Tattletale, leaning over her oversized cup of coffee, put her hands on her cheeks, and spoke in a childish voice, “What if you had to fight Legend, Victoria? What would you do?”

“Seriously. Don’t make me fight you every step of the way to keep this conversation going. Lawyer?”

“Ew.”

Chevalier couldn’t help but overhear as he found a coffee cup and began filling it up.

“Social worker?”

“Good god, Antares, you don’t know me at all.”

“I can’t help but notice you have these graduated stages for what you refer to me as. I thought maybe social worker because you seem to care about those kids. Maybe you’d want to look after others.”

“I’m utter shit at caring about others. I care about my kids.”

“Housewife?”

Tattletale leaned forward. “Talk like that is what gets you labeled as Glory Hole from now to forever, and if you want to push it, I’ll contrive to have it etched on your gravestone.”

Chevalier mixed some cream into his coffee, stirred it, and capped it.

“Come on,” Victoria said. “Engage with me here. If you don’t, I’ll come up with worse and worse answers. Cop.”

“I don’t know. Waitress. Happy?”

“Really. What’s the logic there?”

“What am I good for, without powers? You know where I come from. My family went to shit. I was going to run away no matter what happened. And when you’re down on your luck, it’s hard to get back on your feet. Case in point, this whole damn city. So I would’ve gone to some town that wasn’t Brockton Bay, because my entire reason for going was that it was cape friendly and I was a rookie cape. And I would have found a shit job, found shit boyfriends, and if my parents happened to die, I might get a wad of cash, which I’d promptly blow.”

“That’s morbid,” Victoria said, her chin resting on the heel of her hand, elbow on the table.

Chevalier found his seat, a blueberry muffin in hand, two tables down from the girls. He wasn’t sure how hungry he was, and he did want to ask questions, when there was a break in the conversation. He would eat, see if he wanted more, ask Tattletale the critical questions, then move on.

He wasn’t rushing. He had the tablet. He began scanning the names, logged in to check his messages, and found his inbox nearly empty for the first time he could remember.

He thought back, and remembered he had still been a Ward when he’d been able to finish clearing his inbox. Now it was all filters, sorted by priority and keywords.

Titans gone. An entire box he could archive, along with all contents.

“…you couldn’t even get into university,” Tattletale said. “And there’s no university left.”

“There’s time. We’ll adapt,” Victoria said.