Danny Hebert was exhausted, both mentally and physically. To say that the events of the past week had been harrowing would be an understatement. Things had been extremely stressful before an Endbringer had attacked the bay. Taylor had basically run away from home and was off living with her friends. That would be bad enough on its own, but it was like salt rubbed into an open wound to see that she wasn’t just doing okay, but seemingly better for having run away.

  It was a weight on his shoulders like an Atlas stone, ever-present, crushing him at all hours of the day and night. She was all he had left of Annette, and day by day, he was losing her, too. He felt like a failure. A failure of a husband, one who couldn’t protect his wife, and a failure of a father, having all but lost his daughter. The thought made his blood boil, but an equal measure of angst offset that anger.

  But that was before Leviathan had attacked their city. Life now was different. It had changed everything, and not in good ways. The city was wrecked and barely managing to stay alive by a thread.

  Despite that, there was a strange sense of hope present amongst the destruction and suffering. Taylor had come back into his life, only to drop a series of bombshells. He couldn’t help but blame himself for the fact that he’d failed so miserably as a father that he had a supervillain for a daughter. He should have done a better job. Have been more proactive in addressing the bullying. In communicating with her, getting her to open up to him in the ways she seemed so reticent to do with anyone but her closest friends.

  But that, too, was his fault. Whenever he looked at her, he saw Annette, and his emotions would betray him. He’d lose the words or the things he was trying to say to his daughter because of the spectre of his wife.

  Still, the revelation that his daughter was the feared supervillain Skitter had brought a whole bunch of puzzle pieces into alignment for him. He’d spent long nights waiting for her to come home at the early hours of the morning. He’d feared that she had fallen into substance abuse, as was so common with his coworkers and their kids. Instead of shooting up drugs, though, she’d been out risking her life fighting other villains, robbing banks, and attacking the heroes in the city.

  He felt a perverse sense of pride at the fact. He knew that he shouldn’t ever say or do anything to reinforce that kind of bad behavior, but how could he not be proud? Even if she was doing terrible things, she was apparently very good at what she was doing, and she had been extremely successful doing it.

  His surprise was immeasurable when she told him what had been going on with her life. And it had clicked in his mind when she finished her tale. He’d asked one of her friends, Morgan, what it was that had made her run away from home, and the woman had told him that there was a good chance that he had everything backwards. That she wasn’t running away from him to avoid him, but was keeping her distance to protect him. At the time when she told him that, he’d thought that maybe Taylor had gotten mixed up in some gang activity or something of the sort, but he’d pushed that thought to the side. She wasn’t the type.

  If only he’d known what had really been going on that entire time.

  Even though things seemed to have hit rock bottom for him, they were also seemingly bouncing back just as hard. Taylor had come out as a villain, only to reveal that she wished to join the Wards and be a Hero. Initially, he was against the idea; he didn’t want to see her out and about, risking her life and limb. But Carol had explained to him that she’d be able to clean her record if she did join, and if she didn’t… well, she’d be put in prison at some point. The thought of her there was far worse than her being on a team of heroes. At least there she’d have others to support and protect her.

  So he’d gone with them and signed her on as her legal guardian. It wasn’t the ideal outcome for him personally, but it seemed like it was by far the best choice for her, and for that reason, he’d agreed to it. In the days since, everyone had been so busy that they’d barely had time to interact with each other, but they–everyone at the station–made an effort to have at least one meal together per day. It was a communal meal, and sometimes people would split off with their families into smaller circles, but often it was a dozen people sharing food and discussion.

  He wouldn’t trade those moments for anything in the world. Things were looking up, despite the bleak overall outlook. Taylor was in his life more and speaking to him more now than she had been in months. And more than that, he had been able to see her interacting with her peers. Crystal, Victoria, Amy, Morgan, Melody, and others. A tiny slice of normality in an otherwise totally bizarre situation.

  That brought him to the here and now. For the past four days, since the attack, he’d worked around the clock with the other members of the Dockworkers’ Union to clear debris, make repairs to infrastructure and equipment, and prepare the city to receive the first shipment of disaster relief.

  He’d decided to go with the suggestion that Morgan had made for repurposing shipping containers. They had a rapidly growing container camp in the streets surrounding the station, and other members of their group had been managing to get people moved in and keep the place secured. Within days of the word getting out, they had provided shelter to nearly a hundred others. That wasn’t the only thing they’d been doing with the large collection of containers that had previously occupied the docks. They’d also used them, as well as chunks of broken warehouses, to erect a two-story wall that closed off the docks. There were two ways through the wall, both of which were fairly fortified and guarded by both civilian volunteers and local law enforcement.

