Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

For most of Henry Cooper’s life, you’d have no idea just how strong he was by looking at him. But everyone who’d ever had PE class with him or seen him on the rugby field knew. Henry’s strength, good looks, and sweet personality made him one of the most popular boys at school, but he hardly knew it. He never noticed when girls fawned over him (his friends always had to point it out first). Whenever he had a crush, he was glaringly obvious about it, and no amount of teasing from his friends changed his ways. He spent most of his time being a normal British kid: going to rugby practice, studying hard (academics didn’t come naturally to him, but he was an incredibly hard worker, which helped him be above average at school).

It wasn’t until after puberty that he really started to fill out and look his strength. He worked in construction, and he was at his local gym most mornings for an hour on weekdays and 2-3 hours on weekends. It wasn’t one of those big, chain places, and pretty much all of the regulars recognized each other. Luther and the owners had even adjusted some equipment especially for him, like the triple reinforced punching bag he was using one Saturday morning.

While Henry was doing his thing, he started to realize that David, another regular, was staring at him oddly. Henry and David had exchanged “hellos” and “good mornings” many times and had engaged in a few short conversations, but Henry still considered David an acquaintance more than a friend.

Henry’s punches slowly came to a stop.

“You alright?” Henry asked David.

“Yeah, yeah,” David replied. “It’s just that Sylvia had on one of her docs last night and I sat down to watch a bit with her.” (Sylvia was David’s long-term girlfriend.) “It was about the assassination of JFK and at one point it talked about this conspiracy about a group of terrorists or something and one of them was a boxer who worked for the mob, and he looked just like you, except he was more ape-like.”

Henry raised an eyebrow. “Huh.”

“His face and haircut was exactly like yours. It was very odd.”

“What was his name?”

“Luther, I think.”

Henry nodded, and went back to his workout. David left to do his own workout.

After Henry finished, he went home, showered, and then went to the library for the first time since he finished his A-Levels.

He asked the librarian for a bit of help searching for information about JFK’s assassination, the Dallas mob, and the mysterious “Luther,” and together they found a book about 20th century American history that mentioned the conspiracy for about a page, with pictures of the six strange people who were in the conspiracy.

“My, that bloke looks just like you!” the librarian said upon seeing the picture of Luther.

“He really does,” was all Henry could think to respond. He thanked the librarian for her help and read through the whole page three times. It was an odd footnote in history, and he wasn’t really sure what to make of it. It was probably just a very strange coincidence, right?

Chapter Text

Joel Torres had a pretty happy childhood. His mother loved him dearly and the two of them were quite happy.

Then he went to kindergarten.

Over the following few years, the sweet boy who once begged his mom to let him help with the dishes became increasingly angry, standoffish, and hyper-concerned about appearing tough and masculine. Try as Elena Torres might, her good influence just could not outweigh society’s and school bullies’ bad influences.

From Joel’s perspective, entering elementary school taught him what the real world was like. It was a constant, brutal game of king-of-the-hill and he was usually a loser.

That was, until PE evolved from running around into games about throwing balls. In third grade, Joel played dodgeball for the first time, and over the course of the game he learned that just by focusing a bit, right as he let go of the ball, he could direct it anywhere through the air. The game was quickly over, with all his fellow students agape at Joel’s sudden talent.

Joel started playing around with this newfound talent more and more. He realized he could also control incoming projectiles thrown by someone else. All gator balls thrown his way were flawlessly caught. All his basketball throws went in the net, and with a bit of practice he was able to throw so perfectly he never even hit the rim. This led to some interesting new scenarios at school. The bullying mostly stopped now that Joel had a cool and possibly threatening power. Every single kid wanted to be on his team during PE or recess, but every kid who wasn’t claimed that the game wasn’t fair.

One recess in fourth grade, a basketball game was getting set up, but had devolved into the usual arguments over who got Joel. The team captains, Aaron Sawyer and Daniel Goldberg, were really going at it, and the other kids were starting to get annoyed.

“I wanna play already!” Brady Simmons (a brat) whined. “What if we just ban Joel from playing?”

