Chapter Text
The changes come fast, and they come with the ferocity of a hurricane, with a hatred that Helen doesn’t think any of them were expecting. One day, they were revered almost as gods. The next, they’re weapons of mass destruction, scourges on society. The public bays for their blood.
One day she is donning her super suit to save the world, the next she is burying it in a box, never to touch it again.
The NSA moves fast to get them safe. New identities, new jobs, new homes, new lives.
Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl can no longer exist. Only Bob and Helen Parr, fresh-faced newlyweds embarking on married life, can remain.
It’s not easy.
For all of her adult life, she’s been used to saving people. Being cheered for. Now, when she walks down the street, all she sees is newspaper after newspaper plastered with one damning headline after another. Condemning them for their corruption. Calling them out for their selfish desire to prove that they’re better than everyone else. Sneering at them for the lives they have ruined—never mind the fact they have saved countless more.
She’s been so used to going out and saving people, the idea of finding an ordinary job is something that drains her very soul. Why would she ever want to be someone’s secretary when she fought bad guys on a daily basis? Why would she ever want to take orders from someone when she has been so used to thinking on her feet and facing situations with pure nerve and grit? She knows Bob feels the same way. They’re cut from the same cloth. It’s part of the reason they get on with each other so well—when they’re not butting heads.
Bob is taking this new situation particularly hard. Most days it’s difficult to motivate him to do anything, and he sits on their rundown little sofa, head in his hands, staring sightlessly at the walls. It scares her a little. This is a side of him she isn’t used to seeing. He’s usually so optimistic, so gallingly cheerful. He makes her smile even when she doesn’t want to smile herself. That’s the thing about Bob. He’s so infectious. It was part of the reason she started to fall for him, even against her will.
But now they are both moorless, their plans shredded right before their eyes. Used to being powerful, they are now powerless.
Rick Dicker is put in charge of their file. He’s been trusted with several, including Frozone and Gazerbeam. Mid-forties, he’s steady and stable. Reserved.
Realistic.
“This is happening,” he’d told them the first time he’d met them, gentle but firm. “There’s no getting saved at the eleventh hour. It’s not a movie where the good guys always win. Sometimes they don’t. And you’ve got to accept that.”
It’s no easy feat. They don’t have much time to reflect at first, because they’re too busy picking their lives up. Only a few months into their marriage and they’re already moving on.
The house Rick sets them up with is a quaint thing in a quiet neighbourhood. It’s out in the suburbs—probably the best place for superheroes, Helen imagines he thinks. No one to recognise them, no crime to tempt them back into a superhero lifestyle.
Yes, now they’re Bob and Helen Parr. A lovely young couple, the neighbours probably think, never realising just what lies beneath the surface.
Broken hearts, broken people. Now they’re all each other has got.
The first job Rick presents Bob with is a packer in a warehouse.
“It doesn’t sound exciting,” he concedes, “but it’s a start. It’s getting you back into society.”
Resocialising them, as if they were criminals. Helen curls her hands into fists and bites her tongue to stop any scathing remarks from slipping free. I’s not Rick’s fault. He’s just doing his job. He means them no harm. He just wants to protect them.
Even if that means Bob thinks that he’s working against them. Her husband is angry, a tightly coiled spring.
“You should be fighting for us!” he rages. “You should be telling those idiots like Sandsweet that if it wasn’t for us the whole world would have fallen apart a long time ago! If he stopped being selfish and thinking about the fact that he wanted to end things—never mind the trauma he would have inflicted on his family and those who would have had to witness it!—he’d realise that we’re the good guys! What are they going to do when all hell breaks loose!?”
Cope, was the answer. The cops were expected to step up to the plate to protect citizens from harm. There were news reports about decreases in criminal damage, less sprees of organised dangerous crime. See, people were gossiping out on the streets, they did the right thing getting rid of Supers. They were the real villains all along.
It’s so hard, sitting there with other housewives as they discuss that particular subject, biting her tongue so hard that she tastes blood as they titter on and on, brainless birds parroting things they’ve heard and don’t understand. She wants to shout, scream, shake them. Make them see that they know nothing. Make them see that Supers are people too.
She can’t. She’s a housewife now.
The mantra reverberates in her head over and over and over. Housewife. That’s all she’s been reduced to. She used to take on the wold. Now she is being commanded to stay in her place.
