I inserted my key into the front door, twisted it, and the deadbolt retracted with a solid thunk in the door. Adjusting my bag on one shoulder, I twisted to look back at the street and waved to the unmarked PRT SUV. Officer David Collins, who was like my PRT case worker slash liaison, had given me a ride home as my patrol had run later than I’d originally planned.

  Stepping in, I closed and locked the door behind me. It was late Saturday night, and the lights were still all on. I gathered my damp hair behind my neck and squatted down to take off my expensive sneakers. I’d worn my Limited Edition BallerOne 2010 Championship Title pair, which had cost entirely way too much money for a pair of obnoxiously loud sneakers. I frowned and licked my thumb to wipe off a smudge of dust on the toe box of the right shoe. Fluorescent orange color restored, I straightened the gold and red laces and set them on one of the upper shelves of the shoe rack.

  Standing back up, a pair of arms wrapped around my waist and squashed me in a hug from behind, and I laughed. I smelled her body wash and shampoo combination and knew without a doubt who it was. I leaned back against her and rubbed the side of my head against hers.

  “Hey sis. Sorry, I’m so late. I know we were going to try and get a couple of games in tonight, but work was worky.”

  “Pft, who cares? You’re out doing important shit. Besides, we can still play, it’s not a weeknight.”

  “True!”

  “Let’s get into it then, nerd!”

  I gasped! “Nerd!? You’re a nerd, nerd!”

  She let go of my waist and stepped back, doing her own mock gasp. “Yeah, well, you’re a stinky nerd! First one to a controller gets the first draft!” With that, she sprinted to the staircase and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

  “Bitch!” I called out and ran after her. I waved at Mom and Dad on the sofa in the living room as I ran past.

  Dad said, “Have fun!” before he got back into whatever conversation he was having with Mom while they watched TV.

  Melody beat me to my room and had the Game Station loading up our favorite game: Heroes & Villains: Versus 2! I shut the door behind me and dropped my bag next to it, before grabbing my controller, turning it on, and flopping onto my bed. I was a bit worn down and more than a little sore. I’d worked out hard with strength training this afternoon, and then I’d gone on patrol to continue working on a case I’d been chipping away at for weeks now.

  We tried to keep appraised of illicit activities in the city, especially in the nastier parts of town or in areas where there was a high gang presence. I had been tracking down, surveilling, and logging these shipments, the Azn Bad Boys–ABB for short–had been moving around recently that were of interest.

  My bed felt good, and I rested my head back and closed my eyes while the main menu music came up, and Melody started setting up a match with our favorite settings. The clicks, beeps, and chimes paused a moment, and I felt the bed shift as she lay up against my side.

  “Bad day?” She asked me softly.

  “No, actually, I think I’d say it was a good day. I was able to put together some more evidence and connect the dots on some gang shit going on the north side. I think we’re super close to being able to make a move in on them. That’ll be nice. It’s been going on for two months now. I’ve been tracking this stuff. It could be big for me. My first… you know, win. The thing I can call successful and put my name to.”

  Her fingers traced over my face as she straightened some stray hairs and swept them to the side. We’d always been really close like this.

  She was quiet for a moment before saying, “I’m kind of worried that you’re going to get relocated when you graduate from the Wards. Or if you’re still here, you’re not going to have the time to be my sister as much.”

  I cracked an eye over at her and turned my head. Kissing her on the cheek, I threw an arm over her chest and squeezed her in a side hug. “Oh, Mel, try not to worry too much, please? I’ve poked around with some of the members of the Protectorate here and asked around. They’re short-staffed as it is, so I don’t think I have to worry about a permanent relocation. Maybe for training or something, but I’d be back before you knew it. You know I care a lot about making sure we get time, and it’s just not me hanging out with the other Wards.”

  She nodded and looked a bit relieved at what I’d said about the chances of relocation being low, but I could still see that it weighed on her somewhat. I studied her face for a moment, then looked down at what she was wearing.

  I furrowed my brow when my gaze came to her chest, and then my eyes darted back up to her face. “Did you go up another size!?”

  Her cheeks warmed with a touch of color, and she nodded.