  The gantry cranes had been repaired and restored to service. They had forklifts and container trucks ready. Not enough to work the cargo expediently, but more were being torn apart and patched together to get additional capacity going.

  Last night, they’d finished up clearing the shipping lane of shipwrecks. A rather terrifying-looking woman had come in to handle most of the work there. She wore a strange mix of black tactical body armor and a dress, and an armored welding hood that obscured her entire head and face. She was the leader of a group of monstrous capes, and he was pretty sure, also one of them. She had a mane of what looked like porcupine quills for hair. Apex had been present with her when she rolled up in a big military flatbed truck along with a man with see-through skin and a brightly-colored lizard-man.

  He wasn’t able to see it himself, but according to the other managers, she was able to touch a wreck, and the entire thing just… fell to pieces. Like it had been disassembled at a drydock, other capes came in and removed the big chunks that were blocking the bay, but most of the wrecks had been broken apart in a way that allowed them to rest nearly flat on the ocean floor.

  Work was also rapidly progressing on making the ferry seaworthy. Tsunamis had washed it up onto dry land, and they’d found it half-buried in the wreckage of a big-box store. At first glimpse, it looked like it was in pretty terrible shape, but most of the damage was superficial or to non-critical areas. Ferries, by nature of the types of cargo they carried, tended to be heavily over-engineered and practically bomb-proof. Two capes that Danny actually recognized had been instrumental in getting it repaired and operational. Kid Win and Armsmaster, although Armsmaster had not been in his armor, instead carried around more mundane tools. The faults in the powerplant had been addressed, which was the original reason the ferry had been taken out of service. Getting it back into the water had taken no small effort on the part of the heroes.

  Initially, they had tried shrinking it down with Vista’s ability, but something about the ferry was preventing that from working. So they had to move it the old-fashioned way. It had taken Apex, Manpower, Glory Girl, and Weld, along with a number of creative uses of rigging, to get it relocated. There had been a small celebration that broke out amongst the union members when it was floated once again, and the engines fired up. A vital highway for goods, services, and labor between the northside and the southside was once again operational. We drafted up a simple schedule and pressed it into service immediately.

  Overall, things had been going in their favor, although it had involved an enormous amount of back-breaking hard labor to do so. Not everything had gone according to plan. There had been two attacks on the dockyard already. Thankfully, it was only gang members, but both E88 and The Merchants had attacked with ragtag groups of armed gangs. Most were armed with melee weapons, but there had been a number of shots traded back and forth between them and the people defending the docks. Thankfully, no serious injuries or deaths- so far.

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  It was just a matter of time until the ‘actual’ forces of those two groups actually showed up. They’d debated whether this was just random violence or if it was more organized attacks, and they were just probing and feeling them out in advance of a real attack. Nobody at the DWU had been able to draw any concrete conclusions. One thing was for certain, though. The word had gotten out that the docks were active and there were people doing things here. It was inevitable that they’d run into problems, but Danny had hoped that it wouldn’t be until after they’d unloaded and started dispensing supplies.

  Danny sighed and ran a hand through his hair. It was three AM, and he should have been asleep hours ago, but he was still poring over the documents the Union had drafted up to dispense relief supplies to key locations around the city. The ferry was going to be instrumental in transporting much of the goods to the southern half of the city in relative safety. He still needed to triple-check the rosters they had for skilled laborers before submitting them. Maybe that could wait until the morning.

  He was interrupted by the sounds of bare feet shuffling into the room, and he looked up to see a mop of frizzy brown hair and freckles. Amy, wearing pyjamas and yawning with bleary eyes. She, like most of the rest of the people at the firehouse, had dark rings around her eyes and the half-defeated look of someone who was pushed beyond their normal limits.

  She cleared her throat and spoke, “Uh… Hey, Mr. Hebert. Shouldn’t you go to bed?” She glanced over at the glowing digits of the clock.

  “Just Danny, please. And yes, I should have been asleep hours ago, but there’s more work that needs to be done.” He sighed again. Bed sounded really good right about now.

  “What about you, Amy? Why are you still up so late? Couldn’t sleep?” He felt bad for Amy. All the heroes had been working themselves to the bone, but Amy, in her role as Panacea, had been pulling insane hours. She was either incredibly driven, or she was burning the candle at both ends, or something.

