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Brian’s father took a hard left turn, pressing him uncomfortably against the door as the force of the turn exerted itself on him. A moment later, the car pulled in and came to a seatbelt-jerking halt, and his father killed the engine, dropping the car’s cabin into further silence.
“We’re here,” he said.
Brian undid his seatbelt and opened the car door, leaning out and looking up at the apartment complex. Up there was Uncle Bart’s home, a place he’d been a couple times before, but not often enough or recently enough to remember it. Neutral ground, he’d come to think of it. Neither his mother or father would agree to meet at the others’ house, not at the gym, not at John’s house, not even at the diner.
Neutral ground may be the wrong term. It was the only place both of them felt was neutral enough, which meant their worsts could come out, because of course whenever they had an argument both of them thought they were in the right, and of course a neutral party would take their side.
He followed close behind his father into a slightly dingy lobby and up the stairs to the fifth floor. A few years ago, that might have winded him, but he had spent a lot of time exercising and training. He was a man of fifteen now, and it was gratifying that he didn’t have to worry about looking like an idiot, panting for air just out of the stairwell.
Uncle Bart opened the door when Brian’s father knocked, and Uncle Bart’s smile grew when he took the two of them in. “Rod! Brian! It’s been a while, get in here!” His arms thrown wide, the man approached like a sweater-clad avalanche, wrapping both of them in a hug. Brian’s nostrils were attacked by the strong cologne, and he did his best to avoid breathing in through his nose as he weakly patted on Uncle Bart’s back a couple of times, waiting to be released.
“Geddoff, man, come on,” Brian’s father said after a second, gently pushing Uncle Bart away and giving him what looked like a too-fake smile and a too-real punch on the shoulder. Uncle Bart took it in stride, laughing as he rubbed at the struck shoulder and saying, “not so hard, man, you know I’m a ball of dough these days.”
“Being soft is a choice,” Brian’s father said, with none of the usual heat. “You should stop by the gym- actually stop by, use the bags, get in the ring.”
With a laugh and a shake of his head, Uncle Bart dismissed the words. “These hands are for typing at a keyboard and eating Amira’s cookies. I’m sure if I swung at a punching bag, my fist would just squish up against it like jelly.” Brian, who’d just felt Uncle Bart’s strength first hand, disagreed.
While Brian’s father and Uncle Bart went back and forth with some good-natured bickering, Brian’s mind started to wander. It had been about a week since he’d last seen Aisha, and beyond a daily text-message check-in to make sure John was keeping his distance, they hadn’t exactly talked. Hell, Aisha’s side of the conversation was mostly smiley faces so he couldn’t even say they’d been exchanging words.
He felt like a failure as a man, as a brother. But what could he do? He didn’t have anywhere he could put her- their father’s house would be safer for her, but then their mom would raise a stink, and it could complicate the divorce proceedings. Uncle Bart’s apartment here would probably be great for her, but even if she could stay for a couple days out of the week, that still left the rest of the time that she was living in that shitty situation.
Sighing, Brian straightened out his shirt and followed his father and Uncle Bart deeper into the apartment, where the cologne smell gave way to the smell of something cooking- turkey, he guessed, but it was hard to tell with the spices and the smell of bread mixing in along with it.
The apartment wasn’t small, but something about the decorations managed to make it feel properly big. With a limited amount of square footage, its residents had managed to fit a bunch of furniture, some potted plants, tables with a bunch of knick knacks and pictures, paintings on the walls, and there was still enough room to walk and open up his arms a bit.
Taking Uncle Bart’s lead, Brian and his father took their places in the main space, one each to a plush chair across from a couch, with a small cathode TV on a stand off to one side and a dining table a few feet away to the other. Separated by a waist-high dividing wall, the kitchen was full of smells and light steam and the bustling of Uncle Bart’s wife. Amira. Aunt Amira. He didn’t remember anything about her, didn’t know if her plush body was the norm for her, if she’d put on weight or lost some since he’d last seen her, but at least he knew better than to talk about a woman’s weight.
“And Brian!” Hearing his name brought Brian back to the conversation, where Uncle Bart was now addressing him. “That school’s been treating you well, I hope.” Amira was looking over at them from the kitchen. “You know you can always come to me if you need help with English homework, and I promise to keep the lectures on APA short.”
While Brian put on a smile and nodded, made the appropriate responses, he wondered if it would be a good time to mention that he was planning on getting a GED so he didn’t have to go through two more years of high school taking up the first half of his day. It would take a lot of work, but he was past the point where he could be normal, live the dream of going to college and becoming a doctor or a lawyer and making bank.
