Chapter Text
Back soon. The text clearly said “back soon,” but Lup still hadn’t made it home. Taako liked to think he wasn’t worried until that point, but the panic had set in the next morning. When she wasn’t there to tease him about how much sugar he added into his coffee, he felt the knot in his stomach that couldn’t go away; the ache that only spread through his body whenever he read the text.
Two months later, “soon” seemed like some kind of sick joke.
Taako tried everything he could. Calling the police about a missing person, putting up signs everywhere, calling every person he knew… Nothing worked. He was out of his league. It was even harder to look, because technically, he and Lup didn’t exist. People with abilities weren’t outlawed, per se, but they were erased from records aside from the Bureau of Balance. The Bureau was an organization created by and for the heroes of the city, the first line of defense if anything were to happen, like a villain destroying the city of Neverwinter for what seemed like the millionth time or a hero going missing. The first line of defense that seemingly failed him.
Every day, Taako checked his email, listened out for calls, anything from the Bureau of Balance to indicate that they’d found Lup. Or even got his many messages. Anything but the radio silence that was slowly breaking him inside. But by that point, it dawned on him that the Bureau didn’t even care enough to get back to him. He reasoned that if they couldn’t send a stupid email telling him that they were looking into it, they definitely weren’t trying to find Lup. Everything seemed futile.
The voice in the back of his mind said to keep going, that he couldn’t lose hope. But it took all of his willpower just to get out and look every night. Lup was gone, and he had nothing else to keep himself going. For weeks, he noticed a dark shadow pursuing him, but it never confronted him. While it followed, Taako felt more and more upset, more angry about his unfair circumstances. Until one night, he had an epiphany: why not just go against the Bureau if they weren’t going to help him? He’d heard about people going rogue, kind of mild supervillains. Not destroying the entire city, but just causing tiny problems. And at that point? It sounded appealing.
The Bureau wasn’t going to help him out, so he was going to do everything to oppose them without crossing a line. And who was going to stop him? His shapeshifting was finally going to come in handy. A new face every night, a whole city to search for Lup, defying the Bureau every step of the way. He had his whole life in front of him and he’d be damned if any of the Bureau’s “heroes” were going to stop him from finding his sister.
Years came and went and he somehow hadn’t gotten caught by the Bureau. Granted, he never interfered directly with them, just caused a few little problems here and there. Maybe he was responsible for multiple power outages in their big fancy facility-- which needed to be taken down a few notches anyways. He didn’t try to break in to get information; he didn’t care to figure out what was going on in there. He couldn’t have cared less about what the Bureau of Balance and their silly little heroes were doing. Nobody could prove that he’d caused any of the little issues and minor blunders the Bureau was facing. And as long as he had control of his powers, nobody would be able to even try.