“I’m sorry,” Dicker had said, and to his credit he had sounded it. “But there’s nothing I can do. I know you want to work, but…” He’d shrugged. “Married women don’t. We can’t afford to raise any suspicions or bring you under scrutiny. It’s for your own protection.”
And so that’s what she does. Hard as it is, that’s what she does. Makes that inane chatter with the other housewives about little Billy’s first steps and the neighbour’s daughter and their husbands. Most are envious of hers—“Helen, doll, how did you land a looker like him?”—as if she couldn’t possibly have attracted him herself because she’s just a meek little woman now.
She hates them all. They have no idea how lucky they are. Never to know any different, that life could be exciting and fulfilling and so worth living…
She envies Bob too. He comes home every evening tired and defeated, bemoaning how much he hates his job.
Don’t you see how lucky you are? she wants to yell. At least you get to go off the street! At least you still get to be useful in some capacity! Try being in my shoes, see how much you hate your job then!
It’s not Bob’s fault, she knows that. Knows it’s unfair to take her frustrations out on him. He hasn’t made these rules. She knows he aches for her too, but he needs to process his own grief first. That will take time. He wears ever emotion on his sleeve, lives them boldly and without restraint. He needs support, and that’s what she’s there for as his wife. For better, for worse.
Still, it would be nice to get some of it returned, the nurturer being nurtured for a change.
She doesn’t voice it. Stores it deep inside like she does the rest of the feelings she can’t allow herself to have. Helen Parr and Elastigirl can no longer coexist. Now she has to be a new Helen Parr, with a manufactured smile and a whole list of lines she imitates about her perfect home life. She’s to be the envy of everyone with her handsome husband.
The life fits her like an ill-fitting dress, and on some dark days she wonders how much longer she can keep up this pretence. How long she can keep that smile until it cracks her face in half like glass. How long she can push away her own feelings for the sake of ensuring that Bob has all of her staunch support.
Thankfully, the answer comes to her in a way she hadn’t been expecting.
In the absence of her monthly cycle, in the swelling in her stomach.
She’s pregnant. Ad suddenly there is something for her to focus on again.
When Supers had been legal, she hadn’t wanted to settle down. Not then. There was too much justice to fight for, and she hadn’t wanted to get left behind—she was one of the trailblazers for female supers, and she hadn’t wanted to lose that.
The ban had left her with nothing. No identity. No sense of self. An empty husk.
The idea of being a mother gives her back some sense of self. Some worthiness. Would she have chosen it in another life? No. But she clings to it now. She’ll have somewhere else to pour her energy, something else other than the dullness of suburban life to focus on.
Bob kisses her when she tells him, squeezing her tight in his arms, tight enough to break bones if she was anything else.
“I can’t believe it, honey!” he gushes. “This is fantastic!”
Of course, Bob is the one who’d wanted a family. The two point four kids, the picket fence, the warm home life.
That doesn’t matter, she tells herself firmly. This is a good thing. And who knows? Maybe it’ll help Bob too. Give him something to focus on beside the mind-numbing job. A different life from the one they’d been planning, but a good one nonetheless. They can’t be heroes to the outside world, but they can be heroes to their child, show them the way forward and teach them to fight for their rights. She can’t bear the thought of any child of theirs having to suffer the same way they have over the last few months.
There’s a frisson of uncertainty there too, of course. Dicker had had to be informed over the change in circumstances, and he had expressed slight concern that their baby might possess superpowers too. The thought is a terrifying one—how in God’s name would they keep that a secret in a neighbourhood that knows no boundaries?—but at the same time he isn’t overly concerned about it so she supposes the odds must be minimal.
“It doesn’t matter either way,” Bob reassures her with his newfound enthusiasm. “We’re gonna love this baby no matter what, right?”
A guilty part of her wonders if she loves the idea of what the baby represents more. A way out of her current boredom, a way back into her husband’s attention. A reminder to the both of them that there’s a life beyond hero work—they just have to search for it. Accept it.
In the end, does it really matter? In the end, isn’t that all life is? A series of escape routes, an attempt to keep the past where it belongs? It can never be brought into the present. It can never be erased. The future yawns ahead of them, and Helen is powerless to do anything but stare into it like she might the maw of a gun, threatening with its empty blackness. What will life look like at the other side? A bounty of new hope? A withered garden of dead dreams?
One way or another she’s going to find out.
The trigger has been pulled and there’s no stopping the bullet now.