mark's direction "See that look on his face? How can you see that and not feel the same way?"

Nolan looks at mark. Looks at Debbie. Looks back at mark.

Nolan felt Debbie's words land somewhere soft he'd thought was scarred over. He remembered - in the blurred, half-dream way of memories two millennia old - his mother's rare approval. His father's black moustache twitching at the corners. How distant it had all been. How little it had felt like this. How life after he had lost them had been.

"Strike two!"

"As we get older, it's harder to feel that. The weight of the world, it bogs us down." she turned, -Nolan felt his features loosen at her words -, he saw mark run along the track, feet stepping on the white platforms he was still unsure were not tripping hazards for humans, fist punching upwards in the air, wide smile on her face, "Nice one honey!"

Nolan saw Mark smile, wide and gap-toothed. He felt a pang. He felt love he still did not dare to call love at times.

Nolan stared at Debbie, tightening his featured back.

"But our children remind us of the joys in life. It brings us back, shows us what life is all about. This is humanity."

Nolan stared.

Nolan looked.

Nolan smiled, sad and defeated and happy all at once, feeling a way he only ever did when surrounded by his family.

"Yeah, yeah!" some people in the sands exclaimed.

"Get going, Mark!" the adult spotter - Nolan was still unsure of the term utilised for actors in the sport- said, arm spinning in a circular motion that he recognised after ten years on the planet as a directional signal.

Maybe maybe Nolan should try to enjoy the moment. And Debbie was correct-

"Get going!"

"C'mon, Mark!" Nolan exclaimed an arm still over his chest, his other waving his fist in the air in that peculiar human fashion that he was 'rooting' for his son.

Nolan was still unsure what trees had to so with supporting someone but he guessed idioms were supposed to be odd and nonsensical, he had learned many since adopting his writing hobby.

"Go, Mark, go!"

"Go, Mark, go!" the crowd chanted alongside him and Debbie.

"C'mon, buddy, you can do it!" Nolan shouted, near jubillant.

"Go, Mark! Go, Mark!" Debbie at his side

"And safe!" the blue shirt wearing coach exclaimed leaning over the two children, arms going sideways into a T motion.

"Yeah!" Nolan shouted punching the air in front of him, careful to keep the speed of motion under the sound barrier.

Debbie hugged him, jumping into his arms. Nolan was-

Nolan did not have the words.

"Did you see, Dad?" Mark shouted, small squeaky voice and arms spread upwards towards him. "Did you see?"

Nolan picked his boy up, smile wide, and held him up , holding him above himself in the way he did when Mark asked him to 'fly'.

"Aw, that was amazing!" Debbie

"Yeah." he said, happy, content, soft and human, "Yeah, I saw."

Proud.

---

The front door slammed shut, a rushing 16 year old Mark having realised he was going to be late to school.

"The more he grows up…"

Debbie turned to him, inquisitive.

"Mark looks a lot like I did when I was an adolescent myself."

"You did?"

"I did!"

"Well you have to show me now," Debbie mock slapped his arm, "You can't drop this and expect me to not be curious."

"I'm not-"

"Nolan…"

Nolan stayed silent for a second, his eyes met Debbie's.

Nolan broke.

"Fine."

Nolan flew to the room and back in a blink, the air displacement making Debbie's ponytail swing upon his return.

"Whats this?"

Nolan held up the gadget he'd spent his first five years cobbling together. "It's an adaptor." He said simply.

"why would you need this?"

"Well, you see, Viltrumite technology is largely biological and telepathic. We don't carry photo albums or phones. Anything we want to remember - documents, faces, data - gets stored directly in the implant."

He tapped the side of his head.

"When I left Viltrum, I had identification files in here. Identity documents. Face records. Standard imperial reports I've saved throughout my career. But there's no screen on a Viltrumite implant. No way to show anyone what's inside it."

"So you've had this in you since you were what… an infant?"

"Don't be ridiculous Debbie, I didn't have it implanted that soon." Nolan huffed.

Debbie pointed to the object in Nolan's hands, "So this..."

"This pulls the image out. Translates it from the implant's neural storage format into something a human screen can display." He took the adapter and connected it to a small port on a handheld display. "The data's been in my head for twenty years. I just never had a way to let anyone else see it."

He pressed a sequence on the adapter. A soft hum filled the room.

The display lit up with a young Viltrumite face - sharp features, proud posture. Nolan as an adolescent.

Debbie stared. "That's... that's really you?"

"That's my imperial identification image. Every Viltrumite carries one in their implant from adolescence onward." He paused. "I'd almost forgotten what I looked like back then."

Debbie shook her head slowly. "So you've been walking around with baby pictures in your brain this whole time, and you never thought to mention it?"

Nolan shrugged. "I didn't have the adapter."

"Nolan, you know I know you're lying."

Nolan stayed silent, looking away pointedly.

"Nolan."

The viltrumite winced.

"It's not important."

"You're a terrible liar."

"I'm an excellent liar. You're just... perceptive."

Debbie snorted.

"How long."

"… Just a couple of years."

He could feel Debbie's stare like a physical weight.

"A- About ten, eleven year?"

Nolan looked at her in the corner of his eye and saw her smiling.

"fine," she said dropping the subject, "what else do you have stored in that head of yours? And is that ID still valid? I mean you changed a lot from your teenage self. So why do you have it in your head instead of... wherever Viltrumites keep files?"

Nolan didn't answer right away.

"Nolan?"

Nolan did not think of the scourge that made the databanks fail utterly at the very beginning.

"I just wanted a souvenir," he said. Too quickly.

Debbie's eyes narrowed. "Uh-huh."

"What? A man can't be sentimental?"

"A Viltrumite can't, apparently. You just said identification packets aren't usually kept in implants."

"Then why is this one in yours?"

"…There was a paperwork issue."

"A paperwork issue."

"A bureaucratic one. Very boring. You wouldn't be interested.," Nolan carefully did not think of the tenth year of his life where he had spent hunched over documentation with the mission of making the servers and software function without the key people who had been alive to run them. The ones who knew how everything worked. The ones the Scourge had taken.

Debbie studied his face. She didn't push further.

"Okay," she said softly. "Okay."

---

Debbie paused at the bottom of the stair's.

Nolan was leaned back on the sofa in the living room, head thrown back and snoring loudly in a way he rarely did. a mug of coffee half spilled on his lap and on the cushions.

Debbie smiled, slowly walked around the sofa, she pulled the mug from his lose hold. Nolan did not stir. She set it in the sink then walked back, pulling a ballpoint-pen and a note pad from his other hand, the top page was full of illegible text slowly growing sloppier the further it went, the page was crinkled and folded. Debbie laid it flat on the coffee table, and went upstairs, getting her laptop before letting herself sink down next to Nolan.

".. Ebbie?" He asked groggy and clearly still half asleep.

"Shh, go back to sleep," she murmured, knowing he had spend the last three days saving people from natural disasters all over the globe.

"M'kay," Nolan croaked out, readjusting himself, his head falling on her lap.

Debbie resisted the urge to laugh, how was she going to work now?

Chapter 4

A large groupment was in front of him, a sort of military base.

"Earth isn't YOURS to conquer."

---

The sky was red.

His breath was a slow and rhythmic thing. A breath, a punch, viscera covered him.

Each movement carried with it an odd weight, one that grounded Nolan, kept him counting each breaths since arriving in this pitiful dimension.

67 453.

A crunch.

Red flew.

A slowed movement. Screams reached his ears.

A burst forward, a sudden stop.

Nolan was clean. Unlike when blood trailing from his ears, eyes, nose and mouth as he followed the order to kill all non viltrumites in the first days of the scourge virus.

A turn of the head.

The wine of a laser cannon.

A tilt of the head. He let it hit.

Nolan heard in his skull, felt in his marrow a distant clink of metal.

"Stubborn little thing," he mumbled lips falling into a line, floating there, up in the red sky that he had learned was the equivalent of earth and Viltrum's day blue, body slowly, dramatically shifting to the superman flight form. The reflection made his lip twitch.

It reminded Nowl-ahn of the non Viltrumites he'd had to kill even as blood spewed from his every orifice, turning white and grey a rusted brown as it dried.

Gravity regained its hold on him, barely, briefly, helping him accelerate. It exploded on impact as his trajectory shifted back upwards akin to a pendulum. Air exploded outwards, he felt the skirt of air around him.

The sound barrier had been breached.

He went through one two three eight-

He'd stopped, slowly turned, gazing at the destruction he'd wrought. It was a sight of flames and floating dust.

In the corner of his eye he saw a statue.

He came to a stop in front of it, it had the same posture as statues of Emperor Argall, an image overlayed over it.

The eyes were wrong.

They had always been wrong.

He scowled, destroying the thing.

Nowl-ahn stood in formation with teenagers, with viltrumites taller and years his senior, and did not look at them directly.

Teeth grounded.

He had looking at these stone eyes directly produced a feeling he had no use for, a yearning, a wish that sat heavy in his sternum. He looked at the statue's jaw instead. The jaw was easier. Firm. Correct. Looking every bit like the jaw of Viltrum's emperor.

The eyes…

Lips pulled tight.

He didn't know what made him feel they looked wrong. He rarely pursued it. And never when he was standing amongst his cohort. Never when a drift in attention was a mistake and mistakes were weakness and weakness was only ever excused for the young and untrained, and only ever once. Nowl-ahn was not a child anymore. Nowl-ahn was not yet an adult.

Burning embers lit his chest.

"Who is this?" The cadet asked them, a redundant question, more confirmation of faith and belief. Habitual. Ritualistic.

Viltrumite.

A sudden stop.

The air exploded around him.

Nolan had not noticed himself moving.

Beliefs Nowl-ahn held, beliefs Nolan embodied.

"Emperor Argall," they said.

Nowl-ahn's voice among them. Steady. Correct.

Things like these had no right to cast shade upon his image, the thought had reignited his will to destroy these insects.

One city down- its infrastructures destroyed, it's scientific and production facilities warped beyond recognition, purple blood covering everything.

Many more to go.

---

The portal had been closed for four minutes and eleven seconds.

Cecil knew because he'd been counting, the way he counted everything, the way he had learned to count things in a career that had taught him that the space between events was often where the important information lived. Four minutes and eleven seconds since the white-and-red blur had done a sharp, deliberate dash and gone through it.

Fucking gone, he thought, like Cecil didn't have enough on his plate already.

"Sir, analysis came back from the engineers," Donald said, his voice carrying the particular careful quality it got when the information was the kind that you wanted to say precisely, because imprecision let you pretend it wasn't as bad as it was, "the materials, the approach to design it's completely different from tech analysed from the Shanghai incident. This is decades of work. Minimum."

Cecil looked back at the scorched circle.

"Shanghai," he said. "Pikes and plasma rifles."

"Yes sir."

"Chicago. The same, plus the tank."

"Yes sir."

"Manaus," Cecil tilted his head slightly at the emitter fragments visible from where he stood, bagged and tagged, one of his retrieval specialists crouched over the largest piece with a scanner. "First appearance of a directed acoustic weapon targeted at a specific physiological vulnerability in our primary asset."

"Yes sir."

"What's Robot's ETA? I want him to analyse all this before it turns to fucking dust."

Someone on the other side of those portals had studied human emergency response protocols during the previous attempts.

"Five minutes sir."

"Well we don't have 5 minutes get him here now," Cecil pinched the bridge of his nose, "I can see what these fuckers brought rusting by the second."

"They're not escalating randomly," Cecil said.

"No sir."

"They're running trials."

Donald didn't answer that one. The answer was obvious enough that saying it aloud would have been redundant, and Donald had been with him long enough to know the difference between the questions Cecil asked because he wanted an answer and the ones he asked because he wanted a witness.

Cecil moved, walking the scorched perimeter of the former portal site at an even pace, hands still clasped. His shoes were ruined.

"The formations," he said. "Manaus used the same phalanx structure as Shanghai and Chicago but with modified spacing. Wider intervals."

