Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Missy Biron woke up about thirty seconds before the alarm did the job for her, which gave her just enough time to slam a hand down on her phone before it started rumbling and screeching.  

A vicious sense of satisfaction thrummed through her. Missy knew it was childish to have a one-sided rivalry with an inanimate object, but it wasn’t like anyone was watching, so she continued to let herself do it.

She sighed and rolled over. Too lazy to rearrange the blankets again, Missy stretched her power out to one downy corner, and re-covered her toes. It was unseasonably cold for May—for now, at least. By noon, the fog rolling in from the ocean would all burn off, and her early morning shivering beneath the covers for warmth would be nothing but a distant memory. She curled up tighter at the thought, and shut her eyes in the hopes that she could go back to sleep.

When the plan inevitably failed, as it always did during this section of her daily routine, Missy dragged herself out of bed. After dressing and brushing her teeth and all the usual ablutions, she shuffled down the hall. Missy had to rely on muscle memory to avoid the stray power tool and the bunched up bottoms of bed sheets draped over every item of value. Her dad had said it was to keep dust off the furniture while he completed renos, but Missy could feel the exact spots where each photo frame met the wall. Even when the sensory limits of her powers failed her, Missy could remember the pictures encased within. 

Christmas Day, 2001. Her eighth birthday. That time all three of them went to the county fair, which had stopped altogether in recent years due to both financial and safety concerns. There was even a professional portrait taken of her and her mom and her dad, which Missy felt was the most revealing picture of all. They had on matching red sweaters and wide smiles, attractive enough as a family unit that Missy used to fantasize about them being moderately successful magazine advertisement models. She wasn’t so ambitious as to fashion them as Disney Channel stars or a traveling band, but figured her vision got the same idea across. The perfect family.

Missy also remembered the way her parents had screamed at each other the entire ride to the photography studio, about money and time and all the usual crap they fought over. A second after the picture was taken, they resumed their yelling, which left Missy apologizing to the poor photographer. Christmas and her birthday and the county fair had played out similarly.

There had never been a time when they were happy, but in the photos, Missy could almost pretend.

Her mom wasn’t up by the time she made it to the kitchen in the center of the house, so Missy helped herself to some cereal from her mom’s cabinet, and the milk in the fridge that was hers and hers alone. Her dad didn’t mind when she took some of his ultra-grain brand, but Missy had learned the hard way that when she ate it during her mom’s shift in the house, no amount of apologies could convince him that it wasn’t her mom who was secretly stealing his food. 

Missy wasn’t young or stupid enough anymore to take it personally when they fought, but it was annoying, so she’d learned to sidestep all foreseeable conflicts before they could occur. It was a shame the skill didn’t extend to anyone beyond her own asshole parents.

Missy’s mom emerged from the left doorway just as she’d put the milk away. There was dust in her hair and plaster on her cheek, which clued Missy into how much renovating her mom had done on her side of the house since Missy was there last. Whatever. She’d get to see it in person tonight, when her mom and her dad did their court-ordered handoff and Missy switched to the guest bedroom in her mom’s wing. When her mom came back in two weeks time, Missy would move back to her dad’s side. 

Much like the cereal, the arrangement was just as much for her own peace of mind as it was an attempt at being equitable. The options were usually one and the same.

“You’re up early,” her mom said. She nodded her head to the closed fridge door. “I’m surprised. I heard you come in last night sometime past one.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not like I’m going to leave someone at the mercy of the skinheads just because I have a curfew.” She rolled her eyes. “‘ So sorry about you getting hate crimed but it’s past my bedtime! But I’ll totally make sure to visit you in the hospital tomorrow after school!’”

“I remember the Youth Guard making it pretty clear that you’re supposed to get back within a set timeframe.”

“Section 80.7 allows for provisional schedules, provided the issue at hand is urgent and the Ward in question is both required for the task and voluntarily participates. Things like Endbringers, the Slaughterhouse Nine, and—”

“Last night,” her mom finished for her. “I don’t suppose I can ask what the urgent matter was?”

Missy shoveled cereal into her mouth. Her mom’s cereal brand was good and sugary, but her dad’s was more filling. She knew her mom only bought this type because there were a handful of studies out there on the correlation between processed sugars and increased rates of cancer. She was sure her dad knew it too.

“Nope.”

Her mom hummed in dissatisfaction. It wasn’t like she actually cared much about what had happened, or her daughter’s safety—they both knew full well that Missy would be graduating from the Wards in a year’s time, which meant no more childcare stipend for her mom. Years of divorce proceedings and court rulings had honed her litigious instincts. If she thought there was even the slightest chance that the government body handling Missy’s after school heroism could be exposed for exploitation, then she would pounce.

Missy finished off her cereal quickly.

“Happy birthday,” her mom said, once she was sure she had Missy’s undivided attention again. 

“Thanks.”

“Did you think about what you wanted to do? We could go out to dinner, or order in. Or take the day off, and go to the beach?”

“It’s fucking freezing outside right now.”

“It should warm up later.”

“I’ve got a bio test today, and a presentation in Spanish. Then a shift from three to eight, and Dad will pick me up from there.”

No doubt her dad would have some stupid, big celebration planned that Missy had specifically asked him not to do. Her mom knew it too, and it was killing her inside. 

Her mom brushed her bangs aside, kissing her on the forehead. Missy tried not to sag into the touch.

“If you change your mind, I’m just one call away.” She smiled softly. In a certain slant of light, it almost looked sincere. “It’s not every day my baby girl turns seventeen.”

And wasn’t that the exact problem? Seventeen was a shitty, all-around useless age to turn. Not old enough to drink, not old enough to vote, and stuck in high school for another agonizing year. Even the most milquetoast kid had exhausted the fun of being a teenager by the time the big one-seven rolled around. Missy had lived more in the past five years than people did in their entire lifetimes. What was even left for her now? Surely she could do better than a stray lyric from an ABBA song.

As Missy crossed back through the house to grab her backpack and a change of clothes for work, she took note of every minor addition, every change and renovation her father had made since the divorce to claim the space as his own. Her mother was no better. Missy resolved to be out of the place—and out of Brockton Bay—by this time next year. They were already halfway to creating their own little Winchester House. If Missy let herself be trapped in the tide of new divorce proceedings and patrol schedules, she’d never end up leaving. And when the next birthday came, or a highly improbable one eighty years after that, Missy would be little more than a ghost, doomed to haunt these half-painted halls.

Seven-fucking-teen.

The bio test went badly, and the Spanish presentation went even worse. 

It didn’t bother her. Missy had long since stopped caring about school and all its minute humiliations. The few friends she’d maintained from childhood had moved away after Leviathan, and while the Bay was better off than it had been all those years ago, the generational wound left behind would never be more than a fresh scab, one sharp move away from cracking back open and leaking pus all over the damn place. Everyone who was still around had dismissed high school as a lost cause; better to just wait until college for a fresh start.

Missy hadn’t even gotten that far. She was only at school to check off the attendance boxes, and earn the passing grades required for participation in the Wards. There were Wards-to-college pipelines, of course, provided you were willing to let a few admissions officers and faculty at select university programs know your secret identity, but everyone knew that club and intramural superheroes were almost as much of a joke as corporate capes—an unsurprising evaluation, considering that one activity often lead to the other. 

Missy, as one of the longest serving and top ranked Wards in the entire damn country, was going to skip all that and go right into the Protectorate. She could get a transfer to somewhere far away and photogenic. She could get an apartment and maybe a fish or cat—if she could find someone to watch it while she was away—and then she’d work her ass off until she got promoted. Maybe she’d get transferred around a few more times, save some lives, and scratch the itch that never stopped wriggling beneath her skin, before eventually dying in some heroic endeavor. Maybe she’d get to retire instead, seeing as parahuman mortality rates had gone way down with the disappearance of the Endbringers. Or maybe the Endbringers would reappear, and the once-great Vista would triumphantly emerge from retirement, only to be killed the second she set foot on the battlefield. 

Based on past experience, all three options sounded achievable to Missy. 

Sixth period, which was technically branded as a free time slot for all students not in athletics or electives, meant a commute to the PHQ. Vista waited out back behind the school, offhandedly wishing she’d taken up smoking to pass the time despite her hatred of cigarettes. Toggle came jogging out a few minutes later, followed by the new thinker recruit, Scatterbrain. 

Vista surveyed her team with a practiced apathy, wondering how the hell she’d fallen from fighting alongside the Triumvirate to this. By the time Crucible had graduated, leaving her the well-deserved role of Captain, world-ending events had all but stopped. The frequency of trigger events had dwindled to a stop, leaving Vista with a lackluster team and no threats to guide them against. She figured Scatterbrain would be snatched up by Vegas or Watchdog once he graduated, because thinkers and tinkers were always in high demand. Toggle would probably go to college. She didn’t strike Vista as the kind of person with a future in superheroing.

Toggle yawned, exhausted from the night before. Scatterbrain kept on shooting nervous glances at Vista, like he thought she couldn’t see him staring through his bulky tinted visor. 

Officer Kerns pulled up in the parking lot, beeping his horn, smiling, and waving. He rolled down his window. “Hey, kids! Have a good day at school? Break any rules without getting caught?”

Vista knew his twin eleven-year-old daughters loved the routine, from the few times they’d carpooled with them. She climbed into the passenger seat while Toggle and Scatterbrain slid into the back. The seating arrangement was technically against regulation, but Officer Kerns was a big softie when it came to kids. Sometimes, he even let Vista drive for a bit, before switching back over as they approached the newly-renovated PHQ. Protocol had loosened up a lot in the past few years. Vista hoped that Director Piggot was rolling in the sand at whatever tropical oasis she’d fucked off to. 

“I forgot to turn in my unit project in Mrs. Sakamoto’s class,” Scatterbrain said. Vista could see him frowning in the rearview mirror. “I think she’s mad at me. That’s the third one I’ve missed.”

“You should talk to her about it,” Officer Kerns replied. “She knows you care. I promise you she’ll be more than willing to make accommodations, as long as you communicate with her.”

Scatterbrain nodded to himself. Vista tried not to feel bad for the kid. Life would get much easier once he figured out that school wasn’t the be all, end all of life, but it was clear he’d once taken pride in being a good student. The powers that rearranged his brain probably made that level of academic performance impossible now.

“Geez,” Kerns continued, “It’s like the third act of a Philip Glass opera in here. Do I need to stop to get you guys a pick-me-up? Ice cream? Starbucks? I hear the kids love that.”

“My parents say that coffee stunts your growth,” Toggle said.

“It’s not like it matters. You won’t hit five-four,” Scatterbrain blurted out. 

Toggle glared at him.

“Sorry.”

Vista sighed, readjusting  her shoulder straps. 

“Just take us to PHQ, please,” she said. “There’s Danish cookies and a Keurig in the common room.” 

Triumph and Vista were halfway out the door when Director Renick emerged from his office. Her shoulders sagged the moment she heard the hinges creak.

“Vista,” he said. “My office. Now.”

Triumph and the two flanking PRT officers didn’t even blink. From his spot by the console, Scatterbrain wrung his hands together.

Vista took her time crossing the room, not stretching the actual space out, but slowing her pace enough that everyone knew she was dissatisfied. Renick wasn’t a yeller, but she could see him growing more displeased by the second.

She sat down across from his desk, in the office he shared with Miss Militia. Miss Militia was off attending some bigwig meeting with Chevalier in D.C. The next week, it’d be New York, and the week after that, London, because no shit the highest parahuman authority in Brockton Bay was busy with more important matters than breaking up fights between Merchant rejects on public transportation. For as much reform as they’d promised within the Protectorate, things hadn’t changed. Certainly not in day-to-day affairs. Vista had resigned herself to it.

“Last night?” she asked.

“Last night,” Renick agreed.

“I don’t know what to say.”

He folded his hands across his desk, staring down at Vista through his glasses.

“There’s nothing to say. It was a routine mission—”

“—or so you claimed.”

“—and you broke protocol by going off on your own.”

“—which I wouldn’t have done if I’d been properly briefed! I’m not the one who let some no-name capes break into the PRT armory!” 

“Which I accept full responsibility for,” Renick said. “But that doesn’t change the fact that your actions lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage, fourteen injured—including members of your own team—and one civilian death.”

Vista remained silent.

“There will need to be a disciplinary hearing for the events of last night, probably followed by demotion from Ward Captain.”

“And who’s going to take my spot?” Vista fired back. “Toggle? Our team’s already a fucking joke!”

“Maybe even a shift to probationary status,” Renick continued. “And your placement within any future Protectorate teams will be contingent on good behavior over the course of the next year.” He looked up from her file, which he had been rapidly sifting through. “Happy birthday, by the way.”

Vista stood up, and walked out the door.

“Where are you going?”

She didn’t bother to respond. As Director Renick attempted to reach out and follow her, Vista expanded the space between them. She pushed herself away from the nearby officers and capes too, for good measure. They were all staring in surprise. 

Good little Vista, a consummate professional amongst minors and adults alike. Seventeen was too old for tantrums, but everyone here still saw her as the chubby-cheeked ten-year-old from her early promotional materials. By tomorrow, they’d forgive her for the outburst. But the actions of last night? Not so much.

No one else tried to stop her as she left. She didn’t let anyone try.

Her mom didn’t ask questions when she got home a few hours earlier than expected. Missy suspected she’d get a long phone call and a few emails by this time tomorrow, and that would only be the beginning. Her dad would too. They’d blame each other before they ever blamed Missy, and the back-and-forth would be ten thousand times more agonizing than them grounding her like normal, competent parents would. 

Her mom had just brought the ice cream cake out of the freezer—strawberry flavor, she’d proudly explained, like Missy was still a child—when the doorbell rang. 

Her father was standing there on the front stoop with a strawberry ice cream cake of his own, and balloons in his right hand. Her mother didn’t like that one bit, so the two of them started yelling, right out in the open in the front yard. The neighbors were used to it by now, and wouldn’t call the cops unless it lasted longer than an hour. 

Missy stretched the walkway out between them so that the arguing was little more than background noise to her ears, and crawled into her bed on her mom’s side of the house. Her dad would be the one who came inside, once both the cakes had melted and they’d exhausted all their usual insults. 

All in all, it wasn’t the worst birthday Missy Biron had ever had.

Missy Biron woke up about thirty seconds before the alarm did the job for her, which gave her just enough time to slam a hand down on her phone before it started rumbling and screeching.

She sighed and rolled over. It was unseasonably cold for May—for now, at least. By noon, the fog rolling in from the ocean would all burn off, and her early morning shivering beneath the covers for warmth would be nothing but a distant memory. 

When sleep inevitably failed her, she dragged herself off to the kitchen. It was time to face the music.

Missy helped herself to her dad’s ultra-grain, health-nut cereal, which she promptly choked on as her mother emerged from the same hallway as Missy did.

“You’re up early.”

“Mom?” She hacked out a piece of now-soggy rice. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s Tuesday. Your father and I aren’t switching out until tonight, remember? So you get to see us both for your birthday.”

“No,” Missy said. She set her spoon down, and pushed away from the table. She had the intention of getting up, but her legs were shaking against her volition. She looked at the date on her phone’s home screen, and the paper on the table, and the calendar clipped to the fridge, all claiming it was Tuesday, May 15th.

“I know that things haven’t been easy, Missy, but that’s a cruel thing to say. We both love you. You know that.”

“No,” Missy continued. “It can’t be my birthday, because my birthday was yesterday.”

Her mother crossed the room quickly, brushing Missy’s bangs aside to check the temperature of her forehead.

“What time did you get back last night?” her mom asked. Her voice was sharp with concern. “Did you hit your head? Did they check you over at PHQ before sending you home?”

Something in her mother’s voice snapped Missy from her stupor. She could see it playing out in her head already—her mom marching her over to Director Renick’s to find out what happened, only to find out about the robbery and the bombs and the woman. Her dad would find out too, and the two of them would fight over it all through the demotion, the disciplinary meetings, and her probation period. 

If yesterday was a dream, it was a damn prophetic one.

Missy gently pried her mother’s hand off her face, giving it a firm squeeze.

“Sorry about that,” she said, forcing out a smile. “Early morning grogginess, I guess.”

“Do you want to take the day off? We could go to the beach. Go out for dinner, or order in?”

“I really just need to get to school. I’ve got a bio test today, and a presentation in Spanish. Then a shift from three to eight, and Dad will pick me up from there.”

Her mom kissed her on the forehead. Missy tried not to sag into the touch.

“Well, if you change your mind, I’m just one call away.” She smiled softly. In a certain slant of light, it almost looked sincere. “It’s not every day my baby girl turns seventeen.”

School was the same, but that could be said for the other four days of the week. Her Spanish presentation sucked. Her bio test was awful too, an experience compounded by Missy’s certainty that she’d seen the same questions the day before. She still didn’t know the damn answers. 

The morning fog had completely dissipated by sixth period. Officer Kerns drove them to the PHQ with all his usual good humor and dumb dad jokes. Scatterbrain watched Vista nervously through the rearview mirror.

At the PHQ, Director Renick gave her the exact speech she’d dreamed up the night before. It hurt more to hear it in person, but deep down, Vista knew he was right. She was somewhat ashamed as she stormed off.

At home, her mom and dad fought over strawberry ice cream birthday cakes, and Missy crawled into bed on her mom’s side of the house. For the first time Missy could recall, the bedroom switching felt disorienting. She wondered if this was how Sarah Winchester had felt, wandering the corkscrew halls of her home. 

Missy Biron had spent her seventeenth birthday in a haze. When she finally succumbed to sleep, all she could feel was relief.

Missy Biron woke up about thirty seconds before the alarm did the job for her, which gave her just enough time to slam a hand down on her phone before it started rumbling and screeching.

She sighed and rolled over. It was unseasonably cold for May—for now, at least. By noon, the fog rolling in from the ocean would all burn off, and her early morning shivering beneath the covers for warmth would be nothing but a distant memory. 

A quick check on her phone revealed it to be Tuesday, May 15th, 2015. 

Her seventeenth birthday. 

When Missy was done throwing up in the toilet, she dragged herself down her father’s hallway and into the kitchen. She went for her mother’s sugary cereal this morning, just for a bit of variety from the day prior. The sensation of barley and rice wedging in her throat was still fresh in her mind.

“You’re up early,” said her mother from the left doorway.

Her mom leaned down to kiss her forehead, and Missy trembled at the touch.

“I think I’m caught in a loop,” she told Director Renick. Vista glanced quickly at the shut door to his office, and the console beyond, where capes and PRT officers alike were keeping track of activity on the mainland. Scatterbrain had spent the whole ride over shooting Vista nervous glances—not because he knew what was up, as Vista had initially suspected, but because of the night before.

“Hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage,” Vista continued, before Renick could reply, “Fourteen injured—including members of my own team—and one civilian death. That’s what you’re going to tell me. And I know, because I’ve lived this same day two times already.”

Renick sat back. He was studying Vista closely, but she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. His glasses obscured his eyes.

“Please,” she said. “Just believe me. I don’t know what it is that’s causing this. Gray Boy, or some tinkertech, or a passive stranger effect. I have no reason to think it’s a second trigger, but there are plenty of other possible explanations. Khonsu’s back, maybe, or the Simurgh is fucking with me specifically. But I need your help, because I don’t know if I can get out of this on my own.”

Vista waited nervously as Renick considered her for a moment longer. Then, he reached across his desk, and squeezed her hands with his own. For once, Vista didn’t mind the breach in personal space. She and Director Renick had known each other for years now, more like coworkers than an adult and a child, or a boss and an employee. He’d outlasted all the other PRT Directors, not because he was steelier or smarter or stronger than the rest, but because he wasn’t the kind of man who made enemies. The remaining local villains handled him with something of a soft touch, just as he did the same for them. Heroes followed a similar pattern. 

“What happened last night?” he asked her. “Did you hit your head?”

She told him exactly what had happened—the robbery and the bombs and the woman. She couldn’t remember anything past that, though she must have made it home safely, since she kept on waking up there on Tuesday, May 15th.

After that, Director Renick called the rest of the team in to ask them the same questions, and to Vista’s growing frustration, they could remember their evenings perfectly. But no one had seen Vista that night after she separated from the group. Not until yesterday. Today. Tuesday. 

Renick was frustrated too, if the deepening trenches of his forehead wrinkles were anything to go by. He never yelled, but he certainly wasn’t pleased when he demanded to know why no one had reported Vista missing. They didn’t have any answers for that, either.

Her parents showed up not long afterwards, and managed to put aside their differences long enough to hold Vista’s hands through the physical and psychological testing. Second triggers were quickly ruled out, as was interference from any known stranger within the city. Everyone ignored Vista as she attempted to point out how much of an oxymoron that statement was, and on and on the diagnostics went, until mercifully—or agonizingly, depending on who you were and what you understood of the situation at hand—it all stopped.

Sitting alone in the medical examination room, it was impossible for Vista to ignore the guards posted outside her door. She could hear her parents’ voices rising down the corridor, and had to stop herself from pushing them further away, lest the guards take it as a threat. Her arms swam in the hospital gown they’d forced her into, and she felt stupid with her ass hanging from the open back. She wouldn’t have been surprised if someone told her it was just a subtle way to discourage the flight risks, but nobody did, so she just sat there feeling embarrassed and pissed off. 

Missy Biron was seventeen years old today—and yesterday, and the day before that—but it was the smallest she’d felt since she first triggered.

As the night wore on, everyone agreed it would be best to keep her here under observation for a few days, and hopefully they’d find out what was going on before then. Vista wasn’t nearly as optimistic. They’d chalk her uncharacteristic actions from the night up to an ongoing psychotic break, and the punishments would be lessened accordingly, as would her opportunities to go out in the field. Her record, still half-open on Director Renick’s desk, painted a picture of a child put under long-term, high-stress conditions beyond what even most functional adults could handle. And if word of her predicament got out—and it would, now that the Youth Guard had been called in—all treatment of Wards would be changed going forward. The worldwide decline of child soldiers was objectively a good thing, save for the fact that until this time next year, Vista was one of said child soldiers. The instant her Youth Guard supervisor arrived on site, Vista’s job was as good as toast.

Vista couldn’t even bring herself to care about all of this, when it meant she would finally be free from the loop.

She nodded off sometime before midnight, uncomfortable but exhausted in the fold-up cot the doctor had provided. 

Missy Biron woke up about thirty seconds before the alarm did the job for her, which gave her just enough time to slam a hand down on her phone before it started rumbling and screeching.

She sighed and rolled over. It was unseasonably cold for May—for now, at least. By noon, the fog rolling in from the ocean would all burn off, and her early morning shivering beneath the covers for warmth would be nothing but a distant memory.

Missy checked her phone.

Tuesday. May 15th, 2015.

Seven-fucking-teen.

Chapter Text

By her 23rd seventeenth birthday, Missy Biron had learned a few important things about the way the loop worked.

Like the amount of convincing required to let anyone know what was happening wasn’t worth it. She could not rely on either of her parents—though really, when had that ever been the case?—nor Director Renick. Officer Kerns and the rest of the team, parahuman or not, weren’t much help either. Missy was in this alone.

She’d also quickly discovered that it was physically impossible to stay up past midnight on the day of the loop. No matter what she did or where she was when the time rolled around, she would wake up on Tuesday, May 15th in her bedroom on her dad’s side of the house, thirty seconds before her alarm went off.

