Archive of Our Own ^beta

i.  (august 2015)

Sometimes, Calum hated his life.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he grumbled to himself as he sat upright, his phone flashing in his hand. “Dolphins? Fucking dolphins.”

He hauled himself out of bed and stomped angrily over to his closet to dig out his spare spandex. After a confusing run-in with Ashton’s boxers (he didn’t even live there, what the actual hell) he managed to wriggle into the neon yellow tights and bright green kevlar-reinforced leotard and pull halfway decent looking civvies (for three in the fucking morning, they’d take whatever he showed up in) over the top. As he dug out his keys and tried to find a good place to put his mobile that wasn’t in his underwear, he briefly wondered what the actual hell he’d done in a past life to make criminal dolphins an actual problem he had to deal with.

He was still grumbling as he loaded up his toolbelt and took the stairs down to the lobby two at a time.

Despite the ridiculous hour, there was a government-issue car waiting for him. Some agent he didn’t know was driving, a pretty woman who could pass as his sister, presumably there to ensure he didn’t die on the way to headquarters. Before he went to fight dolphins in downtown Sydney.

He didn’t realize she was talking until she turned and waved at him when they stopped at a red light, and of course, that was when he realized he’d forgotten his hearing aids.

“Fuck me,” he said, and judging by her grin he’d gotten the volume wrong and shouted that rather than mumbled it. He slumped in his seat sheepishly.

She gave him a sympathetic smile and spoke clearly enough he could read her lips, though his skill was rusty and still pretty shitty. He got the jist of it: going to headquarters, briefing there, everyone else already there.

He could see the corners of her mouth turning up as she listed off his teammate’s names, and he silently agreed. He wondered if there was a name change form somewhere he could file.

“Got it,” he told her, struggling to regulate his volume with what probably amounted to no success. “Dolphins?”

“Dolphins,” she confirmed and actually cracked an amused smile. The light turned then, and the car took off again.

forgot my aids, he texted Michael.

goddamnit, he got in reply. i’ll dig your spares from your locker.

dead batteries

i hate you and everything you stand for was Michael’s reply, and then his phone was still the rest of the ride.

Michael was waiting at the garage when they pulled up, washed in yellow light. Like Calum, he was dressed in civvies, though he had lab goggles perched on the top of his head like he’d just forgotten about them, and to be honest, he probably had. He held out Calum’s hearing aids with new (and, knowing Michael, probably improved) batteries. He waited Calum to put them in and adjust the input before saying “you are the worst best friend I have ever had.”

“Luke roped you into wearing spandex,” Calum pointed out. He hated wearing his hearing aids, but he didn’t have many other options as a powered teenager. He was still campaigning for cochlear implants, but for medical kept denying him every time he applied, no matter that fucking three year olds got the surgery. He figured it probably had something to do with technopaths controlling shit that sat in his head next to his brain, but he’d been friends with Michael for years and the worst thing that had happened was that his hearing aids occasionally went missing for a week and were returned improved as much as humanly possible. “And I found Ashton’s underwear in your drawer this morning. Also, he keeps breaking your phones.”

“Stupid Hulk wannabe,” Michael grumbled. “Luke. Luke is my new best friend.”

“You love me,” Calum crooned, slinging an arm around Michael’s neck. The agents escorted them were all politely hiding laughter.

Michael shoved him away. He wasn’t too terribly mad, Calum could feel, so he sent a little cheer Michael’s way. “So. Dolphins.”

“This is seriously a thing?” Calum asked.

“I wish I were joking,” Michael said grimly. He lead them down towards the briefing room, winding through the wide hallways. “Someone got cyberkinetic advancements on dolphins and weaponized their flippers. We have to get rid of them without, y’know, killing them, since ‘Australian Super-Team Massacres Dolphins’? Not exactly the press we’re looking for. Luke--excuse me, Dr Fluke--is working on a plan and Ash--Smash, sorry--is still laughing. We’re looking into sedatives.”

They turned into the elevator and went down six floors to the subbasement.

“Dr Fluke and I were working on grappling hook modifications when the news came in. Smash was literally just out of the medbay for, uh, the incident with the stapler. You’re the last one in.”

“Any luck?”

Michael grinned. His fringe was falling into his face despite the goggles. “With the grappling hook? Not really. We might have found a new explosive compound, though.”

“I--how?”

“Long story.” Michael pushed Calum through the door. Luke and Michael’s lab was, as always, a mess. There were papers everywhere, and today, diagrams of dolphins. Calum gaped a little before wading into the mess, Michael sniggering.

Luke didn’t notice them at first, too busy scribbling something on his tablet with a thin stylus. Michael coughed.

“Cal-Pal!” Luke exclaimed, spinning a full 360 in his chair and nearly knocking the tablet off the table. He had apparently put his mask on and forgotten about it, since his lab goggles were resting over the top. “You heard about our dolphin problem?”

“I can’t forget about it,” Calum said, as dry as he could manage. “How, exactly, are we handling this?”

“We’ve got two down and an analysis on what makes the cyberkinetics work. If we can take down the life support they might retreat.” Michael flopped into an empty chair. “If we can get you to amplify Mike-ro-wave’s technopathy, we think we can disable the lasers.”

Calum gaped. He considered taking his hearing aids out to make sure he’d heard correctly, but judging by Michael’s expression he hadn’t. “They’ve got lasers?”

Luke grimaced. “Yeah, it’s. It’s interesting. We could maybe get the flying mechanics in the same technopathic wave, but we’d probably exhaust all our tech options. Mike-ro-wave would be out for the rest of the fight and I’m not sure we can risk that. Smash’s sonic might have some impact on their communications, but we’d like to avoid breaking all the windows in Sydney.”

He brought up images on the projector screen. It took Calum a horrible second to recognize what he was looking at. “Is that--”

“Penguins of Madagascar, the TV show? Yeah. It was Smash who noticed the dolphin bubbles looked kind of like Dr Blowhole’s. His little brother’s having a whole phase, apparently.”

“Where is our big blue version of the Hulk, actually?”

“He’s watching the episode in question to see if we can’t figure something out from the animation,” Luke said glumly. The three of them sat in silence for a few seconds, appreciating the complete and utter absurdity of their lives. “Hopefully either his sonic or the strength will break the bubbles without us having to resort to cheesy dibbles or motorized scooters.”

“I---that’s not a thing.”

“In the show it is.” Luke sighed. “I seem to be relatively useless today.”

“You can’t get a read on them?”

“There’s a telepathic signature--they’re not doing this on their own--but I can’t get a good enough grip. Dolphins aren’t humans.”

Luke honestly looked put out that he wasn’t being sent out to fight robotic dolphins in mysterious bubbles. Calum wished he could be Luke today.

“Right,” he said, adjusting his hearing aids. Michael grinned and spun his ring around before reaching for his gloves to slide them on. “We won’t know what works until we try. Let’s get out there.”

The scene downtown was genuinely one of the most bizarre things Calum had ever seen, and he’d seen a whole fuckton of bizarre things in his career as a superhero.

The sun wasn’t up yet but the sky was beginning to streak orangey pink with whatever the morning version of twilight was. Dolphins flew overhead in neatly organized Vs, the transparent globes that contained them reflecting both the lightening sky and the consistent yellow glow of the streetlamps. With the red lasers the dolphins were firing, it looked like someone’s really godawful version of a disco themed dance party.

All nearby buildings were commercial, and they were far enough away from the nightlife part of down that there weren’t any spectators. There was a news crew--there was always a news crew, these days, filming Sydney’s superheroes for the news--and SHIELD agents, but no one else, really.

“Time to try our plan,” Ashton said cheerfully. He saluted them and jogged off to one of the taller buildings, hoping to get a good shot off the top. He had his blue duffel bag slung over his shoulder, filled with bricks and other debris for him to throw.

“Turn on your earpiece, you turnip,” Michael shouted after him. A second later, their comms buzzed as Ashton checked in with Luke and the mission handler. “You all set, Calum?” They were headed for a building two blocks down, hoping to contain the damage. Their building was also taller and had an antenna they could borrow--all the better for spreading Michael’s technopathic wave.

“I’d better if they weren’t dolphins and it wasn’t the asscrack of dawn.”

“You’re just being a grouch. Ash, you seeing anything?”

“I’m seeing the front door of an industrial banker’s building,” Ashton told them. “And dolphins. Lots of dolphins.”

“There’s less destruction than I’d thought there’d be,” Calum said. As they ran to their building, Michael pulled one of his devices out of his waist pocket. “Like, there’s lasers involved.”

