I could imagine the expression they were seeing on my face when they looked through the crystal. I’d seen it before, and not in a mirror. When one’s body was like chunky puke spilling out over a bed or filling a bathtub, skin stretched over it, body parts sticking out, it was possible to see one’s own face. Impossible to not see it, really.

A buried, dark part of me wanted to pull the trigger, knowing onlookers might be in the line of fire. It would mean less people would see me like that.

“Is that you?” I whispered. I tracked the Nemean Titan, and raised the laser cannon’s barrel to point at him, tracking his movement. “Is that your nudges and attempts to influence me, when those especially dark thoughts come to the surface?”

The Fragile One was still and unresponsive. No gestures, no lip movements, even as I relaxed my control.

“Or is it me? Was it me that decided to grind my mother’s face into a wall, unconsciously? Deep, buried feelings?”

No response.

“I’m trusting, with everything I have, that you’re on my side. Based purely on you answering my call and jumping in like you did. Like I would. Ever since I woke up, I’ve been holding onto that,” I whispered.

The Nemean Titan got close enough to a pack of capes that they dropped out of the air, no longer coordinated enough to fly in a straight line. I pulled the trigger before even thinking about it.

A golden light, cutting across the dark, ruined section of city, striking the Nemean Titan in the side of the head. Locks of the golden ‘hair’, probably more solid and rigid than any concrete, fell away.

He put his paw-like hand in the way of the beam. I adjusted, moving the cannon, and he was pretty quick in moving his hand to match. The claw took less damage than the rest of him.

His posture shifted, hair gleaming gold in the radiance of the beam. In that moment, I could see past the Titan to a Victor I had encountered in passing on the battlefield. A kid, intimidated and putting on a front. Very good at putting on a front, because it had been a skill he had stolen. I’d moved on to something else, because I’d been young enough I wasn’t allowed to fight the supervillains, only the mooks. The posture and stance had been very similar, back then.

Hi, Victor.

Lasers joined mine. Red and violet.

He abruptly shifted footing, then leaped from a standing position to a damaged building. The building toppled as he used it as a stepping point to lunge for the source of those other beams.