Aaron and Daniel’s faces changed, and it seemed like they were seriously considering this. Joel’s stomach dropped. Ban him from recess?! They couldn’t do that, could they?!?!

“Wait wait wait, hold on,” Joel intervened. “There hasta be a better way to solve this.”

“How?” Aaron asked, crossing his arms. “You automatically win every game.”

“What if I don’t use my superpower?” Joel said cautiously (of course he referred to it as a superpower, wouldn’t you do the same at nine years old?).

Aaron and Daniel considered this.

“How do we know you’re not lying?” Daniel asked. “You could say you’re not using it but then still do it.”

“I wouldn’t do that! It’s not even that fun to always win anyways.”

“Plus, there’s the squiggly lines and the whooshing sound,” Lucas Macmillan piped up. Lucas was the brainiest kid in the grade who liked to play sports.

“What?” Aaron asked.

“You never noticed? Anything Joel uses his power on always has squiggly lines around it, like when it’s really hot outside. It also makes a whooshing noise. So as long as there’s no lines or whooshing, then he’s being honest.”

This changed things slightly, and eventually it was agreed that Joel wouldn’t use his powers again in a competition. There were still arguments every time Joel made a basket or got someone out, but eventually people started to trust Joel, and Lucas’s keen eye.

This didn’t mean Joel stopped using his powers at school entirely. Showing off and pranks were still entirely on the table. One of Joel’s proudest moments was hitting Mrs. Schaff right in the butt with a paper airplane in 6th grade.

Then 9th grade came. Joel’s high school, East Fairmont High, was extremely proud of their basketball team, which often did good, but not great, against other schools. All of Joel’s friends told him he had to try out, and he did, of course. At tryouts he didn’t use his powers, but he was still good and got on the team. The next day at lunch, Joel’s friends were all talking about how great this was for their school.

“I haven’t used my powers at sports since grade school,” Joel said. “Plus, isn’t it kind of more wrong to cheat at varsity basketball than at a kiddie playground game?”

“C’mon dude, think of how cool it would be to lead Fairmont to the championship four years in a row! You’d be legendary!” Aaron retorted. “And it’s against other schools, not your friends.”