“It’s selective destruction. All the cars out here are getting entirely fucked up,” Luke told them. “Public transport and citizens are all fine, small businesses, fine, but big companies? They’re getting blown to bits. And one of the coffeeshops down the street is getting blown to all hell, but the one across the the way from it is perfectly fine. We’re running tracers on a potential pattern, but so far nothing’s come up.”

Calum could hear the clatter of a keyboard in the background, meaning the ‘we’ running tracers was probably just Luke. He had a bad habit of doing that, pushing the handler out of the way and taking over the controls himself, if he wasn’t out in the field.

“Hey, Ash,” Michael said, tapping something that involved mathematics and a lot of pinching on his tablet. “Riddle for you.”

“Yeah?” Ashton was probably in the elevator by now. Overhead, dolphins darted across the skyline, not paying any attention to them, though the cars they’d arrived in were definitely sporting some laser induced holes.

“What’s grey, mammalian, and destroying our city?”

Luke laughed; Calum snorted. Ashton hummed, good-humoredly. “I’m gonna have to go with dolphins.”

“You win absolutely nothing, but yes, dolphins.”

“Just get on top of your building, Mike-ro-wave.”

“I’ll keep him in line,” Calum promised, and tried to peer at Michael’s little screen. “What’s that?”

“I’m trying to get a scan on what I can fuck up for our new friends,” Michael told him cheerfully, tapping something else out. “And then we’re going to watch them crash and burn.”

“Target the flight and sustainability systems,” Luke said dryly, still typing rapidly. “Knock them out of the sky.”

“See, I was hoping you’d get rid of the lasers,” Ashton said. Something dinged, probably the elevator. “I’m at the top floor, I have to take a few flights of stairs to the roof. Hey, Luke, you field tested the new uniform material, right?”

“No, you’re the field test. You probably won’t die,” Luke told him cheerfully, and then muted Ashton’s mic as he started to splutter in protest. “Get moving, Mike, we haven’t got all day to let the dolphin bubbles soar over our beautiful city.”

“Nothing is beautiful this early,” Calum grumbled, and pushed Michael forward. “A block more, buster.”

“I think I found their GPS systems and let me tell you, an idiot designed them,” Michael said, but let himself get pushed along.

Two hours later, when Michael had finally figured out how to short the power sources and when Calum had amplified his tech wave to nullify the dolphin threat (god, Calum was beginning to hate that phrase), when Ashton had finally run out of bricks to throw right as the attack seemed to wane, Calum was really starting to hate everything. Luke had shown up as Ashton’s support about an hour into the fight and was levitating a makeshift shield around them once the dolphins figured out that the idiots running around in neon spandex were there to stop them and not just gawk at the sheer oddity.

Calum’s bad day took a marked turn for the worse after they realized that fact. It was hard enough trying to convince Michael to move when he was mesmerized by tech; laser destruction aimed at their heads only made it harder, and Calum really hadn’t been looking forward to field testing the new grappling hooks, but hey, that happened.

“Never again,” Calum said as he collapsed into the backseat of one of SHIELD’s cars, once they were reasonably certain the standard agents and regular law enforcement could handle the whole fiasco. “If I get a three am call about non-human mammals trying to take over Sydney, I’m hanging up and you’d better hope the Avengers have their phones on so they can come handle it. Tony Stark could totally whip up something to get them here before Sydney’s overrun, right?”

“I’m right with you.” Michael slumped into the seat next to Calum. “Hey, the handlers have a pool going on what the worst headline tomorrow’s going to be. Want in?”

“After the Machiavillain incident last year, I’m not betting on headlines, ever.”

Michael grimaced as Luke snorted. “Fair point.”

“I just want a long, hot shower,” Ashton groaned, claiming the last empty seat. “And then eighteen pizzas and twenty hours of rest.”

“Yeah, about that,” Luke said, and everyone started making noises of displeasure. “Debrief and sitreps first. And then cleanup, if it hasn’t been handled yet.”

“You have just made an awful day worse,” Michael informed Luke, who at least had the grace to look sympathetic. “You were only in the field an hour.”

“Yeah, so I’ll be on cleanup before you will.”

“I hate everything,” Calum moaned, and let Michael pet at his hair while he sulked.

ii. (june 2013)

It hadn’t all been cyberkinetic dolphins at dawn and spandex tights for twelve hours straight when they’d first started. He and Michael had been weeks off of obtaining their HSCs, and they’d done a pretty good job of keeping their respective powers under wraps. Any time someone got too suspicious, Calum would subtly redirect their emotions to something else, or Michael would use his technokinesis to break their phones.

No, it started with his bedroom light being flicked on and someone hustling him out of bed at some ungodly hour of the night. Michael was curled up in a ball on the other side of his bed and woke up kicking and--apparently--screaming. It looked kind of ridiculous in the footie pajamas he was wearing, but he definitely landed more kicks than Calum did.

Despite their best efforts, they ended up in the back of a car, travelling further and further out of Sydney. Michael spent the ride swearing at length, if their guard’s expression was anything to go by. They pulled up into a garage and were hustled into a building. Peeking through the glass panes in doors, they were in a lab compound.

Labs were ominous, Calum thought as they were ushered down a long hallway and into an elevator. Nothing good ever came of powereds in a lab; logic dictated that someone wanted to dissect him for dog chow in a lab, or take apart his brain to see how his emotional center worked. Michael thought he was being ridiculous, but he had an actually useful power, what with his whole technopathy deal. Calum had the power to make people vaguely happy, with a side helping of being almost totally deaf. Although, at this point, he wasn’t sure anyone really knew he was powered, other than Michael, and Michael didn’t tell people stuff like that. They might’ve just kidnapped him as leverage for Michael, or for information on, like, Mali or something, except that Mali had managed to get through secondary without her powers being revealed.

Michael was rapidly translating the scientist’s long-winded speech into Auslan for Calum with long pauses for fingerspelling; when they’d been dragged out of their beds at three in the fucking morning, Calum hadn’t had time to put in his hearing aids, and the jackbooted thugs carting them to this particular lab hadn’t bothered to pick them up, either.

Calum focused on the deliberate movements of Michael’s hands--trying to ignore the footie pajamas--and let the information wash over him, hoping to god this went well.

After the tour, they were deposited in a conference room. Michael made sure to face Calum, and they launched into a conversation about what the hell was going on, and why it had to happen at three in the goddamn morning.

A group of suits came and sat at the table, a blond boy about their age with a quiff and lipring in tow. One of the suits set a thick packet of papers in front of each of them, which Calum eyed with interest.

The blond boy started to talk, angled just enough away from Calum that he couldn't quite understand.

“We’re not discussing anything until Calum gets his hearing aids,” Michael said, glancing between the blond and Calum himself. His expression was angry, and Calum could only assume his tone was the same. “This is ridiculous.”

“Michael,” he said. Everyone looked at him in surprise, probably confused at how his speech was so clear. “It’s fine. I can lipread and you can translate.”

“It’s not fine.”

Calum signed calm down and the less we piss them off, the sooner we leave, which Michael acknowledged with a pissed off shrug and a flurry of fingerspelled swear words directed towards the lab head and the blond boy near the head of the table.

“Tell us where they are in your flat and we’ll send someone to go get them,” the suit who looked to be most in charge said. His expression clearly reminded everyone in the room that they were all beneath him and he’d really rather be in bed at the moment, though he was speaking slowly and clearly for Calum’s benefit.

My bedside table, top drawer, in the blue case. Spare batteries are in the red Altoids tin. Michael relayed the information, presumably with a few added adjectives, judging by the way he angled his face away so Calum couldn’t see his mouth and the suit’s resulting expression. Someone left the room, presumably to go fetch his hearing aids.

Calum looked down at the table and reached for the stack of legal pads in the center of the table. He slid one off the top of the pile and snagged a pen from the cup next to it, and started scribbling, a list of things he’d have to do when they got home. Michael leaned over and took a pen for himself to add to Calum’s notes.

He used their code, the one they’d developed when they were first becoming friends and they’d wanted to talk in class without drawing everyone’s attention by signing. It was a code that lacked vowels entirely and used a number of symbols of their own invention in addition to Auslan grammar rather than standard English; thus far, no one else had cracked it, but then again, no one had bothered trying to crack it.

They entertained themselves for half an hour, to the chagrin of the suits. Michael sketched out little diagrams of Calum’s hearing aids, making little notes on how to improve them further. Calum didn’t quite have the heart to tell him that adding flashing lights wasn’t necessarily the best idea. They had a little game of hangman, and a few rounds of tic tac toe. The blond scooted over their way and eyed the papers they discarded with interest. It looked like he was deciphering their code and trying not to laugh at their conversation.