"To account for Omni-Man's impact radius," Donald said. "If they pack tight he can clear a cluster in a single pass. The wider spacing forces him to engage individually or in smaller groups. It extends the engagement window."

Robot's drone touched down six feet from the nearest body. Kneeling down, sensors extended immediately, a beam of light running over the body, gun armour and nearby tank.

"The wristband configuration is different from Chicago. Integrated into the armour's architecture rather than worn separately. Destroying it won't produce the same cascade aging effect."

"The frequency," Cecil said.

"Forty-nine thousand kilohertz," the sensors swept toward the emitter fragments. "Same design lineage as the previous hardware. Decades more development. And on their end, that's exactly what they had."

The body nearest the cordon went quietly, the wind carrying the dust through the air, pulling from it like it was a sand statue.

"Observer designation. Not field command. Each engagement they've collected data on him specifically. Shanghai, Chicago, now this, each one building on the last. The emitter was a targeted test." A beat. "They now know Viltrumites have sensitive ears."

The plate crumbled.

"And Omni-man walked through it," Cecil said.

"An impressive display of willpower."

Cecil pulled his phone out.

"Note for the record," he said, "that we handed them a live Viltrumite to study at close range for however long he decides to stay over there."

Donald noted it.

Cecil dialled, now to see how the Graysons were fairing.

---

Her breath cought, tears trailed down her cheeks.

"No-" her voice cracked, "Nolan."

Cecil's voice was still in her ear.

Not his words, she couldn't remember the words anymore, they'd dissolved the moment she'd waved goodbye to Nolan as he flew away, perhaps even before when she'd set the phone down on the counter, the moment she'd stood there asking herself if Nolan would be able to be Omni-man, when she'd walked upstairs, gently shaking his shoulder, waking him from light slumber, when she'd seen the shift in his eyes as she'd explained what Cecil had asked.

When she'd walked back downstairs, picked the phone back up and said 'he'll go'.

She knew her husband. Knew how he tried to keep things at a distance.

That was the thing. That was the thing she kept circling back to and then leaving, arriving and leaving, the bottle of red she'd opened two hours ago now sitting well past the halfway mark on the coffee table. She knew her husband. She had always known her husband.

Except.

she didn't.

She poured another glass and didn't taste it going down.

The laundry was still on the couch where she and Mark had left it, Nolan's shirts folded in that neat stack, the enormous clothes Mark had found disproportionately big. She looked at the stack and didn't move it. It felt wrong to move it. Like moving it would be admitting something she hadn't decided to admit yet.

She'd taught him how to do laundry.

The memory arrived without permission, the way they kept doing. She'd taught him how to do laundry because he'd admitted he didn't know how the washing machine worked, why drying clothed was done by a different machine, how one was to add the products and kept folding everything with military precision, dress shirts and undershirts and Mark's tiny baby onesies all with the same exacting creases, and she'd laughed and shown him people actually did it and he'd looked at her with that expression of befuddled exasperation he got sometimes, that particular attentiveness, like she was explaining something in a language he still learning and knew he couldn't afford to miss a word of.

She'd thought it was endearing.

She'd thought so many things were endearing.

She buried her face in her hands, elbows painfully resting on the granite counter, wiped her tears and reached for the bottle of red wine once more. Mark's powers- New tears bloomed from the thought, burning, irritating skin.

She knocked the glass back like she was back in college and this was a shot of vodka.

She tried to pour herself another glass. Quieting this part of her that kept torturing herself with should haves and could haves.

The bottle was empty.

Her mind was quieted, deafeningly so. Did Nolan not trust her?. her vision blurred, the clink of the glass being set back on the table was too loud.

She slipped of the chair, she still didn't completely like the new counter.

She walked to the couch, and let herself collapse on it.

Minutes passed, her mind empty, a void of thoughts.

She brought her knees up to her chest on the couch, wrapped both hands around the wine glass. The house was too quiet in the particular way it got when Mark was at school and Nolan was. Gone. When it was just her and the sound of the refrigerator and the specific weight of a life she had built around a man she was only now understanding she had never fully known.

That wasn't fair.

She knew him.

She knew his coffee, black, and the way he stood at the kitchen window in the mornings like he was expecting something to require his attention.

She knew the particular stillness he got when he was processing something difficult, the jaw, the shoulders, the way his hands went very careful and the rest of his body was taught.

She knew the sound he made when Mark said something that caught him off guard, this almost-laugh that he never quite let out all the way.

She knew that he was gentler with small things than anything that large and powerful had any right to be.

She knew all of that.

And yet.

Nolan-

She thought about the roses.

God, the roses. She'd told that story to her mother, to her sister, to her father, to friends over dinner, she'd told it so many times it had become their story, their origin, their evidence that this enormous serious man was also somehow entirely hopeless in a way she found unbearable and wonderful.

She'd told it as comedy.

She'd told it as this is how I knew.

And she was sitting here now wondering what he'd actually been thinking. What it meant to a being who had lived two thousand years to stand on a woman's porch with an uprooted rosebush because he had learned that roses meant something and had done it with the intentionality he brought to everything.

What that moment had cost him.

Whether it had been terrifying.

Whether the earnestness she'd read as sweetness had actually been something closer to desperation.

A being trying to understand a world that operated on completely different logic and sets of values than the one that had shaped him, trying to get it right, trying not to fail because failure was something he grew up fearing, fearing because they were removed and that must have been terrifying and paralysing and yet Nolan, Nolan was so so strong because despite the feelings that must have plagued him he'd still done it.

She thought back to the moment where Nolan had seemed so scared of himself, how he'd tried to justify, with fervour that was uncharacteristic of him, how he'd- she thought of him in her arms, of the weight of his head on her chest, of tears trailing down his face pooling on her breasts, of of-

She pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum.

She thought of Mark, she though of how she'd had to teach Nolan how to be human, how he'd seemed so befuddled about kids baseball and why he wasn't to use his powers to fly and get a better view of the match, seemed to find the concept of sport that weren't battle odd and bizarre and useless until she had explained what it meant to their little boy.

Of how he'd been off for days, of the uniform, blood soaked left on the floor, of Cecil's call.

She thought of her husband, how strong and fragile he was, how brave, how hurt she was discovering he'd been throughout his life. How she'd learned only now he was an orphan, of how his planet was hit by something called the scourge of the mentality they demanded everyone adhere to.

That strength was the metric one's worth was based on.

How scared he seemed to grow the more disturbed she'd grown.

How he'd snapped shattered when she'd taken a step back.

NolanNolanNolan-

She curled on her side.

NolanIloveyou-

She hiccuped, her breathing grew erratic.

Her nose was stuffed with snot.

And then she thought about the first time she'd hugged him. How he'd gone completely still. Not pulling away, not leaning in, just - stopped, like she'd asked him a question in a language he didn't have yet. She'd assumed it was cultural. It had been easier to assume it was cultural. The first time she'd kissed him, the way he'd been so careful about it, almost formal, like he was making sure he was doing it right. She'd found it sweet. The way he would say something and then catch himself and quietly walk it back, like he'd shown her a room he hadn't meant to show her and was gently closing the door again. She'd noticed, every time. She'd let him close the door, every time, because pressing felt unkind and because whatever was behind it was clearly his and she'd respected that.

Twenty years of closed doors.

She hadn't thought of it that way before. She was thinking of it that way now.

She'd found it sweet.

She thought back of how many times she had dismissed these moments, seeing them as singular events and not the map, the patter it was.

What she was instead was tired, and frightened, and so full of love for this impossible man that it sat in her chest like something with weight, and she lay on the couch in the quiet house and cried in the uncomplicated way she hadn't let herself cry in front of him, because he needed her steady and she had been steady and she was alone now and she didn't have to be.

Nolan.

She didn't say out loud, kept as a thought, buried.

Come home.

---

The sky was red.

It had been red for what felt like a very long time.

He wiped his face.

Looked at the back of his hand.

Looked again.

Looked back at the last bastion on the horizon and pushed his hair out of his eyes. The beard was newer than the hair. He was more certain of the beard. Had watched it come in over what he estimated conservatively as the better part of his yearsmonthsweeks here.

The bastion was the last one. He knew it the way he knew all tactical things, from altitude, from the shape of what remained.

He descended.

Killed the few green insects, his feet never touched the ground.

The things that came out of the eastern structure were wrong before he fully registered them. Wrong in his peripheral vision. Wrong in the way they moved. The wrongness resolved, as they closed distance, into something that made him slow.

His proportions. His build. His face, reproduced with the fidelity of something studied at length and copied with considerable investment and insufficient understanding of what made the original dangerous.

Nolan supposed, distantly, that he had given them enough material to work with.

The few times throughout the campaign they had managed to make him bleed.

He had not thought much of it at the time.

He thought of it now.

He moved through them. They were all aggression and no judgment, ferocity without logic blocs, the surface of him without anything underneath, and he moved through them with the efficiency of someone who had been doing this long enough that the body managed it without requiring much from the mind.

All but one.

The last one was on the ground, had been pushed there by an insect Nolan had promptly killed, on all fours, small, smaller than the others, lacking the signs of artificial accelerated growth, complexion dark in the red light. Had come out of the structure with the others and had not attacked, seemed uncomprehending. Was looking at him with a face that was wrong in a different way, wrong in the way of something unfinished rather than corrupted. The features not quite resolved, stretched by a fist it had shoved in it's mouth.

No powers. He understood that immediately.

He looked at it.

It looked back.

Small and round with a black tuft atop its head.

He thought about Debbie- he missed her warmth, her strength her support so much. About Mark. About the specific warmth of his mate against his chest in the dark of a bedroom very far away, about his son flying in circles laughing at his own mistakes, about these thing he knew made him weak and pulled and pulledandpulled-

He looked at the thing on the ground.

At the fist shoved in it's mouth, at the drool pooling on it's chest, at the features that were so Nolan it ached.

It seemed he had two children now.

Nolan picked it them up.

It They went still in his arms, and without thinking, the way he did not think about most things his hands did, he smoothed his palm across the crown of itstheir head.

The fine hair there. The warmth of the skull beneath. He absentmindedly pushed the hair back, eyes searching for a scar that would not be there, the image of himself as a child, less than a decade, in front of a mirror, holding his hair up, a red healing scar there-

Of being told how lucky he was to have survived the Purge when having been found at the heart of where it had started.

Something moved in him.

Not a memory. The shadow of one.

A hand at the crown of his head. Hold tighter than he had been comfortable with his newly awakened powers. Larger than his head had been.

It's eyes were wide.

The warmth of a palm calloused in a pattern he had no reference for, spreading with a carefulness that had felt, even then, like something that was not guaranteed.

It's face was small.

He had been very small. Small enough that the hand covered most of his head.

A voice. A warning. An order.

Male. His father. Not directed at him, directed past him, toward something else, someone else, a name, a woman's name, two syllables with the specific quality of someone who knew the person they were calling well enough to be afraid for them.

The clone kept its eyes on Nolan's.

Not love.

They did not hold fear.

He was certain enough of that. The texture of it was wrong for love. But something.

Nolan heard the gasped gurgle of the soon to be dead.

Something with enough weight to make the voice urgent, enough to make the hand at his crown press once, briefly, more firmly almost painfully, as if remembering he was there-

Then he lifted itthem to his breasts. ItThe infant was covered in the grey and white the insects so favoured, tone different from what he had worn in the orphana- barracks.

He did not know his father's face, barely remembered his mother's. The rest of the recollection remained where it always remained, at the edges of legibility, dissolving every time he reached for it. The two figures. The moment before everything went dark.

He could not assemble them into anything complete.

He held the thing, the infant, his child that had his eyes and did not cry.

---

She washed her face with cold water and looked at herself in the bathroom mirror for a long moment.

She looked like someone who had been crying. There was nothing to be done about that. She dried her face with the hand towel and put on a clean shirt and found her keys.

---

The grocery store was twelve minutes away.