A painful mishap with the cereal spoon, followed by further but no less painful experimentation, had revealed that injuries healed over—or, if you wanted to get technical about it, reset. Other things, like written notes and property destruction and anything warped by her own powers reset too. Missy wasn’t bold enough to kill herself or anyone else—though give it time, and maybe she would be desperate enough to try—but she suspected the act would play out similarly. If anything, this made her even more terrified. It was one thing to joke about dying early; an eternity of this was unimaginably worse.

She’d stopped bothering to go to school by now, though somewhere around the second week of the loop, she’d taken some time out of her day to prep for both the bio test and the Spanish presentation. The novelty of being a good student was amusing for all of two seconds, before Missy realized that she’d never actually get grades back on either assignment, and then she felt stupider than she would have if she’d just continued to fail both classes. Like any good and selfless Ward Captain, Missy was glad it was her in the loop and not some hapless kid like Scatterbrain. He would have gotten stuck doing math worksheets till the heat death of the universe. Hell, he might have even enjoyed it.

Twenty-three days was not long enough for Missy to gather up the courage to visit the warehouse, but it was enough for her to exhaust all other options, which basically amounted to the same thing.

The docks looked less imposing during the day, when the endless rows of cement warehouses didn’t cast dark shadows over already-dark streets. It wasn’t as pronounced beneath the hot May sun, but the PHQ’s force field continued to emit a pulsing blue light, shining from across the bay. It reflected off the flat planes of the district, making it seem as though the entire area was exhaling slowly, stirred from a deep sleep. Had there ever been a tactical need for it, Vista probably could have produced a similar effect with her powers.

There was once a time when the docks were both the safest and most dangerous place in Brockton Bay, but Skitter—or Weaver, or Taylor Hebert, or whatever the hell it was they were calling her now—was halfway across the world, off rescuing babies from tsunamis with Narwhal and Dragon and the rest of the Guild. Missy would have been jealous of the ex-villain’s meteoric rise, but she knew how parahuman politics worked. In times of dire need, any form of competency was rewarded. Skitter had simply taken advantage of that.

The rest of the Undersiders were far less terrifying too, once you saw them all crammed in the back of a PRT van like the world’s most lethal clown car. Even their presence in the city had ebbed over the years. Rumor was that Grue had retired with a decent chunk of change, and Tattletale and Hellhound—“Bitch” to her face, as Vista had learned through one too many Clifford-like encounters—had moved up and out of the world.

As she traced a familiar path through loading bays and shipping container lots, the irony of the situation began to dawn on Vista. There was no need to be afraid of the docks or what lay in store, because she was the most powerful person within the loop. Too bad there was no one else aware enough to admire it.

The pavement grew charred and cracked as she stepped towards the warehouse in question, which was about what Vista had expected from her incomplete memories on the eve of her birthday. 

Last night, it hadn’t looked much different than any of the other warehouses along the block; sturdy save for a few cracked windows, and some dated tagging on one face. 

They didn’t even have cause to step inside. Vista, Scatterbrain, and Dovetail, along with the fifteen accompanying PRT officers, stumbled across the thieves while they were unloading their truck. It was embarrassing, really, to know that such an amateur group had managed to break into the armory in the first place. It was even more embarrassing that Vista was being forced to fetch the stolen goods, which amounted to little more than some old officer uniforms, a handful of containment foam canisters—which had a preexisting black market—and some unsalvageable, scrapped bits of tinkertech from when Armsmaster and Kid Win were still stationed in Brockton Bay.

Vista turned her back to the warehouse, mentally placing the truck out front on the street where it had been just last night. The memory was fuzzier than she would have liked. After all, it had happened over three weeks ago.

She had been rash, she knew, and regretted it immensely. But the whole assignment had been so fucking demeaning. It couldn’t have come at a worse time for Vista, who was already teetering on the edge of an early-life crisis. 

When one of the thieves got a hit on her, she’d taken him down with a viciousness that surprised even herself. Scatterbrain had given her that alarmed look he kept on repeating during the carpool, one of the officers coughed awkwardly, and Dovetail had opened her mouth, obviously gearing up for a lecture.

So Vista had done the one thing she knew her powers were always good for, and bent the block towards her as she stepped away. Dovetail could have kept up with her flying, probably, but she wasn’t supposed to leave her post. None of them were; they still had to take count of the inventory and bring the robbers in. 

Vista looked down the road she’d warped, looking utterly untouched save for a bit of blast damage. She didn’t bother to retrace her steps from there. 

She remembered the parking lot a few blocks away, and it was impossible for her to forget the woman. It was in the parking lot that she’d crossed paths with the final thief, who was carrying one final box. That part was entirely Director Renick’s fuckup, seeing as he’d declined to mention the fact that the thieves had made off with the few remaining bombs from Bakuda’s reign of terror four years back. 

In her previous efforts to undo the time loop, Vista had received an accidental explanation for the mistake: Piggot had kept them off the record, following the incident with the bombs set off during Leviathan’s attack, and again, when they’d deployed a few against the Slaughterhouse Nine. Renick had inherited the coverup, and rather than coming forward with the remaining weapons, had proceeded to store them in the PRT armory. Vista couldn’t even begrudge him that choice, considering the hell they’d lived through over the stretch of 2011. 

So when the bombs went missing, Renick didn’t tell a soul. He’d assumed the thieves didn’t know any better, and Vista and the others could go and unwittingly reclaim them. It wasn’t a bad plan, per se, and if Vista had heard it secondhand, she might have believed it worked. But some very compelling evidence in the form of the residual scent of smoke, three blocks of damaged pavement, and a towering pile of hospital reports and medical leave of absence forms sitting on Director Renick’s desk proved otherwise. 

Vista recalled chasing the thief through the back entrance of the warehouse. That was where the memories dropped off into an incognizable abyss.  

She looked down at the cratered sidewalk she’d been standing on. Nearly incognizable, anyway. It was safe to assume the remaining bombs had gone off. 

Perhaps Vista was feeling guilty for her role in the destruction, or perhaps she was just looking for another way to avoid stepping inside the warehouse. It was incredible how many different ways one could procrastinate, when they were stuck living the exact same day on repeat. 

She stretched out a hand to smooth out the street—though there wasn’t much she could do about the burn marks—and found that a section of the road wouldn’t move.

Vista frowned, clenching her hand again. Stretching about forty feet in either direction along the road, the sawtooth edges of the asphalt zippered back together, neat and easy as an iron set to cloth. But the center point, little more than a foot and a half wide, remained broken.

Her eyes narrowed. 

Small lifeforms, like weeds and rats, were a common obstruction to Vista’s powers. The biotic limit was a well known weakness to her powerset, but Vista had come a long way from the pigtailed girl in her promo videos. The range, creativity, and speed with which she deployed her powers meant any cape who overestimated this problem was in for a nasty surprise when they faced off against Vista. And because she had grown used to working around it, she knew for a damn fact that no overnight growth or vermin would have left a section as big as the one Vista was now staring at.

She folded four sections of the pavement in on the spot like a tulip, and stepped forward.

“Who’s there?” 

When no response came, Vista brought the walls in tighter, right up to the point where her powers dropped off altogether. 

She stared at the empty air through a small crack she’d deliberately left behind. 

“I’m not messing around,” she warned. “I know you’re in there!”

Vista struggled to maintain her concentration on the blank space, which refused to yield a response. There was nothing there.

It was official; she’d plunged headfirst into the concrete bottom at the deep end of the public pool, and pissed herself so badly they’d had to put on hazmat suits when scooping her out. For every cartoon sequence about dynamite sticks in quicksand, for each VHS copy of the 8th grade health class film about the miracle of puberty, no authority figure or upstanding role model had thought to warn Vista about the seventeenth birthday time loop. They’d also neglected to mention that said time loop came with missing memories that may or may not have been related to an accidental bombing, nor did they teach her about the paranoid delusions that made you lose your grip on your powers and imagine something that wasn’t fucking there to begin with. 

Vista turned her back on the pocket of empty air. She exhaled slowly, and flattened the road back out.

Except, of course, for the one damn spot. It had moved to the left, like someone had taken a few steps in that direction.

She snapped the corners of the road back in, tight as they could go.

“Can you just leave me the fuck alone?” said the woman who had not been there a second before. 

Vista blinked slowly, trying to understand what she was looking at. The woman was dressed entirely in black, which must have been very hot under the mid-May sun that had burned off all the fog, with a grinning demon mask that covered her face.

“Imp?”

Vista smoothed the road out in its entirety. She frowned at the one section she’d left unmended, and knitted that back together too. It hadn’t even occurred to her to question why she hadn’t done that before.

Her stomach grumbled, reminding Vista that this was about the time of day where she usually gorged herself on those stupid Danish butter cookies from the break room. Dovetail kept the mini fridge stocked full of yogurt, but Vista avoided them and diet sodas like the plague. The moment she started eating like a substitute teacher, it was all over. 

Well, the warehouse could wait until tomorrow. 

Missy Biron woke up about thirty seconds before the alarm did the job for her, which gave her just enough time to slam a hand down on her phone before it started rumbling and screeching.

She sighed and rolled over. It was unseasonably cold for May—for now, at least. By noon, the fog rolling in from the ocean would all burn off, and her early morning shivering beneath the covers for warmth would be nothing but a distant memory.

The ever-replenishing boxes of breakfast cereal had gotten old about six days ago, so Missy was cracking eggs into the pan as her mother entered the kitchen. She was exactly as good at avoiding the common pitfalls in their morning exchange—all of which revolved around her father, father-adjacent subjects, or the unexpected cancelation of Hallmark original television series The Good Witch —as she had been before the loop, but the monotony of pre-scripted dialogues was starting to wear on Missy, so she put genuine effort into each conversation, and had even been surprised by a stray comment or insight from her mother here and there.

Today marked the third time overall Missy’s mother regaled her with the story of Susan-from-down-the-block’s ant infestation, and the first time she’d told it within the loop. It was almost nice to experience deja vu unrelated to Tuesday, May 15th. If all the sentimentality hadn’t been wrung out of Missy with the graphic death of her first crush, along with about forty other capes, she would have considered pulling out one of the family scrapbooks from the dusty shelf neither of her parents ever touched, and carding through it. Surely there was a photograph in there that held better memories than the framed pictures on the wall.

The toast popped up, and Missy plated it for both herself and her mother, pouring the scrambled eggs out on top. They were more overdone than she would have liked, but Missy inhaled them anyway. Perfectly cooked meant she was stuck in here. Perfectly cooked and resigning herself to enjoying them meant Missy was never getting out.

“Did you think about what you wanted to do?” her mom asked from across the table. 

Go to the warehouse that I can’t remember, Missy thought, as her mother prattled on about going out to dinner or ordering in.  

But she’d already decided to do that yesterday, hadn’t she? Her mother had offhandedly commented that she needed to renew their Costco membership, and that when she did so, the two of them could go together, walking around the store in a lazy circuit as they racked up free samples. They’d go outside and share a greasy slice of pizza with the persistently mooching pigeons, the way they did on the rare occasion when Missy was much younger. This in turn had reminded Missy of the warehouse, so she went and checked it out. She remembered going and surveying the damage. She’d fixed the road but hadn’t gone inside. 

She was sure she’d fixed the road, but there was no way of proving it now that the day had reset. 

“I’ve got a bio test today,” recited Missy flatly, “and a presentation in Spanish. Then a shift from three to eight, and Dad will pick me up from there.”

It was true that all those events would transpire today, had Missy gone to the right places at the right times and said and done the right things while there. There were also a near-infinite amount of things she could have done instead, had she spent the time figuring out where the right places and times and phrases and actions were. 

The warehouse seemed mind-bogglingly boring in comparison. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t bothered to go inside. Missy decided she would go again today, just as she’d gone yesterday, or whatever the hell she was supposed to call the today that immediately preceded this one.

Her mom brushed her bangs aside, kissing her on the forehead. Missy resisted the urge to smack her hand away.

“If you change your mind, I’m just one call away.” She smiled softly. In a certain slant of light, it almost looked mocking. “It’s not every day my baby girl turns seventeen.”

The pavement grew charred and cracked as she stepped towards the warehouse in question, the same as it did yesterday when she’d come to survey the damage. 

Last night—Monday, that was—it hadn’t looked much different than any of the other warehouses along the block; sturdy save for a few cracked windows, and some dated tagging on one face.

Vista recited the events to the best of her ability. The armory had been robbed, so they’d gone to retrieve the goods. They’d caught the bad guys outside, and then Vista had left. She’d gone to the parking lot with the woman, where she saw the bad guy with the bombs. She’d followed him to the warehouse.

She frowned. It was getting harder to remember it with each passing loop. She had no way of writing it down or relating it back to someone else. What if she forgot the night entirely? What if she unwittingly rewrote what had occurred?

Vista decided a mnemonic would do the trick. She still remembered the H.O.M.E.S acronym from elementary school, and there hadn’t been a single moment in her life where she’d needed to know the names of the five Great Lakes. It hadn’t even shown up on any of the damn worksheets they’d been assigned in that class.

“A.R.B.,” she started, “V.W.” She double-checked what she’d just said, then continued on. “B.B.W.”

It was clunky, but it would have to do. Maybe there was something to this school stuff after all.

“A.R.B. V.W. B.B.W.,” Vista repeated. She tried singing it because she’d heard people did that for phone and social security numbers, but she didn’t actually have a jingle in mind, and it came out so tuneless it might as well have been spoken.

“The fuck?” said a voice to her left.

Vista tensed. She stretched out with her power and—

The warehouse didn’t look much different than any of the other warehouses along the block; sturdy save for a few cracked windows, and some dated tagging on one face.

Vista squared her shoulders, steeling herself to go inside. First, she repeated her mnemonic to herself:

“A.R.B. V.W. B.B.W.”

“Oh, so it’s some bullshit code!” crowed the voice to her left. “What does it stand for?”

“A.R.B. V.W. B.B.W,” Vista repeated to herself. “Armory, Robbed, Bad Guys, Vista Left—”

“That’s two words, moron. Who taught you how to write acronyms?”

“—Woman,” continued Vista quietly, which was the one event she knew she could never forget, “Bad Guy 2—”

The voice scoffed. “Come on! You can’t just introduce numbers in the middle.”

“—Bakuda Bombs, Warehouse.” 

“You know, people usually aren’t as crazy as they think they are, but you might actually be insane. I mean, this is the dumbest, most pathetic, nonsensical, Samuel Beckett-level absurdist thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life.”

Missy had been absent from school when they covered Waiting for Godot, back when the frequency of Endbringer attacks had increased to every two months. From the way the other kids had talked about the play, she was almost grateful she’d missed out. Missy returned after two weeks with a cast over her arm and a fresh skin graft on her chest, and they must have all known who she was, but nobody had said a word. It was almost insulting to be ignored like that. 

Vista frowned. She needed to repeat it to remember. “A.R.B. V.W. B.B.W.”

“Stop saying it! You’re going to get it stuck in my head too!”

“Warehouse,” Vista said. “I’m going inside the warehouse.”

She stepped forward, and a gloved hand came down over her left shoulder.

The warehouse didn’t look much different than any of the other warehouses along the block; sturdy save for a few cracked windows, and some dated tagging on one face.

Vista squared her shoulders, steeling herself to go inside. First, she was going to repeat the mnemonic to herself.

“A.R.B. V.W. B.B.W.,” said the voice to her left, beating her to the punch.

“Warehouse,” Vista said. “I’m going inside the warehouse.”

“You and this fucking warehouse. It’s like lunchtime already. Why don’t you go get some food and come back later?”

Her stomach grumbled, reminding Vista that this was about the time of day where she usually gorged herself on those stupid Danish butter cookies from the break room. Dovetail kept the mini fridge stocked full of yogurt, but Vista avoided them and diet sodas like the plague. The moment she started eating like a substitute teacher, it was all over. 

“Damn. I don’t know why I thought the government would feed its heroes properly. Alec and I once blew an entire paycheck on beluga caviar, but it tasted like nothing, and both of us were kind of grossed out about eating fish eggs, so we just threw the can out.” 

“I hate sushi,” Vista said. “I’m going inside the warehouse.”

Her stomach grumbled, reminding Vista that this was about the time of day where she usually gorged herself on those stupid Danish butter cookies from the break room. Dovetail kept the mini fridge stocked full of yogurt, but Vista avoided them and diet sodas like the plague. The moment she started eating like a substitute teacher, it was all over. 

“Oh my god,” whined the voice to her left. “Just go get food from somewhere else!”

“I’m so tired of eating cereal in the morning. Both the sugary ones and the health-nut, brantastic type. Eggs are starting to get boring too,” Vista admitted to herself.

“Be grateful they’re chicken eggs. Fish eggs aren’t worth the hype.”

Vista wrinkled her nose in distaste. “Gross. I’m just gonna go inside the warehouse now.”

“Oh, for the love of—”

Vista stepped forward, and a gloved hand came down over her left shoulder.

“Eat a banana for breakfast, you loser. What are you craving for lunch?”

Vista’s stomach rumbled. She thought about the Danish cookies, diet soda, and yogurt. And caviar, for some reason, which made her want to gag.

“Burgers,” she said. “I’m really craving burgers.”

Fugly Bob’s was just northeast of the docks, only about a five minute walk from the warehouse when Vista was using her powers. As warm as it was outside, Tuesday afternoons were pretty quiet by the beach, since school was still in session and the summer tourism season hadn’t yet begun—if people even came to visit this year. 2015 marked the lowest crime rates in Brockton Bay in over four decades, but statistics paled in comparison to the lingering reputation Skitter and her ilk had established in the city.

The thought of the Undersiders jarred Missy, like there was something about them she was forgetting. 

Missy shed these concerns as she made a right down Pine Street, where the three-story brick marketplace apartments finally cracked apart, and the gentle, warm slopes of the beach yawned before her. The wind ruffled her hair as a seagull flew overhead. Missy stepped aside before it could crap on her, then looked across the road, where her favorite grease trap was located.

Fugly Bob’s had not changed their neon sign since their opening day in 1987. Miracle of all miracles, none of the letters had burned out yet, despite their very dire flickering. Missy doubted they had cleaned the windows since then either, seeing as the smudges on the glass panes were near impossible to peer through. 

She squinted. In fact, it looked like there wasn’t anyone inside at all, and the lights were off, which was a strange choice for an indoor restaurant, even on a bright day like today. 

The front door was closed, but there was a paper sign shoddily taped onto it. In uneven handwriting that squished the closer the letters got to the right side of the page, it said “CLOSED FOR CLEANING. OPEN AGAIN ON WEDNESDAY, 10 A.M. to 1 A.M. SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.”  

As Missy Biron’s stomach grumbled in protest, she realized that she had just learned something new about time loops. 

They were cruelest when you least expected it.

Missy Biron woke up about thirty seconds before the alarm did the job for her, which gave her just enough time to slam a hand down on her phone before it started rumbling and screeching.

She sighed and rolled over. It was unseasonably cold for May—for now, at least. By noon, the fog rolling in from the ocean would all burn off, and her early morning shivering beneath the covers for warmth would be nothing but a distant memory.

She got up to brush her hair, ruminating on unsatisfied burger cravings, and discovered a paper tied to a few longer strands. Tugging it free, Missy unraveled the note, which read in blocky font: “banana for breakfast.”

Missy’s hands shook and her eyes blurred with unshed tears, as she tried to place the handwriting. She found she could not, and then she found that the window by her bed was also unlatched, which had never been the case before. As Missy frantically scoured the room, searching for any other object that had been disturbed, she cursed the limits of her own memory. For every seventeenth birthday Missy had lived through, and for every one she’d live through in the future, there were still basic details—like the layout of her own fucking room—she had missed. Maybe there always would be.

She ate cereal two mornings in a row, one day for each brand, and eggs the three days after that before finally caving and eating a banana. Every bite tasted like sweet, delicious betrayal.

It was a relief to know that Missy wasn’t actually experiencing a psychotic break like she’d previously thought, but also very distressing to know that there was a person out there who was the likely culprit, because she couldn’t even put bars on her windows without them disappearing the next morning. 

She’d managed to piece together that the mystery person wasn’t actively deadly, or at least had realized the futility of physically harming or killing Missy when it would just be undone in twenty-four hours. They were a little shit though, having left a note in Missy’s hair this morning reminding her to study for the bio test and Spanish presentation. Fucking asshole. Missy hated when villains had a sense of humor.

Her searches through the PRT database on previous loops had yielded no further leads. Missy was displeased by this, but not entirely surprised, seeing as it was most likely an effect of their powers. 

But the absence of a thing still revealed the shape of the place it once occupied, so Missy worked through her own mounting headaches, and came up with a foolproof plan to lure the blank spot out of hiding.

Her own powers seemed better at recognizing the gap than any of Missy’s higher brain functions, so she decided that today, she would set out on a city-wide dowsing mission. With a smile, Missy began to fold up every corner of the concrete sprawl. 

The process was slow-going, as there were a good three-hundred thousand other people in the area, which required a delicate touch. Vista’s concentration came and went with her target's powers, too. It was a feat of monumental willpower for Vista to continue working while intermittently forgetting her reason for origami-ing Brockton Bay in the first place.

She pressed through the protests and confused cries of fellow teammates and family members. She was gentle when she shoved them away and continued her search, going so far as to separate her parents from each other when they both attempted to talk her down from her task. Vista didn’t want them fighting and potentially distracting her. 

It was south of downtown where she finally noticed the irregularity, a pocket of untouched earth about a foot-and-a-half wide that was moving away from the rest of the city. Missy twisted skyscrapers and electric poles down all around the space, honing in on that miniscule spot as it attempted to flee her terrain. Missy dove after it, abandoning all the work behind her.

She was getting closer—within fucking touching distance—when the PRT showed up and buried her in containment foam.

Later, as Director Renick burned holes into the floor outside her holding cell, pacing and listening to the team of psychologists screaming at each other over the phone, Missy couldn’t help but laugh. What did it matter what she did today, when no one would remember it tomorrow? She’d just put on the greatest showing of her power the world had ever seen, and come Tuesday, May 15th, only Missy and the mystery spot would know it.

Director Renick stopped talking as Missy continued to laugh. He pocketed his phone and got down on one knee so that he was eye-level with Missy. He stared at Missy under concerned eyebrows. The laser pistol holstered at his shoulder caught the reflection of the fluorescent lights overhead.

Missy sighed. Onto Plan B, then.

Missy Biron woke up about thirty seconds before the alarm did the job for her, which gave her just enough time to slam a hand down on her phone before it started rumbling and screeching.

She sighed and rolled over. It was unseasonably cold for May—for now, at least. By noon, the fog rolling in from the ocean would all burn off, and her early morning shivering beneath the covers for warmth would be nothing but a distant memory.

She found another note in her hair that morning. All it said was “Shaker 9. DAMN!”

Missy ate a banana for breakfast again, then went directly to the PHQ.

While they let the Wards train with standard PRT equipment whenever they wanted, access to lethal weapons was much stricter, requiring a veritable mountain of clearance forms and the transcontinental chain of approval. Vista had been granted special permission to wear one when they faced down the Slaughterhouse Nine, a privilege which she swiftly lost after Piggot retired. Piggot was an intransigent bitch, and ran the ENE branch with an iron fist that could have knocked even Alexandria down, but there was something to be admired in her unwavering leadership. She had treated Vista like an actual asset, someone with power and potential and the ability to make a difference on the frontlines. At age seventeen, as Captain of the Brockton Bay Wards, Vista had less responsibility than she did when she was thirteen years old and the youngest member of the team. Maybe that fact was a sign the world was getting better, but it hardly felt that way to Vista.