Finally, someone set the case with Calum’s hearing aids in on the table in front of them; quietly, Calum put them on and started to adjust. As always, the initial buzz made him flinch as his brain processed the new input.

“Testing, testing, one two three,” Michael said from beside him, at a clear and normal tone, so Calum could adjust his volume correctly. The suits across the room looked at them. “Mary had a little lamb, whose fleece was white as snow.”

“They work, Michael, thank you,” Calum said dryly. “Right, now that I can hear--what’s all this about?”

Everyone looked between themselves. When Calum had been largely unable to hear, they'd all been falling over themselves to discuss this. Now that half an hour had passed and Calum was a lot more able to communicate there was sudden silence.

"We're recruiting you for a superhero team," one if them said finally, standing up. A presentation started on the projector screen behind him. "A reserve team, if you will."

Calum and Michael looked at each other. “Superheroes?”

“Like Ironman and Captain America?”

“Not quite. A little less visible, mediawise,” the suit said.

Michael folded his arm. “So you want us to--what, be support staff? Because I can tell you, we don’t even have HSCs yet, much less anything you’d need to work with superheroes.”

“You’re powered,” the blond said, looking a little sheepish. “I can read it off the top of your heads. You’re an empath, and you’re a technopath.” He gestured to first Calum and then Michael. He turned to Calum, forehead furrowed. “You’re harder to read.”

Calum’s instinct was to send a wave of crippling guilt at the blond, which probably just proved his point but still sort of worked. The blond flinched and shied back from Calum.

One of the suits took over. “We’re aware you have powers, and we think you might have secondary powers you just haven’t accessed yet. We want to work with you and develop those powers so you can fulfill roles on the reserve team.”

“Just to be clear here, you’re kidnapping students from their beds based on powers that probably aren’t very useful to fight hypothetical villains that may or may not actually want to take over our continent,” Michael deadpanned. Calum could feel his nervousness, knowing he wanted a redirect from the secondary powers line of questioning. He’d been morphing his hair into bright colors for years now and had been claiming it was only hair dye. “Do you not have first string superheroes? Why not make a full powered team based out of Sydney?”

“Big villains are in the US or Europe, and then Sub Saharan Africa or mainland China. Australia’s too quiet for a full powered superteam,” one of the suits said. Calum considered sticking his tongue out and declaring that the suit was an asshole idiot, but he was kind of right. No one wanted to invade Australia, not recently, at least. Even aliens avoided landing there, despite (or perhaps because of) the hundreds of square kilometers of empty desert. “We need a powered team strong enough to hold any villains long enough for a superteam to fly over from Japan.”

“Damage control, you mean,” Calum said, and flicked through the packet of paper in front of him. “Bait.”

“I wouldn’t phrase it like that, but pretty much.”

"So you're recruiting a deaf empath and his translator," Michael said dryly. "To get their asses kicked until Superman shows up."

"You're not just his translator," the blond said.

"Obviously. He's my best friend."

“Well, yes, but you’re a technopath.” Calum raised an eyebrow at the blond, who squared his shoulders and surged on. “Technopaths can take apart weapons, disable robots, cause a car to stop working. As a translator you’re used to negotiations and bridging differences, which could diffuse a situation. And you, as an empath,” he started, turning to Calum. “Well, you do your guilt thing and you’d probably send the villains home in tears.”

It took another three hours and Michael kicking up a fuss about still being in his footy pajamas for a deal to be reached, but in the end Calum and Michael were full fledged members of a superhero team, along with the blond, who a) turned out to be a supergenius and b) was named Luke.

The whole thing wouldn’t have been bad, per se, if they hadn’t been hauled out of their beds at three am and Calum hadn’t had a biology test first thing at school that day. He totally bombed it because he was thinking of what sort of superhero name he’d have, which was a little humiliating, but hey, at least he already had a career lined up no matter if he got his HSC or not.

It was almost worth the whole sleep deprivation and minor kidnapping trauma when Michael turned to him in English excitedly and said, in a low, serious voice, “Mike-ro-wave.”

Calum didn’t stop laughing for the rest of the day, which, of course, meant that was the superhero name Michael picked.

And it wasn’t like Cal-Pal or Dr Fluke were any better, really.

The next afternoon they met up with Luke to discuss powers and how this whole team thing would work. The fourth member of their team, a boy a little older than them that Luke called Ashton was there. He had his hair pushed back with a bandana and was wearing jogging shorts.

“I was out for a run when Luke texted to say you were here and I should drop by,” he explained with a wave of a hand. “Ashton Irwin.”

“Michael Clifford.”

“Calum Hood.”

“I got signed on about two days before you did,” Ashton said, flopping into a seat around a cluttered table in what was, presumably, Luke’s lab. Michael was already looking around the space as if figuring out where he could carve out his own workbench. “Still not really sure what all our powers are and how it’ll work in a team, but yay, team?”

Calum slid into the seat next to Ashton and folded his legs up under him. He reached for one of the yellow lined pads in the center of the table and fished a pen out of his pocket. “Sharing circle?”

“My power’s telekinesis.” Luke scribbled the word on the whiteboard. “It’s sort of...indelicate? I can’t do little or big things with it, I can only really do what I can, like, physically do?” Calum sat up straight and started scratching out a list on his notepad.

“Meaning?” Ashton asked, leaning forward.

“I can pick up a fifteen kilo box and move it, but I can’t pick up a car or do brain surgery,” Luke explained. “It’s, like, limited to what I could actually do if I were using my physical body to do it.”

Michael kicked back in his chair, propping his feet up on the table as he absently signed for Calum. Luke glared a little but didn’t say anything, probably still focusing on making them want to join his super-hero team. “Explain the doctor thing.”

“I’m sort of super-smart?”

Michael raised an unimpressed eyebrow. Luke scrambled to recover.

“It’s not, uh, related to super powers, actually. I’m just really, really smart. I got my first PhD when I was thirteen.”

Michael was signing the whole time; he paused to let Calum sign something and then said it out loud. Ashton watched them with clear interest. “Your first PhD?”

“I have three?” Luke bit at his lip-ring. He looked shockingly young for someone with three PhDs, which Calum supposed he was, if he really was only eighteen.

“In what?” Michael looked torn between disbelief and horror, but Calum knew Michael had been taking apart and reverse engineering all the technology he could get his hands on for years now, so really he didn’t have any room to talk.

“Neuroscience, Mechanical Engineering, and Mathematics. I’m working on a Bachelors in history of music.”

“Why?”

“I like music,” Luke said, as if that was a reasonable explanation. “And I was scaring my classmates, so I got kicked out of secondary and it wasn’t like a ten year old could just get a normal job.”

“So you’ve really earned the name Dr Fluke,” Ashton said, looking speculative. Luke shrugged uncomfortably.

“It was better than Dr Infant, which is what my classmates were calling me, and I felt like I was a bit of an evolutionary fluke anyways.” He scribbled his superhero name next to his power and wrote SMASH!, Mike-ro-wave, and Cal Pal beneath in neat lettering. “Anyways, I know you’ve got powers, but we should discuss what we’ve got here, exactly.”

Michael, Ashton, and Calum looked between themselves.

“I have some degree of super strength,” Ashton admitted finally, when it became clear Calum and Michael weren’t going to be first. “I inherited it from my dad’s side. It’s sort of uncontrollable. Emotionally triggered.”

“Your superhero name is Smash and you’ve got the Amazing Hulk’s powers,” Michael said flatly. Luke hid a snort and wrote Enhanced Strength on the board. “Do you turn green too?”

“It’s more of a pale blue,” Ashton said, entirely straight-faced. Michael toppled out of his chair in surprise.

Calum didn’t bother hiding his laughter as Michael scrambled to sit back in his seat.

Luke looked speculative. “I wonder if you’ve got a way to control it.”

“I get upset and then I break shit.” Ashton spread his hands in a what can you do sort of gesture. “It’s not like I ever tried to figure it out beyond how to make it not happen at bad times.”

“We can do tests,” Luke chirped. Michael rolled his eyes at how easily Ashton agreed. “Have you got a secondary power?”

“If I have, I don’t know what it is.” Ashton shrugged loosely and kicked back in his chair.

“How about you, Calum?”