Joel thought it would be cool to be a legend. He’d probably get a plaque with all the other star athletes in EFHS history. He also didn’t want to be a loser again.

~~~

The EFHS Cheetahs started their season at an away game against the Huntington Prep Knights, aka “the rich kid school.” Naturally, EFHS kids and Huntington kids hated each other, and it was a terrible way to start the season. The Knights averaged 3.5 inches taller than the Cheetahs, and while every Huntington kid came out to support their team, a measly dozen EFHS students came to cheer on theirs.

By the half, the Knights were winning 67-35, and after their coach had given a combined lecture-pep talk and left the locker room, everyone turned to Joel.

“Bro, you gotta do your thing,” Ethan Harlow, a junior, said. Joel looked at all the older boys, staring at him, ready to judge him as a cool winner or lame loser depending on what he said next. He was the only freshman, the smallest, and the youngest.

“Yeah, okay,” he said confidently. “Let’s do this.”

Joel and the rest of the team savored the delicious looks of confusion, fear, and anger they got from the opposing team and their fans as they tied up the game and then started winning. Of course, offense isn’t everything, and the Knights still played amazingly well, but by the end of the game the Cheetahs came out on top, 101-96.

For the rest of the season, Joel used his powers sparingly and smartly. He only used them when they were falling behind and needed a boost. He also made sure not to win every game. He and his teammates calculated how many games they needed to win to get to the championship, and only won enough to get them a third place ranking, so as to not be too suspicious.

For completely unrelated reasons, Joel was also growing out his hair. He mostly just wanted to. At games, he would tie it back in a little ponytail and he liked how that looked. The girl he was currently crushing on, Nikki Davidson, also said she liked his long hair. By the time of the state championship, the longest parts were very close to touching his shoulders.

The Cheetahs, of course, were crushing it in the championships. Joel suddenly became one of the most popular kids in school, because everyone knew he was the reason that this was happening. Joel relished it. Finally, he was getting the attention and recognition he deserved.

Then, the day before the Championship game (once again, against H. Prep, of course), the article appeared. Joel didn’t know who found the article and posted it on every bulletin board in school, but suddenly Joel’s newfound status was in danger. The article, dated to 1963, was about a crazy knife-throwing man who looked just like Joel if he was about 15 years older and grew a beard.

“Dude, is that your uncle or grandpa or something?” Aaron said with a laugh after seeing the picture. It was just before classes were about to begin and Joel’s friend group was loitering in the hallways.

“No,” Joel said hotly. “I don’t know anyone named Diego Hargreeves.”

“Wait… Hargreeves is the name of that Sparrow Academy guy,” Lucas said.

“The superheroes?” Joel asked, then he gasped. “Do you think I’m one of them?”

Everyone shut up and looked nervous, and then Joel turned around to see Principal Crane standing behind him.

“Mr. Torres?” Crane said menacingly. “Could you join me in my office?”

Joel nodded, and none of his friends even went “oooooo” as he trudged away.

Once in Mr. Crane’s office, the Principal got down to business right away. “It has come to my attention that you have been cheating during basketball games.”

Joel immediately lied and pretended to have no idea what Crane was talking about, and could he go to class please? But Crane wasn’t taking any of it.

“A few years ago the idea that a student might have telekinetic abilities was laughable, but now we all know better, don’t we?” Crane said 100% seriously. Those Sparrow weirdos had changed the status quo of humanity forever. He then opened his desk drawer and pulled out a VHS tape and put it into the small TV behind him. Joel gasped. It was a recording of the final four game that the Cheetahs had just won two days ago. He knew they were being recorded for posterity and airing on local TV, but had not realized that this could be used against him. After all, he’d gotten away with it all year.

Crane fast forwarded through the tape, until he reached a shot Joel had made in the second half. It was a really shitty shot, until Joel used his powers to swerve the ball back into the basket. You could even see the wavy lines Lucas brought up years ago. Joel watched the tape and realized how obvious it was for someone who knew what was happening, and he just sat there, with his jaw on the ground.

“We take cheating very seriously here at East Fairmont. We’ve had to drop out from the Championship. I am also going to have to ban you from participating in team sports and suspend you for three days.”