  She took a seat at the table where Danny was sitting, and with a look of mild apprehension on her face, pulled out what looked like a large glove, setting it on the table with a hollow-sounding clack. After a moment’s hesitation, she pushed it over to Danny. She brushed some strands of hair out from in front of her face and said, “I’ve been working on some projects in the little bit of downtime I’ve had, and when I start working, I wind up losing track of time. I hate putting things down when I still have so many ideas running through my head.”

  Danny carefully picked up the glove. No, not a glove… a gauntlet. It looked a bit like knight armor, except instead of being made of metal, it was made of some kind of iridescent green material. Whatever it was, it was fairly light and seemingly quite strong. The craftsmanship was unreal. Each of the joints looked like it was sealed with some ball joint, and there were no signs of any tooling or machining. Flipping it over, he could see there was a leathery material on the inside of the palm and fingers. He ran a fingernail over the armored surface. It was smooth and very hard from what he could tell. He’d honestly never seen anything like it.

  Setting the gauntlet back down, he pushed it across the table and smiled at the tired girl. “You made this?”

  She nodded slowly, took it, and slipped her right hand into it, flexing her fingers and working her hand through its full range of motion. “Yeah. Experiments. This is the latest version I’ve made; each one has been better than the last. I’m trying to make some protective gear for myself. I want to be a hero like my sister, but I don’t have super-strength or durability or anything like that. So I’m trying to make sure I’m protected so I don’t get hurt doing it.”

  Danny leaned back in his chair and thought about that, frowning some. After mulling it over a moment, he couldn’t help but relate what she was saying to how he felt about his daughter and what she was doing.

  “Can I ask you… why? I mean, you’re world-famous as Panacea, and people love you, you know?”

  Amy looked down at her lap, her brows furrowed. After a long pause, she replied, “I know that. But I don’t like doing it. Healing people, I mean. I still want to help people, but I don’t want to do it as Panacea. The pressure, the expectations, the looks people give me… When someone is dying of cancer and they look at me, it’s like they don’t see me as a person; they see the cure to their problems. It’s not easy to say that I don’t want to heal people, but it’s… not good for me.”

  Danny thought about what it was she was saying and tried to relate it to his own experiences. It made a certain kind of sense to him, but the thing that he kept circling back on was why she wanted to place herself in harm’s way. Or why Taylor did, for that matter.

  “Amy, can I ask you something?”

  She looked up and nodded to Danny.

  “I’m still trying to understand this thing about being a hero or a villain. It’s still new to me–being so close to it, I mean–and I don’t think I quite get it. I don’t really understand why you, or Taylor, would want to go out and risk your lives doing that kind of business?” His voice trailed off as he tried to put his feelings on the matter into words.

  Amy let out a soft laugh and sniffed. “Of all the people you could ask that, I’m probably the absolute worst. I don’t get it either. Not really. Vicky or Morgan could probably tell you better. I’ve always thought I was a coward and that I didn’t want to get hurt being a hero. Then… that day at the bank, I don’t know what came over me, but I just sort of… snapped and went into action without even really thinking about it too much.”

  Danny pulled his glasses off and cleaned them with the bottom of his shirt. This was all news to him. “You were there… when Taylor attacked the bank?”

  Amy snorted and shook her head. “Yeah. I wish I weren’t. It was horrible. And… I’m sorry, Danny. For attacking her. I thought she was going to hurt my sister, and Taylor’s teammate at the time was saying awful things about me.”

  Danny took a deep breath and sighed. “I don’t blame you, Amy. You were defending yourself and your family from a group robbing the bank you were at. Everyone has a right to defend themselves. What was it that changed your mind, though? Was it when you were attacked at the bank?”

  Amy played with her gauntlet, hands resting in her lap, and her gaze was fixed downwards as she spoke. “No, it was Morgan who convinced me otherwise. She thinks I’d be a good hero and supported my decision to quit being Panacea when I thought nobody else would get it.” Her cheeks warmed a few shades as she thought back to the night of the gala. Almost as an afterthought, she said, “I think she’s completely fearless. She doesn’t hesitate for a second to put herself in danger for others. She told me she thinks I have it in me to do similar things, but I always second-guess myself.”

  Danny slouched in his seat and was quiet as he contemplated. Finally, he asked: “So would you say it’s a feeling or something of the sort? That makes you want to be a hero?”