“Emotional manipulation,” Calum said. He looked down at his hands and flexed his fingers. “It comes in handier than you’d think.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean--” Calum sighed and reached out to touch Ashton on the forehead. “I can make him happy, so he’ll be in a better mood when I negotiate with him.” Ashton started laughing, grinning widely. “Or I can take that away and make him upset--”

“That’s a really bad idea--” Ashton started to say before his expression dropped into a snarl and his skin shifted faintly blue. He shoved Calum back, sending him and his chair skidding across the floor. A second swing cracked the tabletop. A long, tense ten seconds later, away from Calum’s touch, Ashton calmed. “What the hell happened?”

“I made you upset,” Calum said. He picked himself up and pushed his chair back across the floor. “It was a bad idea.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

“So let’s not mix the empath and the rage triggered super strength,” Luke said, after a long pause. “Michael?”

Michael coughed awkwardly. “I’ve got very minor shapeshifting and technokinesis, I think, is what Calum calls it. I can make broken shit work.”

“Is that why you’re called Mike-ro-wave?” Ashton asked.

“Ah, no.” Michael looked a little embarrassed. “It’s a good pun with my name, mostly. Too late to change?”

“It’s on the paperwork, so. Yeah, too late to change.”

“Well, fuck.” Michael leaned over to poke at Calum, who rolled his eyes and threw a pen at Michael’s face. “So is everyone a second-gen powered?”

“I’m first gen,” Luke said. “Although I think my mum might have some stuff she just never realized. She doesn’t lose anything.”

“M’first gen as well.” Ashton looked a lot calmer now, though that might have been Calum sending some pretty intense serene waves his direction. “It just manifested one day, which, let me tell you, was not a fun discovery for my mum. Neither of my siblings have anything that we can tell.”

“My dad’s a technopath as well,” Michael said. “I inherited it from him, I guess.”

“That’s really strange,” Luke said, looking pensive. “Kids don’t usually get the exact same power as their parents.”

“I didn’t,” Michael protested. “I’ve got shapeshifting too.” To prove his point, his hair flickered between a metallic gold and a violent turquoise before settling back into the bright red he’d walked in with. “Plus, technopathy doesn’t come as easy to me as it did to my dad, so.”

“My dad’s power is making people bleed out of their eyeballs,” Calum said randomly. Ashton and Luke both gaped at him. Michael had heard this story before, so he just inspected his nails and mentally took apart Luke’s phone in his pocket. “My mum’s got metallic powers, and my sister controls the weather sometimes. They got all the cool powers.”

Calum’s day become slightly better when they went to order in pizza and Luke found that his phone was entirely in pieces in his pocket. The yelp alone made the freakishly early wakeup call/kidnapping and failed exam and attempted team bonding all worth it.

Granted, he could have lived without knowing that Luke and Ashton both liked olives on their pizza, but whatever. If this worked out, he had a long time to convince them how fucking gross that was.

iii.  (september 2015)

Usually Calum loved his job. It was a great job, hadn’t been easy to get--not a lot of people wanted to hire mostly-deaf individuals who disappeared randomly for long periods of time and often showed up beaten to all hell.

Here, though, his boss was Deaf too, and appreciated an employee who didn’t mind the near-constant din, and as the amount of Auslan signers continued dwindling, she liked the conversation. He’d grown up with culturally Deaf parents, and while both he and his sister had been born hearing, he’d lost his at seven years old and spent the next two years stubbornly loathing his hearing aids. (He’d only found out years later that his mum had been desperately hoping he wouldn’t inherit her powers so she could safely take him to get the cochlear surgery. Which, yeah, he’d developed powers and hearing aids it was.)

He’d met Michael when he was nine and had immediately formed an attachment when Michael had immediately taken apart the hated hearing aids to improve them--and actually had. They’d been near-inseparable since.

He spent his morning cooing over the puppies, cleaning out the bird cages, and restocking shelves. A few people wandered in, played with the kittens and wandered back out. One of their regulars popped in to buy litter and tins of canned cat food.

Calum liked the pace of lazy mornings in the pet store, or, he usually did. Sometimes people came in and tapped on the glass, or manhandled the kittens, and then he had to get them to back off. His usual tactic was sending a wave of overwhelming guilt at the asshole in question, and then they'd do all the work for him, but occasionally there was the complete and utter twat who was immune. When that happened, his whole day was ruined.

Today’s asshole was of a slightly different variety.

“Where’s the kitty litter?” the man grunted as he entered the store and spotted Calum in his green work apron. His expression was somewhere between befuddled confusion and surly annoyance. Calum sighed.

“Back lefthand corner of the store,” he said, and went back to detangling his shirt from the ferret’s claws. Once he’d managed that, he checked his daily chore list. After enduring ferret torture, he had to feed the fish, clean the turtle tanks, and feed the fucking snakes.

There weren’t many animals Calum outright disliked, but snakes and ferrets both landed on the vaguely unsettling and annoying list. He wasn’t sure he was ready for outright dislike with either of them quite yet, but if the ferrets kept clawing up his shirts he could probably be persuaded.

Calum first figured something was wrong when it took the man twenty minutes to return with a three kilo sack of litter, but he figured the man had just gotten a kitten and wasn’t sure what the right kind was. It happened often enough, new pet owners staring at the different varieties of food, litter and treats in befuddlement. Shrugging off his general sense of well, that’s weird, he checked the man out and handed his litter back over in a paper bag.

He really figured something was wrong when the man returned ten minutes later without the litter and with a big, burly friend. He’d barely had time to press the silent alarm button under the counter by the time he processed the prick in his neck. Swearing profusely, he went down like a sack of potatoes.

And that was how Calum ended up in the trunk of a car, drugged and blindfolded, with his hands bound together. The fuckers had even taken his hearing aids, which. Rude. At least he’d had the courtesy to buy something from the store before kidnapping him, although he hoped he wasn’t going to be expected to use it, as like, a prisoner. On second thought, if he was going to be stuck in a cell with a bucket, he’d take the kitty litter to keep the place from stinking to high heaven.

He tried feeling out with his empathy and got a fat lot of nothing, which meant whoever had drugged him had managed to find something that knocked out his powers. A particularly sharp turn slammed his head against the wheel well hard enough for his ears to ring, and a second turn made his eyes blur. It was probably a combination of the drugs and the two solid knocks to the head, but Calum passed out, and when he woke up, he was tied to a chair in a relatively empty room.

Looking over to the corner, his suspicions were confirmed: there was a bucket, and it was filled with grainy kitty litter. Time ticked by as he sat there. By his internal clock it was probably two or three hours they left him alone, and probably another two or three driving to wherever they’d taken him, long enough for his control over his empathy to start trickling back.

“What the hell is going on?” he demanded, when someone finally wandered into the room where he was being held. If he was going to act like a civvie, he was at least going to be a defiant one. It would either work or get him shot, but he’d had a long day already and at least getting shot would get him a couple of weeks of downtime until they scrounged up a healer willing to work with him. “Clearly you kidnapped a deaf petshop worker and student for some reason, but. Also, I can’t hear anything right now, so you’ll want to talk slowly and clearly so I can read your lips.”

The woman held up a finger and gestured with her palm, where, yes, those were Calum’s hearing aids. She carefully hooked them over his ears and adjusted the volume.

“Calum Hood,” she said, and settled into the chair across from him. “My name is Courtney.”

“Courtney,” he repeated. “Seriously, what the hell is going on?”

“You’re still in Australia,” she told him, and yeah, Calum had figured that out. He hadn’t been unconscious long enough for them to take a plane anywhere worthwhile, and he’d have noticed if he was in a plane while awake. He figured he was probably somewhere near Newcastle, if they’d gone north, Nowra if they’d gone south, and no one would be stupid enough to go two hours west if they were kidnapping him. No matter where they’d gone, they were still in New South Wales, at least.

“Okay, good to know, but I think you should know I doubt anyone will pay ransom for me.”

“I don’t want a ransom, Calum. I want your help.” Courtney leaned forward in her chair, as if she was sharing a secret with him. Calum tried to think through all the potential reasons someone would want his help without knowing about his powers, and figured his bluff might have just failed.

“My help. You kidnapped me and tied me to a chair...for my help?”

“You’re an amplifier.”

“No, I’m a university student.”

“You’re an empath and amplifier,” she told him, and the confidence in her voice meant that yeah, his bluff really wasn’t going to work.

“You’re the one with the dolphins,” he said in dawning realization. “The freaking cyberkinetic dolphins that tore up most of downtown. That was you!”

She smiled coyly. “Quite genius, wasn’t it?”

“You’re the reason my sister shouted at me for half an hour!” he exclaimed, and thumped back down into his chair, relaxing his bonds. “We were fighting dolphins, okay, she was mad. We didn’t hurt any of them, I don’t think, but seriously--that was not a fun day.”