Math problems and English essays didn’t mean much when you were a parahuman.
There probably wouldn’t ever be a good time to bring it up. Groups like New Wave had made him wonder if his father, if Aisha might be next, but from what he could find online, cape families were the outlier. Without bringing them in on the secret for their own good, it didn't seem right to our himself as a cape. And without his powers as an explanation, he didn’t have a good excuse for wanting to skip over school- it would look like he was trying to just plain skip, and nobody would take that well. Maybe if he was able to ace a practice test first, if he had the proof that he could do it, he wouldn’t just look like he was taking the easy way out.
Aisha needed to get out, and Brian was her best bet. But for Social Services to take him seriously as an alternative to their mom, he’d need to have a place of his own, and that took money. Money that he could earn by combining his normal skills with the novelty of his power.
For a while, they all made small talk, discussing sports, cape exploits, and even the weather. Apparently there were plenty of clouds ready to let down snow this Christmas, but whether they’d stick around or drift west was up for debate.
There was a lull in the conversation, and Brian was about to speak up when there was a knock on the door. Amira perked up and stepped around the divider to the kitchen, saying, “Honey, could you take over stirring for me? I’ll get the door.”
“Sure thing, sweetie,” Uncle Bart said, heaving himself off of the couch with an exaggerated ‘whoof’ and switching places with his wife.
Brian did his best not to fidget while they waited for Amira to return. She was a childhood friend of Brian and Aisha’s mom, and apparently they still kept in regular contact, but in his opinion, that wasn’t a good enough reason to overlook their mom’s habits. Especially not after her shitty behavior brought Aisha into the mess.
Still, that connection was the only reason that the whole family was getting together today. Their mom was here to have Christmas dinner with her old friend, and their father was here to have Christmas dinner with his cousin; it just ‘happened’ to be in the same place at the same time.
Aisha was the first to enter the living room, and she gave Brian a small smile which he returned with a nod. She was wearing her ugly Christmas sweater, a thick pile of wool with clashing red, green, and blue, and the words ‘Holly Jolly’ repeated at irregular intervals and angles. It was hard to tell with just a look, but she seemed a bit tired.
Aisha took a seat on one side of the couch while Amira and their mom came in behind her.
“Celia,” their father said, his voice flat.
“Hello dear,” their mom said, giving a smile that was probably supposed to look innocent.
Amira moved past, briefly getting in between the two of them. “Dinner’s almost ready,” she said. “What would everyone like to drink?”
“Just a glass of water, please,” Brian’s father said.
Their mom walked up to the dining table and pulled out a chair. “You know me, it’s coke or nothing.”
Brian glanced sideways at his father, hoping against hope that he’d pass up the opportunity for a jab at her. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the type of man to ignore an opening. “If that was true, the house wouldn’t stink of weed.”
Their mom scoffed. “Amira, can you believe this man? Some people just have no tact.”
“I’ll have soda, please,” Aisha said, getting up and moving to the table as well. Brian was thankful to her for interrupting before things got worse, but at the same time he didn’t want her getting in the middle of the crossfire.
He went to sit next to Aisha and said, “water for me too, thank you.”
Uncle Bart and Amira bustled back and forth from the kitchen, setting down dishes and plates of food. Soon, the table was stacked with a small Christmas feast and with a clap of his hands, Uncle Bart encouraged everyone to dig in.
Brian sipped at his water, watching as Aisha stacked her plate full of turkey slices, bread rolls, and cranberry sauce. He didn’t comment as she skipped over the green bean casserole, instead taking his turn with the turkey.
“Aisha, have some greens, they’re good for you,” their mom said, though her eyes were on their father. As if to say ‘look at how good of a mother I am, making sure she eats healthy.’
Aisha rolled her eyes, but dutifully scooped a single spoonful of casserole onto her plate, where it would no doubt be picked at and pushed around and otherwise not touched at all. Brian took a bread roll and passed on the covered bowl to his father.
“Have you heard of this Dauntless hero, Rod?” Uncle Bart asked, spooning out some casserole. “The guys at work say he’s one of those one-in-a-million capes whose power just keeps getting better and better. I heard that in a few years, he might be on the level of those big three, the Triumvirate.”
Brian’s father swallowed his bite of food and said, “I thought he got transferred out, somewhere up north. Am I thinking of the right guy? Tall, shot fire out of his hands, weird diver suit.”
