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“I wondered if you’d show up this weekend…” She didn’t bother to look over her shoulder at the scurrying sounds she had detected along the shore’s rock escarpment.
“Wow, you really are all that,” he gave a gruff assessment, climbing out of the rip-wrap and deactivating the cloaking device, his inky black suit shimmering into visibility.
“And a bag of chips, and a large soda, and an apple pie for dessert,” She gave a tired smirk, “But I figured after your little go around with your blonde friend here in the verb city, that you’d probably seek me out for advice. Just my luck it happened to be on this weekend of all weekends.”
Turning around, she eyed him. He was large, and firm, but the body was all wrong. He was more lean and angular than his predecessor. Probably owing to his age; or maybe to the heritage. Despite the rumors, she was fairly certain that the big man only had the one blood son.
She turned her eyes away from him and looked out to the verb-shaped tower in the middle of the port, the large G and O cast in concrete, glittering golden from the flood lights set around the building’s base.
“But detecting you wasn’t hard. We’re not in the middle of town with all the sights and sounds to distract me from knowing I was being followed. And you still need practice with the suit. You’re relying too much on the cloaking device. It doesn’t mask sound, just vision. I ought to know. I nearly got my head caved in mouthing off to an alien.”
“So it’s true that you used to wear one of these?” He sized up the smaller woman slightly in her long grey peacoat and warm weather clothes beneath it.
“I still do,” she flicked one of the big buttons on her coat.
The entire ensemble seemed to liquefy around her, transforming from grey, purple, and black to a sort of muddy slate. The lines and angles contracted, and a moment later resolidified on her as a patterned purple and black body suit with stealthy angular panels and aggressive lines of color.
“Mark X nanotechnology. I’m never without whatever I need to be the woman who can do anything.” She gave a brief gesture at the revealed battle suit, “Still wearing the mark 5 after all these years? I mean, not that it’s done you any disservice, but it’s nearly twenty years old. The myo-fiber muscles cost a fortune to repair alone,”
“I get by,” He gruffly snorted, not used to being shown up.
“No, your patron pays well to keep it in good repair. And my friend who makes the suits keeps them well outside of the public eye so most people wouldn’t know that you’re wearing the tech equivalent of parachute pants.” She rolled green eyes and smiled, “But you didn’t come here to compare fashion notes, did you?”
“You act like you know me, lady,” he narrowed his eyes, “You don’t know me from Adam.”
“Oh, don’t try to pretend you’re the one and only dark knight. I know your secret, even if it’s not polite to talk about it.” She smiled, trying not to roll her eyes at the teenage bravado. “You’re four inches too short and light by about fifty pounds. Unless you’ve been hitting the gen-editors hard and fast, you’re not fooling anyone who’s more than twenty years old.”
She flicked a nigh-invisible control on her forearm, and her suit metamorphosed back into the long coat and casual clothes to protect her against the lake breeze as she began again walking down the stony beach, “Now, what can I do for you?”
Sighing reluctantly, he peeled back the skin-tight cowl from his face, revealing a pointed jaw and bright blue eyes. “Well, it’s just that… I mean… Ten and… The Old Man told me this story about the kitty lady, but…”
“But he’s like, really old and junk, and you wanted to talk to someone who used to be what you are now, a teenage hero,” She allowed just a bit of the modern slang to sneak into her voice and shook her head, smiling once more.
“How do you know that I’m…”
“Because you carry yourself exactly like I did, for one.” She nodded, approaching a polished granite slab set in the lake shore. “Like you can stop the whole world if only you have a lever long enough. Your… employer never carried himself like that. He was much more like an iron block than a cocky… Adolescent.”
She heard a disbelieving sneer in his breathing and turned away from the stone a moment to look at him. “Beyond that, it doesn’t take the World’s Greatest Detective to figure out a few things. The old man takes on a handsome young assistant about the same time that the old city suddenly regains its defender? And then there’s that school you go to, a lot of weird stuff happens around that particular attitude adjustment center. Too much to be a coincidence when a rich man’s assistant is enrolled there as a student. Frankly, it’s mostly out of disbelief that more people haven’t put it together yet.”