Debbie knew the route the way she knew the house she'd shared with Nolan for the last sixteen years. A left out of the driveway, the light at Maple that always took too long, the parking lot that filled up after three on weekdays. She drove it now on something close to autopilot, the radio on and not heard, the afternoon light casting harsh shadows..

She wanted doenjang.

She wanted it the way she wanted it on bad days specifically, the way she'd needed it since she was small, her mother's kitchen smelling of fermented paste and sesame oil and the particular comfort of something that took time. Jjigae, because Mark would eat three bowls of it without noticing he was eating, and because making it required her hands to do something her mind could follow, and because she needed both of those things right now.

She had until four.

The grocery store smelled like it always smelled, the cool air and the bread from the bakery and something faintly floral from the display by the entrance. She took a basket instead of a cart.

She was only getting a few things.

She was being very normal about this.

Tofu.

She stood in front of the refrigerated section and looked at the options with more attention than was required, eyes scanning every words on the packages.

She had taught him what doenjang jjigae was.

Not taught- rather she'd just made it, the way her mother had taught her when she'd first brought Nolan home, the way she'd made it every week of her adult life without thinking about it, and he'd sat at the counter watching her - because Nolan had the knack of getting in her way when she was cooking - in that particular way he had of watching things he found wonderful but seemed convinced it didn't show on his face.

And every time, when she'd set the bowl in front of him he'd go very still.

She'd asked if it was alright, even years later, even when he'd forced himself to eat the entire batch the one time she'd been pregnant and angry and had over-salted the soup so much it would have made her sicker than the first trimester had and he had not wanted her to burst into overwhelmed tears because of how utterly she had failed making a meal she usually never failed. She remembered, even now, the moment she'd asked him if he was really that hungry and his eye had twitched the way it twitched every time he tried lying and he'd shoved a spoonful in his mouth. She remembered how she'd burst into laughed after tasting it much to Nolan's panic at the time, then had asked him why he hadn't said anything.

The first time she'd made him taste it he'd looked at her and said I didn't know food could be like this in a tone that was completely serious, like he was filing a report on a significant discovery, and she'd laughed so hard she'd had to put her spoon down.

Debbie put the tofu in the basket.

Zucchini. Mushrooms. She moved through the produce section on automatic, her hands finding what they needed.

She thought about the birthday dinner he'd tried making her during their second year together.

The one he'd tried to make without telling her, sneaking into her apartment like a thief. She'd come home to the kitchen smelling of something burnt and Nolan standing very straight next to the stove with an expression of complete seriousness that did not match the mess he had created, smoke and opened windows and the recipe on the counter, printed from the internet, annotated in his handwriting, every step numbered.

He'd looked up Korean-American birthday food and apparently decided that was what you made for someone's birthday, which meant he had been trying to make miyeok-guk with from scratch.

He'd burned the cream while making the pepper sauce. He'd started over. He hadn't asked for help. And the only thing he had managed was the steak. Not the second attempt at making pepper sauce, not even the rice that he had forgotten to wash and made the rice cooker overflow with starch.

She thought about this birthday dinner. The one he'd tried to make without telling her. She'd come home to the kitchen smelling of something burnt and Nolan standing very straight next to the stove with an expression of complete composure that did not match the smoke or the opened windows or the recipe on the counter, printed from the internet, annotated in his handwriting, every step numbered.

He'd looked up what one should do for their partner for their birthday, and food was apparently what he had decided on, which meant miyeok-guk to start and steak with pepper sauce after, which meant he had been in their kitchen alone for the better part of an afternoon as she'd battled with Chicago traffic trying not to get her hopes up this year, having already booked a restaurant for them and her parents the following Friday.

The seaweed soup had been fine. Over-salted, the broth thinner than it should have been, but recognisable, and she understood from the annotated recipe that he'd made it twice. The pepper sauce had not been fine. He'd burned the cream. He'd started over and burned it again, and at some point had made the decision to abandon it entirely rather than tell her, so there was no pepper sauce. The rice she'd found still dry in the cooker, unwashed, because apparently no one had told him you had to wash it first and he hadn't thought to look that part up.

What there was, was steak. Perfectly cooked, rested properly, sliced against the grain. Of course that was the part he'd gotten right.

She'd eaten everything he put in front of her and told him it was wonderful. He'd watched her face the entire time with that careful attention, checking for something, she understood now - checking to see if she meant it, if the warmth was real, if it would last. She'd meant it. It had been wonderful. Not because any of it was good but because of what it meant that he'd tried, that he'd stood in their kitchen alone and started over and still hadn't asked for help, because asking would have required admitting he needed it.

She had known what she was taking on. That was what she kept returning to, the core of what she had always acknowledged. She had known Nolan was not like other men. She had known there were things he didn't say, things he protected her from, things he carried in a way that didn't invite questions.

She had made her peace with the shape of him and loved him because of it, because of the particular way he was both immovable and fragile in the same breath.

She just hadn't known how deep it went.

She hadn't known about the orphanage. Twenty years and she hadn't known he was an orphan, and even now she only knew the outline of what that meant on Viltrum, the shape of the horror without the content, they were removed he had said and the look on his face and the way he'd lurched forward - a near full bodied thing - to justify it like a man trying to hold a wall up with his hands.

She didn't have the specifics.

She wasn't sure she was ready for the specifics.

She was driving home before she knew it.

She knew her husband.

Even now.

Even in the middle of all of this.

She just wanted more of him. The parts he'd decided she didn't need. The parts he'd spent two thousand years learning to fold away so small they were almost invisible. She wanted to stop accepting the fold.

When he came home - and he was coming home, she was not entertaining any other possibility - she was not going to let him put it back the way it was. She had let him do that too many times. She loved him too much for that and he had been alone too long for that and she was going to tell him so clearly enough that even a Viltrumite couldn't find a way around it.

The light changed.

Mark would be home at four.

She had dinner to make.

---

He kept it short.

He knew what months, years, decades meant on Earth's side, knew that time differed, knew knewknewknew-

This civilisation would not threaten his earth again for a very long time.

He had made certain of it.

A baby that looked every bit like a Viltrumite but for the skin colour and the small flashy protrusions on his chin and cheekbones.

Thought of the irradiated fields, of the fire still roaring, of everything that made a society broken, destroyed by his very hands.

And smiled.

---

The lunch table was loud.

It was always loud, the particular chaos of four hundred teenagers in an enclosed space with bad acoustics and worse ventilation, and Mark had long since learned to tune it out. He was good at tuning things out. He was getting better at it.

He was staring at his tray.

"You've been staring at that for eleven minutes," William said.

"I'm eating."

"You've taken two bites."

"I'm eating slowly."

William put his fork down with the particular deliberateness that meant he was about to say something Mark wasn't going to like. Mark had known William long enough to know all his tells. "Mark."

"I'm fine."

"You're the worst liar I know and I know a guy who told his Mom he'd been at chess club for three months while actually failing chemistry."

"That's you. That's your story."

"The point stands." William leaned forward on his elbows. "What's going on."

Mark moved a piece of broccoli to the other side of his tray. "Nothing. My dad's just- he had to go somewhere. For work. It's a work thing."

"For how long?"

"Don't know."

William looked at him for a moment in that way he had, the way that made Mark feel like he was being read, which he hated, which was also somehow better than not being seen at all. "Is he okay?"

"Yeah." Mark said it fast. Then, because it was William. "I don't know. I think so. He just- left. Kind of suddenly."

"When's he back?"

"I don't know that either."

William picked his fork back up but didn't eat, just turned it over in his hand. "That sucks."

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry."

"It's fine."

It wasn't fine but there was nothing William could do about it and there was nothing Mark could say about it so they sat with it for a moment, the noise of the cafeteria pressing in around them, and Mark pushed the broccoli back to where it had started.

His dad had gone through a portal on live television.

And he couldn't tell his best friend.

"Okay but real talk," William said, shifting gears with the abruptness he deployed when he'd decided a subject needed changing, "are you going to eat that or are you going to keep moving it around like you've decided you weren't hungry?"

"I'm going to eat it."

"Prove it."

Mark ate the broccoli. William looked satisfied in an annoying way.

They made it another four minutes before the shadow fell across the table besides William.

Mark registered it before he registered who it was, the particular way the light changed, and then his shoulders went up without permission because he already knew. Todd was a full head taller than most of their year, broad in the way that came from actual athletics rather than just existing, and he had the specific smile of someone who'd learned that smiling the way he did made people feel smaller even before he started resorting to fists.

William went very still in front of him.

"Grayson," Todd said.

Mark looked up. "What."

"Heard your dad's in the hospital."

The cafeteria noise continued around them, indifferent. Mark felt something cold settle in his stomach. "Where'd you hear that."

Todd shrugged with one shoulder. "Around. Serious thing, sounds like. Must be rough."

It was a cover story. It had to be a cover story - the GDA covering for Omni-Man being gone, because the GDA covered everything, and of course they'd need a reason for Nolan Grayson to have disappeared, and of course they'd picked something like that, and of course it would inconvenience Mark because that was apparently how his week was going. First getting his powers, then dad getting weird, loosing dad and now this?

His dad wasn't in a hospital.

Dad had gone through a portal and ended up somewhere wasn't earth, and Mark didn't know if he was okay, and he'd spent then entirety of the morning pretending he was fine at school and coming home to his Mom's carefully maintained composure and eating dinners that were a little too quiet and he was so tired of pretending he was fine.

"He's fine," Mark said, which came out flatter than he intended.

Todd's smile didn't change. "Sure. Anyway." He reached into his pocket and dropped a folded piece of paper on the table in front of Mark. "Amber said to give you that."

Mark stared at it.

William made a sound beside him that he was very obviously trying to suppress.

"She said," Todd continued, with the air of someone delivering a message that had personally cost him something, "that she's not going to talk to me until I gave it to you. So." He gestured at the paper. "There it is."

His hand flashed forwards, hitting Mark's tray, making it slide on the table and make all the food fall in Mark's lap.

Todd walked away.

Mark didn't move, he felt the table dent under his touch.

William waited approximately four seconds, which was less restraint than Mark had hoped for. "That's Amber's number."

"You don't know that."

"Open it."

"I'm not going to-"

"Mark. Open the piece of paper."

Mark opened the piece of paper.

It was Amber's number.

There was a small smiley face next to it.

William made the sound again, this time not trying to suppress it at all. It was a very undignified sound for someone who considered himself too cool for most things. "She made Todd Williams deliver it personally."

"I noticed."

"She made Todd Williams - who pushed you into the lockers for like forever, by the way-"

"I remember."

"- personally deliver her number to you like a medieval page delivering a letter to a knight-"

"William."

"- because she won't talk to him otherwise-"

"William."

"- which means she has enough feelings about you that she's using them as leverage against a guy who's twice your size- "

"I am aware of what this means- "

"Do you though?" William was grinning now, the particular grin that had survived eight years of friendship and that Mark found simultaneously infuriating and deeply reassuring. "Because you're looking at that piece of paper like it personally offended you."

Mark folded it back up. Unfolded it. Folded it again. "My dad's not in the hospital."

William's grin faded. Not all the way, but enough. "I know."

"You don't know."

"I know it's not what Todd said it was." William was quiet for a moment. "And I know you wouldn't lie to me, if you tell me something I'm going to trust you above that brute."

Mark looked at him.

"You've had that thing," William said, "for as long as I've known you, where something's actually wrong and you go very quiet and you say you're fine about fifteen times. You were doing it in sixth grade when your dad missed your birthday because of the thing you also couldn't explain. You're doing it now." He picked up his fork again, returning to his food with the casualness of someone who had decided the hard part was over. "So. He's not in the hospital. And you're worried."

"Yeah," Mark said, after a moment. "Yeah, I am."

"Okay."

"That's it? Okay?"

"What do you want me to say?" William glanced at him sideways. "I can't help with the thing you won't tell me about. Especially things omit."

Mark looked down at the folded piece of paper in his hand, righting the tray and wiping the food off of himself with the other.