She studied the laser pistol, reacquainting herself with its weight and external mechanisms. She elongated the handle and thickened the chamber, then set them back to where they were. Vista was no Chevalier; messing with the properties of tinkertech often resulted in explosions, and that outcome was too messy for what she wanted to accomplish here today.

Vista faced the warehouse, tears gathering in her eyes. 

“I can’t go inside,” she admitted to herself. Couldn’t do anything, when it was all destined to reset the next day.

With one shaky hand, she raised the barrel of the pistol to her left temple.

They were remarkably efficient weapons. The lasers could pierce through most commonly used materials, and they instantly cauterized flesh upon contact, which made cleanup bloodless and easy. Vista thought that would be the most polite, heroic thing to do. She didn’t want to inconvenience the poor person packing up her body any more than she had to.

Her finger rested on the trigger. She began to pull back—

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” cried the woman seated on top of Vista. 

Vista blinked slowly, head throbbing where the woman had slammed it onto the ground. Her fingers twitched. The woman kicked out, sending the laser pistol skidding across the pavement.

Imp, her brain supplied as the distant memories of Echidna returned to her. Vista shuddered. She’d worked hard to repress that whole digestive experience. Stranger 5. Member of the Undersiders. 

Vista rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I’m not going to come back tomorrow.”

“That’s so fucking—” Imp bunched the green fabric around Vista’s shoulder pads in frustration. She was perched on top of Vista, like Vista was a flight-risk, or worse. A fair assumption, Vista supposed, but utterly confusing as to why she actually cared. “Just because I know my arm will heal in a few months, doesn’t mean I should go break it right now. The pain is still real. Doing something like this will only make you go crazy faster.”

“I wasn’t actually going to do it. After all the crap I’ve seen, I’m not getting killed by something as lame as suicide. I just needed to get you to come out of hiding.”

“That’s what this is about?” 

“Yes!” Vista cried. “Obviously!”

Imp let out a groan of frustration, releasing Vista from her grip so she could run her hands through her braids. “Why the hell do you keep coming back here?”

“Why the hell do you keep following me?”

It took Imp a long moment to reply, “For intel, obviously. I want to make sure you’re not the one who got me stuck in the fucking time loop.”

It was like talking to a damn mirror. Vista found herself wishing the plan failed, that she’d never even realized there was another person in the first place. That of every person in Brockton Bay, hell, the entire world, it had to be Imp who knew what was going on.

“I could say the same thing about you!” Vista said. “You’re the shifty one here, with your stalking and your notes and your suicide hotline routine! Why won’t you let me go into the warehouse?”

Imp stared at her in silence for a moment, the sharp grin of the mask unchanging, before barking out a laugh. “You’re only refusing to go inside because you’re so fucking obsessed with me. Are you scared or something? Go on then, if you really want. I already did. There’s nothing there but a crater.”

Imp stepped back to let Vista up off the ground.

“Stop that. You’re reverse-psychology-ing me.” 

Vista paused, running the words over in her mind. 

“Psychologizing. You know what I mean.”

Imp threw her hands up in the air. “Okay, then don’t go in! I’m not the fucking boss of you!”

Vista shot a nervous glance at the warehouse. She couldn’t enter it, no more than she could return to the parking lot where she’d met the woman.

“I can’t remember what happened inside,” she admitted in a quiet voice.

Before she met Imp, Vista didn’t think eyerolls were an audible phenomenon. Vista didn’t even know what the girl looked like—“girl,” because no way was she much older than Vista, and everyone around Vista seemed dead set on treating her like she was still twelve—but she could visualize Imp’s eyes rolling back into her skull as her mouth pulled into a frown.

“That would be my powers, dipshit.”

“Okay,” Vista said, feeling more and more like a moron with each passing second. But she couldn’t back out now, when this was the closest she’d ever come in any loop to finding answers. The closest that she could remember, anyway. “But why were you at the warehouse in the first place?”

“Because our shit got stolen, same as you!” Imp folded her arms over her chest, scuffing her shoe along the cracked pavement. After she stepped back, Vista smoothed it out. “Wasn’t anything valuable in the mix, but thieves stealing from thieves is a bad look. I had our reputation to defend.”

Missy held back a laugh. Anyone who saw the Undersiders as a mere band of thieves had been sleeping under a rock for the past five years.

“And when you went inside the warehouse…”

“The bombs went off,” Imp finished for her. “You and I were caught in the blast radius. I’m guessing it’s something like the Leviathan memorial. A pocket of time. An unending loop. Did you know the PRT still had possession of some of Bakuda’s bombs?”

“If I did,” Vista replied, “I wouldn’t be stuck here right now. Maybe there’s a limit to the bubble? We could try getting to the far end, and puncturing a hole.”

“You’re telling me you can suddenly warp space and time?”

“No, but…” Vista bit her tongue. There had to be something. This couldn’t be it. “How far does the blast radius extend? Past Brockton Bay? Through the Eastern seaboard?”

Imp laughed. It wasn’t a cheery sound.

“Try the entire world. Try other dimensions. I’ve called Tattletale. I’ve talked to Bitch. I can’t get in touch with Cauldron, but nobody’s been able to in years.”

It was a better list than the people Vista had come up with. Her parents weren’t even parahumans.  

“Don’t you get it?” Imp asked her. “It’s just us.”

Chapter Text

Two important things still held true: Missy was sane, and Missy was stuck in this fucking loop.

Her conversation with Imp had yielded absolutely nothing, save for an end to the anonymous note passing and the mealtime gaslighting. Missy couldn’t even be grateful for the harassment campaign’s conclusion, because she had been banking on it leading to a way out of this existential birthday extravaganza. She was utterly adrift now, unsure of what to do next. Really, it was what she deserved for pinning all her hopes of escape on a villain with a sense of humor.

Four more Tuesdays passed in this miserable state.

Missy drained a bowl of strawberry ice cream soup, the sponge cake sinking like wet croutons along the bottom. 

She hadn’t yet figured out how to whittle down the length of her parents’ arguing. Like two ships not passing in the night, it was easy enough to get them to avoid each other completely, but that course of action meant Missy only got one solid ice cream cake, rather than two melted ones. Though she never managed to eat both by the time midnight came, there was something nice about loading them both into the freezer, side by side. This was one of the rare things children of divorce were good for: double the presents on birthdays and Christmases, double the trees on Arbor Days, and so on and so forth.

She set the bowl back down on the table, then wiped her mouth with her sleeve. Not having to worry about laundry was nice. Missy still bothered to take a shower and brush her teeth every day, mostly because not doing so made her look gross and depressed. It stood to reason that if she wanted to stop feeling gross and depressed on the inside, then she needed to take the intellectual equivalent of a shower.

But what typically made Missy feel better? 

She liked the color pink, though she would never admit it to anyone. She thought chinchillas made for cool pets. She liked drinking a glass of ice water first thing in the morning, because coffee supposedly stunted growth. Missy never liked the drink much anyway. Its smell brought back memories of tense graveyard shifts at the console. She did, however, like going on patrol. She also liked helping good people and stopping bad ones.  

Missy dropped the bowl in the kitchen sink, not bothering to wash it. Tuesday would be here soon enough. She knew what she needed to do.

The weeks following Leviathan were some of the most miserable Vista had ever experienced, for reasons both obvious and abstruse, but it was the mud that she could not forget.

The excess puddles that carpeted every sea-level section of town had met their match in a fine layer of grime and dirt. Vast flats of mud stretched out to the horizon, staining Brockton Bay in brown and gray. When coupled with the typical June humidity and a sudden increase in mosquitos—a blame shouldered by both the stagnant water and Skitter alike—the city had a distinctly swampy feel. 

It was some time during this period that Clockblocker and Kid Win had dragged themselves back to PHQ, covered up to their elbows in the mud. When they removed their boots in the break room so as not to track dirt through the rest of the base, crushed beetle shells and moth fuzz came pouring out.

She’d never seen Clockblocker so pissed off before. He wheeled the whiteboard over to where Vista was waiting, and scratched out an ugly map of Brockton Bay. He divided it into six parts. He made the surviving Wards memorize each boundary, then promise him that by the end of the next week, they'd make the memorized map exercise obsolete. It pissed all of them off, knowing that a group of teenage capes—almost like the Wards’ own cohort, if you overlooked the stark difference in moral codes—had claimed Brockton Bay for their own. The mosquito swarms just made it that much more annoying.

The Wards had never made good on that promise. 

One month after he drew the whiteboard map, Clockblocker was called to New York to assist in a training exercise for a probationary Ward named Weaver. 

As of Tuesday, May 15th, 2015, Imp’s territory encompassed the entirety of the South side of town.

It was a shit territory when Vista was in middle school, and it was a shit territory now. If she had been a supervillain warlord, she would have gone for downtown central or any section of the port, since those were the places where business actually got done. The more tourist-y spots of town might have seemed appealing at first glance, but Vista had none of the requisite patience, nostalgia-warped worldview, or access to large swarms of mosquitoes to attempt any neighborhood revitalization projects.

The ass-end of downtown was marked by stubby concrete apartments and street gutters backed up with years-old fast food wrappers. As Vista continued further southeast, the buildings got lower and lower, until she was fully within the boundaries of Brockton Bay’s most affordable suburb.  

She and her parents had looked at a few houses out here, way back before her dad’s cancer had gone into remission. This was a period characterized by long nights and little sleep, even moreso than the months immediately following Missy’s 13th birthday. Come weeknights at 2:30 AM, their home was a hub of nocturnal activity, with her mom poring over medical bills and house payments, her dad cycling through wet coughing fits, and Missy, eavesdropping on the two of them arguing in the kitchen.

Vista remembered despising the sloping roofs of this neighborhood’s 1950s bungalows, the bars on bedroom windows, the patchy lawns of dirt and yellow grass. There was this one particular house they toured that Missy especially hated; it had a scratchy, gray shag carpet stretching from the front door to the back. Her parents had been hooked by the price tag and reeled in by the bathrooms. The sound of them agreeing for once had Missy so scared of moving, she threw a screaming tantrum right out there on that god-awful rug. 

In the end, her parents decided not to move for Missy’s sake. 

They made up some money when her mom got a second job with Missy’s uncle on her dad’s side, and then again when her dad got better. They made up more money when they stopped having to pay for dog food and pet insurance, then lost it all in legal fees and lengthy settlements. Her mom refinanced the house, saddling Missy with an inherited debt that would long outlive her parents. The new mortgage mattered right up until the point that Missy triggered and got powers, which meant she probably wouldn’t live as long as either of them anyway. Vista’s stipend covered the rest of the costs, and the childhood home she was once so afraid to move out of mutated into a suburban-Frankenstein nightmare, one brick and backsplash tile at a time.

That was the last time Missy ever threw a tantrum. So what if life kneecapped her with a baseball bat? Everyone got dealt an unfair hand. Missy had grown the fuck up and figured out how to move on, just like she was doing now.

Striding through the neighborhood, Missy noticed small signs here and there of its economic recovery. The mobile home park she passed by contained a certain cozy charm, windchimes hanging from door frames and kids playing kickball out front. 

It was hard to imagine a villain’s evil lair hidden within the domestic scene, even one as under-the-radar as Imp.

Vista reached out with her senses, gently sifting through the area for any construction irregularities or strange blank spots.

“Hi.”

She jumped. 

There was a little girl peering up at Vista. Her black hair was tucked back into two French braids, with a whole mess of rainbow and butterfly clips pinned in along her temples and her scalp. There was something vaguely familiar about her, but Vista brushed it off. A lot of little kids had that look to them. 

“Oh. Um, hi.”

“I like your hair.”

“Thank you,” Vista replied.

She looked back out over the sea of trailers and single story houses, concentration momentarily lapsed while searching for someone or something that could lead her to Imp’s hideout. She scowled when nothing came up.

Why the hell was it so quiet out today? 

“I could make it better,” said the little girl. “You should let me braid it.”

“What?”

“Your hair. I can braid it and make it prettier.”

“I’m sorry,” Vista said, brow wrinkling in concern. “Why don’t I come back tomorrow and you can braid it then? I have something I’m doing right now.”

“Spying on Imp, right?”

Vista looked back at the kid, an awful realization dawning upon her. 

Maybe this kid wasn’t in the files specifically, but her siblings were. 

The Heartbroken. It had been a big shitstorm when they first showed up in Brockton Bay with Heartbreaker; hours of prep on dealing with master effects, a wildly humiliating change in protocols for all the women working at PHQ until Miss Militia intervened, and a return of the roiling, anticipatory sensation in her chest that Vista only got when things were about to get truly horrible.

And then, there was nothing. Imp and Citrine had taken care of the situation cleanly and quietly. Their lethal methods, which might have once set them directly in the Protectorate's crosshairs, had been swept under the rug as the ENE team focused on other, more pressing matters. New Endbringers, new Protectorate, new world order. It helped that none of them were eager to seek justice for the villain’s death. It also helped that the death looked like a suicide.

Vista had never even thought to ask what happened to the kids.

“I know who you are,” continued the little girl. “The green visor, the pink skirt, the haircut that hasn’t changed since you were my age.”

“Well, that’s just rude,” Vista said, momentarily forgetting the danger of this situation. She wasn’t about to be bullied by some kid who didn’t even know long division. 

“I don’t like you coming here, Vista. I don’t like you calling yourself a hero when you never did anything to help me and my siblings, and I really, really don’t like that you’re looking for Imp.”

The kid took a step towards Vista.

Vista threw herself back three blocks. How far had Cherish’s range been, when she’d come here with the Slaughterhouse Nine? One block? Three? How far had it been when they stuck her in that box at the bottom of the ocean? When she’d gone and killed Butcher XIV?

Vista moved so quickly through the city, she was sure even Renick had noticed it back at PHQ. Between that and the bombs fuckup, he’d probably be having words with her tonight over melted slices of strawberry ice cream cake.

Missy Biron woke up about thirty seconds before the alarm did the job for her, which gave her just enough time to slam a hand down on her phone before it started rumbling and screeching.

She sighed and rolled over. It was unseasonably cold for May—for now, at least. By noon, the fog rolling in from the ocean would all burn off, and her early morning shivering beneath the covers for warmth would be nothing but a distant memory.

After showering and brushing her teeth, she tugged on her costume. It was a good sign that she still remembered yesterday’s events. With the kid forgetting and Imp unaware, Vista could once again try to locate Imp’s hideout. 

The entire task had an urgent, exciting edge to it that got Vista’s heart pounding as she made her way across town. No matter how many Tuesdays Vista repeated, there were only a certain number of times that she could attempt her stakeout mission before Imp caught on, and changed her habits or confronted Vista.

It wasn’t that other people weren’t real or important in the loop—Vista had been surprised on multiple occasions by her own parents and Director Renick, and she certainly wasn’t going to run around hurting or killing people like some kind of rabid animal. But the fact that Imp also knew and could react accordingly meant that she and Vista were on equal footing. 

For as long as they were stuck on Tuesday, May 15th, 2015, only Vista and Imp had the capacity for change.

Vista made it to the edge of south downtown, not too far from where she’d run into the Heartbroken girl yesterday, and found a perch where she could sift through the rest of the neighborhood. Right as Vista closed her eyes and began sweeping through the area, a blank spot appeared, about a foot and a half wide and about a foot and a half away.

“Are you gonna just stand there hiding the bushes all day, or are you going to come inside? You’re freaking out the kids.”

Vista glared at Imp through her visor. Imp smiled back with her mask. She sounded like she was smiling underneath it, too.

“Have you considered that maybe they’re the creepy ones?” 

“Yeah, well, they have an excuse.”

Vista folded her arms, reminding herself that she didn’t trust Imp, no matter how genial the villain acted. This was the sick fuck that had tried and failed to psychologically torment Vista over breakfast foods.

 “How’d you know I would be here?”

“The kids. Duh.” 

Imp set off down the street, not bothering to ask Vista to follow her. Vista did so reluctantly, but bent a section of the sidewalk up ahead so that Imp stumbled over it and had to catch herself. Vista grinned. It wouldn’t do to let Imp think she was the one in control here.  

After a moment, Imp continued, “Candy told me yesterday, which is good, because she wouldn’t have remembered it today. She thinks your hair is pretty, by the way. I figured you’d show up at some point. You couldn’t leave the warehouse alone, so now that that mystery is wrapped up, you’re onto the next one.”

“You’re not a mystery,” Vista lied. “We have files on you.”

Imp came to a stop at a clean-cut one story house at the edge of the block. The driveway out front had a handful of bikes parked in it, and the cement pathway was covered in washed-out chalk doodles of unicorns, men getting their heads chopped off, and dicks. There was quite a wide range of artistic quality on the dicks.

“Doubt it. The human brain, writing, tech… none of it fares well against me.” She opened the front door, beckoning Vista inside. 

Vista took her time poking around the front room and kitchen. She wasn’t embarrassed about snooping—both she and Imp knew that was the reason why she was even here in the first place—but the goal seemed less pressing now. Vista wouldn’t find a way out of the loop in here.

“You like the place?”

It was nice. Nice, like the kind of place Vista used to dream about living in. Nice like the way Vista’s parents’ house used to be.

She cast a long glance at the sink half-full of dirty dishes, and the pile of shoes by the front door. They came in all sizes and styles. Imp hadn’t asked Vista to take off her boots, though, which Vista was grateful for. 

“It’s a bit more domestic than what I was expecting from an evil villain’s lair. We raided Uber and Leet’s place once, back in 2011.” Vista shuddered. “There are some things you can’t unsee.”

Imp took a seat on the couch, motioning for Vista to join her. Cautiously, Vista sat in the chair opposite.

“Oh, trust , I used to have the sickest bachelorette pad on the Eastern Seaboard. And Alec’s place was even better. I’m talking dentist’s office-sized fish tanks, indoor trampolines, personal movie theaters, the whole nine yards. This place is mostly for the kids’ benefit. It’s not like I get to spend all that much time here anyway. Tattletale’s moved onto bigger, better cities, Grue’s all but retired, and Bitch fucked off to go homestead in another dimension entirely. So it’s kind of just me holding down the fort right now, and hoping people won’t notice.”

Vista blinked at her.

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“The same reason why you let me see your face. Not like you’re gonna spend the next twenty-four hours on repeat trying to take me down. Speaking of which…”

Imp tugged her mask up off her chin in one quick motion. 

Vista looked at Imp’s bare face, and her warm eyes, and her slightly crooked smile. Vista would have blamed her stupor on the unexpected action, but the truth was that Imp was disarmingly pretty. As anyone who’d seen Eidolon sans spandex could tell you, most capes were not. Vista decided that puberty must have been kind to Imp; in Vista’s experience, you’d didn’t develop a personality like Imp’s if you’d been born hot.

Imp stuck her hand out. “Aisha Laborn. Pleased to meet you…”

She paused, clearly expecting something out of Vista. Vista paused too.

They made such a big deal about your secret identity when you joined the Wards. 

After filling out the paperwork, and getting a friendly tour from one of the local heroes, and countless soul-draining meetings with lawyers and consultants and psychologists and nameless suits, they sat you down for the first of many training seminars. 

Vista could practically recite those workshops from memory, Microsoft powerpoint graphics and all. To be a child hero was to master work/life balance. You could be the straight A-student at school, and punch bank robbers in the afternoon! Mom and Dad knew, of course, and they were so proud of you for choosing to use your abilities for good, but it was a low-commitment thing.  Dipping your toes into the water of superheroing, and being content when you were told to sit back while the adults handled the big bad scary stuff, like Endbringers and serial killers and sinewy ten-foot tall dogs.

They didn’t talk about the way that trigger event had a way of consuming your life, or how signing up for being a cape probably meant your life was already fucked up beyond all repair. Mom and Dad would ferry you to “work” twenty minutes early, and pick you up twenty minutes late, all so they didn’t run the risk of seeing each other any more than they had to. You got thrown in against Endbringers and serial killers and veiny ten-foot tall dogs anyways, and you stayed when the city was almost condemned, and when things finally started to go back to normal, you couldn’t remember how to talk, to let go and be a kid again. 

Real identities, second identities, no identity at all—it all boiled down to the same thing.

Vista fumbled with the strap on the visor, leaving her face bare too.

“Missy Biron. My name is Missy Biron.”

A moment too late, she remembered to take Aisha’s hand and shake it. Aisha didn’t notice the awkwardness, too busy staring at Missy with open interest. 

Against all logic, Missy wanted to make a good “first” impression. She hoped she wasn’t too red in the face, or that her forehead wasn’t too shiny with sweat. It was past noon, so the fog rolling in from the ocean had all burned off. This left Brockton Bay warm and humid, like it was every year around this time. Like it was every day. 

“Tomorrow,” Missy announced. “PHQ. 4:30 P.M.”

The smile dropped off Aisha’s face.

“What?” 

“I’m gonna use the PRT database to look into other time and tinker powers, and you’re going to help me.”

“I never agreed to that.”

“No? Well, let me convince you. Thirty-seven days ago, I lived through the second-worst May 15th of my entire life. Thirty-six days ago, I lived through it again. I went to investigate the blast site, because I couldn’t remember what happened there and was hoping it might be the key to getting out. I spent over a week trying to get into that damn warehouse, only to find out that the missing memories had nothing to do with the time loop, and everything to do with the only other person stupid enough to get caught in it.”

“Aw, that’s me!”

“Right. And since the warehouse proved to be a complete waste of time, no thanks to you—”

Aisha blew her a teasing kiss.

“—you’re going to help me find another way out.”

“I don’t know,” Aisha said, leaning back and crossing one leg over the other. “I’m not really into the whole teamwork thing. My time’s valuable, you know? I’ve got other things I’d rather be doing with it.”

Missy slammed a hand down on the table, pressing deep grooves into the wood with her knuckles. She stood up so quickly that the chair she was sitting in went flying back, and began to fold the walls and couch in on Aisha. She could fuck with Missy’s head all she wanted, just like she had at the docks, but that wouldn’t stop Missy from warping the house beyond all means of escape. That certainly wouldn’t stop Missy from coming back here tomorrow and doing the exact same thing.

“Most people think of Brockton Bay as a big city,” Missy said. “Take you and me, for instance. We run into each other maybe every three months in costume, and even less when we’re out pretending to be normal. Your power probably helps with that, same with all your little supervillain friends. And if Brockton Bay starts getting too small, twenty-four hours is enough time to get to a lot of other places. If you keep your power on at all times, and you buy a plane ticket first thing in the morning every day, you might be able to avoid me for a few weeks.”

Aisha attempted to stand up. The couch continued to press in around her, not unlike those cheap pullout sleeper sofas or a gravity well. Missy walked towards Aisha, bringing the rest of the house with her. Even if the commotion was audible from outside, if any of the Heartbroken or whatever mercenaries on Tattletale’s payroll were hanging around, they wouldn’t be able to get in here. 

Vista continued, “But rest assured that if you don’t help me now, I will spend this infinity hunting you down. And this city, that seems so big and easy to hide in, won’t be when I’m done with it.”

She laid a hand on Aisha’s left shoulder.