Courtney got up and started untying his hands. “The dolphins were a warning,” she said, and loosened the rope. “I need your help for the second phase.”

“You’re not going to run?” she asked, once he was free.

“I’m not stupid,” Calum said with a roll of his eyes. “If you’re untying me this early in the process you either want me to escape and carry news of your evil plan back, and since I don’t have any details of a plan, that’s not it, or you want me to try to escape and run into your booby traps, which will convince me of your might and render me helpless against your will.”

Courtney looked impressed. “Fast thinker.”

“I live with a merry band of idiots,” he told her. “If you want hot shower water, you learn to avoid booby traps.”

She snorted out a charming little laugh. “You were born with your powers, right?”

Calum shrugged, figuring it wasn’t worth it to lie. “They manifested when I was ten, but yeah, probably.”

“Mine happened about a year ago.”

He eyed her, figuring she was probably mid to late twenties. That was shockingly late to naturally develop powers, so...

“Accident of some sort?”

“Nuclear waste spill, right into the ocean where I was working.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

Calum’s hearing aid crackled. “Don’t know if you can hear us, Calum, but we’ve got your location and are within twenty minutes of taking the building you’re in. It took them awhile to turn on your hearing aids. Stall as long you can.”

He didn’t let his facial expression change, or reply, even. “So what happened?”

“I lived when I really shouldn’t have,” she said. “And then developed some interesting powers.”

“Like?”

“Well, I could talk to marine life after that.”

“So you talked to dolphins and convinced them to...destroy Sydney?”

She blinked. “Not destroy Sydney. Just the companies who dumped toxic waste and were destroying habitats.”

Calum tried to process that and only mostly succeeded. “So, environmental terrorism.”

“That’s a strong phrase.”

Calum stared at her and sat back down. “You blew up at least four buildings in Sydney using laser powered dolphins.”

“Yeah, but only the scummy ones.”

“That’s still ecoterrorism.”

She waved his comment off and leaned back in her chair, watching him with sharp eyes. “You’re an amplifier,” she said. “I need you to make my circle of influence stronger.”

He let her talk, trying to sort out how the hell her plan worked. The only thing really getting him through was Ashton’s snarky comments every time she said something particularly absurd.

“So you...you want to affect all the dolphins--”

“And whales--”

“All the dolphins and whales, and make them build flying bubbles and lasers, and take over the world?”

“Not take over the world, really. Just...restructure it.”

“Jesus, that’s a plan. We’re right outside,” Ashton said. “I think Michael brought a flamethrower. He’s pretty pissed off.”

Calum sighed and smiled at Courtney. “Yeah, you shouldn’t have kept my hearing aids. Or given them to me.”

She paused. “What?”

He tapped the hearing aid. “There’s a tracker in them. And if I’m right--” He could hear Ashton laughing through his comm system, and then the wall came down in a pile of cinderblock.  “That should be them, actually.”

Courtney swore and took off as the dust settled. Ashton saluted Calum. “Alright, Cal?”

“Been better, not going to lie,” Calum said. Ashton snorted and followed after Courtney, not worrying about petty things like walls, and structural elements. Luke was next through the hole Ashton had created.

“Hey, Cal-Pal! I’m to take you back to base,” he said. “Also, Mike is sort of destroying everything. It might take awhile.”

It turned out he was a bit north of Newcastle, along the coast, and that SHIELD had used helicopters to get to him. A handler hustled Calum and Luke into the choppers and took them back to base for mission debriefs.

Calum hated debriefs. He wasn’t fond of sitreps either, but debriefs were the actual worst, when your adrenaline hadn’t yet worn off and you were exhausted and trying to remember everything in your head, in neat chronological order. He hated sitting in the bare room with the tape recorder on the table, and he hated the paperwork he had to fill out and sign. He wasn’t fond of the interrogator either (for all they called him a handler, he would fit in as an interrogator in any James Bond movie he’d ever seen) and the blank expression he always had, and, it, just, it sucked.

Usually he could wrangle a minute or two alone with Michael before they hauled him off, but not this time.

So, to continue his awful fucking day, he sat in the squeaky chair and rubbed at his tired eyes as one of the medics treated his cuts and bruises and checked for more major damage, the interrogator staring at him blankly and unnervingly the whole time.

After three detailed recitations of the day’s events--went to work, got kidnapped by goons, crazy lady tied him to a chair and tried to seduce him to the dark side (not literal seduction), claimed responsibility for the dolphin thing a month back, called herself Courtney, powered through an illegal nuclear waste dump, then Ashton broke the wall, Luke broke him out, and Michael proceeded to break literally everything else, no, he really didn’t remember much more, could someone contact his boss and see if a) the animals were okay and b) if he was fired, because that really would just round out the suckiness of today, okay, and also, could he get Maccas or something because he was starving. Getting kidnapped and resisting evil really took it out of you.

When he was finally let go, it was going on midnight and he felt exhausted right down to his bones. Michael was waiting, had apparently watched the whole proceedings through the one-way mirror while Luke and Ashton handled mop-up and tracking duty at the hideout where Calum had been taken. Michael met him at the door and wrapped him in a crushing, clinging hug. Calum returned it gratefully, and buried his face in the crook of Michael’s neck.

“Don’t you ever do that again,” Michael told him, a little angry and a lot exhausted. “I was the one who called it in when you didn’t show for lunch. They cut the silent alarm in the store, called it in like it was an accident.”

“I’ll do my best not to get kidnapped again,” Calum promised, and let himself be held.

iv. (january 2014)

For whatever reason, Tuesdays really had it out for him. First it was the villain flooding most of Canberra with miniature, localized thunderstorms and holding the Prime Minister hostage for what actually legitimately seemed like no reason at all. That, and the fact that he was pulled out of his Sports History in the Twentieth Century lecture to fly an hour to Canberra to keep the government buildings from flooding meant that he was already in a foul mood.

Then, when they spent six straight hours soaked and chilled to the bone chasing the villainess down in the most frustrating game of tag, he was ready to implode.

They finally got to a good, empty area, and Ashton was coming around from the other side, and hopefully, for the love of all that was good and holy, this was going to be over soon.

Or, well. That’s what Calum thought until:

“Little brother!” The villainess shouted, her black cloak swirling around her dramatically in the high winds. It would be kind of an awe-inspiring sight, if Michael wasn’t too busy working out what tech he could disassemble off of her and how much damage he could get it to do. Next to him, Calum froze as she launched into a speech about family and responsibility, and like, destruction of the world at large. There was also a threat about Calum’s dog, which--no.

It had already been a fucking long day by pretty much all of Calum’s standards, dealing with flooding and lighting and power outages, and all of Luke’s (completely valid) bitching about how much spandex sucked when it got wet. He was also dealing with a pretty obnoxious wedgie that he couldn’t really fix at the moment, not with all the cameras pointed at them at the moment.

He’d had a fuzzy suspicion for most of the day, but this was just icing on the cake. “You’re shitting me,” he said flatly and immediately sat on the ground, subtly sending waves of rage in Ashton’s direction. Ashton glowed faintly blue and started scrambling for something larger to throw. “This is not happening.”

“Little brother?” Luke said, and got shocked with one of the villainess’ lightning bolts as he tried to telekinetically throw one of his new goo-balls to trap her. “Ow,” he managed, and passed out.

“Told you those wouldn’t work,” Michael shouted, darting across the field and out of the way. “That’s what happens when you try to imitate movies, I told you Big Hero 6 wasn’t a good source of inspiration!”

Ashton was fuming and managed get one good shriek off at her; she went tumbling and retaliated by dropping approximately a metric ton of water on Ashton with his own personal raincloud. He howled louder and started sonic-ing loud enough that everyone flinched. Calum’s hearing aids screeched in protest and died.

Michael shouted something, then realized that Calum’s hearing aids were both sparking and dead. Rolling his eyes, he started to sign a question.

Is that your--.

“It’s Mali-Koa,” Calum shouted in reply, expression grim. Michael sighed and remembered that Mali-Koa usually kept her cell-phone on her when she was out wreaking havoc. He disassembled the phone--from her yelp, she’d stored it in her bra--and started messing with her hearing aids long enough for Ashton to get in a few good hits. It was kind of weird to hear her raging in a strange pseudo-formal sort of dialogue when last weekend she’d been yelling at him to not use her bras as slingshots.

“This isn’t over, brother!” Mali shouted as she gathered the winds beneath her so she could fly off. At least, that’s what Calum assumed she was shouting. His hearing was a bit shot at the moment.