That was true. William couldn't read his mind, and Mark- Mark couldn't say what had happened. His dad was- his dad was Nolan Grayson and whatever else he was and wherever he'd gone he was going to come back, he was going to walk through the door like he always did and things were going to go back to being the thing they were before this week of too-quiet dinners and his Mom's careful composure and the piece of himself Mark had been carrying around that felt like waiting.

He had a girl's number in his hand.

He was worried about his dad.

Both of those things were true at the same time and neither one cancelled out the other, which felt like something important about being seventeen that he couldn't quite articulate.

"She put a star on the in the corner," Mark said.

William's grin came back all the way. "I saw."

"That's- that's a thing people do."

"Uh huh."

"That doesn't mean anything."

"The star specifically means nothing, sure."

"William."

"The fact that she made a guy who benches one-eighty personally hand-deliver it, though-"

"I hate you."

"You really don't," William said, picking up his tray, and the cafeteria noise continued around them, indifferent and constant and almost like everything was normal.

---

The table was set for three.

Debbie hadn't been able to bring herself to set it for two.

She'd put his plate out the way she always did, at the head of the table where it always was, and then she'd looked at it for a moment and looked away and called Mark down for dinner.

That had been forty minutes ago.

The jjigae was good. She knew it was good because she'd made it right, had done each step correctly, had given it the time it needed. She'd eaten half of what was in her bowl without tasting any of it.

Mark was moving food around his bowl.

He'd been doing so for the past twenty minutes.

"You know, it's going to get cold if you continue like this," Debbie said to her son.

"It's already cold," Mark retorted in that way he started to answer obvious question since becoming a teenager.

Debbie stared.

The boy - seventeen, nearly a man, still her baby - looked up. Hunched the way his father did when he'd crossed a line. The same tell. The same apology waiting to happen.

"Sorry, Mom."

She smiled because smiling was easier than crying. "It's fine."

It was not fine.

A second, the seventeen year old looked up, hunched over himself in the way his father did when realising he crossed a line Debbie did not approve, looked away, "Sorry Mom."

Debbie smiled at him.

She wanted to tell him. You look just like your father when you do that. The same guilt. The same apology before anyone's even accused you of anything. She didn't say it.

Because if she said it, she'd have to think about where Nolan was. If she thought about where Nolan was, she'd have to think about the portal. If she thought about the portal-

She picked up her spoon.



Soon enough, dinner was over.

Plates and bowls were stacked and brought to the counter by Mark. Debbie putting the left overs in the fridge.



it happened when she opened the dishwasher.

A knock at the door.

Her heart did something stupid. Lifted. Then dropped. Because it could be anyone. It could be Cecil with news. It could be-

"Mark can you get it?"Her voice was steady.

The boy groaned sitting up from the couch he had been laying on, rereading the latest Séance Dog comic for what must be the fourth time, "Ooo-K Mom."



She finished putting the dishes in the machine.

No sound came from the entryway.



"Wai- you have a beard?"



"Mark? Who is it." Debbie asked him, just as she straightened herself.



"Uuh- Uh Mom? It's Dad." Mark sounded unsure, voice strained, "and uh- he brought a uh-"

The world stopped.

"I'll take it from here Mark."

Contracted. Pulled inward until all that was left was the sound of her son's voice saying a word she hadn't let herself hope to hear.

Her husband. Nolan's voice. His voice. That strong baritone, so full of the confidence he had lacked the week before Manaus.

Her husband walked in.

Debbie teared up.

The sight of him confirmed Mark's words. The sight of him froze her. The sight of him was revival.

Brown and white beard. Hair longer than she had ever seen on him, messily falling over his forehead. Eyebrows far from the neatness he preferred.

Both arms holding something. One holding mark up, their son's toes barely grazing the ground. The other held a small thing to his chest. A small thing suspiciously like a green skinned black-haired baby with facial protrusions that looked vaguely like a Flaxan's, like those things that had attacked earth so many times by now.

Did Nolan- with one of these aliens that kept trying to invade Earth? In just a single day? but clearly - her eyes trailed over Nolan's features again - it wasn't just a single day for him.

Nolan's eyes widened when they met hers.

"Nonono, no, no," he gently set Mark down on the floor, leaning forwards just enough so Mark's feet were solidely on the ground. He walked forwards, still holding the baby with one arm in a pose that reminded her of how Nolan had held Mark when he'd been this small - a green baby that was smiling at her, incisor poking out of bright pink gums - Nolan's other hand extended outwards in a placating manner. "I would never do this to you." He said, cupping her cheek.

Debbie frowned, unsure of what Nolan meant.

---

I would never do this to you.

He had said cupping her cheek. His wife's cheek. His mate's cheek, this lovely, beautiful human's cheek. trying to say it without breaking.

The words hung there, in the air, heavy with meaning Nolan was uncertain Debbie understood. This. what a paltry word to encompass the whole Nolan had witnessed. Of knowing what that other version of him had done. Of what Nolan himself had done, of the potential to-

How that version had tried to justify betraying his heart, his love his mate.

Debbie's hand came up, not to push his away, but to rest over where it cupped her cheek. Fingers warm. Steady.

Clean. Untouched by the blood and ash Nolan had turned a world into.

Unafraid of Nolan.

Of this version of her husband that was more impostor than the liar of the series.

She should have been.

"The baby's a clone," he murmured, the words resounding oddly in his chest, feeling clinical, even as he tilted her head upwards, hunching over enough so she wouldn't strain her neck. His tone detached in the manner it did when standing before Thragg, giving the Grand Regent his mission debrief rather than the warm infant in his grip. "I rescued him."

He could feel her pulse against his cheek. Elevated. Not panicked.

Controlled.

Twenty years spend with this other version of Nolan had indeed had their uses.

The weight around Nolan's heart grew. Burned and stole breaths not yet taken.

The infant gurgled against his chest. A small sound, wet and content, the kind of sound that had been alien to Nolan, the kind of sound that must have been smothered in that laboratory, smothered by the failures its predecessors were. Failures Nolan killed.

It rested there, calm in the Viltrumite's hold, unaware Nolan had torn through its creators with the very hands that held him.

Nolan heard the boy gurgle against his chest, felt the palpitations of a tiny heart against his ribcage. So different from Mark's, from the beat that had drummed against Nolan as he'd held his near full grown son.

"These-" Nolan couldn't stop the snarl his face morphed into when the memory flashed before his eyes again, his head whipped sideways to glare at air itself, "these fucking insects dared to-"

Nolan lost all of his momentum.

Mark was there.

Flinching. From Nolan.

Not much. Not even a step back. Barely something a human would call a movement. But to Nolan- that slight shift backwards, that tensing of shoulders that tuck of the chin.

The expression that had crossed his face- fear.

Mark had seen his fury.

Had seen Nolan's anger.

A held breath.

Five beats of a too fast hummingbird like heart.



Nolan's face fell into an expression he couldn't name. Something that made Mark's worried fear filled look deepen.

Nolan must have taken too long to process. To waken that social part of him. That part that had been able to communicate. Read others.

Nolan felt the strain of his too wide eyes.



Nolan felt the tightening of the hand on his. The squeeze that pulled his attention away from-

"Nolan," she said. Not a question. A warning. A plea. All of them at once.

Nolan felt inept.

He sighed. The sound came from somewhere deep, somewhere that hadn't existed before this moment- before he had seen fear in the eyes off one that should never feel it-

"I'm sorry," He said between an inhale and a murmur, interrupting the atrocity of a thought. His thumb caressed Debbie's cheekbone, tracing the path where tears could have been. "They made clones of me, this little one was the only stable one."

Nolan did not think of the massacre. The malformed bodies. The things that had looked almost like him, almost like Mark. Almost like a being deserving life if backwater science hadn't been rushed, if the presumption made hadn't been hastily taken as a world was razed, if the insects had understood what superior being they had been trying to replicate.

Of how unstable pure viltrumite DNA was if duplicated artificially lacking the RNA that would have-

Remembered smothered screams- the confusion in eyes that had never known- of incomprehension and confusion filling too wide, too malformed blind eyes-

A twitch of the moustache. eyes darting away before finding themselves back staring in the depth of wise brown pupils.

The thoughts were no more.

Nolan heard the bracelet the GDA had given him during the years he did not live, the one that had been left in the bedroom before Manaus, chime. He ignored it.

A finger played with the short hair framing that warm expression.

Debbie smiled at him.

There was something broken in her expression, something that made his chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with physical pain.

A part of him wished it was physical pain.

"You worried me so much," she said. Hand flat against his chest, the warmth waking something in him buried, something he did not dare name.

The bracelet chimed once more.

The warm palm pressed against his pectoral, the fingers' pressure like rays around a star, the warmth of an infant against his other, a small head warm and shifting slightly with every opening and closing of the small mouth. The drool turning cool against through the costume, against Nolan's skin - barely felt but starker than it would have been before the monthsyears spent in that other dimension.

Debbie rose to her tiptoes. Her lips pressed against his. Soft. Warm. His.

"Urg," Mark said loudly, his hand coming up to cover his face as he turned away. "Not in front of me! We talked about this!"

Nolan felt himself smile. The beard he'd grown in that other place caught on Debbie's face - he'd need to shave.

A hair strand fell into his eye.

Nolan probably needed to go to the barber.

That heavy object, constantly pressing against his lungs warmed and grew heavier on one imagined breath.

He remembers joints protesting as he stood, remembers the cold, remembers watching that blank, tired wrinkled face in the mirror. Remembers the unshed tears. Of the suppressed hatre-

"Nolan." Debbie's voice pulled him back. "Where are you right now?"

He blinked. "Here."

"Where, exactly?"

The kitchen. The house. The family he didn't remember building but couldn't imagine living without.

"Here," he said again, and this time he meant it, catching her lips in a languorous kiss. They ignored their teenage son's exaggerated retching sounds.

Their lips parted. Nolan smiled. Grinned. Bared his teeth in that bizarre way he'd learned was wholly American- human- and so very Debbie. Debbie. Mate. Core. Heart.

He pulled back slightly, stared at the three of them.

Stared and basked in the warmth-

The sound was subtle enough Nolan almost missed it.

Almost.

Teleportation.

His head snapped towards the living room a fraction of a second before the light appeared, before the air begun to shiver, distort from one focal point.

Nolan moved.

One moment he was in the kitchen area, Debbie's hands warm against him.

The next he held a man up by the neck one-handed, careful of the child in his arm.

The air boomed in the next instant.

He heard Mark gasp.

Felt his too long hair fall from the slick-back he'd barely managed them into before ringing the bell.

Nolan recognised that face.

Cecil.

The human's feet were still on the ground - Nolan had made sure of that, had adjusted his grip so the man could stand, could breathe, could speak. But the threat was there. In the stillness of Nolan's body. In the precise control of his grip. In the way he didn't blink, blue eyes staring apathetically in the human's.

"Mr. Grayson," Cecil said. His voice was steady. He'd been threatened before. By worse things than Nolan, probably. Or maybe not. Maybe this was the worst, and Cecil was just very good at hiding it. "Good to see you too."

Nolan didn't release him.

The baby shifted against Nolan's chest. Made a sound. A sound that sounded weak distressed, a little gasp that threatened to-

Nolan's grip loosened.

Cecil's eyes dropped to the baby, then back to Nolan's face. Something flickered there. Assessment. Calculation. The same look he'd given Nolan in Hong Kong, in Manaus, in Shanghai, in-

"You've been busy," Cecil said.

"State your purpose."

"An object. Heading toward Earth. Small, non-ballistic trajectory. Analysts don't think it's an asteroid, and we're not looking for another Battle Beast. You remember how that went. We need you to intercept it."

Nolan did not in fact remember. There was nothing for him to remember.

Nolan scowled.

Mark's voice came from the kitchen doorway. "Can I come?"

Red overlayed Nolan's vision, the sound of populations screaming-

Nolan's head turned. Not sharply but with a deliberation that made his son stop mid-step.

"No."

The word came out flat.

Final.

In the kind of tone that didn't invite negotiation.