  Amy brought her eyes up to Danny. She pursed her lips and rocked her head from side to side in response. “Not exactly. Sometimes, and I think it varies between people, too. But it could also be the fact that you know you have abilities and that if you don’t do it, nobody else will, you know? Like you can’t just expect a fire to put itself out. If you’re holding the extinguisher, you don’t wait to see if someone else also has one. Or something. I’m not good at explaining these things.”

  Danny put his glasses back on at studied Amy’s face as she spoke. When she finished, he nodded. “I’m just… I want to support my daughter and see her doing the things she wants to do and to be successful, but I also am her dad, and I don’t want to see her hurt.”

  Amy nibbled on her lower lip. “Well, I can only tell you about my feelings, but when I told my dad that I wanted to be a more traditional hero instead of healing people, he wanted to know what my reasoning was, and he pushed me some, making sure it was something I really wanted and wasn’t just a flight of fancy, you know?” She shifted in her seat before continuing. “But once he knew that it was something I really wanted, he supported me entirely, and that was… an amazing feeling, knowing that your parents back you in pursuing your desires.”

  She placed her gauntleted hand on the table and worked the armor. “I guess what I’m saying is, maybe talk to Taylor about it? Find out her specific motivations, and see if they are things you support. And if you do, you should um… let her know?”

  Danny nodded. It was easier said than done. He always had a bad habit of clamming up around her and not fully expressing what he wanted to say, but Amy had a point. Nobody else was going to do it, so shouldn’t he take action?

  “Danny?”

  He looked up at Amy from where he’d been lost in thought. “Mm?”

  Amy reached her gauntleted hand out, across the table, towards Danny. “Can I test something? I need to touch your hand, if you don’t mind.”

  Danny blinked, then extended his hand. “Sure, of course.”

  The leathery material on the inside of the gauntlet touched the back of his hand and remained in contact. Amy closed her eyes, and several seconds passed, then Danny felt a change come over him. He was still tired, but the foggy, muddy crud that had been clogging his thoughts for the past few hours cleared. He felt much more clear-headed and partially refreshed, and then Amy pulled her hand away.

  “What was that?” He asked her.

  She cleared her throat. “I’ve been working on ways to use my power through the armor, and I think I’ve got it figured out now. I just pulled some of the normal toxins associated with exhaustion out of your bloodstream.”

  “Oh, wow. I had no idea you could do that. You should bottle it and sell it! You’d be an overnight millionaire, hah!”

  She chuckled some and nodded, then broke into a wide yawn. Sliding her chair back, she stood up and walked over to the sink to get a drink. “Well, I came here to get a drink before bed, before getting sidetracked. I’m going to try and get some rest now. Have a good night, Danny.”

  “Goodnight, Amy. I think I’m going to do the same and try and get some sleep. God knows I need it.”

  She waved and walked out of the spacious kitchen and dining room.

  Danny had a lot of things on his mind, but for the first time in the past several days, logistics and planning weren’t one of them. He always felt a sense of guilt around Taylor that he couldn’t relate to and interact with her in the ways that he wanted. He tended to throw himself into his work, and that was someplace where he felt like he shone, and the real Danny Hebert was able to come fully out and show himself. He had more confidence and self-assuredness working with the Union. Perhaps that same dynamic was at play with Taylor? Maybe she felt more herself when she was in costume?

  If that was the case, it was something he could entirely relate to. He hated being weedy, awkward Danny. At work, he was tall, in charge Danny. The Danny who wouldn’t back down from a labor dispute, would picket endless hours, and fight for his people relentlessly. He didn’t wear a costume, but if Taylor also felt that pseudo dual-identity dynamic, and she was more herself fighting other parahumans on the streets, then he got it. He did his best to make a mental note of it as he headed to the bathrooms and brushed his teeth.

  He also needed to talk to Morgan about these things, as she’d proven very insightful in the past, but she’d hardly been about since the night that she and Taylor had signed up. Danny had problems separating work and life. Pretty big problems. He wasn’t sure that Morgan was able to separate the two at all, from what he had seen in the past week. She never stopped, only long enough to eat, take short naps, and visit everyone for their daily meals.

  He could only hope that things would start to settle down soon and that everyone in his immediate circle would return to a semi-normal schedule as he lay down in bed. The worst day in the bay’s history was behind them, and things could only get better from here on out.

  Sleep took him moments after his head hit the pillow.