“Shaker 9, remember?

Missy Biron woke up about thirty seconds before the alarm did the job for her, which gave her just enough time to slam a hand down on her phone before it started rumbling and screeching.

She sighed and rolled over. It was unseasonably cold for May—for now, at least. By noon, the fog rolling in from the ocean would all burn off, and her early morning shivering beneath the covers for warmth would be nothing but a distant memory.

In the kitchen, she topped her toast off with peanut butter and bananas, then stared down at the meal, sure that there was something that inspired her to make it in particular.

Her mom came in from the left wing, running through all the usual questions in all the usual ways before finally asking Missy what her plans were for the day.

An awareness snapped through Missy at the question, yesterday’s exchange coming back to her like a punch to the gut. There was no guarantee Imp—Aisha, as she’d properly introduced herself—would show up at PHQ, but the fact that she hadn’t used her powers was a good sign. She hadn’t run away from Missy, and she didn’t seem like she was going to come after her either.

“School,” Missy said through a mouthful of bread. It tasted good right now, but she wasn’t sure what she’d do once she got tired of the peanut butter banana toast. Maybe it would be wise to start skipping breakfast altogether, along with the other human maintenance tasks that carved time out of her precious twenty-four hour window. “Going to the PHQ afterwards. It’ll probably be a longer shift because of all the paperwork from last night, so don’t wait up for me. I can get a ride home from someone there.”

Her mother frowned.

“So we’ve only got this morning together? I won’t be seeing you for your birthday?”

Missy pushed down the wave of guilt. It wasn’t about the birthday, it was about her mom getting a win over her dad. Neither of them cared. Really, nobody did.

“There’s always other birthdays.”

“Well, when you get back,” her mom replied, “make sure to check the freezer. I’ll leave something in there for you. And don’t stay up too late, okay?” She smiled softly. In a certain slant of light, it almost looked pained.

Not a problem. Missy was never able to make it past midnight anyway.

Missy ended up wasting half the day at school, because not going to school would prompt more questions than answers.

She ran through her Spanish presentation with the bland, flat delivery of a child reciting the pledge of allegiance every morning, then drew dicks all over the bio test, just like she’d seen on the driveway up to Aisha’s house. She doubted any of the Heartbroken were in school. She couldn’t decide whether she felt envious of them for this fact, or sympathetic. Probably the latter; their familial circumstances made her own home life look downright pastoral.

By the time Officer Kerns rolled up in his van, Vista was vibrating with energy. She’d done things of questionable morality in previous loops—turning Brockton Bay into a burrito hadn’t been her brightest moment—but conspiring with a villain to break into PHQ was a whole new low. There was no S-Class Threat to justify her actions, no greater good to throw her support behind. 

In some ways, it was almost better that this was the problem Missy was worrying about. It meant she still cared, and that she still had hope she’d get out. She could only be so lucky, to be worried about the issue of Aisha and identity. For as long as they were trapped in the time loop together, anything they said or did in collaboration did not matter. 

Not long after Vista donned her mask and clocked in for the afternoon, a tour group swept through the main floor, led by one of those guides whose smiles never quite managed to reach their eyes when they greeted Vista in the break room.

Vista, preoccupied with speculation about whether or not Imp would appear and in what manner she would do it, didn’t pay much attention as the group came to a stop before the console. 

These groups came in every hour and a half or so on weekdays, and even more frequently on weekends, provided there was no urgent crisis PRT Department ENE was currently engaged in. The tours that came through the main floor were an exclusive, exaggerated affair. Guests would be background checked upon reservation, then searched upon entrance, in exchange for an opportunity to see the offices up-close and personal. The information exchanged by the tour guide was no more specific than that of the general tour, but this was made up for by in-person glimpses at the tinkertech screens, a quick peek into the armory—which was closed after Monday’s incident—and, of course, the main attraction: the heroes.

Scatterbrain, still young and swept up in his pseudo-celebrity status, gladly stood up and gave the tour group a showy demo of his powers; a card trick here, a “guess how many fingers I’m holding up” there. Vista resisted the urge to bark at him to conserve his energy for a real emergency. They hadn’t had one of those in months, and Vista knew for a fact that there wouldn’t be one today, unless either Imp or herself were behind it. Brockton Bay had become boring like that.

“And over there is Vista, Captain of the Wards,” the tour guide announced. Vista waved but did not look up, pretending to be busy. “Did you know that she has more experience on the field than some of the Protectorate members on our current roster?”

The group oohed and aahed appropriately, and Scatterbrain sagged as the limelight moved off of him. The tour guide was right about her years of experience. Experience was why Vista didn’t give a shit about any of this.

“Any final thoughts before we move onto the memorial hall?”

“I have a question,” asked a familiar voice from the back of the tour group. Vista looked up in alarm. Aisha grinned in response.“For Vista.”

The tour guide looked to Vista for permission. 

She could see Renick looming from across the room, that stern glare stuck on his face like it had been cast in resin. Still pissed about the explosion, like he was every Tuesday. Vista knew he would forget all this come tomorrow, but not playing along for now meant today’s loop would be that much more difficult to get through. She didn’t know if or when she could convince Aisha to come back here either; Vista could only make so many threats before the other girl retaliated.

“Sure,” Vista said through a pinched smile. “I’m always happy to talk to the upstanding citizens of Brockton Bay.”

The tour group chuckled at her response. While their attention was focused on Vista, Aisha shot her a wink and a devious grin.

“So your power is that you can move buildings, right?”

“Spatial manipulation, yes,” Vista replied. 

“But you use it to move buildings?”

“Well…”

“I’ve seen her do it!” one of the other tour group members piped up. “About three years back! There was this big fire south of downtown in one of the old office buildings across the block from the place I worked at. They hadn’t fixed up the building to modern safety standards and zoning laws, so there were all these people trapped on the top floor, and no one knew how to get them out in time. We were all standing on the street, watching in horror, when the edge of the road started cresting like a wave. It was Vista!”

The group gasped in excitement, Aisha loudest of all and patently fake. Why no one saw it but Vista, she could not understand.

“She stretched a nearby office building up, and got everyone out of there without breaking a sweat.” The man looked directly at her. “You couldn’t have been more than twelve—”

Fourteen, actually.

“But you were already so brave. Saving all those lives, just like that.”

There was a horrible churning in Vista’s stomach at that very moment, so bad she felt it might knock her off her feet. She wished Renick would come back into the room and dismiss the group, or dismiss Vista, or tell them about Monday night—the blast site at the docks, the five officers in the hospital, the nine others with visible injuries. The woman in the alleyway, now in the morgue.

“So hypothetically,” Aisha continued, “you could use your building moving powers—sorry, spatial manipulation —for other things.”

“I won’t,” Vista started.

“She could, though,” said Scatterbrain.

Vista didn’t glare at him, but it was a close thing. 

“I could, but I won’t.”

Aisha laughed, the trap swung shut.

“But you could, hypothetically speaking, turn my house into a Gordian Knot. Seal the windows, seal the doors, warp the whole thing beyond all recognition.”

“Yes,” Vista said. “I suppose I could do that. Hypothetically speaking.”

“So it stands to reason you could do that to the whole city too? Like the opposite of when you saved those people from the fire. You could just make Brockton Bay into an M.C. Escher nightmare, if you really wanted to and there were no consequences for your actions.”

“Yes,” Vista said again. “If I really wanted to, I could trap you in one place until you inevitably died of dehydration.” 

“Okay!” said the tour guide. “We’ll be moving onto the gift shop next! Everyone say thank you to Vista and Scatterbrain for their time. It’s not every day you get to speak to such young, enterprising heroes!”

The group walked off, quieter now that they’d had a healthy fear of capes put into them by Aisha. Vista went back to her desk, where she sat and glared at the static monitors until her jaw started to cramp.

The sun began to dip behind the taller buildings of central downtown. Sharpened rays of light squeezed in through the spaces between the concrete facades, skipping like a stone across the bay until they hit the forcefield of PHQ and refracted in a brilliant display of color. Vista rubbed at her jaw with one hand, and squinted. What was she so upset about, exactly? Sure, the sunset freaking sucked, but that was an everyday occurrence, and didn’t exactly inspire the sour feeling that was currently concentrated at the back of her mouth.

It must have been the dread of things to come, which were a direct product of a past she could not change or move on from. Any moment now, Triumph would report in for patrol, Vista would get up to join him, and Renick would reappear on the main floor, demanding that Vista come speak to him in his office. As if she wasn’t already feeling guilty enough.

She rearranged a stack of files on her desk. Kicked up in the motion, a post-it reminder fluttered down to the floor.

As Vista bent down to pick it up, she caught the handwriting across the back. It was both familiar and unidentifiable. The arms on her hairs stood up in anticipation.

“ Second floor women’s bathroom 3rd stall .”

Vista swiftly stood up, and crossed the room. She shouldered past Triumph at the door, only glancing back to tell Renick, “Sorry, gotta run to the restroom first,” when he demanded to speak with her in private.

She found herself grinning in excitement, yet she could not explain why. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t broken rules before.

So eager was Vista to get to the bathroom, so trusting was she of her gut instinct, that she didn’t think to sweep the space with her powers before boldly entering, and kicking down the door to the third stall.

She blinked at the empty space before the toilet. 

How long had the note been on her desk, again? It was possible the person who wrote it was long gone. That explanation made the most sense, actually, since Vista hadn’t seen them place it and she’d been at her desk virtually all afternoon.

“So what’s the plan?” Imp asked her, mask pulled on as she shut the door to the stall behind them. She hadn’t noticed it earlier, but Imp’s civilian clothes converted easily into a costume—black jeans and a sweatshirt, and that same scarf that was too threadbare to be considered fashionable. Vista barely had the room to jump, and found herself pressed almost chest to chest with Imp, so that she did not fall into the toilet or the narrow space on either side.

“Fuck! Jesus! Do people ever get used to this?” 

“Not really,” Imp said with a shrug. “My power’s always on unless I’m focusing on turning it off. Either everyone around me has to be uncomfortable, or I am. The only reason the Vasils don’t complain is that it’s relatively mild, compared to their baseline living situation.”

Vista bowed the walls out to give them both some space. Imp didn’t budge from her spot.

“Fascinating,” Vista said, because she was a cape first and a person second. When she remembered the person part, she added, “That totally fucking sucks.”

“Sometimes, yeah. But we’re not here to have a pity party for me.” She cleared her throat, the angle of her mask betraying that she wasn’t meeting Vista’s eyes. It occurred to Vista that maybe Imp was just as uncomfortable as her, but relied on crass humor and memory-fuckery to hide it. The thought made Vista feel unbearably smug. “Conspiring with a hero to break into PHQ is cool and all, but I assume you wanted to actually do something here?”

Vista nodded. It was hard to stay on track, when the knowledge that she actually had a plan kept on coming and going. She thought of the training retreats they used to do with other Ward branches, where they’d switch up team members at random and still be expected to work together seamlessly. It usually ended in skinned knees and shouting matches, but the sentiment was a good one. Though not by choice, Imp was the only teammate Vista had here. Vista needed to make the best of it. 

“There’s a secondary database located in the basement, where the department keeps actual paper copies of information on inactive and deceased capes.”

“I get the paper copies thing—thinkers at work are scary as shit—but why inactive capes? It seems like those are the ones that pose the least threat.”

“Those who have access to history are doomed to repeat it,” said Vista. “A bunch of Bakuda’s bombs were modeled off of preexisting cape powers. All those Slaughterhouse Nine clones our teams went over back in 2013 were made with DNA collected during autopsies. Point is, if the people know the resources are there, they’ll do their best to exploit them.”

“So we’re breaking in…”

“To see if there’s any info on time powers that I haven’t already read about. I didn’t know we even had any more of Bakuda’s bombs. It stands to reason that someone’s researched them further in the five years since they were built.”

Imp sighed. “If it’ll make you sleep easier between loops…”

“I’m getting us out of here,” Vista fired back.

“Sure, whatever.”

She stepped back, motioning for Vista to lead the way. It wasn’t exactly the vote of confidence Vista was looking for, but it would have to do. 

Breaking and entering, as it turned out, was remarkably easy when you had a stranger on the team and a person on the inside running the heist.

While Vista was fielding the usual lecture from Director Renick, Imp followed her directions. There was no way of telling how much mischief Imp had caused in between swiping keycards, disabling cameras, and sneaking her way into the basement, so Vista consoled herself with the knowledge that it would all reset tomorrow. 

Vista finished out the rest of her shift with little fanfare, her knowledge of what Imp was up to coming and going like waves onto the shore. 

By the time she was done for the night, that awareness of Imp sat heavy in her mind. Any apprehension she felt about letting the proverbial Trojan horse inside the gates was quickly brushed aside. It wasn’t like the Undersiders hadn’t broken into PHQ before, and there wasn’t much Imp could do with confidential information while she was caught in a time loop. It was almost funny, how the same anomaly that made the two of them so powerful had also neutered them. That was about what Vista had come to expect from life.

Vista herself didn’t have much trouble getting down into the basement either, only passing a janitor as she made her way through the half-dimmed hallways. The ease with which she had staged this whole thing made Vista embarrassed on behalf of the department. It made sense that protocols had relaxed a bit now that capes like Regent weren’t in the city, but as Vista had been reminded just two days ago, there were still plenty of Heartbroken floating around. 

Vista knocked on the door to the file room, tapping out the pattern she’d rehearsed with Imp ahead of time. 

Imp opened it with a mock bow. 

“Welcome to my humble—”

Vista shoved past her, effectively silencing any more dumbass commentary. 

She’d only been in the secondary file room a few times before, always with an adult with higher clearance than her, but the standard PRT organization still applied here, which meant Vista was able to pull out the files she wanted without too much hassle. Once she’d gathered them all up in her arms, compressing the pages down so she could stack it all, she turned towards the shitty card table pushed against one wall of the room, and dropped them with a dull thud. 

Imp peered over her shoulder, simultaneously compelled by the prospect of secret information and bored by the fact that it was exactly that—plain old information.

“If these don’t read like tabloid headlines,” Imp said, “I’m fucking out of here.”

Vista ignored her, prying open the file on Gray Boy. “Try Perdition.” 

She heard the rustling of pages, followed by some laughter and a name muttered a few times over. 

“Oh, this guy! Fucking idiot killed Accord in the middle of the attack on New Dehli. He couldn’t even finish off Tattletale or Chevalier.”

“Well, he had time looping powers too,” Vista reminded her, “so maybe there’s something in there we can use.”

She frowned at the pages in front of her. Gray Boy was something of a ghost story among the cape community. Dead long before Vista had triggered, the things he was capable of were best left to half-remembered childhood nightmares. The fact that they could not be forgotten—that the evidence of his powers would likely outlast all the capes who had ever encountered or traded word of him—was what made him all the more terrifying.

There were two death dates listed within the file, and two names attached. Vista ruled out the possibility of visiting Glaistig Uaine. If given enough loops, she might have been able to get in contact with the woman who now had control over Gray Boy’s powers, but it was just as likely she would kill Vista on the spot. The question of resets was still unanswered, but Vista would have much prefered to spend eternity in her own skin than in the ghostly service of one of the world’s deadliest parahumans. 

The second name was one Vista had nearly forgotten. Not many people talked about the clones, or the insane weeks spent controlling and containing them. Flechette—or Foil, as she’d been known as for much longer now—had had the dubious honor of putting Gray Boy down a second time.

Vista frowned at the reminder of her old teammate, then glanced at Imp out of the corner of her eye. She was lackadaisically paging through Perdition’s file; Vista would have to double check her work after this. 

She supposed Foil was Imp’s teammate too, or had been at some point in the past. The hero-turned-villain hadn’t been nearly as active after the cloning incident. Vista didn’t know if she still lived in Brockton Bay, or if she was even still alive. In all likelihood, she knew nothing more about Gray Boy’s powers than Vista did about Shatterbird. 

Vista marked Foil off as a dead end, and Gray Boy too. She was firm in the conviction that this was a logical choice. Any discomfort she might have felt at the prospect of contacting old friends was a happy coincidence, now that she knew she wouldn’t have to go there.

“That was wild from start to finish,” Imp announced, dropping the Perdition file onto the top of the cabinet with a light thump. “Remind me never to get disappeared.”

Vista rolled her eyes. “That’s all your power does. Any info in there on his abilities?”

“Nothing we didn’t already know. I guess the Earth Aleph to mercenary to Yàngbǎn pipeline doesn’t allow for much time for official testing.”

“How about contacting him?”

Imp grimaced at the papers in question. “Disappeared, remember? There’s not much left of him to talk to.”

“Jesus, okay,” Vista said. Her mind conjured up images of what being “disappeared” entailed far faster than she would have liked. “Go take a look at the Brussels-Tempo incident next. I’m gonna go through a few more capes over here.”

And they did just that. Time passed quickly in their intensive search. They remained undisturbed. Vista almost would have been disappointed how easy it was to get inside the basement, if her expectations hadn’t been lowered by years of humiliation at the hands of Brockton Bay’s rogues gallery, and Monday’s own armory heist. Though Imp’s powers were an asset for getting in, Vista suspected the only reason they had not yet been caught was that no one would think to search for her in a place where she knew she was not supposed to enter. She also suspected they had not bothered to search for her at all.

At the bottom of the pile was one final folder that Vista had saved until last. She knew it was her greatest chance of getting out of here. If it could not help her, then it was likely nothing else would. In this respect Vista had rationed her hopes very carefully.

Imp sat on top of one cabinet with her legs swinging out in midair. She was, impossibly, even more chatty when bored, but always spoke in a low, even voice. Against all odds, Vista had found herself reassured by Imp’s presence, as it took the tension out of what might have otherwise been a high stakes clerical task. Vista had even managed a few responses to the background chatter, though she could not remember what had been asked or how she had answered. 

With nothing else to distract her, Vista opened the file and began to read.

The Bubble and the Scar were two symptoms of the same problem, one which Vista was now a casualty of too. In recent years, she had done her best to avoid that swath of downtown, even employing her powers to unnecessarily tilt certain side streets away from the blast sites. It brought back memories of much harder times. The sight alone made her shiver—not because of fear of the past, but rather, disgust for herself. Both the Bubble and the Scar were physical reminders of the hero Vista had once been. 

In her own fucked up, adrenaline junkie type of way, she missed it, and the guilt over missing that hero made her hate the person she had now become.

Vista flipped through the pages slowly, turning each and every speculative report over in her mind. There were no concrete solutions to be found. Even in the studies where a researcher had dared to bring up more questions on relocation or “popping,” the conclusion was always the same. Bakuda had studied other time-based capes when constructing the bombs, so it stood to reason that their effects would play out in the exact same way—if there was a way to dispel the area of effect, it would have to come naturally.

“Nothing,” Vista said. She looked around the basement, at the piles she’d neatly organized and the table where Imp had spread her own work. “There’s nothing.”

“Radiation and other effects eventually go away,” Imp replied. “Maybe if we just give this time—”

“How much time?” Vista cried. “One hundred years? One thousand? Until the fucking sun burns out?!”

“Please. You’d go crazy way before that—”

“Stop treating this like a fucking joke!”

Imp went quiet. Vista took the moment to catch her breath, sliding her visor off so she could wipe some of the condensation that had started to gather on it. She saw the faintest reflection of her own face, green-tinted and malformed. Vista threw her visor on the ground, kicked the table over, and let out a harsh yell.

Still no one disturbed them. Vista knew that there were still officers and capes stationed upstairs, whiling away the hours between patrols like the swing of a pendulum. They could not care because they could not know. 

Vista must have looked awfully frightening, or awfully pitiful, or some odd mix of the two, because Imp didn’t disappear on her. Instead, she bent down next to where Vista was kneeling and placed a light hand on her upper back.

“Hey,” Imp said in that same low and even voice, “Why don’t you take the evening off to throw shit around your room and cry yourself to sleep, then come visit me tomorrow? I don’t know how to get us out of the time loop, but I can certainly cheer you up.”

Vista wanted to argue that there was no way to be okay with this, and that she didn’t even want to, but by the time she’d thought of how to verbalize that, the memory of who she was talking to had already slipped her mind. 

She didn’t remember how she got home that night. Only that she did, and that her crying was loud enough to rouse her dad from the right hall. If he asked her questions, she did not answer them, nor did he attempt to ask them again.

Missy had just gotten her breathing back in check—and her dad had gotten two cake slices from the freezer—when the clock hit midnight.

Missy Biron woke up about thirty seconds before the alarm did the job for her, which gave her just enough time to slam a hand down on her phone before it started rumbling and screeching.

She sighed and rolled over. It was unseasonably cold for May—for now, at least. By noon, the fog rolling in from the ocean would all burn off, and her early morning shivering beneath the covers for warmth would be nothing but a distant memory.

The memory of Imp was lodged firmly at the back of her brain, a clear sign that Imp expected her to keep their appointment. 

But there were plenty of hours to-go until the clock struck midnight and the day reset, so Missy really did stay snuggled under those covers. Her mom came in to check on her after about thirty minutes with the sugary brand of cereal in a bowl—Missy had now been stuck long enough that she was ready to eat this variety again—then left Missy be. She smiled and frowned where it was appropriate for a mother to feel such things, felt Missy’s forehead temperature with the back of her hand, then agreed to let Missy stay home from school and PHQ for the day.

“My poor girl,” she’d said to Missy as she fluffed her pillows badly. “You can’t even enjoy taking your birthday off because you’re not feeling well.”

Missy laid back down across the lumpy bed, and tucked her head to her chest. She had to hold back the laughter.

If only her mother knew the half of it.

The route to Imp’s territory was practically a standard commute at this point. 

Missy took her time getting there, employing no powers as she transferred bus lines and walked down quiet, peaceful streets. In this rare moment of stasis, Missy saw the city with fresh eyes. She had grown used to thinking of it in tactical terms, mapping out the spaces where people were and weren’t, what different materials the buildings were constructed from, and the exact points where roads diverged from the grid layout. It had taken years of dedicated practice and careful observation for Vista to learn these things. The end result, of course, was that Vista never went where she didn’t need to go.

That was all out the window now. There were no places Missy needed to be, no streets she needed contort. Another person might have been delighted at the opportunity to live in this moment, but Missy had lived in it for too damn long. Go fucking figure Tuesday, May 15th, 2015 was one of the most boring days in all of Brockton Bay history.

By the time she made it to Aisha’s place, she was sweaty, tired, and altogether done with the city that she’d given so much of her life to. Naturally, Aisha didn’t care about that, or let Missy finish her minute-long tirade about humidity and public transportation and the seagulls that seemed compelled to poop on every surface in Brockton Bay. Instead, she shooed two dark-haired kids off the driveway—now covered with even more dicks—and beckoned Missy inside. The house looked about the same as it had two days before, give or take some dirty dishes in the sink. Aisha must have gotten bored of eating the same things too. 

“I don’t know why you asked me back over here,” Missy said, crossing her arms and doing her best not to let Aisha see the redness in her eyes. “It’s just like you said. We’re stuck. We might as well go our separate ways now, since neither of us can help each other. No need to spend eternity telling each other our crushes and braiding each other’s hair.” 

“No? Damn. Candy is going to be pretty disappointed.”

“Give her a day and she’ll be over it.”