“That’s Dynamo,” Brian said. He’d come up during Brian’s research into powers and how they might change over time. Nothing about Dynamo or state-change powers had really applied to him though. “He was a hero in Boston a few years ago, before Behemoth got him.”
Uncle Bart sighed. “That sounds about right. This is why I don’t follow heroes too closely; at least with football, the worst that happens to the star players is usually a concussion.”
Brian nodded slowly as Amira started speaking with Aisha and their mom about some event that had happened downtown this morning.
That was something else that had come up in his research: the dangers of being a cape. The fatality rates for Endbringers looked a lot more grim once you were a member of the group that the numbers applied to. Still, there was a lot that you could get away with as a cape, a lot of ways to make money. Some kid from the bad part of town looking for work? Nobody legit would want to hire him, and everyone else would be out to exploit him. A well-built cape who could cloud an area in darkness, though, that would open doors. Bounty hunting was too dangerous and he wasn’t equipped for it, and joining the government heroes wouldn’t guarantee anything except tying him down. There was a lot of gray area to work in though, and a lot of money that could be made by someone who could hold his own in a fight.
He glanced at Aisha, and happened to catch her eye. He didn’t want to involve her in his cape work, didn’t want to open her up to that. But even though cape families were an exception rather than the rule, it seemed there was some kind of increased likelihood of siblings or kids of a cape getting powers themselves.
After that night, John was convinced that the lights had just gone out, and Brian had knocked him around enough that he probably wouldn’t have a very clear memory of the event anyway, so he was mostly free and clear when it came to exposing his powers when they first manifested. But not every cape got that luxury; a lot of trigger events were very public, and very destructive. If Aisha had the possibility of something like that happening to her… well, she was a good girl, stayed in school, didn’t get out much. Had friends. It was hard to imagine her having a public breakdown and shooting someone with laser beams by accident.
It was better that nobody knew about his powers or what he was doing with them. ‘Don’t spread your shit around’ was some good advice, though he couldn’t remember where he’d heard it.
“Brian, buddy, you good?”
He looked up- Uncle Bart was staring at him, a faint smile on his face. Brian quickly tried to muster a smile of his own.
“Yeah, sorry, just thinking about something. Um, this food is really good, thank you for inviting us.”
Uncle Bart laughed. “It’s Amira you should be thanking, she did all the work on the food. I was just the taste tester.”
“You mean you kept sneaking bits of food as soon as they were done,” Amira joked. “You’re a menace in the kitchen, dear.”
“Mmh, reminds me of someone,” Brian’s mom said, her tone much less jovial.
“Had enough men around that you can’t even remember their names, huh?” His dad shot back.
Brian wanted to stop them. Really, he wanted to flood the room with his darkness just to shut them both up. But of course he couldn’t do that.
“Listen to this old fart sling his slander at me,” his mom said, gesturing. “He gets so jealous, I couldn’t even wear my nice necklace or he’d think it was some other man with his arms around my neck.”
“You…! No, you know what, I’m not doing this,” Brian’s dad said. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and set it down about as hard as you could throw paper. “Your childish games, playing around, I-”
“At least I know how to-”
The two were talking over each other now, though thankfully there wasn’t any shouting. Yet.
Brian looked down at his plate, still half full, and then decided to commit to the lie anyway. “Man, I’m feeling pretty stuffed. I think some fresh air would be nice, right Aisha?”
His words cut through the argument, though it was liable to start up again any second. At least he could get his sister away from them while they hashed it out though. She looked at him, at either end of the table, and nodded. “Yeah, sure,” she said.
Brian didn’t meet his father’s eyes, but out of the corner of his vision, he could see the man tense up as he stood. Their mom had a heavy frown on her face too, but she didn't stop them from stepping away from the dining table and slipping out.
Once they were just outside the apartment, Brian closed the door behind them and let out a small sigh.
“It’s fucked up,” Aisha said.
Brian shot her a sideways look. “Since when did you start swearing?”
Aisha stuck out her tongue at him. “You’re not the boss of me.”
“I’m not saying that, but…” but what? It wasn’t appropriate? She knew that. It didn’t fit his image of his younger sister? What did she care? “But you really should tone it back.”
“Whatever,” Aisha said with finality. “So are we going outside, or are we just sticking around here for a while? Because this is boring, but it’s cold out there.”
“Let’s… explore a bit, maybe. We can take the elevator down to the lobby for a start.”
Aisha shrugged. “I guess. Not like I want to go back in there, anyway.”
Brian led the way, slowly shaking his head. “Merry Christmas, sis.”