“You have so much explaining to do,” Ashton said when it became apparent the area was clear. His hair hung in his face, dripping wet and shaggy. When it became apparent that Calum couldn’t hear much of anything, Ashton clumsily signed his meaning while he spoke. Across the field, cameras flashed, trying to get a good shot at the scene. “So much explaining.”

Calum sighed and thumped his head to rest on Michael’s shoulder. Michael patted at him reassuringly and tried to wander off to check on Luke, but he stumbled and fell.

That was about when Calum realized that Michael's ankle was maybe broken, and his day managed to get even shittier.

“At least she’s not flooding Canberra anymore?” he tried, and just got twin glares from Michael and Ashton for his efforts.

--

“So my sister’s kind of a supervillain?” Calum said sheepishly, when they were all back in Luke and Michael’s lab after another long and bumpy flight back to Sydney. Luke folded his arms and glared at Calum, a little groggy but otherwise awake and functioning. Ashton was too busy wrapping Michael’s ankle to glare, but Calum could feel the disapproval radiating off of him. “And, uh. My mum. And dad. And, well. My whole family, except me.” He’d put his backup hearing aids in, had already made a mental note to ask Michael to fix his others and maybe tweak them so that Ashton’s sonic blasts wouldn’t knock them out of commission.

“You didn’t think to mention that?” Luke demanded. He threw his gloves and mask onto the table and started stripping out of his uniform. Underneath he had a sweaty tank top and baggy shorts and was soaked entirely through. He threw his shirt across the room, where it fell to the floor with a wet thwack. Everyone else was still dripping wet, so Calum made the trek across the room to their lockers and fished out clean, dry clothes for everyone. Granted, they were worn out track bottoms and t-shirts with holes in them, but at least the boxers and socks he fished out of Luke’s locker were still in the plastic packaging and so he was able to divvy out new and dry underwear.

“It didn’t seem relevant! They don’t usually terrorize Sydney,” Calum protested as he started pulling off his layers. He was pretty sure he had rainwater all the way through to his bones. “I thought they were off at the Supervillainy convention in New York this week anyways.”

“First of all, there’s a Supervillainy convention in New York? That’s a thing? Second of all, we’re a superhero team, of course it’s relevant.” Luke harrumphed and marched over to his precious whiteboard, having changed without a second thought. Calum considered making everyone happy and not shouty, but Michael had probably built up a resistance to that by now and it would just make Luke madder when he realized. He finally wriggled free of his innermost layer and pulled on the dry sweats and boxers.

“There is a very well known and internationally recognized Supervillainy convention in New York,” Michael told them, sounding fully exhausted. “Jesus, Ashton, wrap it tighter, would you? I don’t think I’ve lost blood flow to my toes yet.”

Ashton snorted and loosened the ace bandage enough that Michael’s glare eased a little. Not that his glare was fully effective, given that he was absolutely still soaking wet.

“My parents kind of have this thing,” Calum said, sitting at the table. Luke was working on some formula or other--when he was stressed, he turned to mathematics. “It’s a whole family business. They want me to use my powers to, like, inspire feelings of despair so they can carry out their grand plans.”

“Don’t forget the part where you’re supposed to seduce me from the side of good,” Michael chipped in. “Corruption’s a big part of the whole family thing.”

“Seducing Michael’s supposed to enhance my villain cred.” Calum shrugged and sent a subtle calming wave towards everyone in the room. It worked only in that the tension drained from Luke’s shoulders a little and Ashton’s touch gentled on Michael's ankle. “I think being rejected by society for my deafness and gayness is supposed to be part of my backstory, but I’ve never really been rejected by society, so it didn’t really work.”

“You’re related to a supervillain and you didn’t tell us,” Luke repeated. “You work in a pet store.”

“The whole emotions thing works great on puppies.” Calum spread his hands and shrugged; even when he communicated verbally, he liked gesticulating. “Not so much on the snakes, but I don’t think much makes them happy.”

“Calum, focus. Does this mean your family’s going to go after us?”

“Mali? Nah. She likes storms and lightning and people screaming. I don’t think we did enough damage for her to hold a grudge.”

“Could she have tracked us here?” Ashton asked, helping Michael wriggle into dry pants.

“She controls storms. Tracking is not her forte.” Calum sighed and took the whiteboard marker from Luke. “Look, Mali does storms on a normal day and hurricane damage when she’s on a feedback loop from natural weather patterns. My mum’s got magnetic powers, and my dad’s, like, blood control. They don’t want to kill me or my friends, they want to corrupt me to the side of evil.”

He started two lists, one titled Hood Family Plans and the other titled Calum’s Plans.

“So, their plans are usually shit like, borrow the Prime Minister, or whatever.”

“By borrow, you mean kidnap, right?” Ashton asked. He was finally changing into his own dry clothes.

“Semantics,” Calum said with a handwave. “But, uh. Yeah, my sister’s a villain. But they don’t tend to do long lasting damage. Remember when I said my dad makes people bleed out their eyeballs? He only does that sometimes.”

Luke choked and flounced off, probably to do research. Michael threw a whiteboard eraser at Calum. “You’re an asshole,” he informed the room at large.

Calum groaned and threw himself into an empty chair. His phone started flashing on the table, signifying a video call incoming.

When he answered it, it was his mum, looking a little put out and signing about as fast as he could understand.

Great, so now he had to explain to his mum why he and his sister had been beating each other up all over the Australian Capital Territory. And she was probably going to ask after Michael and demand to know when he was going to get on with corrupting his team, which. He thought he preferred when she was pestering him about dating Michael.

He propped his phone up on the table and spent another half an hour convincing his mum that no, it wasn’t about cancelling dinner, and yes, he and Mali were fighting on opposite sides of the good-evil dichotomy, and yes, he was going to continue fighting for good.

With Michael sniggering across the room, Calum really thought this ranked as one of the worst days he’d had in a long fucking while.

v. (october 2015)

The thing about having an arch nemesis was that, at some point, you actually had to, like, do battle with them. It wasn’t just kidnappings and fighting with minions. At some point you actually had to take down your nemesis yourself.

Calum was thinking along those lines as he ran down the street, trying to make himself as obvious a target as possible. As he was wearing neon green and yellow, it wasn’t hard to do.

He bobbed and weaved in what he hoped, hoped was an unpredictable pattern. Apparently letting your arch-nemesis work with dolphins for a few months meant grenades and upgraded lasers came into the equation, and really, he was getting tired of fighting fucking dolphins.

Technically this was the second day of what was now being dubbed the Dolphin Siege, with dolphins attacking the major cities and especially focusing on Canberra and Sydney. It had been bad enough two other SHIELD affiliated teams had been pulled in from New York and Tokyo. It had been a little humiliating admitting they needed help, but. Seriously. Dolphins with lasers. Everywhere. It wasn’t something the four of them could handle on their own.

On the upside, he’d gotten to meet Captain America, which was fucking amazing.

A little distracted, Calum skidded into the reinforced SHIELD building and scrambled down two flights of stairs.

“Hey,” he panted when he finally slid to a stop in Luke’s lab. “It’s not very fun out there.”

“Well, the distraction worked, we’ve knocked four of them out of the sky,” their handler reported, and distractedly threw a water bottle at Calum, who drank it greedily. “So what’s the plan now?”

“I was going to go motivate everyone,” Calum said, shrugging. “But I get where that could be a bad idea. Anyone need an amplification boost?”

“I actually need you up by St Mary’s,” Luke said over the comms. “We’ve got a base location, and if we triangulate we should be able to corner your friend.”

“She kidnapped me, she’s not my friend.”

The handler looked confused and a little worried, but Calum was already heading for the door.

“Yeah, you’re the only one who’s actually talked to her, so she’s your friend and also, your problem.”

“Fuck off,” Calum grumbled, just as Michael chimed in with “St Mary’s, you said? The primary, the college, or the chapel?”

“The campus,” Luke told them, sounding tired. Calum started up the stairs, his muscles protesting. It had been a long couple of days. “That’s as close as I got.”

“That’s as close as the genius child got? Shocking.”

“This whole thing was a scheme designed by some crafty fucker, okay, you’re the one who got kidnapped by a rookie villain.”

“We’ve never had an archenemy before, how was I supposed to know?” Calum pushed open the front doors and considered the six kilometer run wearily, then decided to flag down an agent with a car. The fact that vehicles were currently hot targets wasn’t really deterring him; his neon yellow supersuit made him enough of a target already.

Luke sighed. “Just get over here,” he said, and muted his mic.