“No!” Joel cried. “You can’t let the preps win! Please, let the rest of the team play!” he pleaded. Joel was sure Huntington kids were behind all this, but he never found out who it was for sure. He also knew his reputation was ruined. As soon as word got out about this, he’d go from star up-and-coming athlete to loser reject all over again.

“I’m sorry, but that’s not how the rules work.”

Clearly the rich kids (and their parents) got to Crane.

Crane, of course, called Ms. Torres and told her what her son did. Joel had to wait in the office for her to come and pick him up, which meant she’d have to miss work. Once his mom came to take him home, they silently left the school (she would wait to discuss this with him in the car), but not before Joel snatched a copy of the article posted by the front door, looked at the picture for a second, then tore it up and threw out the scraps. He hated that face and hoped he would never have to see it again.

He let his mom cut his hair, finally.

Luckily, by the time he was old enough to see that face every day in the mirror, those old wounds had mostly healed. He often wondered who Diego was. His mom said he wasn’t any relative she knew of, and his grandparents weren’t of any help either.

Something about finally reaching the same age as Diego re-sparked his interest in figuring out who the man was. He also hoped to hopefully close that awful wound in his childhood for good. He went to the library and found the article that ruined his life, and then another about how Diego had escaped and disappeared after the assassination of JFK, never to be seen again. Diego found the whole story spectacularly strange, but there was nothing to connect Diego to him. No one in his family had ever lived in Texas, and very little was known about Diego’s past anyways. He looked at the co-conspirators photographed next to his clone, and he realized one of them looked an awful lot like a disgraced movie star who also had superpowers. She had disappeared off the map after that scandal though, so Joel didn’t know how or where to find her, and he didn’t want to contact a spoiled Hollywood actress anyways.

He left the library more or less feeling like his search was over, although a part of him felt unnerved about a man with his face being in a plot to kill the president (especially the one Joel always thought was kind of hot). But either way, he knew who Diego was now and could get on with his life. He did wonder if there was anyone else like him, the actress, and the Sparrows, though.

Chapter Text

Christina Mainhardt had always gotten what she wanted since she learned to talk. Well, it didn’t always work when she was little, but if she focused really, really hard, she could make her mom’s eyes glaze over with a milky-white hue and buy her the doll, then the clothes, then the car. She didn’t always use her power just for herself. At her mom’s boss’s baby shower when she was 12, she convinced the boss to give her mom a substantial raise. When her friend Julian scraped his knee on the blacktop, she made it go away. She turned Fs and Ds into As for fellow students for a price. She made cafeteria food edible. She made Mr. Donnelly, the physics teacher, a lot less mean.

By the time she graduated USC with an acting degree, using her special ability wasn’t even that hard anymore, and she began living the life she’d wanted since she’d fallen in love with movies, attention, and money. Right out of the gate she got herself the role of the older sister in a drama about a broken family losing their father. The movie, of course, did fantastically well with critics and audiences (anytime the director was about to do something stupid, Christina changed her mind), and the roles came pouring in. She was a cop, a criminal, royalty, a single mother with two jobs, and anything else she wanted to be. The money and fame grew, and she gave herself and her mother a very, very comfortable life (as comfortable as one can be in Los Angeles).

And then “Whites of the Eyes: How Hollywood’s Big Sister Gets Her Way” by Washington Post investigative journalist, Mr. Paul Blake dropped, along with video footage of Christina using her power on Evelyn Lee, the casting director on her latest film. Christina’s perfect life was suddenly destroyed, and no amount of talking to every connection she knew could get the scandal to go away. If Christina’s ability was all about getting inside people’s heads, Paul Blake somehow beat her at her own game. The scandal was like a virus that kept spreading no matter how hard Christina tried to contain it. She was effectively blacklisted in Hollywood, and her own mother refused to speak to her anymore, feeling completely betrayed and hurt. She had nothing, and she found herself unable to even use her power anymore, like some kind of horrible block was in her throat.