  “Oh, come on, Mel! This is such bullshit! Are you kidding me?” I protested loudly, and she laughed, a warm, genuine laugh that seemed to knock out that doubt that had been lingering.

  “Maybe if you spent less time in the gym, you’d have more going on, dummy.”

  “You act like you’re not hard into athletics yourself!”

  It was something I harbored just a touch of resentment over. I’d had to drop my team memberships with my ‘knee injury,’ but Melody was about as much into sports as I was. We both had that competitive streak that ran deep in us. She’d continued without me, and I’d urged her to keep at it when she’d been talking about quitting in solidarity with me. We’d both played soccer heavily, and she had a scholarship to BBU. She also played basketball. I had done track and field as my spring sport. I was a pretty good runner, not great, but not bad. I was better at pole vault and downright mean with a javelin. I was happy for her success, but also a touch bitter at my career derailment.

  After triggering, I’d spent more time with the weight racks and a bit less on the treadmill, both because I really wanted to be stronger, but also because it fit my cover story better. I’d dropped my body fat percentage and had some pretty spicy abs now, but that also meant that I’d gone down a cup size up top. At least the glute training gains from squatting offset the other losses.

  I pouted at Melody. She rolled her eyes and poked me in the abdomen, timing her pokes with the points she was making as she said: “You know you’re still smoking hot, shut up. You could have your pick from like a dozen people at school if you wanted.”

  I huffed. “It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I just don’t have the time, and the double-life thing is already hard enough to manage as it is. I practically have a full-time job as a Ward with the hours I log, on top of school and trying to have at least a little social life here and there. You want me to cram dating into that, too?”

  Melody pursed her lips and thought a moment. “What about if you were to try and overlap with something else? Someone at work, maybe?”

  I gave her a flat look. “Oh my god, really, Melody? Really? Who?” I stressed the who with a note of incredulity.

  She blinked and groaned. There were a lot of fairly good-looking people in the Cape community locally. Despite being a little shallow at times, I tended to be more drawn to personality than I was figure. The big issue was, well, I was gay. Gay and in the closet, more specifically. There was a higher overall percentage of female capes than there were male capes, which was great for me, but macro trends didn’t always correlate to micro trends.

  Thanks, economics class.

  The pickings of female heroes in my age group in Brocton Bay were pretty narrow. And I had pretty strong feelings about a couple of them that made them automatic exclusions, like in the case of Sophia.

  “I’m not trying to nag you, but I still think you should tell mom and dad.”

  I lightly thudded my head against hers. “I know. And I want to. It’s just… whenever I want to bring it up, it’s never the right time to announce that. I’m maybe a little nervous and procrastinating a bit, but I’m also, you know, busy.”

  “So don’t make an announcement, dummy. Stop trying to be a hero at home, you’re not Phoenix Strike, you’re my sister. You’re overthinking things and hyping yourself up in a bad way.”

  I clicked my tongue and nodded. She was right, and I knew it. She was smarter than I was when it came to stuff like this. Or maybe had a better intuition for it. I could be introspective about a lot of things, but there was a whole… basket of worms inside, too, that I had tended to avoid poking around in. Most of it stems back to my power and related experiences.

  She reverted topics while I was stewing with the video game soundtrack bopping in the background when she asked: “What about Vicky?”

  What about Vicky, indeed?

  It was fair to say that the thought of Glory Girl in that context had crossed my mind more than once or twice. There were issues there. We got along great, we had a ton in common, and we already knew each other pretty dang well. I voiced my biggest doubt: “I’m pretty sure she’s straight, she’s always fucking around with Dean, you know?”

  “First of all, because she is dating or whatever you want to call that thing with Dean, doesn’t mean she’s straight, and you’re being deliberately stupid about that.” Her response was brisk, but she was right. “Secondly, her relationship is toxic. You know it, I know it, deep down, she probably knows it too, if she can see past her hormones. You’d be doing her a favor if you swooped in after one of her regular breakups and showed her.”

  I bit my lip, and my nerves twisted my stomach. Reluctantly, I admitted: “She’s also one of my closest friends I still have, and… I don’t want to fuck that up. What if she was put off when I approached her? There isn’t a ton of people I can just… really be myself around, you know, big picture.”