Aisha just sighed, crossing the kitchen to dump a glass in with the rest of the dishes. After subjecting Missy to an awkward, lingering pause that Aisha was surely reveling in, Aisha said, “That’s exactly what I thought we could talk about. You think I’m not affected by this dumb fucking loop? You think I wanted to be saddled with an identity crisis before I was even legally allowed to vote? It sucks that I’m never going to see Candy and the rest of the kids grow up. It sucks that I won’t, either.”

And that was without having to live through a shitty birthday celebration on repeat. Missy could barely stand to be talked down to by adults now. How would it feel in one-hundred loops? Or a thousand? 

“But in some ways,” Aisha continued, “it’s nice. A photograph captures a single moment in time, and stretches it on forever. Relationships end, and people change. But right here and right now, the things I like about my life? I can continue to enjoy them, for as long as I like.”

Missy glared at the cream carpet beneath her boots that she was dirtying up. No wonder Aisha hadn’t asked her to take off her shoes; come tomorrow, it would be clean again.

“And what if I don’t like anything about my life?”

“I’d say you’re just cranky because it’s past noon and you haven’t eaten since Monday. Wanna get lunch?”

Missy cast a skeptical look around the kitchen. 

“Are you cooking?”

Aisha barked out a laugh. “Fuck no! I’m tired of all the crap in here anyways. I was figuring we could find a restaurant down by the boardwalk.”

“Fine,” Missy replied. “But you’re paying.”

Aisha threw an arm around her shoulder, leading them both back out the front door. 

“Only if you give us a ride there.”

They went to Fat Sal’s for pizza, since Fugly Bob’s was still closed. It was almost fun getting the two of them there—Missy hadn’t had a chance to show off her powers since Scatterbrain joined the Wards, and he had an annoying habit of being unsurprised by things that were conventionally impressive.

Aisha, for her part, had gladly skipped across the crimped streets. She’d bowed after recklessly crossing a few gaps Missy was still working to shorten, and alternated between whooping and golf-clapping as Missy demonstrated through the more showy aspects of her powers. Missy found herself leaning into it too, coiling buildings up and around them in a way that wasn’t strictly necessary for travel. At one point, they’d stopped moving altogether, so that Missy could shape streetlights into animals at Aisha’s request. She’d called for elephants and parrots and turtles, which ended up looking more like fat starfish. Missy had sullenly explained that she wasn’t much of an artist. Aisha simply laughed, and asked her to make another elephant.

Now, squeezed into a greasy corner booth at Fat Sal’s Pizzeria, Missy felt that ease and lightheartedness draining away. Across the table, Aisha studied the menu with an intensity Missy hadn’t witnessed before—not back at the docks, and certainly not during their PHQ “raid.”

She closed the menu with a snap, meeting Missy’s gaze.

“This place,” Aisha said, pointing up at the stained ceiling and its poorly rendered copy of the Sistine Chapel, “is a Brockton Bay landmark. I go here at least once a month.”

“Two weeks for me,” Missy replied. “I’m in the area a lot.”

“And if you aren’t, it’s still easy to get here, right?”

Missy forced herself to look back down at her own menu. An exhausted server came and brought them two tall glasses of water in those blue plastic Pepsi cups. Missy ran a fingernail along the goosebump surface, smoothing it out, then reverting it to its proper form. The motion made a sound like a busted xylophone, and was still audible over the restaurant’s ancient music speakers, which were permanently set to Neapolitan crooning.

“Somehow,” Aisha continued, as if the conversation hadn’t come to an awkward standstill, “I always order the same thing here. I guess I’m just worried about wasting money on something I don’t want—which is stupid, obviously, because I’m a regular customer.” 

Missy’s eyes settled on the combo part of the menu. They served a mediocre piece of pizza here, with a side of fried chicken wings that weren’t anything to write home about. Somehow, the two dishes performed a sort of alchemical wizardry when consumed together, transcending basic gustatory descriptors like “salty” or “greasy” or “good.” She always ordered the same thing too.

“I doubt you’re missing out on much,” Missy said. “They use the same five ingredients in every dish. Carbs. Tomatoes. Garlic. Cheese.”

“Basil?”

“Basil. There. That’s five.”

The server brought them garlic knots, even though they hadn’t ordered them, and bowed his head to Aisha. Missy frowned. Was Aisha lying about being a regular, or was she something more? It seemed unlikely that she’d outright let these people know her identity as a supervillain, but if anyone could afford to be flippant about that, it was Aisha and her stranger abilities. 

Aisha gestured to the basket, and Missy turned her down. She didn’t want to consume any breads paid for with dirty deeds or money. Aisha popped one in her mouth, then spoke with her mouth half full, “Only five ingredients? That’s a racist thing to say! You’re being, like, Italianphobic.”

Missy glared at the garlic knots. “That hasn’t been a thing since the 1940s. And you can stop with your stupid anecdote. I can hear the moral coming from a mile away.”

“Morals? Coming from me?”

“You’re going to say, ‘Now that I’m stuck in a Groundhog Day scenario, I finally have the time to do all the things I could never do before, like ordering everything on the menu at Fat Sal’s. Isn’t that awesome?’ And I’ll tell you, ‘No, this fucking sucks because I don’t even like Fat Sal’s that much!’”

The server cleared his throat, a pen and notepad in his hand.

“Can I take your order?” he asked quietly.

Missy passed him her menu with a flat expression. 

“We’ll both have the fettuccine alfredo,” Aisha replied. “With shrimp.”

The server nodded, slid his notebook back into his apron, and practically sprinted to the kitchen.

“I hate seafood,” Missy told Aisha. She had the strangest feeling of deja vu. 

“Me too. But since you suggested it, I thought we could both try something new on the menu.” She took a sip of water, holding up a finger like she meant to continue. “ Groundhog Day ?”

Missy sank back into the vaguely sticky pleather booth, and sighed. She supposed she could pick out the shrimp, but it would leave the sauce with a vaguely fishy flavor. She was so hungry at this point that she didn’t even care.

“It’s nothing,” Missy said. “Just some dumb old movie I used to watch with my parents.”

The alfredo, unfortunately, had turned out to be wildly fucking good—good enough that Missy was considering making it her permanent order from here on out, sans shrimp. When she told Aisha this, Aisha had rolled her eyes. 

“No way in hell are you sliding back into old habits,” she had told Missy over the last few noodles on her plate. “When we come here next week, we’re ordering the chicken parm.”

“I don’t know,” Missy had replied, too fast to think better of it. “The veal picatta looked pretty damn good.”

Aisha had simply nodded along, and just like that, there was a standing date between the two of them. The promise of a future meeting was almost enough to make Missy forget that it was still technically Tuesday.

Missy’s uneasiness came back full-force as Aisha signed the check—not showing Missy how much they’d actually been charged—and they got ready to leave. The distraction had been nice, but Missy wasn’t ready to go home to her two strawberry ice cream cakes, where the reality of the situation would fully sink back in. She suspected that the Heartbroken were more volatile than Missy’s own parents, and wondered if Aisha felt the need to avoid them for a bit too. Did Aisha also feel guilty for feeling such things? Did she feel guilty for not feeling guilty? Maybe she didn’t feel guilty at all. 

The two of them walked side-by-side down the main stretch of the boardwalk. It was dark outside and cold again, a harsh wind blowing off the ocean and onto Missy’s face, where it whipped water into her eyes and stung her reddened cheeks.

They stopped at the corner, beneath the awning of a 24-hour liquor store Missy could recall frequenting as a child. Her parents took her to the beach once for a summery holiday—Fourth of July or Memorial Day or something along those lines—only for it to devolve into a fight over foldable chairs and plastic pails and bonfire supplies, until her dad decided he’d had enough, and scooped Missy up onto his back as he strode over to the corner store. He’d let Missy buy a Slim Jim off the cardboard display rack, and a Snickers bar too, then smeared a thick line of sunscreen across her nose and cheeks the second he’d paid for the tube at the register. She’d held onto that single slice of time tightly, long after the rest of the day had faded away, and probably for good reason. 

The LED lights from the refrigerated beers section shone through the glass storefront, cutting across Aisha’s profile with a sharp, flickering band of light. She looked expectantly at Missy. There would be no ordering meals for each other, no laser pistols knocked from hands. Whatever happened next would be entirely up to Missy. 

“Want to know something really fucking stupid? It’s my birthday.”

She waited as Aisha processed her words, counting the time up on her fingers.

“The four year anniversary of Leviathan? Seriously?”

“ I know ,” Missy said. It was all she could think to say on the matter. She wasn’t sure how to express her feelings about it, or if she had even processed them after all this time. “Were you there? I, uh, don’t remember you.”

“No.” Aisha didn’t bother to elaborate. Missy knew for a fact that the PRT file on Imp didn’t stretch back that far, though that could have easily been because of her powers. She would have been young. In all likelihood, she hadn’t triggered yet. But it would have been shortly after the attack that she did, which meant it hadn’t been a good period in Aisha’s life either. “You were though.”

“That was also my first kill,” Missy admitted.

Aisha looked at her in shock.

“Not intentionally.” 

Missy cast a quick glance at the ocean. The waves lapping at the shore still made her a bit nervous after all these years, and probably always would. She’d heard that normal people felt that way too, though their fears stemmed from run-of-the-mill things like a healthy respect for the power of nature and the movie Jaws. 

“There was this cape, Bastion, and the two of us were holding up a building full of capes after Leviathan crashed into it. He told me to collapse it around him, so that everyone else could get out.”

“The slur guy? Not to be insensitive to your coming-of-age trauma, but there’s worse people to kill.”

Missy shrugged. “Better people too.” 

“Like Kaiser. Guess we’ll have to thank Leviathan for that one.”

“And Armsmaster. But your team would know more about that.”

Aisha laughed sharply, like she was just as surprised by the reaction as Missy. When she caught her breath, she said, “God damn, Missy. I didn’t think you had that kind of humor in you.”

“And why not? We went through a lot of the same crap together.”

“I guess we did.” She trailed off.

Missy looked at her expectantly.

“Sorry, is this the part where I give you the villain recruitment speech?” She stepped back into a darkened patch of pavement, and lowered her voice to a stupid-sounding growl. “You’re not so different, you and I. Two sides of the same coin. Join me on the dark side, and together we can finally pop this time bubble I secretly constructed to win you over.”

Missy slapped her outstretched hand away, and bent an overhead light post so that it was shining down on Aisha.

“How do you know it’s not the other way around? Maybe I was tasked with bringing you to the light, and intentionally set off this loop to make it happen. It’s pretty self-sacrificing to trap myself here with you, when you think about it. A villain would be content with the psychological torment alone, but what I really want is your redemption.”

“Redemption?” Aisha asked. “I’m not the one who killed the leader of the Boston Protectorate!”

Against her better judgment, Missy laughed. 

Across the street, a pedestrian gave them the stink eye. Missy and Aisha both stared the guy down until he continued on his way, probably to one of the nearby dive bars, where he’d bitch about the kids these days and their attitude with the three other dudes who frequented the otherwise empty bar. 

An idea dawned on Missy. 

“We should get something to drink,” she said, pitching her voice low enough that no other person would hear them.

Aisha looked at her, half-excited and half-shocked.

“I don’t know how to handle this!” Missy quickly explained, before Aisha started in on her. “I mean, normally I’d throw myself into work so I could feel like I was making some sort of change, but there’s no work to be done. So I figured I’d try to cope with existential dread the way normal people do. Skin-picking, booze, sex—“

Aisha raised an eyebrow.

“I’ve got a fake.”

“Missy Biron, who the hell are you?”

Missy sighed. She was already starting to regret her boldness. “It’s good for other stuff, you know.” 

Not that any of the people who actually mattered would be swayed by it. Missy had acquired it during a manic fit of teenage rebellion last fall. The classmate car envy that had brought on the fit was resolved not too long after, once Officer Kerns took over the afternoon shift and started letting Vista into the driver’s seat. She never bothered to use it anywhere, even for something innocuous as going to see an R-rated movie by herself. Simply having the thing made her feel better about her own autonomy.

“Okay, so you haven’t actually used it before,” Aisha said. She hadn’t stopped grinning, obviously taking perverse delight in Missy’s recklessness. “If it makes you uncomfortable, I can just go in and grab something off the shelf—”

“I’m not helping you steal ! And don’t tell me that the bottle will be back up on the shelf by tomorrow, so our actions don’t matter, because I’ll know. My actions matter to me.”

Aisha leaned back so that the pathway was clear for Missy, and waved at the door.

“Alright then. You go inside and buy us illegal booze with your illegal ID. Since the whole thing was your idea in the first place.”

Damn right it was. Missy dug her wallet out of her jacket pocket, and stomped inside. The last thing she saw as the automatic doors closed behind her was Aisha’s stupid fucking grin and her upturned eyes, which Missy knew were tracking her, long after Missy had looked away.

People weren’t technically allowed on the beach or in the water after eight when all the lifeguards clocked out, but since Missy had already broken one law today, she didn’t mind breaking another.

Trading tiny, gagging sips directly from the bottle of Fireball, Missy and Aisha had clambered over the thin metal rail, past the rocks and down onto the sand, where they picked a spot that still stored a bit of warmth from the noon sun. Their shoes had been abandoned somewhere back by the rocks, after Missy pointed out how much dealing with sand in socks sucked. Aisha had readily agreed, chucking her boots back toward the road. This sent Missy into a shitfit, which in turn sent Aisha into one too.

Exhausted, they had collapsed next to each other, and began to talk in that way only people who’d artificially lowered their filters could.

Aisha continued to surprise Missy, in not just wit and level-headedness but a form of naivete that was almost irreconcilable with a member of one of the most famous villain teams in America. 

She didn’t have much tolerance for drinking, which led to a long, winding discussion between the two of them over whether to get tipsy, or totally fucking shitfaced. Missy, not too comfortable with the usual teenage rites of passage, had backed off her original plan, and agreed that tipsy was best. The bottle of whiskey was a prop more than it was an actual instrument for either of them. Missy didn’t mind. Fireball tasted awful.

The other big thing was Aisha’s awkwardness, which had blossomed over the course of the night like a beautiful, pimply flower. It made sense, in a way. Aisha hadn’t gotten a lot of time to be a normal kid, so while she was plenty capable in a crisis, pockets of her personality preserved an almost tween-like sense of silliness. To make things worse, Missy could feel herself responding similarly. She wondered if this was what people like Director Renick and her parents saw when talking to her, and flushed in embarrassment.

Aisha tapped Missy’s arm with a few fingers to get her attention again. Missy was grateful she didn’t wear pigtails any more. She knew that if Aisha was given the opportunity, she would absolutely attempt to pull them.

“First crush. Go.”

Missy hummed, giving the request its proper gravitas. The answer popped into her mind with little prodding on her part.

“Well, it wasn’t my first, but it was certainly my worst. Do you remember Dean Stansfeld? Gallant?”

It wouldn’t have been surprising if Aisha hadn’t. The world had little use for long-dead Wards. Dead capes, in general, were easily forgotten about when there was a newer, flashier cape ready to replace them. But that trend had subsided over recent years, as had the frequency of parahuman deaths.

“Glory Girl’s on-and-off boyfriend?” Aisha smacked her on the arm, curling up closer. Missy shivered, though it was objectively warmer with Aisha so close. “Missy, you scoundrel! I never took you for the type to steal another woman’s man!”

“It wasn’t like that! Victoria was actually super nice to me, and Dean had the whole”—she waved a hand by her temple—“emotions thing, so he knew too. I was twelve and I was not slick.”

“So if cucking wasn’t the appeal—”

“You could have just left it at forbidden love—”

“—what was the appeal?”

“He was safe, I guess. Textbook handsome, smart, kind. Superpowers aside, I think he made everything feel normal to me. Dean was the type of guy I could safely talk about at a middle school sleepover.”

“No fucking way were you going to those,” Aisha said.

“No, which is why I’m stuck doing them with assholes like you now! Your turn to answer the question.”

“Fine. Promise you won’t laugh.”

Missy turned so that they were facing each other head on. With one ear to the sand like this, she could sense the mutability of each individual grain, and the surf lying just beyond, which rattled her bones and chilled the soles of her feet. Aisha’s characteristic dead space and Missy’s own center of self might as well have been one, for all that they had registered the same to Missy’s powers.

“Now you’ve just made me even more intrigued!” Missy said.

Aisha stared at her, expression set and dead-serious. Missy held out her hand to Aisha, pinky first.

“I promise not to be too mean, but you can’t blame me if a giggle or two escape.”

“Taylor Hebert.”

Missy blinked. “What?”

Aisha kept her mouth shut. 

“You… but the bugs…”

“I was just a kid! And she was older and she and my brother were kind of a thing, which made her like this cool, unattainable thing, and…”

“And you were making fun of me for Dean!”

“I can’t describe it,” Aisha said quietly. “Life was awful, and then it was insane. And she was insane too, but she was reliable. That was important to me.”

Missy understood the sentiment. Hadn’t she felt the same thing, for Dean? Happy family, happy girlfriend, happy life. His powers were the exactly-as-advertised “gift” on every bullshit Wards welcome pamphlet , a spare helping on a life already carved from normalcy and success. Missy couldn’t even get a ride to school without going to court over it.

“But it’s done now. I guess I’d be nice to her if she showed up back in Brockton Bay. Not that she ever will. Too busy using butterflies to help old women cross the street.”

“Have there been any other crushes?”

“Why?” asked Aisha. “Jealous?”

Curious, more accurately. The Heartbroken had stayed here in Brockton Bay, and Imp had taken over Regent’s territory. Missy could see between the lines well enough. She never would have asked that question directly though. Things like that were always what got her parents fighting again. Some things were too big to discuss, too distant on either end to meet halfway in the middle. The people that couldn’t figure out how to avoid these conversations were always the ones who ended up fighting bitterly. 

“No,” Missy said. “Just wondering. I don’t think I’ve had time.”

“And now that you’re in a time loop?”

Missy went through the facts to the best of her ability: She was trapped in a time loop on her seventeenth birthday, and there was likely no way out. Imp, real name Aisha Laborn, was trapped in the loop with her, and had the capacity for immense violence and manipulation. Missy had also consumed enough Fireball to mildly impair her judgment, which was probably already impaired due to time-loop related emotional distress and the aforementioned villain’s stranger abilities. 

Really, besides going on a violent rampage or locating and setting off even more of Bakuda’s bombs, there wasn’t any other decision that came close to the level of stupid of kissing Aisha fucking Laborn.

Missy went and did it anyway.

It wasn’t exactly hard, with how close they’d been lying, even if the two of them were clumsier than usual. Aisha seemed receptive enough, judging by the way her arm had come down around Missy’s exposed hip.

Missy only pulled away when the grains of sand stuck to her cheek started finding their way inside her mouth, so, with Aisha still half-holding her, she sat up on her side, took a swig of whiskey, swished it around her mouth, and spat it back out.

“All of the burn and none of the warmth,” Aisha commented wryly, not reaching for the bottle. As if she liked the taste any more than Missy.

“If you try to wipe this,” Missy said, getting a finger up in Aisha’s face, “I will know, and I will fold this whole fucking time loop into a goddamn taco. You don’t want to spend eternity as a taco, do you?”

Aisha wrapped her hands around Missy’s.

“Not really, no.” 

Missy shrugged. 

“Okay, then. Any last things you’d like to confess? A crush so awful I’ll never speak to you again? The mortal sin of hating strawberry ice cream?”

Aisha looked at her for a long moment. Missy stared back, unflinching. The tide had come in while she was distracted, and she could now feel the occasional wave lapping at her feet. It was just asking for trouble to remain here, but Missy could hardly bring herself to care. 

“No,” Aisha said. “Nothing that can’t wait.”

So Missy leaned in, and kissed her some more.

Chapter Text

Missy Biron woke up about thirty seconds before the alarm did the job for her, which gave her just enough time to slam a hand down on her phone before it started rumbling and screeching.

She sighed and rolled over. It was unseasonably cold for May—for now, at least. By noon, the fog rolling in from the ocean would all burn off, and her early morning shivering beneath the covers for warmth would be nothing but a distant memory.

All that effort to beat the alarm was wasted not five seconds later, when her phone chimed twice in a row, signaling that Missy had received a text. She pulled a pillow over her head, a tried and true tactic for muting background noises, including but not limited to: ambulance sirens, push notifications, and arguments between adults who should have known better but never did.

The phone began to vibrate more aggressively, ringing with some sugary pop song Missy set when she was eleven and had not bothered to change since. She sighed as it hit the chorus, reminded of a much simpler time, when sleepovers were the go-to way to get out of the house. Life was simple now too, in very different ways than it had been before.

The number wasn’t in her contacts, but Missy answered anyway. Due to the nature of the loop, she and Aisha had resorted to memorizing each other’s numbers—a task made easier by Missy’s own mnemonic-jingle system, which Aisha teased her mercilessly for. Aisha had an endearing habit of humming it to herself when she thought Missy couldn’t hear her. She obviously wasn’t used to being paid attention to. Missy gladly bore the responsibility of being Aisha’s secret (and perhaps only) admirer.

“Yo. Seven Suns or Euphonics of Dismay?”

“We already went to see Seven Suns,” Missy replied. “You seriously like their butt rock enough to listen to them again?”

Aisha laughed on the other end, blowing out the speakers where she must have brought the phone too close to her face. Missy shivered with the phantom sensation of breath on her neck.

During these daily calls, Missy liked to occupy herself by reconstructing the parts of Aisha that naturally—and preternaturally—slipped her memory. She worked backwards from the details that stuck. A lopsided smile here, an incessant tapping of the fingers on wooden surfaces there. How the top of Aisha’s head came up to about Missy’s ears. If time was properly passing, she would probably be taller than Missy in a few months.

“Sorry that I’m trying to find something fun for us to do! It’s not like you’ve found any other bands performing in Brockton Bay on a Tuesday night,” Aisha said.

She made a good point about lack of entertainment in Brockton Bay, but Missy could get them elsewhere pretty easily. Or Aisha could call a car, and they would be in New York by the evening. Missy was certain there were plenty of bands performing there, if the swatch book of concert wristbands adorning Flechette’s old gym bag were anything to go by.

The only thing stopping Missy from bringing this option up was the worming insecurity about existence itself. That if she truly got bored of Brockton Bay—not in the usual teen “I’m moving to the big city to pursue my dreams” way, but “I’ve committed every insignificant detail of this town to memory, and might just kill myself if I stay here one second longer than necessary”—then she’d been stuck for far too long.

“Seven Suns it is,” said Missy. “The drummer of Euphonics of Dismay is kind of a douchebag. I had homeroom with him last year.”

“Wow, you never told me you knew a local celebrity!” Aisha teased. “Next thing I know, you’ll be telling me you’re friends with the captain of the Brockton Bay Wards. Think you can get me an autograph?”

Missy found herself smiling. “I don’t know. I hear she’s real hard to get in touch with.”

Aisha sighed. “If only there was a way to get her attention. It would have to be serious, though, to catch the eye of a big name hero like Vista. Not getting up for an old person on the bus. Stealing candy from a baby. Kicking over a cardboard box full of abandoned puppies.”

“Don’t even think about it.”

Missy heard the sound of glass breaking on the other end, followed by muffled yelling.

“Shit,” Aisha said, voice quieter as she moved away from the receiver. “I gotta go. 4:30, my place?”