~~~

A few years later, Christina was a librarian in the-middle-of-nowhere, Ohio. People here didn’t care about Hollywood one bit, and a simple last-name change basically gave her a fresh start.

She was reshelving historical books one day, and she happened to pause on a book about the Civil Rights movement. She opened it up and flipped through the pages, looking at the photos, until she suddenly stopped on a page about sit-ins across America. There was a picture there, in the middle of the page, of a woman passionately yelling unknown words. The picture was labeled “Organizer Allison Chestnut at riot after sit-in at whites-only diner, Dallas Texas, Nov. 1963.”

But it was her. Allison Chestnut was maybe a few years older than she was, and wore her hair straight, but it was undeniably her. She flipped through more photos about the movement in Dallas and learned all about Allison Chestnut and her husband Raymond, and how she disappeared the day JFK was assassinated, along with a mismatched group of other strange people.

She learned that this other version of herself saved Raymond’s life after saying an unknown phrase to a white cop.

Christina slammed the book shut and put it back on the shelf where it belonged. She didn’t know what it meant, or how on Earth a Black woman could say something to a white cop and get him to leave a Black man alone without special, reality-altering abilities, and she really didn’t want to think about it. Maybe the story was wrong. Maybe she had dirt on the cop.

Christina’s mind did come up with more fantastical ideas, but none of them made any sense and completely broke reality as she knew it.

Of course, up until a few years ago she used to break reality every day…

Chapter Text

Stefan (Stef) Fischer was eight years old when he first monetized his ability to talk to the dead. Ilse Wager came to him during recess, tears in her eyes, and begged him to summon her little bunny rabbit who died last week. Ilse was a brat and not very kind to Stef in the past, so he initially refused. Then she said:

“I’ll give you a mark,” and suddenly everything changed.