"Dad-"

"No, Mark." Debbie this time. Her voice was quieter than Nolan's but no less firm. She had moved to stand beside Mark, her hand on his shoulder, her eyes fixed on her husband and the man he was holding by the throat.

"But I have my powers," Mark said. "I can help. I should-"

Nolan went very still.

"So," he said, voice barely above a whisper, "It's now that you say it."

He hear Mark's mouth open and close, "Well, if you hadn't been so weird-"

He stopped. A beat. A sharp inhale, "Wai- you knew?"

Nolan shot his son a look, one heavy with something he didn't know how to name before turning back to Cecil, glaring.

"The object," he said. "Explain."

Cecil, still in Nolan's grip, still not struggling, raised an eyebrow. "You going to let me go, or are we doing this the hard way?"

Nolan held him for a moment longer. Then, with deliberate slowness, he released him. His hand fell to his side, fingers curling into a loose fist.

Cecil straightened his jacket. Didn't rub his throat. Didn't acknowledge the threat to his life outwardly.

"Unknown origin," Cecil said. "Unknown composition. Small. It entered the system three days ago and has been on a direct intercept course with Earth ever since. Our models suggest it's not natural - the trajectory is too straight, the velocity too controlled, something's clearly guiding that thing."

"And you want me to destroy it."

"I want you to assess it. If it's a threat, destroy it. If it's not-" Cecil shrugged. "Then we have a conversation about why something is sending packages to our planet without asking permission first."

"I'll go," Nolan said.

"I'll go with you," Mark said eagerly.

Nolan turned. Readjusted his hold on the baby.

"We'll talk later."

He was young, Nolan told himself, he didn't know what he was so desperate to jump into.

Seventeen.

Mark was young. So young. Seventeen years old, with a seventeen-year-old's certainty that he was ready for things he couldn't possibly imagine. He had powers now - real powers, Viltrumite powers - and he thought that made him invincible. Thought it made him ready.

He had no idea what was coming.

No idea what Nolan had done.

What Nolan still might do.

"You'll stay with your mother," he said looking at Mark's brown eyes, "and your brother." His gaze wondered around the room, meeting his mate's, "As a family about our newest addition," he finished.

He handed the baby to Debbie, shared one long kiss with her. He smiled, "I'll see you guys later," he said to the room at large.

He glared at the Fury wannabe, "And you better be gone by then."

---

His blood burned as it coursed through his veins.

His temples pulsed when his eyes settled on the distinctly humanoid figure in earth's orbit. Far from the uncountable debris of what must have been satellites.

He pushed.

Nolan accelerated.

His hand found its way around a throat for the second time in less than a quarter of an hour. The skin was strong, though, reminiscent of a Viltrumite's.

Three-diggited hands wrapped around his forearm.

The cold of the void burned as Nolan orbited around the planet. Turned frigid before burning once more.

Nolan had gained velocity.

The Unopan was still fighting him.

'I thought we'd gotten rid of you centuries ago,' he spat.

'Huh? So you ARE the same guy! You know the beard was reaaally throwing me off-'

Dust flew, rocks exploded outwards as Nolan slammed the Unopan into the Moon's crust, creating a giant crater.

The impact shuddered through Nolan's bones.

Not pain. He hadn't felt pain from impact in a very long time.

But force. Yes.

The kind of force he rarely exerted, force that reminded him he was still inside a body, still bound by physics, still capable of transferring momentum from his fist to a skull to a planet's surface.

The Unopan's skull had not cracked.

A part of him, despite the smouldering anger, wished to hear the cyclopes out.

Nolan stared, blankly.

The being beneath him was still able. Still conscious. Still staring up at him with that single orange eye, wide now, not with fear but with something that looked almost like recognition.

'Okay,' the Unopan's thought arrived, shaky around the edges, the telepathic equivalent of someone raising their hands while coughing up dust. 'Okay. That's- that's fair. I probably deserved that. The orbit your planet thing was a lot, though. Really drove home the whole me not being at Urath-'

Nolan's hand tightened.

The Unopan's throat compressed. Not enough to kill - although Nolan was certain he was just shy of doing so - but enough to stop the flood of words.

'What do you want with my planet,' Nolan thought back.

The stated question landed.

Settled.

The way that dull soundless way objects collided together in space.

Directed. Dark. Cold.

Came out carrying the weight of every world he had ever taken and every being he had ever ended.

It did not come from the thought of Debbie. Mark. The yet to be named infant-

The Unopan winced.

'OooOok. I can see you're angry. B-but hear me out,' it communicated hands out in a placating gesture.

Nolan had seen it.

The flinch.

The eye squeezed shut.

The hands came up. Palms out. Empty. Placating.

The universal language of the weak.

The eye darted past Nolan's shoulder. Toward Earth. Blue and white and suspended in the void like a promise.

Nolan shifted one of his fingers. A threat. A reminder of who was at who's mercy.

'I'm really in deep shit aren't I?' the Unopan thought. 'Telia is soooO going to kill me for this.'

Nolan stared at him, lips pressed in a line, expression feeling hard like stone falling into that of a Viltrumite enforcer.

The Unopan stared back.

Chapter 5

Nolan hummed, a low vibration that rumbled in his chest.

His feet's plants were on the hardwood, yet the viltrumite felt the phantom pull of the atmosphere, that perpetual instinct to hover just an inch above the masses. A towel was draped over his shoulder, an adjustment that felt more natural day by day, the boy's chest lightly pressure against him, his small head held up by his own power. Nolan gently tapped that small back with three fingers, three fingers that could crush, and marvelled as a small chest rose and fell.

He was still awed by the small fragile being, his son, an infant's who's entire torso was dwarfed by the breadth of Nolan's hand.

Nolan moved with a sort of held-breath stillness, his muscles loose with readiness, soft and agonizingly careful. Protective. There was no pride of empire in this moment, only a quiet, visceral grounded fear. He traced the curve of Oliver's spine with the tip of a thumb, feeling the tiny, individual vertebrae like a string of pearls under silk.

It was terrifying.

He adjusted the towel on his shoulder, his movements slow and deliberate, manoeuvring small fists open, cataloguing the size of miniature hands, of small breakable fingernails that would need to be trimmed today.

His eyes drifted towards the counter, settling on the neat stack of paperwork, his thoughts jumping to that of the physician and of story the GDA provided.

Surrogate.

The word smarted. Made the corner of mouth twitch and the weight in his chest grow more present.

Marc's birth having, in this story that was implied to have some traces of truth, had had complications that made it dangerous to go through a second pregnancy.

Clean, a mundane human explanation to hide the truth, he remembered thinking, a numb heavy thing washing over his body like a pressurised hose, starting his his eyes and spreading downwards as if attracted by gravity.

His eyes met dark brown, pupils looking so much like Debbie's despite sharing no DNA. He smiled, a small wobbly barely there thing that mirrored theshakyness of his eyes.

He had thought back to that professional woman, arriving with a case larger than her torso, introducing herself with the steel of a being that truly cared and believed in what they did. Testing their baby's reflexes, his health and asking them questions about milestones Oliver might have reached, comparing them to the standards of Earth. He thought of the inoculation injections and asking to keep the needles,his mind immediately thinking of what the Invincible-SHEILD government organisation could do with them. What had been done with his own blood when-

A distressed whine escaped Oliver. It reminded him of the distant past. Of being nineteen and watching his aunt care for Sara, back when all he'd know was humanity and the pandemic had started, and that strange claustrophobic panic settled over the world, countries closing their borders and the world shrinking to family and the glow of small screens. But this time, still on earth it was him, as Nolan, a full grown Viltrumite. Not human-

With his own child.

He was a father in a quiet house that was starting to wake, his elder's alarm blaring just as Debbie turned the corned, having slowly walked down the floating stairs.

Her presence was an anchor. An anchor without which he knew- he knew-

He offered her a smile, not daring to finish the thought. Nolan shifted his hold on the babe, trying to find an equilibrium that remained forever out of reach, Oliver protested Nolan's fumbled shifting hold. Short, angry grunts leaving him - sound of defiance that felt too loud to be created by something so small and adorable.

Nolan stared at the baby, at Oliver, chest feeling fuller than ever with something that kept wanting to burst out, something that resemble anger so, so much and yet- He laid the boy face down along the length of his forearm, his fingers carefully bracing the head, his limb serving as a sturdy, living shelf.

Just like Uncle Ferd-

"Nolan," Debbie huffed out amusedly, her eyes softening as she reached them. Nolan felt his expression settle, smoothen, no longer this anxious thing that would have weakness in any other place in the universe. "Are you giving your father problem? three months old and already reaching that rebellious phase are we?"

He though again, of the name she'd bestowed on their youngest, Oliver.

He thought of how the purple Thraxan baby in the series he remembered less clearly than he had when he'd first woken in this house. He thought of how that name had been borne with the pride any child had for this immutable thing that was one's name.

His cheek grew numb.

The name - a coincidence that did not feel like one. Perhaps she had always wished for a second.

His lower lip followed.

This tingle-

"Debbie," his voice was a low loving rumble.

"Yes you are. With your cute button nose," she said, eyes zeroing on their babe, her voice getting into that higher, melodic pitch as she approached. Nolan's heart quickened. His lips parted as she neared.

Her hands slipped under the baby's armpits, pulling him into her embrace and away from Nolan's apparently subpart baby-handling skills.

Nolan felt his guts flutter. Felt his lips quiver, a wide stretch threatening to emerge.

His skin was quiet.

Nolan pouted. Fake and small. An faux expression of wounded pride that he assumed would be ignored. But then, Debbie's lips landed on his mouth. Long. Gentle. And devastatingly soft.

The pout wiped clean from his face. Nolan's eyes blew wide. His expression melting into a smile, genuine. For a moment, the haunting image of Debbie and Mark standing opposite from him, faces twisted in confusion and bracing for betrayal, words leaving his mouth as a hesitant cascade.

In Debbie's arms, Oliver looked larger. Larger than he had been a mere 48 hours ago. Nolan thought about how much bigger the baby was than when he'd brought him to Earth. How much bigger Oliver seemed in Debbie's arms, the difference easier to see when compared to her slight figure.

How the baby seemed smaller when held by him. Or by Mark.

The green too, was fading as Oliver grew. The protrusions he had born on his face growing fainter day by day. The newest addition of this magnificent, beautiful family would likely look fully Viltrumite and human by the end of the year.

You are… so beautiful, he thought eyes trailing over the contours of her face.

Half-Flaxan.

His eyes returned to the distasteful protrusions on his son's face.

The word, the description echoed through his skull withe the hollow ear jarring force of a church bell at noon.

The media's name for the specie - Flaxan - sat poorly, awkwardly in his mind.

His eyes met Oliver's dark brown pupils ringed by irises lighter that were growing lighter, shedding the void-like quality they had held under the red sky of the ravaged Flaxan home world. The decelerated aging of the Viltrumite genome was clearly winning the war, slowing the rapid cellular decay of Oliver's Flaxan half.

This bestowed strength, this proof that Oliver was strong, that he was more, that he was Nolan's, felt deeply, darkly satisfying. That his body was ridding itself from the insect's DNA.

His mind drifted towards the destruction he had wrought upon that world. He didn't feel much of anything regarding the slaughter of what could distantly be described as Oliver's people.

And that, this thought, was jarring; it was the worst part of what he was, what he had become.

The numbness returned.

He'd lost his humanity.

The pads of his fingers raged, feeling like fireworks. The skin of his hands felt dry as he clenched them into fists.

This… it was not the distant pleasure of accomplishing his self-assigned mission. Not the horror of this deeply human part of him beaten, broken, tried to claw towards -, that part of him constantly seemed to suppress, pushing down the spikes that threatened to shatter his composure.

No, what he felt was just a numb anger, a residual thing that felt like a warm weight that did more to ground him than breathing exercises.

The more time passed the less he believed it was directed at any particular thing.

He looked at their child - his and Debbie's -, gazed at the survivor of the genocide he himself had authored. He was a butcher.

They had been threats. He had removed them.

The way he'd removed threats for the past two thousand years.