The shouting got louder. Missy frowned, troubled by her own powerlessness with the situation. This thing she had with Aisha was compromising, she knew, but it wasn’t like it mattered much when no new situations or threats would unfold in this narrow window of time. May 15th was exactly as boring as Missy and Aisha allowed it to be. If Aisha couldn’t handle whatever was going on with the Heartbroken, Missy would hear about it on the news, or directly from Director Renick. By this time tomorrow, Aisha would know how to stop it from ever happening again.

“Why do I always have to come to you?”

“Because I always buy dinner.”

With her money made from drugs and protection rackets and other illicit affairs. The stupid part was that it would never be completely spent. The $40 dollars Aisha blew on them for dinner would only reappear in her wallet tomorrow, so they could spend it once more.

“4;30, your place,” Missy agreed, and hung up the phone.

There went her favorite part of the day.

Aisha greeted her at the door with a too-big smile. Missy took in her slightly frizzy hair, the light wash jeans that rode up her ankles. She must have outgrown them in the past year or so, not unlike the spidersilk bodysuit she wore as Imp. Her fingers were tapping an anxious, repetitive pattern onto the side of the lacquered door, so Missy reached out and took Aisha’s hand in hers.

“Everything good? We can reschedule if you need to,” Missy said.

Aisha shook her hand out and shut the door behind her. She passed Missy on the porch, taking the lead as if it were her powers that were going to get them halfway across town to Fat Sal’s.

When Missy didn’t move, Aisha said, “Sorry, we can go. It’s just annoying to deal with the same problems day after day, you know?”

Missy did. “Like defusing a bomb, but you’ve done it so many times that you’re not even scared any more. Just tired. At that point, you start to wonder why you haven't just let one blow you up already.”

Aisha whistled, low and unimpressed. “Wow. Okay. Calm down, Emily Dickinson.”

“I’m trying to be supportive!”

“Then support me by getting me the fuck out of here.”

Missy hesitated.

“Come on,” Aisha insisted. “They can handle one night on their own.”

Missy cast one last apprehensive look at the house. She sure hoped so.

The boardwalk was the same as always. The smell of old vegetable oil, a stinging breeze that swept in from the ocean, and seagulls that were all too quick to take advantage of the rare tourist walking by with food on a stick. Missy had been here more than enough times, throughout both her childhood and in recent memory, which was probably why she had gotten cocky, and forwent her usual pathway beneath various storefront awnings and cement overhangs.

Fat Sal’s Pizzeria was within spitting distance when a seagull zipped down the main stretch of road, close enough to the tops of Missy and Aisha’s heads that they were forced to jump back and away from each other.

In one great white streak, the seagull relieved itself.

Missy, rusty from a year and a half of zero world-ending crises—and thus, a year and a half of not being shot at while on duty—reacted far slower than she would have liked. She’d managed to bend the glop of shit away, but not before it made contact with her own skin. To make matters worse, pushing it away set it directly on a path towards Aisha, who received a twin smear on her own arm.

“Ugh! What the fuck, Missy?”

“Shit! Sorry! Shit!” Missy replied, distraught over the oily sensation. All she wanted to do was shake her arm and flail around, but that would only make it run or spread to more places.

“You normally throw your teammates in the line of fire like this?”

Missy froze. It wasn’t that she’d forgotten that today was Tuesday, May 15th, but the fact had come to rest uncomfortably at the back of her mind, where it could easily be overlooked and drowned out by fun, flashy things. Loud music, good food, standing dates with a warlord of Brockton Bay—that type of stuff. Missy thought that with a bit of practice, she could adapt to this way of life, just as she had to every hardship before. But something about Aisha’s unintentionally harsh words had dislodged the memory of Monday night, the fear and shame and guilt that came with the robbery, the explosion, the woman. Now that she’d started ditching school and her shifts at PHQ, usual reminders like Renick’s disciplinary meeting were easily avoided. Aisha had been the excuse to forget it.

“Whatever,” Aisha continued when Missy didn’t reply. “Let’s just go inside and get to the bathroom, before we’re caught in another blast zone.”

Sal was glad as ever to see Aisha. He passed them the keys to the bathroom before they’d even ordered, and by the time they came out, there were fresh breadsticks waiting at the table. Missy choked down the dough, along with her own disgust.

They ordered item #37 off the menu. Chicken marsala. While neither of them felt particularly compelled to drink wine with dinner, it had found its way into the dish, elevating the chicken to a level of class that the rest of Fat Sal’s entrees couldn’t hope to compete with.

Or, it did in theory. Something must have been wrong with the oil or another ingredient. Each forkful Missy ate tasted more rancid-sweet than the last, and she gave up on it entirely, pushing the plate away before she needed to make another mad dash to the bathroom. Aisha continued to eat, unperturbed.

“We should do burgers tomorrow,” Missy said.

Aisha swallowed some mushroom, took a long sip of water, then asked, “You sure? Fugly’s isn’t open, and most of the other burger places in town kinda suck. I have a grill in my backyard, I guess, but I don’t really know how to cook.”

Neither did Missy. She was more of a frozen dinner kind of girl.

“Why is Fugly’s closed on Tuesdays?”

Aisha took a few more bites of marsala, then crumpled up her paper napkin and dropped it on the plate to signify that she was done. A waiter swept it up quickly, swapping out their plates for two slices of pre-packaged tiramisu.

“Do you want yours in a box?”

“No, thank you,” Missy told the waiter.

Aisha raised an eyebrow. “They have to take the time to clean out all the rat droppings.”

“No.”

“Yes. They actually failed their safety and cleanliness inspection two years ago. Mikey—the owner—told me, so I went to the health department and I scared them into keeping it open.”

“Aisha Laborn, the enemy of FDA regulations and hero of local businesses everywhere. What about Fat Sal’s? Why do they seem to owe you a favor?”

The waiter dropped off the checkbook. Aisha stuffed two crisp twenties in it, stood up, and took Missy’s hand as she got out of the booth. Missy wondered who she’d learned that from—the older brother she didn’t like to bring up much, or maybe a teammate or another family member. Both subject areas were places Missy and Aisha did their best to steer clear from. Maybe it seemed silly, since that was what they primarily had in common, but some honesty had to be sacrificed in order to maintain their happy little facade.

“Humid places attract roaches,” Aisha said right as they were out the door. “We’re pretty close to the beach, aren’t we?”

Missy let out a shriek so loud that the seagulls on the telephone lines above were startled into flight.

Thankfully, none pooped on them again.

Seven Suns sounded just as bad from the pit as they did from the back left balcony, with the added drawback that it took thirty minutes longer to pick their way through the crowd after the set was over. But Missy had danced hip to hip with Aisha all the same, swaying and screaming and kind of wishing that she was inebriated in some way. Chicken marsala just didn’t do the trick like Fireball or Smirnoff. Missy had considered the possibility of drugs with enough frequency to know that it was a bad idea to bring them up to Aisha. The fact that she couldn’t recall ever having a conversation about it, coupled with a handful of unaccounted-for days where Aisha had all but disappeared from existence, meant that they probably had discussed it before, and that it didn’t go well. If Aisha continued to avoid the topic, then so would Missy.

As they poured out into the grimy parking lot, Aisha scrolled through her phone. The LED screen cast into sharp relief her growing frown and heavy brow.

“Everything alright?” Missy asked.

Aisha continued to flip through messages. There must have been dozens, if not hundreds of them.

“We just got out of here later than I expected. That’s all.”

Missy shuffled her feet on the gravel, unsure of what to do or say. Aisha hadn’t asked Missy to take her home, or call someone for help, or anything of that sort.

Then again, Aisha never wasn’t good at asking anybody for anything. She’d gotten used to being ignored.

Missy tapped Aisha on the shoulder, and stretched her powers out as far as she could before she hit another living being. Downtown pinched before them like a paper fan, the yellow lamps of South Brockton Bay’s sleepier suburbs now within spitting distance of the two of them.

Missy held out her hand. “Ladies first?”

And Aisha stepped forward without a smile.

By the time they’d made it to the house a few minutes later, Aisha had calmed down enough to crack a few jokes.

“It’s pretty late,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows. “Wanna crash here for the night? We could read magazines on my bed and paint each others’ toenails.”

Missy rolled her eyes. Whether she slept here, or in some bushes, or with the fishes and Cherish down at the bottom of the bay, she’d still end up back home come tomorrow. For that reason alone, she’d never taken Aisha up on the recurring offer.

“Don’t you have a crisis to handle? I don’t want to get whammied by one of the Heartbroken just because I showed up at the wrong place and wrong time.”

Aisha shrugged.

“The effects probably wouldn’t linger. They certainly don’t for the kids. And besides, it’s the same shit it is every night. Juliet gives Roman a black eye, Candy has a meltdown, and some creatively cruel words are exchanged. Who needs to forgive when you can skip right to forget?”

“Jesus, Aisha,” said Missy. “That’s horrible.”

Aisha stepped back from Missy, back from the ambient lamplight. Her voice was cold and cool when she finally replied, “Is it really? That’s how my powers work, and the whole damn loop too.”

“So if we were at Fat Sal’s, and some other customer started choking to death, you wouldn’t even bother to try the Heimlich on them?

“Why should I?"

“Well, what about me? You seemed pretty reluctant to let me use that laser pistol when I was trying to get in touch with you.”

“That’s different,” Aisha said. “You’re aware of what’s happening.”

“And nobody else matters? It’s okay that the Heartbroken are doing all this shit”—Missy gestured to a broken window that hadn’t been there this afternoon—“every day because they’re just going to reset?”

“What do you want me to say, Miz? Because I could spend all my time mediating their arguments, like I do every fucking day of my life, but then I wouldn’t spend any time with you. Not like you’re out there trying to get your parents back together—”

“Shut up.”

And for once, Aisha did. They both stood there for a while, breathing heavily. It was the only sound to be found on Aisha’s big, lonely block. By summer, every suburb of Brockton Bay would be humming with crickets, ratcheting sprinklers, murmurs of neighbors throwing backyard barbecues. But it wasn’t that time of year yet.

“How many days?"

“What?”

“How many days have we lived through?” Missy asked.

She’d stopped counting somewhere in the high seventies. For Aisha, it had probably been much lower.

There wasn’t much to say after that. Some creatively cruel words had been exchanged that would not reset, unless Aisha saw fit to do it herself. Missy did not think she would.

Missy Biron woke up about thirty seconds before the alarm did the job for her, which gave her just enough time to slam a hand down on her phone before it started rumbling and screeching.

Just once, it would’ve been nice to sleep in until the alarm went off. Or better yet, have a chance to shut it off the night before. Of all the bad decisions made on Monday, this was the easiest one for Missy to complain about.

She checked her phone out of habit. There was a text from an unknown number.

sorry i didnt mean to piss u off

i know it’s hard for u

please call me back?

Missy put her phone back down, then sighed and rolled over.

Missy sat down across from Director Renick’s desk, in the office he shared with Miss Militia. She hoped Miss Militia’s indefinite business trip to D.C. was going well. Innumerable hours were spent discussing the same damn problems of parahuman policing and funding and legislature, and they’d never make any progress on it. But wasn’t that how it always went?

She’d received a few more texts while at school from the same number:

i said i was sorry

we need to talk

call me. now.

if i dont say this now then i never will. call me.

Seven unread messages in a row, which meant Aisha knew and didn’t care that she’d come off looking desperate. A lot of people were weird about double texting like that. Missy had ignored the buzzing in her pocket during the Spanish presentation, and had to be pulled aside during the bio test because the vibration settings were “distracting” “other students” from “getting their work done” in a “timely” and “accurate” “manner.” Her phone wasn’t confiscated though, nor was she accused of cheating or sent to detention, which is what would have happened to any other student had they been in her position. Missy’s teachers were more lenient with her than most—probably worried that the alerts were for an Endbringer attack. If only.

“I’ll be with you in a moment,” Renick said, not looking up from his computer as he finished drafting an email or ordering a missile strike. Most likely the former. On days like this, she missed Piggot.

Missy turned her phone back on, tilting it under the desk as she tried to covertly scan for any new messages that had come in. She didn’t get pleasure out of ignoring them, but she did like knowing that she was being missed. It was far from the worst thing Missy had done or felt.

There was one more text from about ten minutes ago.

whatever. when u stop being a lil bitch u know where to find me

Ten minutes was too long for Aisha to still be looking at the message window, right? Missy pressed down on the A key, tempted to reply, then backspaced when Renick cleared his throat. She hurriedly shoved her phone back in her pocket, pretending she never saw the texts at all. Maybe Aisha was right about her. Maybe Missy was trying to fix that.

“Last night,” Missy said.

“Last night?” Renick asked.

“I fucked up.”

Renick remained quiet. Had any of the other management been here in his place, Vista was sure she would have immediately been chastised for language, which would have killed all motivation for her to talk further. Maybe that was the idea, and the PR department existed solely as a smokescreen. If the Wards didn’t talk about what was bothering them, then the administration didn’t need to bring in therapists, and business went on as usual. The logic tracked; why look under the hood of your car when it drove perfectly fine?

“I’ve been running through what happened nonstop since then. Like if I hadn’t decided to leave, then the woman wouldn’t have—”

“Vista,” he interrupted, using her professional name. She was grateful for that bit of distance, for all that it failed to absolve her.

“I just need her name.”

“Why? You can’t change what happened.” He sighed, standing up and opening the door for her. “Go home. Get some rest. We’ll discuss this further at a later date, when emotions aren’t running as high.”

Missy didn’t budge.

“Because of me, she’s dead! And you want me to just sleep it off?”

“It wasn’t because of you—”

“She only stopped outside to talk to me! The guy only fired on us because I was there, and she only got hit because I was too fucking slow to warp the bullet away! And I have no clue what to do or how to handle it, because none one of the others felt like this. Not Bastion. Not Shatterbird. So I’m just… I’m asking…”

She trailed off. Everyone staring at her from the main floor through Renick’s glass wall looked very far away and smudged—not because Missy suddenly needed prescription lenses or because she’d pushed this little office miles away from its original location, but because her eyes had filled with tears. Missy wiped ineffectually at them, feeling a little bit stupid and mostly very guilty.

“Her name,” Missy said again. The woman’s name wouldn’t fix it. Nothing would, but at least it was a start.

According to the report she’d stolen from Renick’s office three days after their exchange—a significantly more difficult thing to acquire, now that she and Aisha were pretending to ignore each other—the woman’s name was Isabelle Ortiz. She spent a full day going over the writeup, sounding out the name on her tongue in penance. No mnemonics were needed for Missy to commit it to memory. But there was only so much Missy could glean from the file, so she committed the woman’s address to memory, then went to scope it out.

Isabelle Ortiz lived a few blocks south of downtown, in one of the rare buildings that hadn't been destroyed by Leviathan. Missy had heard secondhand that all these places had persistent black mold and wood rot problems, and that the landlords were unlikely to do the necessary structural fixes to make it stop, but that didn’t stop the rent from going up.

As Missy made her way down the 7th floor hallway, she kept her eyes upwards, admiring the crown molding that ran along the seams of each wall. She’d gotten a bit into architecture back when she’d first triggered, trying to learn more about the materials and history of the buildings which she could reshape like clay. But artistic flair wasn’t as essential to making a shape structurally sound as understanding basic geometry, and her powers already gave her an innate understanding of that. Now, most of what she picked up was absorbed through the HGTV shows that both her mother and father watched religiously. Their neverending DIY construction projects never looked as good as the stuff on TV. Then again, the projects were never about some glossy end goal. It was an exercise in pretty one upmanship just as much as it was an excuse to keep on holding on.

Apartment 714, she’d understood as she approached the entrance, was one bedroom with a combined kitchen and common room. Missy sensed that there was a pipe in the bathroom that was about a month away from bursting, which was bound to flood both her apartment and the one right beneath. An under the table inspection paid for by her shady landlord would reveal that the flooding changed exactly nothing in her living situation, as the walls of the building were already overrun with black mold, and the city had suspended ordinances on mold remediation over three years prior to focus on other, more pressing housing issues. For Isabelle, who lived in fear of roaches divebombing her in the shower, who already had to walk two blocks south to wash her clothes at the laundromat, this would be the final straw of city living, and she’d ultimately decide to get the fuck out of Brockton Bay, or at least move to one of the quieter suburbs.

At least, that was what Missy would have done in her position. Isabelle wouldn’t be doing any of that now.

The door was locked, which was never a problem for Missy, so long as there was a gap between that and the floor.

Stretching and condensing the ornately carved sheet of wood, she lifted it into an open archway, stepped inside the apartment, and set the door back in place.

On the couch directly opposite to the door, an old tabby cat greeted her with wary eyes, then resumed licking its groin. Isabelle hadn’t mentioned the cat, but that wasn’t surprising. They hadn’t even spoken for more than five minutes altogether. Just long enough for her to say hi and offer Missy a cigarette. Missy hadn’t even had the chance to accept.

Missy poked around the combined kitchen-office-den for a bit, not quite sure what she was looking for but taking in every small detail nonetheless. She decided then that Isabelle was a lonely woman, but not an unhappy one. There was a framed picture of her alone in front of the Eiffel Tower, and backpacking through some temperate mountain range. There were nine unread voicemails from her mom stretching back through the past three months, and one drunken call from a guy named Travis that Missy quickly turned off. After a tour through the fridge and pantry, Missy had learned that Isabelle had an incorrigible sweet tooth, but was probably lactose intolerant. Missy threw out a carton of fuzzy, deflated blueberries, and washed the three dishes Isabelle had left in the sink. She fed the old cat, who became much friendlier with her after this fact, and let her get close enough to read its name tag—Pumpkin, which was apt enough considering its mottled orange coat. Missy ripped Isabelle’s schedule off the fridge before heading to her bedroom.

She didn’t know what else she was expecting. It was more of the same. Isabelle was organized but a little bit messy. She led a quiet and unassuming life, and judging from her weekly calendar, she liked to do the same shit every day. The Monday night excursion to a dive bar near the docks was an irregularity, but one Missy didn’t find suspicious enough to investigate further. She herself had made some uncharacteristic choices that night too.

Her mom would make a big scene at Isabelle’s funeral, and her coworkers would be mildly sad, and Travis would have to find a new hookup. As far as civilian deaths went, hers would barely make a splash. She would only be remembered around anniversaries and holidays, which were rough for everyone. Given enough time, she would not be remembered at all.

Missy sat down on Isabelle’s half-made bed, tucked her head into her knees, and began to cry.

Maybe this was Missy’s punishment for letting it happen. An eternity of living through the same damn day, where it was impossible to make amends or properly move on. Missy glanced down at Isabelle’s schedule. She would have liked the consistency, at least.

Pumpkin licked salty tears off her face with his sandpaper tongue. When Missy attempted to pet him, he leapt off the bed and back to his food bowl. Some fucking support animal. Missy sat up from the bed too. Her breaking in here must have seemed awful creepy to any outsiders, but Missy didn’t feel ashamed the way she had all the countless Tuesdays before this. Isabelle deserved to live. Since she could not have that, she deserved to be remembered.

What had she said again, after leaving the bar and crossing the parking lot to speak to Vista? It had been weeks, months, so long ago that Missy had feared forgetting entirely. This was an unfounded fear. Missy remembered the conversation perfectly.

“Vista, right?”

“Sorry, I’m on duty right now. If you want an autograph, you can swing by the Protectorate ENE Headquarters and I’ll speak with you there.”

“On duty for what? I don’t see any bad guys in spandex running around.”

“Well, they wouldn’t be very dangerous if you could spot them that easily. Imp, Othello, a few others.”

“Fair point. Want a cigarette?”

“I’m the captain of the Wards. What do you think?”

“I think you look like you’re having a rough night, and could use someone to talk to. What is it? Boy trouble? Cape trouble? Cape boy trouble?”

“I’m sixteen, not twelve.”

“Hey, I’m… well, my age isn’t important right now… I’m older than sixteen, and I have plenty of boy trouble.”

“It’s not boy trouble.”

“Something else, then. Well kid, whatever it is, you’ll probably forget about it by tomorrow. And if not tomorrow, then the day after that. You’ve got a whole lot of life left to live.”

Missy decided to walk back home from Isabelle’s apartment. Between the distance and the route, it would probably take quite a few hours. Her feet would be rubbed raw by the time she made it back, but she was counting on that exhaustion to put her in a deep, dreamless sleep the moment her head hit her pillow. If she didn’t make it back home, she’d just end up back in bed in a few hours anyway, and it would be like she’d never gone to the apartment at all.

Outside, the sun was directly overhead, bearing heat down on Missy’s head and the concrete all around her. If she peered through the urban thicket of downtown Brockton Bay, she could almost make out the rig across the water, shining white like a second sun.

Missy turned away from the blinding light, and instead found herself looking at another glowing dome: the time distortion bubble, washed clean from recent rain, round and bright as a worn pearl. She sighed. Now that she’d seen it, she couldn’t continue to pretend like it wasn’t there, as she’d tried so hard to do for the past few years. Missy began to walk towards it.

She had come here quite a bit, in the weeks immediately following Leviathan. Without the remains of Gallant and Aegis and Velocity to bury, it was the closest thing Missy had to closure.There were the people trapped inside the bubble too, Dauntless and some Empire guys Vista felt an inkling of pity for.

It was mostly Dauntless, though, whom she used to gaze at through the milky film of the time bubble. She could almost make out his silhouette, the helmet and the shield and the line of his shoulders, and the barrier between here and there was so tangible that Missy had often considered reaching out to warp it.

But there was no telling what kind of effect that would have. At age thirteen, Missy had not yet grown into her powers. She was a bit like Dauntless in that way, who had been heralded as the future of the Protectorate, just as she’d been labeled the future of the Wards. He’d been kind to her on the rare occasions when they’d patrolled, and he hadn’t treated her with kid gloves—a surprising feat, when she knew he had a son close to her age at home. She’d wanted to free him, she supposed, as a way to make amends.

To prove that if there was a future for him, then there was a future for her too.

Missy approached the bubble at the point where Dauntless was most visible, looking not at his familiar outline, but the world outside the bubble. The memorial had grown a lot in the years since. More people died, and Vista went off to fight other Endbringers, and then the Endbringers died too, until Leviathan’s attack on Brockton Bay seemed like the half-remembered dream of a child. The time that came before might as well not have existed at all.

The grass surrounding it on all sides was green and lush. Kids played catch along the circular strip and dogs frolicked. People only laid flowers at the carved stone wall on occasions like the deceased's birthdays, so the fence next to the bubble was relatively untouched. There would be a city event this evening for the fourth anniversary of the attack, but for now, it remained a public park, built because, not in spite of, the impenetrable white bubble carved through its center.

It was nice, but it wasn’t fucking fair. If all these people had found a way to move on and change, why hadn’t Missy? Why did she only want it for herself, now that the loop had robbed her of the opportunity entirely?

The barrier of the bubble looked more malleable than it ever had before, practically singing for Missy to reach out and touch it. She imagined Dauntless’ forever form observing all of this, people and the city and a world that would leave him behind.

Well, that made two of them.

Missy Biron woke up about thirty seconds before the alarm did the job for her, which gave her just enough time to slam a hand down on her phone before it started rumbling and screeching.

She sighed and rolled over. It was unseasonably cold for May—for now, at least. By noon, the fog rolling in from the ocean would all burn off, and her early morning shivering beneath the covers for warmth would be nothing but a distant memory.