Stef’s little business, which the school and his mother initially tried to shut down, became a very successful LLC after Stef graduated from secondary school. His mother begged him to go to uni and to not monetize his abilities (she thought it was bad for his ego, and, somewhat reasonably, found them rather unsettling), but Stef ignored her, and teamed up with his old school buddy Finn, who would run the business side of things.

For the first year of business, things were going great. He was the only real psychic in a world of fakes, and people would pay exuberant prices to actually SEE the ghost of their loved ones. Of course, it didn’t always work. Sometimes people had gone into the light, or they were just a stubborn bastard who didn’t want to be summoned, but more often than not, Stef got to reunite families, at least for a little bit. He also bought his own mansion at age 19.

Then he got his first televised interview.

Then the cult came.

Stef woke up early one morning to hear a loud commotion outside his window, and immediately was struck with the reasonable fear that people had come to invade his privacy after the interview. Finn, who was lying in bed next to him, noticed both the noise and Stef’s shuffling and groggily asked what was going on.

“Someone is on our lawn,” Stef said. “I’m going to investigate.”

“Have fun,” Finn replied with a yawn, before turning back over and going back to sleep.

Stef put on his robe and went downstairs and opened his front door to see a bunch of dirty, American hippies on his front lawn.

“IT’S HIM! IT’S REALLY HIM!” shouted an older Black lady in English.

Everyone started screaming at him and calling him “Prophet” and Stef immediately booked it back inside and locked his front door and pushed his entire body against it to try and prevent the gaggle of lunatics from breaking down his front door, but Stef’s slim frame was no match for all of them pushing together and the hinges of his door broke loose and the hippies came running inside.

“Prophet, where have you been?! Why did you leave us?! Have you stopped the apocalypse?? Tell us of your travels!!”

Stef looked at the gaggle of people surrounding and overwhelming him and just did the first thing he could think of. He raised both his hands in the air and yelled “STOOOP!” (Also in English).

Everyone else raised their hands to their foreheads and Stef saw that they all had matching “HELLO” and “GOOD BYE” tattoos on their hands, and a shiver of fear ran down his spine. He thought about getting those tattoos when he was 17, but decided against it. He then took a moment to assess the situation. They all immediately shut up when he told them to stop. He had control here.

“You,” he said, looking at the woman who first identified him as “Prophet.” “What the hell is going on here?”

“We found you, we finally found you,” she exclaimed overjoyed. “I knew if I just held on you would be back again!”

“What--?”

“So many of the old gang didn’t make it. Keechie he-- he passed on a few years ago and left me in charge. If only he could be here today!” The woman took Stef’s hands and tried to kiss his fingers, but Stef pulled his hand away.

“Who are you??” Stef asked incredulously. “Who’s Keechie?”

“Prophet?” The woman looked up at Stef with sadness and a tear in her eyes. “I’m Jill. Don’t you remember our last moments together? The dirt? The sex swing?”

Stef was so confused he wasn’t even sure how to respond (if things were different maybe he would’ve asked about the sex swing- he and Finn had been looking for ways to spice things up). “Lady, Jill, I have no idea who you are. I don’t know what dirt you’re talking about or what the sex swing is about, and I’m not a Prophet, I’m a Seance, and you’re all trespassing on my property!”

“You are the Prophet!” Jill said, with more passion in her voice. “You are the Exalted Klaus Hargreeves! You are the Starman! We are Destiny’s Children!”

“No I’m not! Get out of my house and off my lawn before I call the cops!” Stef cried, not knowing what else to do.

Destiny’s Children obeyed.

Stef went back upstairs. Something about the name Klaus Hargreeves was familiar to him, and he asked Finn about it later that morning while they were eating breakfast.

“Hargreeves?” Finn asked. “That’s the name of that American billionaire and founder of the Sparrow Academy.”

“Oh yeah,” Stef replied. “Those obnoxious superheroes, right?”

Finn nodded. “Have you ever thought you might be related to them somehow? Because you have a power too?”