It took half an hour for Calum to navigate through the mostly evacuated city. When this whole fiasco had started two days ago, most of Sydney had taken it upon themselves to either get out of the way or help with the effort. The fact that there were flying dolphins and craters in most of the roads made it a little more difficult to wind his way to his destination, but eventually he ended up at Hyde Park and from there it was only a quick run to the front of St Mary’s, where Luke was waiting.

“I think she’s in the cathedral proper,” Luke said. Michael was sitting on a concrete barrier, and Ashton was probably off comparing muscle size with the Incredible Hulk, or saving bloody Perth on his own, or something stupidly heroic. “Ready?”

Calum took a deep breath and nodded. Michael jumped off the barrier and headed for the doors, Luke and Calum not far behind.

St Mary’s was an old Catholic church, as old as any buildings really got in Sydney, anyways. It was all stained glass and heavy wood and cold stone, as regal a building as any. The pews had been pushed aside--how, Calum had no idea, he’d previously thought they’d been bolted to the floor--to make room for a makeshift command center with banks of monitors and a million wires.

They split up, setting their mics and comms to a private channel so as to avoid the chatter of other units sorting out the mess Sydney was stewing in.

In the center of the monitors, Courtney wheeled herself between keyboards on a desk chair, skidding over the complex stonework of the floor.

“There is no way it’s this easy,” Michael hissed back. “This is a trap.”

“No fucking shit,” Calum said, and wove his way through the stacked pews. “Think we could break some of these pews?”

“They’re wood, I won’t be any help,” Michael said, a little annoyed. “If I could touch the monitors I could probably break the system. It doesn’t feel like it’s super well constructed.”

“Cal, amplify my telekinesis,” Luke whispered, voice barely audible through the comms and over the hum of the machines. Calum crept over and pressed his palm to Luke’s shoulder, pushing his strength into Luke’s.

Carefully, Luke managed to levitate the pew, and carefully swung it towards Courtney, who appeared not to have noticed.

“Definitely a trap,” Calum whispered.

Luke snorted out a laugh. Then, he nodded at Michael and dropped the pew into the bank of monitors, on top of Courtney. Across the room, Michael dove for the tech and shorted it as best he could.

The thing about getting knocked out was that it tended to delete your short term memory, so Calum actually had no idea what knocked him unconscious. The last thing he remembered was Luke sneaking up behind Courtney, and then a fat lot of nothing.

When Calum woke up, he was in the SHIELD medbay and the entire assault was over, with the dolphins disabled and the villain in custody. Or, well, in custody until there was an engineered breakout. Calum knew how these things went.

Luke was sitting next to his bedside, reading, and Michael was sound asleep on the cot across the way.

Calum coughed and immediately Luke was putting down his book and scrabbling for the wastebin. Good thing, because as soon as he went to sit up, Calum retched and lost the contents of his stomach.

Luke smoothed Calum’s hair back and passed him a glass of water when he was done, along with his hearing aids.

“It was a trap,” he said sheepishly, once Calum was done vomiting. “Some weird kind of jury-rigged super high-tech and super illegal hologram system fixed with explosives and a power neutralizer. You got the worst of it and got knocked completely out. Michael used the power trace to track her down--turns out he’s actually a leech? Not a technopath at all. Or, well, like a mimic? He can absorb powers and use them, turns out he’d absorbed technopathy from his dad early on and just stuck with it, can you believe it? Anyways, he pulled the power trace and then we--

“Luke, you’re babbling,” Calum said dryly, not even bothering to try processing . “Give me the clifnotes?”

“We tracked her to an offshore base and there was a whole thing--the Hulk and Smash are totally bros now, it’s really weird--and once Courtney was out of commission, we ended up hauling in another animal talker--animpath?-- to convince the dolphins she wasn’t dead and that destroying Australia wasn’t in their best interests, and worked out a peace treaty. It’s entirely possible they’re setting up their own government based out of the Great Barrier Reef.”

Calum figured he was probably on the good drugs and that all of this would make sense later.

“Any casualties?”

Luke winced. “Current totals are thirty-six dead, eight of them SHIELD agents, but reports are still coming in and there’s a few people in critical condition. Too many injured people, not enough healers to keep them from the brink of death. Everyone on our team is fine, Ash broke his arm and a whole suburb of Melbourne is on fire, but we’ll have a new patrol to prevent dumping and the company responsible is getting fined and disbarred from working. Captain America signed your goggles, by the way.”

“I’m going to have to get a new set of goggles, why’d he do that?” Calum said blankly, and then stopped. “Wait, why?”

“Michael let slip that you’re a fan.”

“Of course he did,” Calum groaned, and was hit by another wave of nausea. He gagged and Luke immediately thrust the wastebasket back under Calum’s nose. It was a kind thought but the smell of vomit just turned the nausea into actually throwing up, and Calum emptied his stomach for the second time in as many minutes, this time mostly watery bile.

Luke had the sense to grab a clean wastebasket this time and swapped out the bins.

“I have to check you for concussion,” he said, and proceeded to test Calum’s reflexes. After Calum was too slow to recall an object’s location, Luke frowned. “I think you’ve got one, but I’ll get one of the docs just in case.”

“You’re a doc,” Calum grumbled, but Luke was already bounding out of the room, having left the wastebasket in Calum’s lap.

Across the room, Michael sat up. “Is he gone?”

“He’ll be back,” Calum warned. “And we’ll be subject to random reflex tests for weeks.”

Michael shuddered. “If he comes back I didn’t wake up.”

“Good choice,” Calum told him, and got up to crawl into Michael’s cot. There wasn’t quite enough room for both of them on the cot but with some creative maneuvering of their limbs and Calum’s wastebasket, they managed to make it work

“You smell like vomit,” Michael said unconcernedly as he wormed his hands beneath Calum’s shirt.

“You smell like sweat and dust,” Calum told Michael and curled up a little tighter.

“You love me anyways,” Michael said sleepily. Calum felt nice and soft and sleepy, and burrowed down into the uncomfortable cot as best he could.

Granted, Calum was feeling less nice when Luke woke him up to shine a flashlight in his eyes and remind him to drink water, but really, this week could have gone worse.

( +1 )

Victories were almost never a sure thing against true villainy. There were always temporary wins, a saved day and a slow start towards rebuilding whatever had been destroyed.

Calum’s team had no true victories under their belts--no villain had entirely repented and reformed, no one had chosen to revert to citizen rather than criminal status--but they’d also never completely lost either. Three years of teamwork and their record was a solid zero sum game. Which, to be fair, was a fairly decent record when the fate of your country and continent was at stake.

Today was turning out to be a good day. No one had called Calum out of bed at the crack of dawn to go fight an aquatic mammal hellbent on burning down his city, weekly family dinner had been cancelled, classes were out for summer recess, and Michael had made breakfast.

That was one of their better kept secrets, Michael’s cooking skill. Most people assumed he didn’t have the patience or the talent for it, but technology tended to obey Michael so at the very least the things he cooked turned out edible and pretty okay. When he put his mind to it, the generally turned out fantastically.

He didn’t try often, their schedules being what they were. Calum was usually up early, heading out for a run, right about the time Michael was crashing after staying up late finishing homework or working on a project with Luke. Today was a reversal, with Calum choosing to stay in bed and Michael puttering around the kitchen. When Calum finally chose to get up, he didn’t bother putting his hearing aids in, instead preferring the stillness of his own head.

Michael must have heard him coming down the hall because he turned to wave when Calum wandered into the kitchen.

You just up?

Calum nodded and jumped to sit cross legged on the counter next to the stove. Sunlight streamed through the windows, warm and splotchy over his thighs. He could feel the warmth radiating from the stove and the breeze from the vent fan; beneath him the counter shook ever so slightly with small vibrations as the dishwasher ran. He couldn’t hear Michael’s radio but knew Michael was humming along to something at a ridiculous volume from the way he moved and the way the sound ever so slightly shook the ceramic jar filled with cooking utensils. The whole kitchen smelled like french toast, warm syrup and cinnamon.

Michael caught his attention by gently pressing a palm to Calum’s knee; satisfied that Calum was watching, he started talking with his hands.

My ears are still ringing, he signed, in the grammatical structure of Auslan. Direct signed English translation was easier for him, but the Auslan grammar was more natural to Calum, who appreciated the effort. We were testing out Ashton’s range in the lab and I’m buzzing. Can’t sleep.

Calum didn’t bother to hide a smile at the sign for Ashton’s name. “Has he gotten any louder?”

More precise, Michael said, carefully schooling his facial expression to match the context. Calum snorted. I just forgot my earplugs. Luke laughed.

So did Calum. Michael pouted and flipped the french toast in the pan.