There were no texts waiting for her when she checked her phone, but there hadn’t been for a few days now. Missy dialed a number she had memorized by heart, humming along to the tones of each digit.

It picked up after one ring, and a voice came out on the other end:

“Okay campers, rise and shine!”

“I’m sorry,” Missy said simultaneously, and then, “What?”

“—and don't forget your booties ‘cause it’s cold out there… it’s cold out there every day!”

Missy could hear the self-satisfied smile on the other end. She ran her fingers through her hair, smoothing out a knot that must have formed last night in the chaos and the combat.

“It’s hot as fuck today. Or it will be in a few hours. What the hell are you talking about?”

“I watched that movie you were talking about. I guess it’s kind of like our situation.” Aisha paused. “No offense, but I would not go through all that for one chick.”

“Neither would I,” Missy replied. “But I do care. I’m sorry for flipping out on you and ignoring my phone. I had some shit I had to sort through.”

There was something about Aisha’s texts she couldn’t quite remember, but Missy brushed it aside. Neither she nor Aisha were the touchy-feely types. She was confident her apology would be enough.

“Oh,” Aisha said. “Well, thanks. And I’m sorry too. What do you think about Fat Sal’s and then Euphonics of Dismay? Or—better idea—we could get drunk on the beach again and chase the seagulls around as payback.”

It all sounded wonderful. Amazing, even, so long as she and Aisha were there together. But her mind soon wandered to other places they had not been, places Missy had not been brave enough to go. There were pictures on the wall of Isabelle in front of the Eiffel Tower, backpacking across a mountain range, dancing at a party. All the photos in Missy’s house were covered by cloth sheets and dust. Each picture was a mechanical preservation of that exact moment in time. For Missy, this meant anger, stress, and artifice; that didn’t mean Isabelle Ortiz had felt the same way.

“That all sounds great, and I’d be glad to do it all again later,” Missy said. “But I’m thinking we should get out of Brockton Bay today. What do you think about Paris?”

There was dead silence on the other end. Not even the usual clamors of snowballing Heartbroken drama.

Missy had just started to feel self-conscious about the offer, when Aisha responded at last.

“What’s the weather like there?”

“How should I know?” Missy asked. “I’ve never been!”

“And you think I have? Let’s just go, and figure it out when we’re there. We can buy matching berets.”

They did not, in the end, buy matching berets. But Aisha did barter for a loaf of fresh bread from some cranky market vendor, all in halting, horrible French that she admitted to picking up from an unnamed former teammate. They drank coffee out of stupid little cups that cost as much as Dunkin back home. The knowledge that the money would return to her pocket the next day did not make Missy regret buying it any less; she’d tried and failed to like coffee throughout most of her tween years, to zero success.

They did all the other usual touristy crap with a sense of ironic glee that came naturally to teenagers. Somewhere past six in the evening—noon in Brockton Bay—Missy had found her joy morphing into something unironic, purer and genuine than anything else she had felt in a good long while.

It was the Pont des Arts that gave Missy pause, an old bridge that had become something of a romance landmark in recent years. The light of the setting sun reflected off the love locks, and the locks reflected off the Seine below, setting the whole bridge alight in a warm golden glow. There must have been thousands of them, and people still milled around trying to find space to place their own empty locks.

“Didn’t know you were into this cheesy kind of crap,” Aisha said, looking out in the same direction as Missy. Missy tilted her head, so that she could take in both Aisha and the padlocked bridge before her. “We could stop by a hardware store, I guess.”

“Are you kidding? The thing is completely covered already!” replied Missy, embarrassed that Aisha had even offered on her behalf in the first place. It alarmed her how much she wanted to.

“I don’t know, I’m sure you could find us some space.”

“I wouldn’t bother,” an older man said as he shuffled past them.

Aisha looked at him curiously. “What do you mean?”

“They’re taking the locks off in a few weeks. The whole structure is sagging from the added weight.”

Missy reached out with her powers, confirming the stranger’s words. She could have done something to fix the bridge—redistributing weight, shoring up supports—but the offer would have been hollow. It would just reset tomorrow. The locks were forever slated to be removed.

Up ahead, a couple embraced each other in delight, successful in sliding their lock into place. They had stuck it to another lock, which was stuck to another lock that was actually stuck to the bridge. Neither of them seemed too ashamed of how cheesy and futile the act was.

“Well that fucking sucks,” Aisha said, once the man had shaken his head and wandered away. “What’s even the point if they’re just gonna get taken down?”

“It’s cheesy crap,” Missy agreed, “but I still think it’s kind of nice. What does it matter if a lock stays up or not?”

Missy pointed to the couple up ahead, who were getting a bit too frisky for polite company. She would have attributed it to cultural differences, but they were most likely tourists too.

“The whole idea is that it’s permanent.” Aisha crossed her arms. “Otherwise scraps of paper would do the trick.”

“They don’t care about the past or future, where the lock came from or where it goes. The act in this moment is what matters.”

Aisha rolled her eyes.

“Even if it is a cliched defacement of a historical landmark,” Missy added. She kissed Aisha softly, and Aisha kissed her back. To any people passing by, it must have looked like they were celebrating their own padlock placement.

Missy brought them back to the coast, long after the night lights of Paris had switched on. It was barely night back in Brockton Bay, which meant they still had time to spare back home.

The Atlantic Ocean was quiet today. Missy pinched the waters at two narrow points, until PHQ and the city were a rising point on the horizon. Doing so felt as easy as breathing. Aisha, pressed into her side, went still in awe.

“Do you want to come over to my place?” Aisha asked hurriedly.

Missy paused mid-step.

“I come over to your place like every day.”

“I meant, I don’t know, stay the night or something. We can make popcorn and watch a movie. I’ll send the kids off. Whatever.”

“I’m not saying no,” Missy said slowly, “but you know it won’t last past midnight. You’re going to have to call me in the morning, same as you always do.”

Aisha shifted her weight from one foot to the next.

Missy narrowed her eyes. “What?”

“The way the loop works is—well, you wouldn’t know. You’re not conscious because of the whole explosion…” She vaguely gestured in Missy’s direction. “But I can crash at your place in the morning. If you want me there or whatever.”

Missy thought about all the times that Aisha had left notes in her room, warning her off, fucking with her, flirting with her, all three at the same time. It made sense that she had gotten in somehow, but Missy had attributed it to her powers. For better or worse, Aisha made things easy to overlook.

“So, what? You wake up before me?”

“It’s more like I don’t fall asleep at all.” Aisha looked everywhere but Missy. She scratched the bridge of her nose. She shifted her weight around some more. “How else did you think you were getting from the docks to your house every morning?”

“You mean you… you tuck me into bed every night?”

Aisha scoffed. As if Missy couldn’t see right through her self-consciousness.

“And it’s fucking difficult. Do you know how heavy you are?”

“It’s muscle mass,” Missy said, waving Aisha off. “So you’ve been going full creepy stalker mode this whole time—”

“Leaving you in some burned-out warehouse would be ten-thousand times creepier!”

“—and you were doing this before we met each other.”

“Being a villain and being polite aren’t mutually exclusive!”

“—and after we fought and I ignored you for like a week straight.”

“I knew you’d call me back. I’m impossible to hate. Literally. I’ll just make you forget that you hate me if you do.”

Missy brought them over the ocean in one big step, then released the coast of France behind them. Hopefully she hadn’t thrown off too many navigation paths of nearby ships or planes. Aisha trailed off, once again distracted by Missy’s space-bending display. Missy used the moment to catch her breath and consider the situation in all its stupid, sweet, stalkery glory.

“I’ll stay over tonight,” Missy agreed. “And then you can stay over with me and my fat ass tomorrow morning. I’d say the workout is good for your muscle definition but…”

Aisha threw her head back and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Missy hadn’t shared a bed with anyone since the days when her parents had still loved each other, letting her cuddle up in the warm hollow between them, so basically since never. She worried about moving too much, or having bad breath, or some other social faux pas that wouldn’t even occur to her until it actually happened, leaving Missy stumbling to apologize and explain.

The only consolation was that Aisha seemed just as confused at this level of intimacy. She’d set herself up across the bed from Missy, facing her but not quite touching. As stiff as she was, her eyes had begun to droop. More tired than Missy, probably because she’d been up way later into the night. It now occurred to Missy that Aisha was making the same commute to her house in the early morning that Missy did for her during the day.

They’d been playing a game of truth or dare earlier, which had eventually melted into a very honest conversation, which had eventually faded out into a comfortable, sleepy silence.

“Do you ever feel guilty?” Aisha asked Missy. Her mouth was slow to get the words out, her voice little more than a rasp.

“Of course I do,” Missy whispered back. “I don’t think you can be what we are without it.”

Aisha nodded.

“It’s kind of a useless emotion, though,” Missy continued. “I guess feeling bad about something you’ve already done is a good way to learn what not to do next time, but it doesn’t change the action that caused the guilt. So it happened. So you’re guilty. So what. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Right,” Aisha said. “Yeah. Right.”

She fell asleep not long after that. Missy was content to watch her for a while, and would have continued to do so until the clock struck midnight, but they’d gone a little overboard with the coffee and booze in Paris, and Missy needed to pee more than anything else in the entire world right now. With great reluctance, she pulled herself out of Aisha’s arms, and off to the bathroom.

On her way back through the bedroom, she stubbed her toe against a night stand. The act would have been more forgivable for someone who didn’t have a sense for these things, so the best excuse Missy could come up with was that she was both tired and distracted, and that Aisha’s room was both dark and unfamiliar. A few papers had fallen to the floor with the motion. Missy leaned over to set them back on the table, and saw something sticking out from the drawer. Her finger followed the wire, snakelike and frayed, back inside the wood box, where she discovered a thin, black box, all ports empty except for the one where the ripped wires had been attached. Missy flipped the whole thing over, indiscriminately boring in shape, color, and function. She knew what it was, though. They made Wards sit through too many types of workshops—self-defense, public speaking, tech and security protocols, some bullshit called “mental wellness”—for Missy not to recognize an NVR system. They were used in most common security setups, for remotely storing footage from cameras. So why the hell did Aisha have one tucked away in her desk?

Aisha shifted in her sleep, but did not wake.

Missy exhaled in relief, then placed the box back in the drawer in case Aisha woke before today’s events reset. Aisha moved with Missy as she climbed back into bed, evidently more comfortable asleep than she was awake, similar to how she was more open on the phone than she was in person. Her embrace was warm as the day after the fog had all burned off.

Missy Biron woke up about thirty seconds before the alarm did the job for her, which gave her just enough time to slam a hand down on her phone before it started rumbling and screeching.

She sighed and rolled over, nearly slamming her own head into Aisha’s. Aisha grinned.

“And how was the trek back through downtown this morning?” Missy asked. Her parents had never replaced her childhood twin bed, so it was a bit of a squeeze for the two of them to fit. Her left leg was starting to cramp. Missy resisted the urge to stretch it out, knowing that if she did so, she’d accidentally kick Aisha or imply she wanted the other girl to get up and go.

“Wouldn’t have been so bad if I wasn’t lugging you behind me.” Aisha laughed but did not meet Missy’s eyes. Missy was realizing she did that a lot. You’d think a person with the power to be ignored would have the opposite problem, always looking and never expecting to be looked back at. “Your house is actually insane. And I say that as someone who lives with the surviving children of a sex cultist.”

Missy flattened the bed out, giving her room to move her leg without having to push Aisha away. The pinching sensation was gone, but she still felt anxious, tense, thinking of the boring black box miles and miles away from here.

“I’d tell you to wait until the reno is done before you judge, but…”

“They’ll never be done at this rate,” Aisha said. “Sorry. Is that okay to joke about?”

Missy shrugged. “It’s not like we can do anything else about it. Do you think Fat Sal’s is open in the morning?”

“For me, they will be.”

“You mean for me,” Missy corrected. “You’re asking them because I asked you.”

“So fucking embarassing. Maybe we should just go back to that bridge and get a lock for ourselves, if we’re going to be so corny about all this.”

“Who cares? No one’s ever going to know, except for us.”

“Yeah,” Aisha said again. “Yeah. Right.”

Missy didn’t know that she was planning on taking the box until she did it, which was probably for the best. She didn’t know if she could have lied to Aisha’s face like that. But she’d been at Aisha’s house again, and Aisha had wandered off to find some shitty bootleg DVD she’d bought at the boardwalk the week and a thousand Tuesdays prior. Missy had shoved it into her bag and left not long after that. If Aisha seemed suspicious or hurt about her refusal to stay the night again, she didn’t let it show. She promised to call Missy in the morning and let her go. Same as always.

Missy barely remembered the walk home. By the time she’d made it, both her hands and the sculpted landscape around her were shaking. Missy smoothed it all out, clothes and cement, then took a deep breath.

Her dad now fast asleep and the half-eaten strawberry ice cream cake tucked safely in the freezer, Missy plugged the NVR into her monitor, and pulled up the footage dated from Monday, May 14th, 2015.

It was all static and noise, like someone had run a magnet too close to a tape or shoved sand in every crevice.

Missy sat back in frustration. She recalled Imp’s file back at PHQ, the vague descriptions of her powers. Dragon had reported that physical and digital copies of Imp eroded over time too, not as rapid as memories but still pronounced enough to be an issue. It was for this reason that her file had to be recopied on a biweekly basis, along with a few other standard procedures for stranger-related information. But if Missy remembered the footage at all, that meant Aisha hadn’t fucked with her memory. She still had a chance of figuring out what was happening, if she could simply get ahold of the tape sooner.

The tape looped back in a flash of white, and there was static and noise once again.

“Seven Suns or Euphonics of Dismay?” Aisha asked her every morning. And “What do you want to do today?” and “Are you happy?” and “Are you okay?”

“Neither,” Missy always said, and “Why don’t I come to your house?” and “Of course,” and “Yes.”

Though she didn’t say it, it was obvious that Aisha was nervous about Missy ghosting her again. Missy was too intent on watching the tape to care. She pushed her luck further and further, showing up at all hours to the South side of Brockton Bay, and leaving just as fast. Aisha let her come and go as she pleased. She must have grown suspicious, but only ever asked those same four questions, for fear or guilt or some other muddied emotion Missy was too focused to decipher. Missy supposed she could have asked Aisha directly for the footage on the NVR, but by the sixth or seventh day of her tape viewing attempts—who even kept count any more?—she had gotten ahold of it within ten minutes of stopping her morning alarm.

Aisha kissed her goodbye with sad eyes and a tight smile. Asking, borrowing, taking; in the end, it all amounted to the same thing.

A vignette had already begun to appear around the edges of the footage, darkening and blurring the corners of the warehouse interior in question. The side effect of Aisha’s powers was almost romantic, if you put much stock into padlocks on bridges and cities of love and that kind of dumb, mushy thing. Missy knew with certainty that this was the warehouse she could not remember. Aisha had told her there was nothing but dust and heaps of melted plastic inside. Missy had happily believed her.

A man came running through the back entrance, gun in one hand, a Protectorate-issue case in the other. He locked the door behind him, and caught his breath. Though she could not make out his face, Missy knew exactly who he was.

He fiddled with something inside of the box. He called his team for help, knowing that they’d already been apprehended a ways down the block. He paced and paced, and checked the lock on the door behind him, as if that would do anything at all.

There was no sound attached to the shitty warehouse security cam, so when the walls to the man’s left peeled up and open, Missy had to imagine what the sounds of creaking metal and scraping cement would be. The thunderous anger of the Ward Captain that stepped him, the volume and tone and content of the words Vista silently screamed at this random, nameless goon.

Director Renick had counted one dead in the explosion and surrounding incidents, a civilian by the name of Isabelle Ortiz. Missy suspected this man would have been in that number too, had any parts of him remained.

A person in dark clothes and a demon mask ran up behind Vista, the feed going out for a second as she appeared. When she waved her hands and shouted to Vista and the thief, the video stabilized again. Vista ignored her. The man took a step back towards the box, and just as the walls reached out to swallow him whole, threw the entire thing down on the ground.

He blipped off the screen. Missy paused the video, rewound, and watched it again. When she got to the moment where he disappeared, she paused, and leaned in close. It was a pretty shitty camera, so the best she could make out was a brief dark outline on the ground where the man had once stood, before that disappeared too. A nuclear shadow, there and then gone.

One too many mission debriefings and firsthand experience had taught Missy how to recognize ground zero of a Bakuda bomb without too much trouble. She sat back, and resumed the footage.

The woman in the demon mask reached for Vista, one-sided in her attempt to pull Vista away or shield her or simply find a single moment of comfort. A pearly white wall pushed towards them, smooth and familiar as the bubble that had marred downtown Brockton Bay for exactly four years now.

Just as it reached them, Vista reached back. In the instant before the footage whited out, Missy saw the distant outline of the two of them: her and Aisha, Aisha and her, enveloped in a shape of Missy’s own creation.

She stared at the blank screen of her computer, not bothering to watch the footage again. She’d seen enough.

Out in the kitchen, Missy heard the far off sounds of her mother putzing about. Pouring cereal, humming a familiar juvenile tune, being just as clueless as she’d been every other Tuesday. Missy’s eyes welled with tears for the birthday she wanted to celebrate, for the shitty parents she wanted to celebrate it with.

Her phone began to ring, some sugary pop song Missy set when she was eleven and had not bothered to change since. As it hit the chorus, Missy checked the caller ID. It was an unknown number. It was a number Missy had memorized by heart.

Chapter Text

There was heavy breathing on the other end. Missy listened to it, giving no signal that she was actually there, other than the fact that she had picked up the phone. She waited, and listened, and waited some more.

“I know you’re there,” said the voice on the line. “Please, Missy.” They paused. When Missy declined to respond, they continued: “You’ve gotta understand why I did it. Why I let you find out, and why I’m even talking to you right now and not attempting to make you forget.”

“Threats. Great. Starting off real strong there, Aisha.”

“Are you gonna let me be honest or what?”

Missy scowled. “Fine.”

“Good,” said Aisha. Nothing about her tone of voice or the way either of them felt right now agreed with that word. “At first, I was scared for myself. We were at the epicenter of the blast, and the only reason we were stuck in the loop—the only reason why we didn’t get disintegrated like that asshole in the warehouse—was because you did something with your powers. Twisted the shape of the bubble to shield us or whatever. I don’t know, I’m not a scientist. And when I realized I might die if I asked you to pop it, I couldn’t bring myself to tell you.”

“That’s it?” Missy yelled. She swallowed, then started again. “You were going to just let me suffer? Because you were scared of something that might happen if I knew?”

“What about this is suffering? What about this says that I don’t care about you? I tucked you into fucking bed before I even knew you, and I still do it every day before crawling back into my own.”

And she’d done it today, too, despite knowing what was going to happen. Did she seriously think that would endear her to Missy?

Aisha said, “There are infinite ways to make Tuesday, May 15th a good day, right? I was going to call my brother on the phone to catch up, and read every book in the downtown branch of the public library, and take the kids to museums and cook them recipes I finally had time to practice and perfect.”

But all she’d done instead was fuck around with Missy. Missy had done the same for Aisha.

She looked to her laptop, wiping at her face, unsure what to say. The footage had already begun to degrade again. Rewatching it was unnecessary. The events were burned into Missy’s memory. How she had ever forgotten, she did not know.

“You weren’t going to tell me,” Missy said. That was the most damning part of all. Because Missy might have gotten them stuck here in the first place, but Aisha had kept them trapped.

“I was going to, after a while. I did. I knew you were going insane.”

“You distracted me! The restaurants, the beaches, the concerts, the bed. Your dumb fucking smile, your nervous twitch.”

“You think I wanted any of that?” Aisha replied. “I fell in love with you, you asshole! And not a day goes by that I don’t regret it, because now when I think about that warehouse and the idea of popping the bubble, it’s your death that I’m most scared of!”

It was the most words she’d gotten out of Aisha about herself maybe ever, and Missy couldn’t calm down enough to consider them. She didn’t care about the bad French lessons or the suburban home full of kids too screwed up in the head to enjoy it or the newfound fixation on expanding her cultural literacy. If Aisha wanted to have a life carved in the shape of people long gone, then that was her business. But Missy wouldn’t do the same for Aisha.

Quietly, Missy said, “Maybe you should have stopped worrying about my death, and started considering what was left of my life. Goodbye, Aisha. Don’t call me again.”

There was nothing but heavy breathing on the other end.

Missy hung up the phone and cried. She’d been doing a lot of that lately.

Missy Biron woke up about thirty seconds before the alarm did the job for her, which gave her just enough time to slam a hand down on her phone before it started rumbling and screeching.

She sighed and rolled over. It was unseasonably cold for May—for now, at least. By noon, the fog rolling in from the ocean would all burn off, and her early morning shivering beneath the covers for warmth would be nothing but a distant memory.

Except the cold wasn’t a distant memory, because it would just be back tomorrow. All thanks to Missy. She ran through the events of last night, and all the nights before. When she came to no new conclusions about what she knew, she decided to stay in bed, maybe today or maybe forever. It wasn’t like there was anything else to do.

Her mom came in not long after that, a plate of charred toast and some old and bent cardboard party hat pulled over her head. Missy had never seen it before, which meant there were still unexplored avenues on Tuesday, May 15th. Missy didn’t care.

“Good morning, birthday girl—” Her mother stopped. “Is something wrong? Was it… work? Did patrol go alright? You’re usually out of bed by now.”

Missy sat up, pulling the sheets away from where Aisha had tightly tucked them. It would be pretty damn obvious if she decided to give up on getting Missy home one of these days, but for now, she seemed to be continuing to do it, out of guilt or fear or whatever the hell else rattled around in her stupid evil lying brain. Good. Missy wanted her to feel bad.

“Yeah, sorry,” Missy said. “I’m—”

Fine.

The hat had slipped further down her mom’s brow as she looked on in concern. Missy scrambled for an answer to the benign question, and found she could give one. She hadn’t been able to in a good long while.

“Can we just stay home today?” she asked in a quiet voice.

Her mom brushed her bangs aside, kissing her on the forehead. Missy sagged into the touch.

“Of course.” She smiled softly. In a certain slant of light, it almost looked like her mom was ten years younger, a time when Missy’s love for her was still strong enough to think her infallible, omnibenevolent, unwavering. And maybe her mother was all those things, before her own love had run its course and wrung her dry. Missy could not know for sure; it was so long ago that either of them had felt or believed those things. Time had a funny way of distorting things. “It’s not every day my baby girl turns seventeen.”

Unknowingly playing along with a cruel galactic joke, Missy’s mom suggested they watch Groundhog Day. She never let Missy forget that she’d been obsessed with it as a child, for reasons unknown to all involved.

“God, no,” Missy replied immediately.

Her mom sighed. “Everyone says that kids grow up fast, but you never quite believe it. Where’d all that time go, Miz?”

“Same place it always goes, I guess. If you really wanna watch some crap from my childhood, just put on one of those made-for-TV kids movie channel originals. Can you pass the popcorn over here?”

Missy’s mother passed over the popcorn, and turned the TV on. After changing channels a handful of times, they found one of those crappy teen movies—the standard sleepover shlock—and just let it run as background noise. Her mom vented about work, which was normal. The story about Susan-from-down-the-block’s ant infestation made a triumphant return, with new embellishments Missy’s mother must have thought up on the fly.

