No, for her, every step was about strategy and positioning. Dropping the right hints, as she was imprisoned, the right compliments, getting the invitation to watch her place, moving in, then getting her and Rain out of jail. She’d invited me to stay and she wouldn’t ask me to leave if there wasn’t a graceful way to do it. It wasn’t hard, once she was figured out, to block off her options by making certain actions out to be undignified. Minimize the damage and maximize the gains.

Once I was close, positioning became that much easier. She was just as hungry for someone close as Kenzie was, but the difference was that Ashley had spent years on her own. I talked about leaving doors open, and hers had nearly closed.

This was good, as things stood. Being close to her meant I could impart lessons about morality, encourage heroism. Her being close to me, to us, meant we had a constant, omnipresent reminder that violence was a consideration and an option.

The natural blending of civilian and cape identities had to account for violence, for conflict, and for a careful pruning of external forces and influences. Ashley was very good at pruning, and very easy to prune now that I was close enough.

That was without getting into the various degrees of non-platonic subtext.

On the topic of the non-platonic, I had cheated earlier when I’d commented about Byron to Rain. Byron had talked vaguely about Moonsong over the last few weeks, and I’d seen this coming. I’d considered the value of encouraging the relationship and working to reinforce it solely because a ‘political marriage’ between Breakthrough and the Shepherds could be useful, to use a way overblown term for what their relationship would be, but I’d seen the way Byron had looked at me on that day in group therapy and my vision for the team saw a Capricorn that had both halves working in harmony. Getting to the point where that happened required drawing Byron out of his shell, and I could do that so long as we had a bond or connection. They were two opposites in that. Byron needed to feel like his civilian self wasn’t being ignored or left without options. Tristan needed to feel like his goals as a cape weren’t being stifled.

Once that was done, well, there was a running theme through all of this. With any cape, the civilian side naturally degraded. We were parahuman, not human, and once Byron and Tristan reached the point they were okay, motivated, and roughly on the same page, that natural degradation would leave only those portions of each brother that worked well together. I’d wanted to be a coach and sometimes being a coach meant tearing down, then building back up.