“So were you there all night?” Calum had no idea how loud he was speaking, what his inflections were. Michael never corrected him, knowing how hard it was for Calum to regulate that without assistance.

I left at dawn. Ashton and Luke are still there, probably.

Calum nodded and watched Michael scramble eggs and finish the french toast. Two glasses of orange juice and two mugs of coffee were already on the counter, along with two bright yellow plates. Calum loved them, for how loud the color was.

“Talk to me about sound?” Calum asked, a good five minutes later. Michael smiled and flipped the last bit breakfast onto plates, and pushed those onto the counter. He turned off the burner and checked that nothing would catch on fire. Calum held out his palms flat and let Michael dance his fingers over the sensitive skin there.

“I’m listening to You Me at Six,” Michael said out loud, absently finger spelling the band name into Calum’s palm. Calum read the words off his lips as best he could, sorting through the possible syllables to catch Michael’s meaning. Michael’s right hand tapped out a steady rhythm onto Calum’s left palm, the beat reverberating up Calum’s wrist. Calum took his right hand and pressed his fingers against Michael’s throat to feel the vibrations as Michael sang along, probably entirely too loudly for the hour, and read the words off Michael's lips as best he could.

Even with his hearing aids, Calum never really understood or liked music all that much. It probably had to do with the faintly robotic quality (or, not so faintly robotic, if he was using standard, unmodified hearing aids) all sound got when processed through his hearing aids, meaning he never really had a chance to love the layered sounds Michael swore up and down were there. Michael practically breathed music, though, and it had taken them the better part of five years to figure out how Michael could best share it with Calum in a way they could both enjoy.

And the thing was, this worked. It was nice to settle into this sort of halfway world, where Michael could share his music and Calum could actually enjoy it.

The flashing light on Calum’s phone went off at the same time that Michael’s vibrated against the counter.

Calum let his hands drop as Michael lunged for the mobile before it shook itself off the counter to answer it. He tucked the phone between his shoulder and chin and tried to get the jist over to Calum.

Crisis developing, we’re getting called in. Calum sighed, hopped down from the counter and went to dig out his spandex and put his hearing aids in.

“What’ve we got?” Calum asked, halfway into his uniform when Michael came in. Michael shrugged and handed over the phone.

“Minor villain trying to pull off a bank robbery five minutes away from your location,” the handler of the night told him over the line. “We deactivated Dr Fluke and Smash so it’s just--hey!” There was a string of swears, a loud thud, and then Luke.

“They think I can’t stop a bank robbery on two hours of sleep,” Luke grumped. “They shut down my systems.”

“I think it’s the two hours of sleep after you collapsed from exhaustion that’s stopping them,” Calum said, as flat as he could manage.

“You’re playing handler today?” Michael asked through his earpiece. Calum made a face at him and switched the call to his hearing aids; he couldn’t have two devices hooked over his ears, so Michael had hybridized them.

“If you’ll have me,” Luke said, and there was an annoyed squeak from the other end of the line--probably the handler Luke had displaced. “Right, the triple zero call came from a woman inside. She’s off the line now but her phone is still active and picking up audio from the lobby. Silent alarm was triggered twenty-six seconds after the call connected, that was eight minutes ago, first responders and police arrived on scene two minutes ago.”

“Their response time is getting faster,” Michael said, somewhat airily. He had his base layer on, the kevlar mesh under his uniform, and was carefully strapping on his knee and elbow pads. “Any details on who we’re up against?”

Luke didn’t reply for a few seconds. “Threat analysis gives us a few, most likely options. Cal-Pal’s not going to like it.”

”Spit it out,” Calum ordered, double checking his equipment belt. “We need a plan of attack.”

“It’s your arch, Mike-ro-wave. Machiavillain is definitely on scene. As for who’s causing it--well, it’s either the dolphin lady, uh, Courtney Vostrek, or...or, well. Typhoon.”

“Mali-Koa?”

“Yeah, Sorry, Cal.”

Calum sighed and reached for his beanie. “I figured it’d happen. Family dinner was cancelled, which means dastardly deeds, usually. Keep an eye out for my parents?”

“Will do. An officer should be knocking at your door in the next few minutes to escort you to location.”

“You’re a gift, Lukey,” Michael sang, and muted his mic. Calum followed suit. “God, today of all days? You up for some crime fighting?”

“Something tells me this is Mali’s idea of a gift,” Calum said. Michael grinned and fastened his cape on. “Mikey? We’re battling someone with mind control and possibly someone with wind control. You really want to wear that today?” Michael’s grimace was plain.

“Fair point, I’ll grab my jacket.”

The bank robbers turned out to be some moderately powered villains somewhere in the midrange of their priority list. It wasn’t hard to sort out an easy plan to take them down with the help of Sydney’s finest, and all before the dye packs had a chance to ruin any money the robbers could get away with.

The Maciavillian was a mind-control powered, and he had four regular criminals under his control. That, luckily, meant he didn’t have enough focus to take either Calum or Michael completely under his control, and Calum was at least a little immune to him anyways. Immune enough he could get within needle distance, at least, and prick the bastard in the neck with one of Luke’s patented tranq syringes.

“Hey, Cal-Pal,” one of the officers said, when it was all said and done, and waved him over. Calum went, a little amused. “We found this in Maciavillian’s pocket. Any clue what it’s about?”

It was a white envelope, not sealed, and inside was a card bearing only the word CONGRATULATIONS on the front. Inside, in looping green ink, was a simple message.

Happy anniversary, hope you enjoy your present. More to follow. xx a friend.

Calum choked.

“Maciavillian claims it came from Typhoon, but she’s nowhere to be found and no one’s seen her at the scene, so it really could be anything,” the cop continued. “We’ll need your sitreps, though.”

“SHIELD and our handlers will email them over,” Calum promised. “You need this for evidence?”

“Nah, figure you lot could do more with it than we could. Mike-ro-wave done putting the computer system back online?”

“Probably. Thanks, officer.”

As soon as he was out of hearing range of the officer, he scrubbed his hand down his face. He leaned against one of the SHIELD issue cars and waited.

“Whatcha got there?” Michael asked when he finally finished inside the bank and slumped next to Calum.

“A card,” Calum said, and let Michael read it. He watched as Michael’s forehead creased in confusion, and then smoothed as he understood. “Typhoon.”

Michael snorted. “Luke, you getting this?”

“Activating google cam, don’t turn your head.” Luke was silent for a few moments. “More to follow?”

“I’m assuming she conned other minions into pulling stupid stunts or giving themselves up today.”

“Your sister gives you the weirdest gifts,” Michael said, and slid the card back into the envelope. “Only your family would think giving up villains was a suitable present for a wedding anniversary.”

“Isn’t second anniversary supposed to be cotton?” Calum asked, at the same time Luke inhaled sharply.

“Oh, it’s your anniversary!” he said in surprise. “Right, congratulations on, what, two years married?”

“Two years,” Michael confirmed. “So, any clue as to where she’ll direct anyone else?”

“Not yet. Hey, you two should take the day off. Smash and I can handle it, and the agents are always bitching about cleanup duty. We’ll let them bitch about field duty for awhile instead.”

“You still haven’t slept more than two hours in the past sixty,” Calum told Luke, and glanced at Michael, who was smiling at him big and wide and goofy “So, no, let’s not do that. I’d rather do this, anyways. It’s more...exciting. Makes for a better date.”

Luke pretended to gag. “God, you two are weirdos.”

“Romantic weirdos,” Michael corrected, grinning dopily at Calum.

Luke cracked his knuckles. “Right. A tip called in to one of the lines says that there’s a Dustdevil kicking up a fuss about four kilometers from your location. Want in?”

“Hell yeah,” Michael crowed, and held out his elbow for Calum to take. “Shall we?”

“We shall,” Calum said, as prim as he could manage in neon green and yellow spandex. He snagged a SHIELD agent and obtained the keys to a car, his arm still looped through Michael’s. “Though, if today doesn’t end in some hard to explain bruises and cake and me getting laid, we’re going to have issues.”

“Then today will end with cake, and you getting laid,” Michael promised solemnly, though the mischievous expression on his face gave him away. “We’ll find you a chicken and everything.”

Calum shoved at his husband while Luke made more gagging noises. “You’ve got a fucking weird relationship.”

“Works though, don’t it? Dustdevil, you said?”

Sometimes Calum really hated the whole superhero situation, hated the bizarrely timed wake up calls and the general weirdness that came with a superpower. But some days, he really couldn't imagine anything better, and knew he wouldn’t give it up for the world.