She grinned slightly at the panic-stricken look that ghosted across his face. She also paused as she considered him. Damn he was a handsome kid. And those same blue eyes really almost could belong to the old man. No wonder the rumors persisted. But no, the jaw was all wrong, and he clearly was nowhere near so smart as the big guy. Same heart though. Besides, she’d done her homework on the issue, and doubted that the rich and powerful industrialist had had a fling with a no-name clerical assistant; wasn’t his taste or style.
“Oh, take it easy. If the super-guy out there in the tower,” she indicated the verb-shaped building on the island, “can disguise himself with a pair of glasses, I’m sure you’ve got a few years to hone your act before most people really start to get suspicious.”
“Fiiine.” He relented, but his expression didn’t really ease. “And you’re right. You used to be a teenage superhero, and you managed to balance high school, and world saving, and supervillains blowing up your prom, and dating and… how?!”
She laughed lightly and shook her head, “Believe me, it wasn’t easy. And you seem to forget. I didn’t really balance it. I didn’t even know I was living in the closet until college. Didn’t date a lot in high school.”
He moved closer to her and held out his hands, as if seeking divine intervention in his own troubles, “But you did! I’ve… I got this girl, you see… and she… she wants to be with me and I can’t- can’t tell her about what’s going on and why I can’t always see her when I want to and then there’s this other-,”
“And then there’s this bad girl who gets your jet-boots going and you can’t seem to let go of her either, I know,” the redhead cut him off, holding up her own hands. “I know about bad girls, believe me. They are hard to quit.”
She sat down on a handy bench and patted the seat next to herself, “Look, balancing life with superheroing? It’s never easy, okay? You either do it, or you don’t. Your boss never really did. For him it was all an act. You? From what I hear, you seem to be doing fine. It’s been over a year now and you’re still fairly sane and making good decisions. Heck, you’ve even got my best friend’s granddaughter on your side, so a tick in the 'banging’ category right there.”
Smiling, she continued to look out onto the bay of the verb city, “But don’t tell her I said that. She and her grandmother don’t exactly get along and she really doesn’t like me. I dunno why, but kids these days, go figure. Anyway, point is, you give yourself too little credit.”
She focused green eyes on him and nodded, “As to romance? Love? Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re young yet. Your love life will sort itself out…”
“And how?” he also looked out at the tower; less impressive than the justice satellite but still a signal that people fought crime with vigor for generations. “How did you sort yours out?”
“Well, for starters, I’ve known different kinds of love. Love changes, and what you think you want at seventeen may not be what you want when you get to be my age.” She sighed slightly. “My first love came when I was about your age. And it was with my best friend. Safe, sane, predictable as it could be. Everyone had been waiting for us to hook up. I would do anything for him. Well, anything except to pretend to be what I wasn’t, which was hetero.”
“My second love was a few years later… and she was my great love. The kind that challenged me and changed me and made me question everything about myself. We tried to make a real thing of it, but life had other plans, the way it often does.” She turned to face him again, “And that was itself a huge lesson, don’t be afraid of what life is going to throw at you. Go out and meet it on the field of honor and give it all you’ve got.”
“I’m sensing more to this story?” he tilted his head, watching the fifty-something woman sitting next to him, and looking past her to the granite marker set into the shore of the lake with its green “GO” shape and familiar if infamous name.
“Yes,” She nodded, a wistful grin on her lips, “I thought that after my great love came and went, that I’d never love again. But I did. My third love is the love of my life. She and I are happy together, and we need each other in equal measures. Without her, I’d have forgotten long ago what and who needed protecting. And she tells me that I taught her how to be a better cheerleader and remind her to be less serious.”
She patted the black-clad teen hero on the shoulder, “And who knows… if I live to be a hundred and twenty, maybe I will find even more kinds of love. I love my daughter even if she tries my patience worse than every supervillain I ever faced… or dated. Sometimes I wonder if she isn’t my great love reincarnated and sent to keep an eye on me. Keep me honest. And then there’s all my god-children and my inlaws, and the ones who aren’t with us anymore.”
“Point is, you’ll know what to do with experience.” She shook her head softly, cinnamon and silver strands of hair shining in the moonlight at the lights of the lamps along the beach path.
She stood up and left an ethereal and unnatural green orchid on the green GO stone that looked out over the bay.
“The big thing is…” she turned and faced the young superhero in the black bodysuit, “Don’t be afraid of what the rest of the world thinks. I did that twice, and it was never a good thing.”