Nowl-ahnHe, Nolan should feel something. The human part of him that part was screaming. But the scream was distant. Muffled. Like hearing it from the other side of an ocean.

His eyes met Debbie's.

The scream got louder.

He looked away.

These insects would never hurt his family, his, Nolan's family. Nolan had made sure of that.

Nolan met Debbie's eyes with a soft smile. A lie. His palm's nerve endings sparkled.

The entirety of him agreed… it was saddening to be forced to kill so many.

This felt like defeat.

Her eyes meeting Nolan's.



They were beautiful.



Debbie settled on the sofa, Oliver on her lap, facing up. Her fingers hovering above him, his small arm shooting upwards in attempts to catch her dancing fingers.

"You don't have any spare suits," his lovely mate said, fondly looking down at their child, hand barely escaping Oliver's later attempt at a grab. "You should go see Art."

Nolan looked at her.

Art.

"Alright," he said.

"Today."

"Yes."

He found his phone. Opened the contacts. Scrolled.

Art.

Art.

The tailor. From the series.

Art Rosenbaum. Address beneath the name.

A high pitched joyous keen filled the house, Oliver had managed to grab his mother's index.

"Got it," Nolan said to himself.

"Mm?" Debby wordlessly asked looking up after managing to extract her finger from Oliver's hold. "This Morning Nolan," she continued eyes meeting his pointedly.

He blinked, had Nolan forgotten something?

"I'm going," he said after a beat.

"Good."

As he passed by her he dipped down over the back of the sofa, landing a soft peck on her jaw, "I love you," he murmured, another landing under her ear. "Should I get the-"

"The crib?" She cut him off with a questioning lilt, head swivelling to face him, eyes snapping down as her hand was pulled downwards towards a single toothed open mouth.

He stole a kiss from her, a palm lightly bracing the back of her head.

"We already talked about it," she said, a small smirk and knowing look as she pulled back slightly.

"Yesterday before dinner, I know," he said in a sigh, "I'll take the car."

"Stop making Art wait, I told him you'd come this morning."

"I guess I can't make him wait now can I?" He said low and carrying a want he expressed by leaning forwards a tad more, closing the distance-

"Never enough huh?" "Nev-" Her lips were on his.

When they parted, he stayed there, eyes trailing over the traits that were so Debbie it ached.

"I'll pass by IKEA then," his past life's favourite restaurant.

She looked at him a moment longer. Looked back down at Oliver.

"IKEA on Cleyburn," she said. "Don't go to the one on-"

"I know. You did transfer the emails of the purchase to me."

---

The address was a workshop in an outside shopping center, the kind that was more parking lot than buildings, with each construction sharing more similarities than not despite the differing branding. Nolan turned the key in the ignition, the motor stopped its singing.

He stepped out of the car. Carefully slamming the door shut.

He looked at the name on the flat rectangle signage spanning the entire building's length. A. ROSENBAUM ALTERATIONS & BESPOKE.

The charms abode the door chimed as he opened it. The retail space was neat, almost aggressively ordinary. Racks of dress shirts in plastic dry-cleaning bags. A display of belt buckles shaped like sports team logos. A rack of greeting cards, the kind you bought when you'd forgotten someone's birthday and needed to pretend you hadn't. A calendar on the wall behind the counter, flipped to the current month, a local pizza place's logo at the bottom.

Someone had put a lot of effort into making this look like a place that sold nothing more interesting than alterations and the occasional off-the-rack dress shirt.

The door to the back was propped open with a phone book. Nolan moved toward it, wondering how the yellow books were still a thing, both of his lives having had these heavy paper bound things forgotten thrown to the trash.

The workroom was… full.

The organised fullness of someone who knew exactly where everything was. Bolts of fabric in colours Nolan had no names for, a dress form in the corner wearing something that looked to be a half-finished three-piece suit in deep dark blue. Navy? The colour of the sky ten minutes after the sun had fully set, when the last light had bled out and what remained was just the vast dark waiting.

A sewing machine on a heavy wooden table. Scissors that looked like they could cut through bone - probably could, the way Art made things, though that wasn't their intended purpose. Pins in a tomato-shaped cushion. A measuring tape draped over the back of a chair. Chalk marks on a length of fabric spread across a cutting table.

The smell of it - fabric, oils, something underneath that he couldn't place but that registered as familiar.

The man at the bench had his back turned. Older. Round-shouldered in the comfortable way of someone who had spent decades bent over a worktable and had made peace with what it had done to his posture.

He was working - hands moving with the particular grace of someone for whom the work had long since stopped requiring concentration yet managed to keep them engaged for the love of the craft.

He didn't turn around.

"Sit down, Nolan. I'll be with you in a minute."

The chair was wooden, sturdy, positioned exactly where someone would sit to wait. Art had put it there for that purpose. Had probably had it there for years, for all the people who came through his door with torn costumes and impossible requests and the particular tension of people whose lives required clothing that could survive what their bodies could do.

Nolan sat and watched Art's hands move and said nothing.

The room was quiet.

His gaze wondered around the room, eyes falling on streaked of fabric covered in chalk, patrons traced over it, the seam allowances traced around them.

Nolan's eyes snapped back to the man.

"So," Art said, standing up, after sending him a small smile. "How's the baby."

Nolan was guided to a door, one that when opened revealed a metal staircase that led to a basement. A basement where, Nolan knew, superhero suits were fashioned.

"Good."

"Debbie?"

"Good."

Art made a sound as he lead the way down the stairs.

The stairs clanged with every step, the percussion feeling like a accusation.Nolan's footsteps were silent - they always were, he couldn't help it, the snap calculation of counter-gravitational cushioning so he'd avoid the migraine he could feel growing - but Art's were not. Each step a blow to the neutral state Nolan had painstakingly dragged over himself.

"Debbie came back a few days ago, the suit held up better than I expected," he said. "Given what you put it through."

The basement was smooth sealant-covered concrete. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, the frequency just on the edge of Nolan's hearing, the kind of sound he could ignore if he concentrated.

"It did."

Nolan couldn't concentrate.

"I heard about Flaxan," Art said.

"Mm." He felt like a heavy object was lodged in his throat.

"Debbie said you'd spent much longer there than were willing to admit. Beard fits you, by the way."

Nolan blinked. Reached up. Touched his jaw. The hair was still there, still unfamiliar under his fingers. "Thanks…"

Art neared a large table. The suit was spread out over its surface - red and white, the colours wrong under the fluorescent lights, the white gone light blue, the red turned mauve.

Nolan's suit.

His costume.

The thing that made him Omni-Man.

"Do you remember when I fitted you for your first suit?"

Art picked something up. A tool. Nolan didn't register what.

"Mm."

"You were no negative about how it looked," the tailor huffed, "Even said you looked ridiculous, can you belie that? Here I was putting my heart and soul into it and you criticized my work! Really zero shame, that one. Comparing it to the ugliest half-skirt atrocity you'd been wearing-"

"It wasn't that bad…"He started. Stopped. Considered. "Ok, no. It was."

He showed him a measuring tape, "Arms up, you know the drill."

Nolan did not know The The Drill™ yet he took off his jacket, and spread his arms in a T-pose. Adjusted his stance when Art tapped his shoulder, his elbow, his wrist. The tape was cold against his neck.

The soft feather like sensation of the tape wrapping around him an odd unfamiliar comfort.

"Are you alright, Nolan."

That was not quite a question.

Nolan said nothing.

Art measured. The tape stretched across Nolan's chest, around his biceps, down the length of his spine. Small sounds - the whisper of fabric against fabric and the man moved around him, the soft exhalation of an craftsman in the middle of concentrating, the buzz of the lights overhead.

"Debbie told me you've been off." A pause. The hands still moving, slower. "The last few days."

Nothing.

He stared ahead, mind distant. Resolutely ignoring the direction this conversation seemed to head towards.

"Alright, well I can say with certainty you've lost two and a half centimetre around the abdomen," Art said standing back up back popping as he stretched it out - the sound feeling like a slap.

"Usually when I bring the subject you talk about the cape-" Art continued the previous subject.

Nolan slowly exhaled, controlled.

"I mean yeah." Nolan's voice came out too fast, feeling like an avalanche. "A cape, especially a white cape, is just bad taste."

The silence stretched.

The faux confidence he'd wrapped himself in crackled.

"I've never known you to forget something."

It fell apart.

Nolan looks away, lips falling into a tight line. Not at the suit. Not at the stairs. Not at Art. Just - away. The concrete floor had a stain near his left foot. Old. Dark. Oil, maybe. Or blood. He didn't ask.

He felt like a child.

"Did I say the wrong colour?" Nolan asked.

"You did."

"What colour was it?"

"Red."

"Oh," Nolan said in an inhale.

"Yes. Oh."

Nolan worked his jaw.

Art went back to work. The room filled with the small sounds of a tailor doing his job. A tailor that didn't push. One that had known Nolan long enough to know that pushing ended the conversation more than not.

Several minutes pass. Each tick of the long needle of the analogue clock a hammer on his eardrums.

"I don't remember anything," he admitted in a murmur.

Art set down his tools.

Turned.

Gave Nolan his full attention without making it feel like an entire catastrophic admission.

"I can't remember when I met Debbie, or how. Or… or our life together," he looked down. "I don't- I don't remember any of my life… on earth. I don't remember what brought me to the planet. While I have guesses. I-."

He stopped.

A breath. Held. Released.

One. And two.

"I don't remember what I last remember before waking up in our house. On Earth. Where I have a family."

A beat.

The silence feels deafening.

His chest hurt.

His stomach roiled.

He didn't move.

A beat.

"Does Debbie know?"

Nolan looks away, not answering the tailor.

"So you haven't said a thing to her."

His tone was not accusatory. Just confirming.

Somehow that was worse.

"You know..." Art picked up a piece of chalk. Rolled it between his fingers. Set it back down. "I think she's upset."

A sharp inhale, a head snapping up. His attention was on the human.

"She know you're hiding something."

The silence after was long. Long. Heavy. The kind that accumulated weight the longer it went unbroken.

"I…" Nolan looked back down. His back folded. His shoulders curled. He was making himself smaller without meaning to, the way he'd done as a human sometimes when the weight and stress he'd put on himself got too heavy. "I know," he finished, the words a sigh.

Art looked at him for a long moment. Then, with a shift in his posture, his expression he spoke. "You know... when you first arrived."

He picked an object from the table again. Something in his voice changed - fond, dry, and familiar.

"You and past you are very different."

He glanced up at Nolan with a look that invited him into the joke.

Art described early Nolan - the stiffness, the formality, whatever specific detail is most absurd in retrospect. The military posture during civilian situations. The way he treated casual conversations like briefings.

Something that landed as plausible and amusing because it was something specific he could picture his pre-merging self acting like.

Nolan listened. Something in him loosens slightly.

Art shook his head, a small smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. "Stood at attention the whole time. Every time I asked you to turn, you turned like you were ready to argue. I asked if you wanted the shoulders tapered and you said-" He pitched his voice lower, a rough approximation that made something in Nolan's chest loosen, just a little. "-'Is that standard procedure?'"

Nolan's mouth twitched.

And the questions." Art was grinning now, full and warm. "You had questions about everything. The thread weight. The tensile strength of the fabric. Whether the seam placement would affect aerodynamic drag." He paused. Looked at Nolan with something that might have been wonder. "I told you, 'Nolan, it's a costume, not a spacecraft,' and you looked at me like I'd just said something profoundly stupid. The only thing holding you back being the fact Debbie was there with us."

Nolan huffed. Not a laugh. But close enough.

"You didn't know how to stand still. That was the thing." Art's voice softened, the humour still there but something else underneath. Something tender. "You kept wanting to hover. I'd tell you to stand on the mark and you'd be an inch off the ground before you caught yourself. Took you three fittings to break the habit."

The room was quiet again. A softer quiet. One that did not grate.

"You know... I think there's still a part of you that remembers." Art sent him a knowing smile, "The way you move, it's not the way you moved when you first came here."

