I hadn’t wanted my mother to get hurt, being careless with my power and with not trusting her about it, but I’d been willing on a level to leave the door open for it to happen, and that willingness went hand in hand with my relief about Amy being on Earth Shin now. The realization had taken me some time, the process of rationalization comparatively quick to begin. Life was genuinely easier if I let the slate be wiped—or perhaps struck—clean.

I had even related that philosophy to Kenzie. To her parents. Another slate that had been struck relatively clean. After they’d dropped the tidbits they had on Hard Boil, and after the two hundred messes that had followed in succession from that, Kenzie had eventually found her equilibrium. Her being in a kind of limbo right now with her disconnected and distant institutionalized care wasn’t the worst thing in the world, much like how people could use sensory deprivation tanks to center themselves. Kenzie struggled because she hyper-connected, and a disconnected civilian life meant she wouldn’t hyper-connect or get distracted.

She’d even forged a family in a way that didn’t take away from her ordinary life. Regular ‘meals’ with Ashley. A small circle of peers her age that she could connect to, that honed her and refined her. People like Aiden who I was happy to take on a general, arms-length coaching role for.

It was important to strike a balance with powers, to find a niche where their use could be casual, not overbearing, not solely a thing where we went out at night three times a week to be reckless and violent with them. It was important to have the casual little acceptances of power in our lives. For Kenzie, leaving the door open for her to tinker regularly was good for her on that casual acceptance level, and really good for the rest of us on a strategic level.

This was an equilibrium I had effectively trained my whole life to manage. The absorption of one aspect of identity into the whole. I’d had to learn that.

Ashley wasn’t. Ashley was new ground, something I was having to figure out on the fly. Damsel had been… not struck from the slate, because I’d only come up with that terminology recently, but I’d left the door open for her to go. I likened Ashley to a cat, as much as she might be annoyed with the comparison, and a cat couldn’t be approached without caution. Go straight for the vulnerable belly or throat and the claws came out. Metaphorical, in Ashley’s case.