On screen, the teenage girls with crimped hair had begun fighting about a boy, though the dreamy boy with the swoopy bangs was just a stand-in for their other interpersonal conflicts going on, including but not limited to: the highly emotionally intelligent and very fast horse inherited from one girl’s dead father that was going to be taken away by a mean man in a cowboy hat, the group’s fraught choice between going on a popstar world tour or going to college, and a childhood betrayal between the two main girl best friends, which traced its origin all the way back to a forgotten 4th grade birthday party invite that had festered and expanded in the many years since. The girls were all seventeen, just like Missy.

“It’s a tough age,” her mom commented.

Missy stretched back, sinking into the couch. The idea of letting her powers go on autopilot—fluffing out the cushions, wrapping over and around Missy until she was all but consumed by the feathery cocoon—was tempting.

“I guess I’ll just have to wait and see. I’ve only been seventeen for a day.”

“And that one day? How’s it going so far?”

Missy clutched a tassel-laden throw pillow tighter, looking away so she didn’t have to meet her mom’s eyes. She could feel her mom’s sigh more than she could hear it.

“Every parent worries they’re gonna screw it up, and we were no exception. You remember what my mom was like before she died. And your father—well, you know how we don’t ever visit his mom and dad. I can almost excuse him for everything, just because I’ve seen what it was like. Bad parents make bad children that become bad parents.”

“Gee, Mom,” Missy said. “It’s nice to know how you really feel about me and my future.”

Her mom normally yelled at Missy for snarky comments like that. But rather than resort to scolding or harsh words, she simply said, “Do you know how hard it is, having concrete proof that me and your father messed you up?”

Missy blinked in disbelief as the words set in. She balled her fists up in the pillow, face growing hot with anger.

“You want me to feel bad for you? To apologize? Fine. I’m sorry me triggering because you and Dad were fucking fighting all the time makes you feel bad.”

“I didn’t mean it like that—”

“Then what did you mean?”

Her mother was quiet. The sounds of the movie had all but faded, racehorses and college concerts and frenemies gone as fast as they were introduced.

“Go ahead, tell me,” Missy said. “Since you’ve got my attention now.”

“It’s just… I hate knowing that you’re out there every day, putting yourself in danger. Like when we were in the car on the way home from school when the Endbringer evacuation warnings went off. Your twelfth birthday. I was taking you out for a treat—Starbucks, I think. You and all of your friends loved getting those “coffee” drinks and the overpriced pastries. Something about having your names written on the cups, I guess.”

“I remember. God. Officer Kerns—the guy who drives the team to PHQ on weekdays—he has two daughters in the sixth grade who love Starbucks.”

“Some things never change,” her mother said. “The rain was coming down so hard that traffic was backed up all the way from downtown to the waterfront. You got the call, and within five minutes, had cleared a path for me and all the nearby drivers out of the city. I had to turn off the locks for you to get out of the car, and then you were gone, like you’d never even been there at all. I remember thinking to myself, “This might be the last time I see her, and I didn’t even get to say goodbye."”

Missy shrugged. “Timing was tight with Leviathan on the way. If I’d gotten to the meetup just a few minutes later…”

“They said it was optional to fight, not just for Wards but for all capes, but there was never really any other option for you besides going. I would have kept you locked in the car if I thought it would have worked. And every day before you go on patrol, I think about doing the same thing. You’re so damn brave, Missy. But I really, really wish you weren’t.”

Missy looked away again, bringing the pillow up to her face.

“Well, at least there aren’t Endbringers to worry about any more.”

“But you still go out on patrol. Like whatever happened last night. I don’t know if it’s better or worse that I don’t know what’s going on any more. And I’ll know even less when you’re an adult. I don’t know, maybe I never understood.”

No, she didn’t. And she certainly couldn’t now.

Her mom sniffled, brushing down Missy’s hair with one hand. It was one of the few maternal actions she performed with complete sincerity, and so Missy never minded.

“But that’s just how it is with kids. You’ve already surpassed us in every way, Missy. I might not like that you’re a hero, but I’m proud of you. And I can’t wait to see what you do next.”

They settled back into their positions on the couch, just a little bit closer than they’d started. By the time the credits were rolling, Missy was fast asleep, sunk halfway into the cushions and between her mother’s arms. It was the kind of moment she wouldn’t have minded living through again.

Missy spent the next seven Tuesdays learning guitar, before realizing that any calluses formed would immediately reset. She knit half a scarf, then knit the same half of a scarf again the day after. By the third day, she got fast enough to finish it, but it didn’t look very good. It was cold and foggy out the next morning, but the scarf had been completely erased from existence. Missy made another one, just because she could, because in the infinite span of these twenty-four hours, she could do both everything and nothing, and neither option was something the human brain was equipped to deal with.

Missy considered gifting it to Aisha to replace the threadbare scarf she seemed dead set on wearing everywhere, then thought better of it. That one probably had more sentimental value anyways. And Missy didn’t really want to talk to Aisha anymore, after she’d put so much work into hiding that this whole loop was basically Missy’s fault.

She wondered what Aisha was doing. Besides dropping Missy off at home every morning. Missy didn’t know how to feel about that, so she stopped thinking about it entirely. She went to school, she went to work, she stayed home. There were birthday celebrations with her mom and there were celebrations with her dad, and there were celebrations that didn’t happen at all because her mom and dad were fighting over who got to celebrate with Missy. She considered picking up guitar again.

When Missy could stomach no more of this unending agony, she went and sought out the only person in the world who was qualified to talk about Wards, time-related altercations, and falling in love with villains.

There was an apartment north of the docks, close to where trains came in and out of town, that Missy had memorized a while back. She’d never been before, despite knowing the address by heart. In fact, she’d done her best to avoid it in recent years, much like the time bubble downtown. The address had been slipped into her uniform locker on a ripped piece of paper years back, some time between Echidna and Behemoth. The other Tuesday, Toggle pointed out that it was super weird that they used to measure life in those kinds of atrocities. To Missy, it was weirder that they had stopped.

She knocked on the door to the apartment, then looked down at the carefully embroidered welcome mat at her feet. Missy stepped off it, not wanting to dirty such nice needlework. She looked to her left and to her right. The Undersiders seemed more like a loose alliance than a full cape team these days, but it was still good practice to keep an eye out for any nearby, lurking villains when you were intruding on their so-called territory. Though really, all this was made moot by the fact that the one Undersider Missy didn’t want to run into had the power to go unnoticed.

A few moments later, the door opened. Lily, hair a little longer and face a few years older than when Missy had seen her last, looked back in confusion. By the time a smile appeared on her face, she was already diving in for a hug.

“Vista, hi! It’s so good to see you. Any reason you’re stopping by—not that you’re not welcome, obviously. I’m just surprised. It’s been years.” She caught her breath, pulling away. “How are you?”

Missy shook her head. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Lily raised an eyebrow. She seemed at-ease, comfortable. “Ooh. Gonna elaborate on that or…?”

“Yeah, actually, I will. Do you mind if I come in and ask you a few questions too?”

Lily stepped back, gesturing inside with her free arm. “Lead the way,” she said, then shut the door behind them. Missy resisted the urge to take one last look over her shoulders.

Lily set her mug of tea down, concern pulling at the corners of her mouth as she listened to Missy explain everything. Apparently Parian—Sabah, Missy learned, since Lily seemed comfortable throwing her real name around—was a big fan of Earl Grey.

“Sorry,” she said, once Missy had caught her up. “It’s just a lot to take in.”

“Director Renick said the same thing, every time I told him.”

“And you’re sure it’s just you and Imp stuck? What does that mean for me and Sabah? For people in Brockton Bay? Everywhere else? Because I definitely feel like a normal, real person that time passes correctly for. Not counting my powers, I guess. Did you check with Dennis?”

“No, he’s still in Phoenix. We haven’t talked since he left—his mom moved to Arizona with him. Wasn’t much left for them in Brockton Bay, I guess. But it wouldn’t matter anyway. I already checked the files on Bakuda, and just about all the other time-based capes out there. There’s not a tinker or a thinker or trump in the world that could solve this problem for me by today. Not one I could get in touch with, at least.” Missy took a long sip of her own tea, careful not to get too excited at what Lily might say next. She’d been disappointed when looking for answers so many times before. At least it felt good to confide in someone else. Or maybe it just felt good to talk to an old teammate.

“And Imp?” Lily asked. “I don’t know how I can help, if you think I’m just going to forget tomorrow, but maybe if I get in touch with her today…”

“She doesn’t know how to get out,” Missy said. “If she did, she’d tell me. She knows she owes me that much.”

“And people think regular breakups are hard,” Lily muttered under her breath. Missy flushed with embarrassment, or maybe something else. She hadn’t been thinking of it like that. “So what was it you wanted to ask me?”

Missy took another sip of tea, then put her cup down too. Quickly, like she wouldn’t be able to get the words out if she said them any slower, she asked, “What was it like when you killed Gray Boy?”

Lily, to her credit, answered just as quickly, “Glaistig Ulaine killed Grey Boy.”

“The Gray Boy clone, I mean. How’d you figure out how to get around the time bubbles?”

“Oh. I didn’t.”

“What?”

Lily scratched her head. It was strange to see her so comfortable and casual, when she had been one of the most professional capes Missy had ever had the chance to work with. But Missy couldn’t bemoan the loss of a good hero, when this was the person who had come out the other side. Maybe the world didn’t need big heroes any more.

“I pretended to be caught,” Lily said after a moment of consideration. “I was just out of the line of one of his loops, but when he was staring head on, it all looked the same. I saw the opportunity for what it was, so I started screaming on repeat. Used my powers to time it out right, and repeated. And Gray Boy just watched and waited, like he was enjoying the show. I screamed for what must have been hours. There was no other choice. He would have caught on if I hadn’t, and trapped me for real. Just when I thought my throat was rubbed completely raw and would give out on me, he looked away.”

“So you shot him? Through the bubble?”

“No. I don’t think I could puncture one, enhanced timing or not. I stepped around, and I shot him in the base of the neck, which I knew would kill him instantly, and stop him from looping himself or me.”

“There was no trick?” Missy asked, the hopes she didn’t even want to have in the first place fading yet again. “No moment of realization? You didn’t figure his powers out?”

“Not at all. But I knew mine well enough to make it work anyways.”

Lily’s words echoed through Missy’s head long after Lily had sent her home, hands full of homemade tea blends, despite the fact that they’d just be gone again tomorrow. Lily also told Missy she was welcome back any time, whether or not Lily remembered inviting her. Missy recalled the footage of the explosion, the way Aisha had reached for her as the bombs went off, the way Missy had reached out, instead of back at Aisha. The chrono effect had looked near-tangible in the grainy feed, the same way people could rest their palms on Dauntless’ bubble if they didn’t mind losing a little bit of skin. Unlike downtown, the warehouse explosion hadn’t expanded in an even manner, hadn’t formed a closed loop—at least, not anywhere that Missy could see.

She thought about her powers, and the ways they interacted with the world. If space and time were inextricably related, why could Missy affect one but not the other? What exactly had she done that night?

Missy Biron woke up about thirty seconds before the alarm did the job for her, which gave her just enough time to slam a hand down on her phone before it started rumbling and screeching.

She sighed and rolled over. It was unseasonably cold for May—for now, at least. By noon, the fog rolling in from the ocean would all burn off, and her early morning shivering beneath the covers for warmth would be nothing but a distant memory.

At breakfast, her mom poured her a bowl of cereal, the sugary kind that purportedly caused cancer. Missy also ate a banana. Her cravings for them had come and gone, but today was a lucky day. She liked eating them again.

Her mom made idle conversation, comments about the weather and neighbors and current television shows that Missy had heard before and would hear again. She brushed Missy’s bangs aside and kissed her forehead. She wished Missy a happy birthday.

Her mom didn’t know that Missy knew that her mom hated that Missy was a hero, because it had happened because she and Missy’s father were shitty parents who were shitty to each other, and endangered Missy’s life and mental wellbeing on a daily basis, and every good thing she had achieved as a Ward, every life she had managed to save, had been in spite of Missy’s mom and dad. Missy also knew that her mom didn’t know that Missy had gotten a woman named Isabelle Ortiz killed last night.

When she was done with her cereal, Missy asked her mom, “Do you wanna take the strawberry ice cream cake out of the fridge? I was thinking we could celebrate my birthday together right now, since I’ll be at work later tonight, and you and Dad are switching.”

After a moment of confusion, her mom agreed. When they were done with the cake, Missy hugged her mom tight. She did her best to commit every detail to memory, from things familiar—her mom’s hand on her hair—to the new—how somewhere along the way, Missy had gotten taller than her mom and hadn’t realized it. Time was funny like that.

At school, Missy aced her bio test, and the Spanish presentation right after that. During sixth period, Scatterbrain worried about the project he’d forgotten to turn in for Ms. Sakamoto’s class, and Officer Kerns offered to take them out for ice cream or Starbucks to cheer him up. When Toggle and Scatterbrain looked to their Ward Captain for a response, Missy surprised them all by agreeing. No one batted an eye when the three capes showed up to PHQ twenty-five minutes later than usual, happier than they’d been in months, or maybe ever.

Director Piggot would never have stood for such a violation of procedure, no matter how quiet Tuesday, May 15th, 2015 was for cape and criminal activity. Then again, Director Piggot wasn’t here any more, nor were most of the Wards who’d worked under her.

When Director Renick called Missy into his office, Missy went readily, and told him, “The woman who was killed last night—Isabelle Ortiz—had a cat named Pumpkin. You should probably make sure someone feeds it.”

Renick stared at her in confusion, so Missy added, “She told me last night. About Pumpkin the cat. She was a good person, and I don’t think I’m going to be okay with what happened and how I reacted for a long time.”

“Well,” Renick responded, adjusting his glasses, “we have counseling available for these things. It’s not your fault, you know.”

“I know, but that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with, and it doesn’t bring her back. Do you mind if I go home early today? I know we’ll need to have a disciplinary talk later, and I’m going to lose a lot of my responsibilities, but I just think I need to take today off.”

To his credit, Renick didn't look at her pityingly, though he was probably thinking all sorts of sympathetic, infantilizing things.

“Of course,” he said. “Take all the time you need, Vista.”

The path south through downtown and into the suburbs was so familiar, Missy might as well have been on autopilot. She’d already gotten halfway there by the time it occurred to her that she could have just called instead, but by then Missy was committed. Her section of accordion-folded sidewalk deposited her at a nice house on the corner of a sleepy street, with kid bikes scattered across the yard and chalk dicks of varying artistic quality rendered all across the cement driveway.

Missy stood there for what felt like a lifetime, trying to remember why she was here. Still, she waited. She felt more sure of this than she’d been in anything in her entire life. That feeling, whatever it was in the absence of her memory, was worth holding onto.

“You should have guessed,” said a voice to her left.

When Missy didn’t respond, they continued, “You knew what I could do to make people forget. You’ve seen me do it before, to you and to half this damn city. Why didn’t you ever go inside the damn warehouse, Miz?”

For the same reason she avoided thinking about Isabelle Ortiz, and why she continued to let her parents carve out their two spheres within the same home, why she didn’t answer phone calls or texts from Dennis after he’d transferred to Phoenix, why she never visited Lily, and every other piece of life she’d turned her back away from over the last seventeen years. It had always been easier to pretend that things were fine than to actually acknowledge the problem. Because what the hell was Missy supposed to do when there wasn’t actually a solution? What was she supposed to do when there was one?

“I guess I just wanted to see the best in you,” she told Aisha.

As Aisha clutched at both of Missy’s arms, something occurred to Missy: as angry as she was angry at Aisha for keeping the warehouse from her, she was angrier at Aisha for taking on the burden of truth by herself. Her powers, her team, her actions, her family amounted to the same damn thing. Always lonely. Even with the two of them here together.

“And I still do,” Missy added. “That’s why you’re going to help me break the loop.”

Aisha flinched. Missy grabbed at her, closing the space between them so she couldn’t get away. Even if she forgot, Missy was determined not to let go.

“Can’t it wait another day?” Aisha asked. She pressed her head into the crook of Missy’s neck.

“Or another year?” Missy countered. “Ten? Fifty? Until we couldn’t even stand the sight of each other and you didn’t have anything left to lose? Did it occur to you that we might have actually made it out okay? That if we wait and it does work, forever would have fucked our brains up so much that normal won’t be possible any more?”

“Who fucking cares about normal! You don’t like your life! Your parents suck! The Protectorate treats you like a joke! We don’t even need capes anymore and you won’t get into college anywhere and your future sucks. Your future just totally fucking sucks, Missy Biron!”

“Maybe it does,” said Missy. “Maybe it will. But I want to find that out for myself. I think you deserve to, too.”

She could feel the exact moment Aisha began to cry, a wetness gathering on her neck that wasn’t from sweat or condensation from Aisha’s breath. Missy hugged her tighter, and cried too.

When they’d wiped all the snot and tears and all that other baby shit away, Aisha said, “I’m scared you won’t survive.”

“And I’m scared I’ll forget you. I’m scared you’ll let me forget.” Missy wiped away one stray tear she must have missed. Her stomach grumbled. “God, I’m hungry. I would kill for a burger from Fugly’s right now.”

Aisha shook her head. “They just had to pick Tuesdays to clean up the rat shit.”

“Right! I’m eating at Fugly Bob’s. Do they think I care about a rat dropping or two?”

Aisha laughed. “Alright, fine. Let’s make a deal. I don’t know what’s going to happen in that warehouse, but I know I can’t stop you so I might as well tag along. And tomorrow—tomorrow like Wednesday, May 16th, tomorrow—if we’re both… us, we meet up at Fugly Bob’s for dinner.”

“You sure you’re going to be able to get there on your own?” Missy asked. “Since I’m usually your ride across town.”

“Hey, I get your ass home easily enough,” Aisha replied. “Are we doing it or not?”

Aisha stuck out her hand, and Missy took it, along with her whole body for a kiss.

“Deal,” Missy said.

Even to a cape with extensive field experience, the docks were creepy at night. The one saving grace of the area’s stark geography was its proximity to PHQ, whose blue-white forcefield pulsed from across the bay like a nightlight, dull and round and soothing all at once. It reminded Missy of the time bubble to the south of here, a space that kept capes separated from the outside world, not unlike PHQ. Missy could go her whole life without seeing another fucking dome.

She didn’t use her powers once they got into the area proper, taking it step-by-step. Aisha walked beside her, keeping a firm grip on her hand. Aisha’s presence faded and returned, like she was fighting against the impulse to turn tail and run. Missy wasn’t worried, though. Even if Aisha doubted herself, Missy knew for a fact she would stay to see this through.

Char marks mixed with shadows as they approached the warehouse in question. The smell of smoke and chemical compounds hung heavy in the humid night air.

At the door, Missy and Aisha kissed one last time. No words were exchanged. They held hands as they entered.

It was exactly where the security cam had ended. A filmy white barrier separated Missy and Aisha from the center of the room, where the explosion had originated. She could see two vague outlines inside, one reaching towards the other, the other reaching forwards. It was her and Aisha, thrown together by chance all those nights ago.

Missy squared her shoulders. So maybe she couldn’t bring Dauntless back, or save Isabelle Ortiz, or get her parents back together, or rectify any of the other thousand microscopic and huge tragedies she’d experienced in the past seventeen years, but she could do this. It was exactly like Lily had said; to get out of the time bubble, all she needed to know was how her own powers worked.

The only thing keeping Missy Biron here was Missy Biron herself.

She reached forward, towards the pale reflection of herself, only to encounter resistance—Aisha’s hand, she realized, still clinging onto her own. Missy looked back at the reflections, two people who hadn’t even known each other all those Tuesdays ago.

When Missy reached forward again, she didn’t mirror her past self’s pose. Instead, she threw one hand forward. With the other, she reached back to Aisha, and held her close.

It was as simple as a trip to the suburb south of downtown, Missy thought. A routine trip to Fat Sal’s at the boardwalk, or an interlude in Paris, France.

The walls of the warehouse bowed inwards, and the white surface of the bubble cracked open. Together, Missy and Aisha stepped through.

Missy Biron woke up about thirty seconds before the alarm did the job for her, which gave her just enough time to slam a hand down on her phone before it started rumbling and screeching.

She sighed and rolled over. It was unseasonably cold for May—for now, at least. By noon, the fog rolling in from the ocean would all burn off, and her early morning shivering beneath the covers for warmth would be nothing but a distant memory.

She blinked, trying to remember why she knew that. Weather was predictable in Brockton Bay this time of year, she supposed.

She blinked again, looking around her room for the first time with new eyes. Her shelves were a little dusty but undisturbed. Clothes in the hamper, sheets on the bed and slightly wrinkled. Everything as she’d left it.

Missy poked her head down the hall. The walls were covered for renovations, old childhood photos hidden beneath the taupe sheets. Missy stepped over tangled wires and rented power tools. The door to her mother’s room at the other end of the hallway was closed. She walked into the kitchen from the right doorway, and sat down. A few minutes later, her dad came out. He rummaged around the cabinets, retrieving a brand of health nut cereal that sucked in both flavor and taste, but probably added three months to a person’s life each time they ate it.

When her dad turned around to pour the cereal for the both of them, he stopped.

Missy was slumped over the table, sobbing with full-body shudders.

“Oh,” he said, and laid a steady hand on Missy’s back. “Does that mean you had a good birthday, or a bad one? Both? Neither?”

Missy laughed, spit flying, utterly uncaring of how fucking disgusting and insane she must have looked.

“Something like that,” she replied. “Do we have any leftover ice cream cake?”

The PRT put her on probation for the next six months. This amounted to a mandatory eight-week disciplinary workshop, increased one-on-ones with Director Renick, and sessions with a therapist they were flying in next week, not just for her but for the rest of the team. She also wasn’t allowed to go on any B-Class or higher missions, and had her hours cut in half. The result of this was that Missy was out of PHQ by 4:30 that evening. She called her father to let him know she was meeting up with some friends at the Boardwalk. He was so excited to hear that Missy had any friends at all that he didn’t put any stipulations on how late she could stay out, nor did he ask who she was hanging out with.

Fugly Bob’s was open, just as their sign promised. There were a few other people eating inside, but most chose to take it to-go, considering the whole rat droppings situation.

Missy slid into a booth in the corner, resting her elbows on the greasy laminate table. She’d gotten here early, which only made her anxious. She asked for a menu to pass the time, which was stupid when all Fugly’s sold was burgers. No one came by to take her order, but no one kicked her out, either.

At around half-past seven, a chill swept through the open front door and jingled the bell overhead, the last cold ocean breeze in Brockton Bay before summer set in.

Missy checked her phone. There was a number she recalled that was missing from her contacts, but she did not dial it. She had been patient for so long; she could stand a little bit more time now.

The bell by the door jingled again, but no wind swept in.

Missy stared at her phone, confused at why she was looking at it. She put it away, then looked down at the table. Why was she here when she hadn’t ordered any food? She shook her head; what a way to waste a free Wednesday evening, when those were so rare to come by.

As Missy stood up from the booth, a hand came down over her left shoulder, holding her in place.

“Hey,” said a familiar voice.

Missy broke into a large grin. “Hey yourself. What took so long? Did your watch break?”

Aisha sat down in the booth across from her. She waved her wrist in Missy’s face, before Missy caught it, and twisted it around so that their fingers were intertwined.

“The opposite actually,” Aisha said. “My watch is working, exactly the way it should.”