Nolan meets his gaze.

Something in his chest cracked.

Just a little.

Just enough.

Almost lightly. The closest thing outside of Debbie's vicinity to lightness he's managed in days.

"I could use a beer," Nolan said.

Art stared at him.

The man burst out laughing.

It wasn't a small laugh. No,it was full-throated, genuine, the kind laugh of someone who had been holding something in and had finally been given permission to let it go.

"Never change, Grayson," Art said, still laughing. "Never fucking change."

He crossed to the small refrigerator in the corner - the kind you saw in dorm rooms, white with a rounded top, humming quietly - and pulled out two bottles. He held one out to Nolan.

"Come on," he said. "Roof. I'm not drinking in here with your bloody suit ready for the incinerator."

---

"This access is an accident waiting to happen."

"Mm."

"I could have flown you up."

"And risked you blowing your secret identity?"

"…"

"We already had this conversation huh."

"Yeah."

"When?"

"About 17 years ago. I remember because you have baby Mark in your arms."

"Was he a well behaved baby?"

Art looked at Nolan, corner of his lip quirking up as he settled into his chair, "Not at all." He laughed,"You were so proud of the little terror. Well actually no, I think there was a small part of you that was ready to throttle him because of how much he kept crying."

"Wh-"

"But what parent doesn't go through that?"

Minutes passed, the sun was half way to reaching its apex.

Nolan handed him a bottle. Twisted the cap off his own. Took a sip.

The beer was cheap. It didn't taste good. But it was cold. And it was something to hold. And Art was beside him, not asking anything else.

They drank in silence for a moment.

"Thank you," Nolan said.

"For what."

"For-" He gestured vaguely with the bottle. "Not pushing."

Art shrugged. Gravel crunched under his shoes. "You're not a suit, Nolan. You're a person. Pushing a person doesn't make them talk. Just makes them better at not talking."

Nolan looked out at the parking lot. Twelve cars. Fourteen if you counted the two near the dumpster. A woman was loading groceries into a minivan. A man was arguing on his phone near the dry cleaner's. Ordinary. Unaware that a Viltrumite was sitting on a roof above them, drinking cheap beer, trying to remember how to be human.

"I should tell her," Nolan said.

"Probably."

"I don't know how."

Art took a long pull from his bottle. Swallowed. His lips parted with a pop, "Debbie's not going anywhere, Nolan." Art turned to look at him. His eyes were older than the rest of him - carrying the weight of decades spent watching people try and fail and try again. "She's waited this long. She'll wait a little longer." A pause. "But don't make her wait forever."

Nolan nodded.

They finished their beers in silence.

He stood up.

"When'll the suit be ready?"

"In an hour after i make some adjustments, come back in a week, the five others will be ready."

"Thanks, Art."

"Anytime, Nolan."

Nolan looked around, no one was in the parking lot.

"You're a good friend," he half turned back, giving the man a nod, "Later."

He jumped down. He had errands.

---

The training ground was a crater.

Mark was… starting to understand why his dad had insisted on doing this somewhere remote. The clearing in the woods was a forty-five minute flight from the house, hidden from satellite view by a combination of tree cover and something his dad had called 'Fucking shield wannabe countermeasures don't repeat to your mother' that Mark didn't fully understand.

What he understood was that his dad had just thrown a boulder at him the size of a small car, and he had caught it.

Barely.

"Catch," Dad's voice sounded again, Mark felt sweat trail down his back, the sight of his dad onehandedly tossing a boulder he'd described as 'weighing about 15 tonnes give or take, what's with that look?'

The boulder had hit his hands with enough force to drive him back twenty feet, his heels digging furrows in the dirt, and he had staggered under the weight of it, arms shaking, teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached. But he had caught it. It hadn't hit him. It hadn't hit the ground despite his less than secure and confidant grip.

Mark was still holding it.

"Put it down," his dad said.

Mark set the boulder down. It hit the earth with a thud that he felt in his bones, settling into the soil like it belonged there.

"Good," his dad said.

Mark looked up.

His dad was there, standing in the same pose he did after every toss of the boulder, arms crossed over his chest, expression unreadable.

The light filtering through the trees accentuating his father's beard - the beard he hadn't had before he'd gone into that portal on live TV a month ago.

The beard that had been trending on social media and especially twitter about #Omni-dad and #Omni-Beard and all those thirst posts he kept stumbling on.

Dad still didn't want to tell him how long he'd spent over there.

Mark wiped sweat from his forehead. His hands shaking from exhaustion.

"How many more?" Mark asked.

"As many as it takes."

"Dad." That's not an answer.

"As many. As it takes, Mark."

Mark looked up at the sky, a heavy exhale leaving him. He nodded. Bent his knees. Picked up the boulder and tossed it at his father.

It was stopped mid air and set down softly, silently.

Dad.

"I thought we were still going to train."

"I did too but I have another idea. Come at me."

"Uh- What? Dad- what?"

"I said, come at me," Dad repeated, as it it was obvious. "We're going to spar."

"No we're not," Mark said quickly, confused. "What the hell-"

"No swearing."

"I'm sorry, but please answer my question, Dad."

"What question?"

"You know what question."

"Just like your mother know about you playing hero?" His father asked, arms crossed over his chest sending him a pointed look.

"You know about that?"

"You're little deal with the GDA? The costume Art told me he was making for you? Yes I know. Do you really think you'd have a member the Guardians of the Globe casually drop in on one of your patrols nearly every time you went out if I didn't? Do you really think, me, your Father, doesn't know and facilitated you easing into superhero life?" His father looked disappointed before smiling tightly, then brightly, "And I lied, your mother knows about it all, of course."

Mark's mouth opened and closed, "-It- uh. What? Uh- Its been two weeks!"

"It has."

Minutes passed.

A hand dropped on mark's shoulder.

"I'm- I… I'm sorry to have dropped this on you. But you have to understand… As your father. I worry. To know you'd decided to go out there and risk your life without telling me. I… apologise for not helping you like I know I should have. I've been," Dad closed his eyes tight and pained, fingers tightened on his shoulder. "A mess. I haven't been available how I should have, and with Oliver. Things haven't been easy for you."

Mark didn't know what to say.

"You know I love you," seeing dad look at him like that, it hurt, "don't you son?"

"I love you too, dad," he said honestly, and voice cracking just at the wrong moment, making dad smile like he always did.

"Ice cream?" His dad offered with an awkward half smile,

Mark stared at him.

"You just threw a fifteen-ton boulder at me. Repeatedly. And now you want ice cream."

"Yes."

"That's-" Mark stopped. Considered. "Actually, yeah. Okay. I want ice cream."

His dad's smile widened. Real. Brief.

The kind that had been rare the past month, the kind that made Mark's chest hurt when he saw it because he hadn't realized how much he'd missed it until it was back.

They flew to the nearest town - Mark carried this time, his arms wrapped around his dad's shoulders the way he hadn't done since he was maybe twelve, the wind rushing past them, the trees blurring below. His dad's beard tickled his forehead. He didn't complain.

Mark took two chocolate and Dad took milk flower and strawberry.

They sat at a picnic table near the edge of the parking lot. The sun was low. October cold. The ice cream was already starting to melt.

Dad ate his strawberry. Mark ate his chocolate. Neither spoke for a minute.

Just the crunch of cones. The hum of the gas station lights. A truck on the highway.

Mark took a bite. Swallowed. Took another.

"Dad," he said.

"Mm."

"About Oliver."

Dad's jaw stopped moving. The muscle there jumped once.

"What about him."

Mark licked his cone. Tried to find the words.

"What do you feel?" Mark said. "When you look at him."

Dad set his cone down on the wrapper. Looked at it. Didn't look at Mark.

"I don't know," Dad said.

"That's not-"

"It's the truth."

Mark waited.

Dad picked up the cone again. The strawberry was dripping onto his fingers.

"His people attacked Earth," Dad said. "Three times. You know that."

Mark nodded.

"I went through the portal to stop them. To make sure they wouldn't come back." Dad's voice was flat. Measured. The same voice he used to describe flight trajectories. "And I found him. In a laboratory. In a tank. The only one who survived what they were doing."

Mark's stomach turned. He kept eating.

"He was small," Dad said. "Smaller than he is now. Greener. His eyes were brown. Like your mother's. Not the blue they are now."

Mark said nothing.

"Even under that red sky… I couldn't leave him there," Dad said, looking like his mind was far away. "It would have been kinder to have let him die."

Mark's eyes widened, horrified.

Looking at his father.

It felt like looking ate someone you were just realising was a stranger.

"You brought him home," Mark forced out.

"I did," Dad looked back up, ice blue eyes meeting mark's, "I don't regret that."

Mark stayed silent.

"Do you remember that talk we had with your mother when i came back?"

"Yeah," Mark said, "Hard to forget."

Dad nodded. Ate some of his ice cream. Swallowed.

"I didn't tell you everything," Dad said.

Mark waited.

"I don't know if I can tell you everything."

"Then tell me something."

Dad looked at him. The sun was behind him, casting his face in shadow. His ice cream was melting onto his fingers.

"He was alone," Dad said. "In that place. In that room. The only one left alive. And when I found him, he looked at me."

Mark's cone was gone. He didn't remember finishing it.

"He looked at me," Dad said again, "and I couldn't-" He stopped. Swallowed. "I couldn't walk away."

"So you brought him home."

"Yes."

"And now?"

Dad set his cone down. The strawberry had melted into a puddle on the wrapper.

"Now I look at him and I don't know if I saved him or if I just couldn't stand to leave him," Dad said. "I don't know if that's the same thing."

Mark stared at his father.

"Does it matter?" Mark asked.

Dad blinked.

"Does it matter why you brought him home?" Mark said. "He's here now. He's safe. You're not going to hurt him."

"How do you know?"

"Because you're my Dad. You don't hurt people. Not like that."

Dad looked at him astonished, then burst out laughing.

"Mark," Dad started, face in his hand, shoulders shaking with restrained laughter. "I killed the other test subjects."

Dad's ice-cream was on the ground.

Somehow this single image encapsulated the entire conversation.

Mark didn't say anything.

He couldn't.

His father was laughing.

Laughing.

Face in his hands, shoulders shaking, and the ice cream was on the ground, and Mark didn't know what to do with his hands.

The more it went on, the more they sounded like sobs.

Dad's laughter stopped.

Not faded. Stopped. Like someone had closed a door.

He looked at the ice cream on the ground. At his empty hand. At Mark.

"Say something," Dad said, his eyes were damp.

Mark opened his mouth. Closed it.

"You killed them," Mark said.

"They were going to die anyway."

It sounded like a lie.

Mark swallowed audibly.

"Do you want to go home?" he asked his father.

"Are you going to tell me it's okay?" Dad asked.

Mark shook his head.

"Good," Dad said. "It's not."

They sat there. The sun was lower now. The parking lot was empty.

"We should go home," Mark said.

"Yes."

Dad stood up.

They flew home.

The kitchen light was on. Through the window, Mark could see Mom at the counter. Oliver in his bouncy seat beside her.

Dad landed in the backyard. Stood there.

"You coming?" Mark asked.

"Yes," Dad said.

They walked inside.

Mom looked up. Smiled. "How was training?"

"Good," Mark said.

"Good," Dad said.

Oliver made a sound. Dad walked over. Picked him up. Held him against his chest.

Oliver grabbed a fistful of Dad's beard.

"Ow," Dad said.

Mark didn't snort this time.

He watched his dad hold his brother and thought about the ice cream on the ground and the other test subjects and the way his father had cried.

---

Oliver was asleep on his chest, small fists clutching the fabric of Nolan's t-shirt, the rise an fall of his chest a soothing melody accompanying the tiny bird like metronome of his heart.

Nolan hadn't moved in a near half an hour.

Not because he couldn't. But because he was laying on the sofa, head nestles on his lovely wife's thighs, listening as she talked, eyes fluttering as she played with his hair.