“I never really thought about it. I mean, I have a power, why shouldn’t other people? I don’t even think I’m the only one who isn’t a Sparrow to have a power. Wasn’t there an American actress who had a massive scandal a few years ago after it came out that she used her magic power to hypnotize people into giving her roles?”

“True. But aren’t you more curious now? That Jill person said you had the same last name as the billionaire. Maybe you’re connected somehow.”

“How??” Stef replied. “I know my own life! I’ve never met that woman before and I’ve never used a sex swing!”

“Sex swing?” Finn said, looking a different kind of intrigued.

~~~

Later on, Stef couldn’t stop thinking about what happened that day, and he decided to look up “Klaus Hargreeves” at the library. He was in for a shock: a doppelganger/cult leader who only appeared in history between 1960-1963 and disappeared after the assassination of JFK. Stef and Finn spent weeks looking up anything and everything they could find on the mysterious man and concluded that he might’ve had the same powers that Stef had. Then, they furiously tried to contact Hargreeves. They mailed him letters, called his businesses, and used every contact they ever made to try and get him to respond, but he never did. He didn’t even send a “Cease and Desist” or a “stop fucking bothering me” letter.

Eventually, the more Stef thought about it, the more overwhelmed he became. He threw out his notes and told Finn to leave it be, a bit more harshly than usual . It was too much, too weird, too crisis-inducing. He tried to think about it as little as possible, and threw himself into his work and the occasional drink instead.

Chapter Text

It was first brought to Aleks Zieliński’s attention when he was 11 years old. His best friend, Jacek, came to him with his latest conspiratorial interest. Aleks liked Jacek because he was ambitious and smart, like him, and he was one of the few kids in school who wasn’t overpoweringly jealous of his abilities to blink small distances. Aleks just had to put up with Jacek’s interest in the conspiratorial and crazy.

“You know, you look just like a kidnapped American teenager from the 1960s,” Jacek said one day at recess.

“What??”

Jacek explained the conspiracy: a group of terrorists in a plot to kill President JFK and the boy that they kidnapped. None of them had been seen after November 22nd, 1963. Aleks, being a young man of logic, did not believe Jacek one bit. After school, the pair went to the library and Jacek showed Aleks the blurry black and white photo and Aleks had to admit they looked awfully similar.

Over the following 2-3 years, Aleks became more and more of the boy’s look-alike. For the first and only time in his life, he became interested in one of Jacek’s conspiracies, and they poured over every source and shady website they could find. They were able to find a lot about the cult leader, Klaus, and a decent bit on the Civil Rights Organizer and the boxer, and a bit of leaked info on the knife lunatic and Russian spy, but almost nothing on the boy, except, a bloody sighting in Wisconsin two decades later.

Eventually, Aleks got older. The paths dried up. Day by day he looked less and less like the boy in the photo, and only his old photos were proof that the pair looked exactly alike at one time. He lived thousands of miles and over an ocean away from Dallas Texas, and by the time he was going to uni he barely thought about it anymore.

He did still wonder about his powers often. As a kid, they were just a part of him, but after that pretentious American “Sparrow Academy” surfaced, he wondered more and more about where they came from. He was also glad his mother decided to keep him rather than send him to live with that billionaire. He wrote to Sir Reginald Hargreeves once, though, hoping that he would have answers, but he never got a response. After the Christina Mainhardt incident he thought about writing again, but figured it would probably be just as useless as the first time.

Chapter Text

Before those strangers arrived, Ben lived what he thought was a perfectly normal life in the Sparrow Academy, without an inkling of an idea that another version of himself saved the world.

Chapter Text

Mikhail Belyaev was always a temperamental child, which really sucked for his mom and dad, because when he cried things tended to explode. Their home life got a bit better when Mikhail was about six, and his mother and father (Tatiana and Dmitri) finally realized that wearing dresses made him upset, he disliked his long hair, and much preferred to play with the boys at his local school. This transition might’ve been impossible to pull off in Russia in the mid-1990s for anyone else, but Mikhail’s ability to glow with white light and hurt anyone, including adults, who tried to call him by his old name or be rude or awful to his parents led to most people forgetting that he was ever not a boy.

While Mikhail’s violent streak subdued as he got older and became happier with who he was, it never fully went away. He was a confident, ambitious, and sometimes aggressive young man who often made people forget he was only just over one and a half meters tall.

His parents, hoping to focus all this energy, first encouraged Mikhail to try sports, which he solidly hated. Then, he got old enough to join the school orchestra, and his parents heavily encouraged him to pick an instrument and try out. Mikhail picked the violin, and immediately fell in love with it, rising to first chair in the entire secondary school orchestra when he was only 15 (much to the dismay and annoyance of older violin students).

When he was 16, he won a national award for music, which put him on the government’s radar. A week later, agents arrived at the humble Belyaev house in order to question Mikhail and his parents. Mikhail found the questioning quite confusing. He had never been to the United States, let alone Dallas, Texas, and while he was born female, his deadname was not “Vanya,” and his parents stuck by the fact that Vanya wasn’t a name they ever thought about naming their son.

In the days that followed, Mikhail was also given a test to see how fluent he was in English, and it was determined he only had the language skills of about a 7-year-old native speaker, certainly wasn’t fluent, and spoke with a Russian accent, not an American one.

Mikhail desperately wanted to ask the agents why all of this was happening, but his parents forbade it. Mikhail was too young to remember what the Soviet Union was like, but his parents were not.

“But my powers!” Mikhail cried one evening, after the agents had left. “If they try to hurt me I’ll hurt them first.”

“Mik!” Tatiana cried. “You can’t just go around hurting government agents! Right now they’re letting you come home to us at night, do you want to have to stay there, locked up?!”

“I can bust out of any cell they put me in!” he retorted.

“They will find a cell you can’t bust out of!”

“I doubt they have one!!”

“YOU CAN’T DEFEAT THE ENTIRE GOVERNMENT!” Dmitri cried out. “For God’s sake, Mikhail, violence doesn’t solve everything!”

Mikhail quieted. His father was usually the kindest man he knew. He knew the story very well of how his mother and father were just flirting when he was born in a freak accident, and how Dmitri stayed by Tatiana’s side, and married her, and raised Mikhail as his own, even though nobody knew who the father was. Not that many people are so honorable.

“Ok,” Mik finally said quietly. “I won’t ask any questions…”

True to his word, Mikhail didn’t ask the agents any questions. He just answered theirs and did what he was told. After several months, the agents told the family that they were closing the case, and Mikhail was free to go, and he had a clean record. Tatiana and Dmitri were overwhelmingly relieved for the ordeal to be over. Mikhail was too, but he was still curious as to why this happened in the first place. With very few clues to go off of, he began to privately search for why he was of interest to the government. Because of the focus on English and America, he searched for sources about the United States. The following school year Mik took a world history class, and at the bottom of a page in his textbook about the United States in the 1960s was a footnote about the assassination of JFK and the strange conspiracy around it. One of the people mentioned was “Vanya Hargreeves.”

Vanya was the name the agents asked about all those months ago. Hargreeves was the name of that American billionaire Sparrow Academy man. Mik wasn’t sure how these were connected, but that day after school he skipped orchestra rehearsal and went straight to the city library to look up Vanya Hargreeves, consequences be damned.

The photo in the book he found shocked him. The person pictured really did look like an older version of himself. The eyes and the face were uncannily similar and the hair looked exactly like his hair when he was little. There were even records of Vanya exhibiting powers similar to his, including powers he had never tried before, like blowing up bullets or sucking the life out of someone (he wasn’t sure he really wanted those powers).

Suddenly, he was struck with fear that his parents put inside of him. What if they found out he knew this? What if the government did? He shut the book, put it back, and went out of the library and ran back to school. The conductor noticed he was late of course, but Mikhail made up an excuse about a really bad headache and quickly tuned his violin.

Nobody learned about what he now knew. He never talked about it, and he tried not to think about it too much. Too many questions, not enough answers.