The weight on an infant, even one that had reached the size of a one year old and the _ of a nine month old, was a peculiar thing, not in the fact a living, breathing entity was using his sternum as a bed, but because of the cooler warmth so similar to human, so similar to something he still, at times, did not allow himself to name.

His boy's chest rose.

Fell.

His heart was a slow metronome, not in slow in the manner Debbie's was, but slower than what he had grown to appreciate was the norm with Oliver.

This is great, he thought with a pang, with guilt.

Debbie talked.

Her fingers danced in his hair, his eyes fluttered, looking at the distant ceiling.

He listened. Always tried to listen to her. Always turned his attention to her.

He was weak for her.

Her voice moved through the air with the ease of a person that knew she was heard and would always be heard by him. He traced the partition, the tale, the communication… her words. He tried to fashion the most beautiful description of her words, knowing now that he was a published author on this impossible earth, in this impossible life.

A melody.

Her voice was a melody. Her words an Aria. Her heart the orchestra.

He smiled, slightly, lazily. His eyes traced the curb of her jaw, the lines of her face, settling on the spark of her eyes.

He ached for her even in her presence.

"- and she cc'ed the entire department," Debbie was saying, her fingers catching on a knot, pulling, sending a pleasant electric sensation through his body. It was gentle, lovely and soothing that part of him that still remembered what being touched-starved was like. "The entire department, Nolan. Whitmore included."

"-n purpose," he said, voice coming out as a low rumble that felt like crashing stones in his chest. Oliver shifted on his chest, curling on himself, no doubt having felt the vibration through bone and flesh, perhaps even with the super-hearing Nolan was starting to believed his youngest had inherited.

He looked down, Oliver still there, eyes closed and drool pooling on Nolan. The viltrumite looked back up at his wife, his partner with half-lidded eyes. A warm palm landed on his cheek, soft and soothing, a thumb tracing his left cheekbone from the outside in, up the side on his nose then down the bridge.

His breathing shuddered. Warmth pooled in his chest, down his abdomen.

"Oh, absolutely." A pause, the abstract shapes drawn on his scalp ceased. His eyes snapped open. "She's been doing this for months. Every time I catch an error she was supposed to catch - suddenly there's a chain I shouldn't be on."

Oliver shifted flipped over. Nolan lightly braced the boy so he wouldn't fall as he moved, his head still on Nolan's chest. Oliver's small feet kicked at the air around his father's jaw.

"You could escalate," he offered.

The fingers in his hair paused again.

"I could," he said in a sort of hum.

"But?"

"But Sandra has been here for eleven years and I've been there for four and going above Sandra is not the same thing as winning against Sandra." She resumed. The fingertips pressed once at his temple, deliberate, and then returned to their wandering, and he closed his eyes. "I have to wait. You have to let her make a mistake that's big enough it can't be managed quietly." A small breath. "Paul keeps telling me the same thing."

Nolan's eyes opened.

He did not move. Oliver did not stir. The ceiling was the same ceiling it had been a moment ago. Nothing in the room changed.

Paul.

He mulled it over.

Paul.

The realisation came slowly, then all at once, grinding at his feeling of security with the force of an avalanche.

He exhaled through his nose. Slow. Controlled.

Oliver's small foot had found the collar of his shirt, small toes dug into his collarbone.

"Who is Paul," Nolan said.

It came out entirely level. He had long practice at entirely level.

Debbie's hand stilled. Just for a moment. Then continued.

"Sales," she said. "He transferred from Portland, I think two years ago now. We have lunch sometimes." A pause that was not quite a pause. "Why?"

Why.

A fair question. He was cataloguing several possible answers and finding that none of them were the complete one, which was itself information, which he was setting to one side for the moment.

"You trust his judgment," Nolan said. "About Sandra."

"I do."

His lips drew in a tight line, his eyes focused on a distant imaginary point.

Debbie's hand stopped.

He felt her looking at him. He did not need to see her face to know the particular meaning of this look - the one that meant she was seeing something he had not entirely meant to show, assembling the shape of it with the patience of a woman who had learned, that pushing ended conversations and waiting opened them.

"Nolan?" She asked.

"Invite him to dinner," he said.

As if to display his disapproval at the thoughts Nolan did not dare put words to, a heel met his jaw with force.

Force that woke the babe.

Force that hurt Oliver.

A wail erupted.

---

Nolan had noticed Mark sitting on the roof for more than an hour now.

And he had learned, through the near 4 months in this family, that this was an invitation, a sign of needing help.

"Mark?" he asked from the garden.

"Dad."

"You look like you need company."

"I won't say no to that."

Nolan rose slowly, shoed feet leaving the ground. He sat next to Mark. He landed next to Mark with the careful lightness of someone who had learned, recently, that his own weight could be startling. The roof took it without complaint. He sat close enough to be present, far enough to not crowd.

Minutes passed.

"Are you alright, son?"

A beat. Mark's thumbnail traced the edge of a tile. Back and forth. The small habit that served to burn off restlessness.

"Yeah."

"You've been-" Nolan looked at his hands, "avoiding me for the past week." He turned his head away from his son, from the teenager he had at times thought of in a manner similar to Oliver. "Since… our last training session."

"Yeah," his son said without inflection.

"I know it gave you a lot to think about."

An inhale, "It sure did."

"It won't happen again," Nolan promised to his son and to himself.

"Dad?" Nolan turned to face his son. "You know that I love you right?"

Nolan stilled.

Mark was not looking at him. Looking at the garden below, chin slightly tucked, affecting the posture of someone who had asked a casual question. His heartbeat gave him away. Elevated. Not much. Enough to notice.

Stressed, anxious. he noted.

"I do."

Seconds passed. Mark's eyes snapped toward Nolan before darting away again. He pressed his torso a fraction closer to his thighs, wrapping into a tight self-hug. His knuckles whitened slightly where his fingers gripped his own sleeve.

"Ok," he said to Nolan, "Just- just checking."

Minutes passed, the silence settled. Lighter.

Nolan's gaze drifted past the shingles of the roof, past the neatly manicured suburban lawns, out toward the open horizon where the sky faded into the deep, ink-blue expanse of an upper atmosphere polluted by light and airborne particles.

He compared it, briefly, to Viltrum's. To the sight that had been home for so long. He thought of the- of the tomb. Of the bodies he had helped put into orbit.

He though of the pandemics of his human life.

The difference ached.

Nolan had been younger.

Nolan had nearly died because of a virus that killed quicker and ached more than Covid.

He inhaled. He exhaled.

His eyes unfocused.

His limbs relaxed.

His mind shifted, pulling away from the quiet of the Earth, drifting backward into the cold logic of his childhood. The cold logic of a child that had grown after the purge, the cold of a child that-

His tongued darted out, trailing his bottom lip, a soothing distraction.

Around twenty years, that was how much he could not remember. two and zero. so little.a fraction of his lifetime. Yet seemingly more important than what he remembered living.

Twenty year that had, in his other life, had its conclusion play out in the form of a cartoon.

Earth.

Viltrum.

The thought hung in the crisp Earth air, heavier than the atmosphere itself.

Should he send a message to Viltrum ?

The question came, accompanied with other thoughts. Thoughts he considered in the way he'd considered infiltration and destruction of planetary systems. Angles. Variables. And on a later, lesser import and now, costs.

Three months and three weeks. That was how long, comparative to this dimension that he had been here. A duration where he'd. No he should stop lying to himself. He was still fighting with himself. On questions of ethics and humanity.

He felt the muscles of his visage tighten.

What ever way and what ever timeline he had been told to adhere… he had been here shorter. Most certainly. Such a mission would, according to experience, last years if not decades without contact. Especially for assets as experienced as Nolan.

How long had it taken for his body to mature? four centuries. Four centuries before he-

Nolan looked at his son.

Before he'd reached a biological age similar to Mark's.

Perhaps he'd have a year, two at the most before he'd need to-

But earth was-

He'd need to report that everything was going as planned and greater Viltrumite intervention.

"Okay so," Mark said, making Nolan return to reality, "this is going to sound kind of stupid."

Mark was doing this thing Nolan had noticed he did when he was nervous. "It's about Amber."

"Alright."

"I think I'm messing things up." A pause. "I don't know if it's fixable of like- if it's a thing where I just- If I just leave for some kind of mission, will it fix itself? Or will that make our relationship worse."

Nolan stayed silent for a moment.

"What is it you think you did?"

"We were hanging out with William and-" he paused, teeth lightly grinding together. "She was talking to us, it was about a charity she was volunteering at and she was asking us if we'd like to help out. And I just-"

He sighed, heavy and long.

"I feel like I made her feel like I didn't want to help. I do." He said as he straightened, looking his father in the eyes. "In fact I really really want to, especially if it's with her and William."

"What gave you that impression?" Nolan asked, voice soft.

"I- I was called away by Cecil to help in that wildfire in California…"

"You left in the middle of your conversation?"

Mark looked away, "… yeah."

"What excuse did you give her?"

"Family emergency…"

"… and how many times did you use it?" Nolan asked his son.

"too many," he mumbled.

Nolan blinked, "How long exactly?"

"Two months and a half."

"You're aware that she knows right?"

"Wha- how?"

"You're not exactly… subtle. Son, you're a very poor liar."

"Hey! that's-!"

"A good thing, just… not for your current situation," Nolan managed as he suppressed the smile that wanted to emerge.

"What?"

"Your situation is also not sustainable."

"I know. I know, but I can-" he gestured broadly at the sky. "I can't exactly tell her the truth."

Nolan stayed silent.

Mark turned to look at him. then slowly, "… Dad."

Nolan raised a brow.

"You're doing your face."

"What face?"

"That face." Mark said, "You- you really think I should tell her?"

"If you want to have a working relationship with her?" Nolan turned back towards the city, "Then yes. Hiding things… it has this tendency to-" he mulled the words over, "make things worse for everyone involved."

"But if I tell her, won't she become a-"

"A target?" Nolan finished, "That's something to take into consideration, yes. It's also the consideration every Superhero has to confront if they ever wish to have a life outside the caped community. And… I don't want that for you Mark. You're young. You're more lucky than you know, and you have this opportunity to live, really live and become the best person I know you can be. Don't ruin it by tainting your relationships with your friend and girlfriend with secrets, especially if you know you could confide in them."

Mark stared at him.

The stare lasted long enough that Nolan became aware of it in the particular way he became aware of things that required a response he hadn't prepared.

"That's…" Mark started. Stopped. "That's a lot coming from you."

"I… suppose."

"Dad. You have- you're not exactly an open book." He said it without accusation. "Like. At all."

Nolan considered denying this and found he couldn't construct a version of the denial that would survive scrutiny.

"No," he agreed. "I'm not."

"How do I even-" He exhaled through his nose. "How do I start that conversation."

Nolan was quiet for a moment.

"I don't know," he said.

Mark looked at him.

"I've never had it," Nolan said. "Not that kind of conversation." He kept his eyes on the horizon. "I'm not the right person to tell you how to begin something I haven't managed to do myself."

"So what do I do?"

"Talk to William," Nolan said, "You told me he has a boyfriend now, no? I think you should tell him first or something, sharing the burden as it were."

"But that's-" Mark spluttered, "that's not easy."

"And I never said it was."

"But what if it goes wrong with William?"

"It won't."

"What if he doesn't talk to me anymore?"

"That won't happen."

"What if-"

"Mark," Nolan said, lightly pulling his son closer in a one-armed hug, "However badly you think it'll go, reality won't be as bad."

"That's not very reasuring."

"Well it's the best I came up with."

"You didn't even tell me everything was going to be alright."

"Do you want me to lie to you?"

"no."

Minutes passed.

"Dad?"

Nolan hummed in acknowledgement.

"You said you haven't managed to begin it either." Mark wasn't looking at him. "The conversation. With Mom. Right?"

Nolan said nothing.

"You're going to though." It wasn't quite a question.

He honed in of his mate's slow sleeping breathing.

"Yes," Nolan said.


___
A/N :
I'm realllyyy deep on a SW project right now so the next update might take a lot of time :3