  Melody stared into my eyes as she responded: “Sure, that’s always going to be a risk any time you put yourself out there to change an existing relationship. But have you ever thought that maybe she feels the same things you do? Meaning that she feels that there aren’t a ton of people she can be herself with? Sure, she’s got her sister, but what about people she can date? Maybe she keeps bouncing back to someone that doesn’t work out because she feels she lacks options, too.”

  It was a point. A pretty solid one, at that. And I really hadn’t ever considered that possibility. Victoria’s on-off-on-off thing with Dean was always a subject of debate with the people in our social circle, with a lot of varying theories. I’d had a handful of late-night calls from her sobbing after the latest breakup. I liked Dean. I liked Victoria, but the two just weren’t good for one another. My personal theory was that both having emotion-manipulating powers was probably something that was going to make any romantic relationship fail, and I’d heard some pretty nasty rumors that he was a bit of a philanderer. He’d always been professional with me, though, oddly enough.

  “Buh! Maybe. I mean it, I’ll think about it. Right now, though, it’s high time you get taken for a ride on the school bus.” I grinned over at Melody and grabbed my controller. I had to hold the power button to wake it back up from where it had powered down while we’d been doing gross girl talk.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “You wish, you’re going to get walloped. I did some research online and am testing some new team comps, and I got one I think is going to mess. You. Up.”

  “Oh, it’s on!” We both sat up on the side of my bed and got into drafting our teams. I’d heard that this game was sorta similar to an Earth Aleph game, not sure if it was based on it, or the other way around. But it was one of my favorites. I liked fighting games, go figure, and I was solidly decent at them. So was Melody. We played the previous version so heavily we’d worn out two sets of controllers. Back in February, I bought her a proper stick-and-button arcade-style controller for our birthday with her favorite fighter on it: Narwhal.

  Narwhal was, to put it bluntly, fucking hot. She didn’t wear a uniform or costume at all. She fought bare ass naked with her skin covered by scales of her forcefield projections, with a giant unicorn horn made from her power that was her namesake. On top of being, you know, smoking hot, she was also super strong. Not in a brute rating sense, but in the game balance way. Her forcefields weren’t just defenses; she could also attack with them from range and slice people into ribbons. She had a finishing move of decapitating a character with one. Sick.

  She was always Melody’s first pick, and I couldn’t pre-draft ban her. I mean, I could, I just wouldn’t be a bitch like that to her and deny her favorite. Melody picked her.

  “You have some secret sauce for me, huh? I got a little of my own. You might be surprised by my team!” I picked one of my usual go-to characters, one I didn’t want to spoil my surprise until the last pick. I picked and locked in: Chevalier.

  “Boring. Typical. Lame,” Melody taunted. This was one area where I felt my trash talk was actually somewhat decent.

  “You’re going to get the fuck-you sword strike so, so many times, just you wait and see.” Chevalier had a charge attack with his giant sword that tended to knock whoever got hit by it clear off the stage for a KO, provided they had accumulated some damage or weren’t super robust.

  “Uh-huh. We’ll see about that.” Her cursor flew over the giant grid roster, flicking between pages. She kept lingering on one person or another, playing mind games with me. After the clock started ticking down the last ten seconds for the draft, she flipped pages and locked in Miss Militia as her second pick. Another one of her staple go-to characters, and for good reason. Miss Militia was a solid all-around pick because her weapon ability allowed her to pull out whatever kind of gun she needed at the moment or situation.

  I nodded. I wasn’t going to shit-talk Hannah, and she knew it. Plus, it was just a solid pick, I used her a decent amount myself.

  My second pick came up, and I futzed about a little in the same fashion Melody did, elbowing her a few times and teasing her antics before locking in Myrddin. He was very similar to Miss Militia, a sort of toolbox or utility pick, very versatile, and generally just a solid performer.

  “Nerrrrrrd piiiiiiiick!” Melody dragged her taunt out. “Nerd! Nerd! Nerd! Here comes the wizard with his stick!” I rolled my eyes.

  Myrddin was a hero who went in hard on the whole 'mystical wizard' thing. Robes, staff, beard, you name it.

  Time to see who the final picks were going to be. The so-called counter picks, the one character that would either shore up a deficiency in a team, or more often than not, be something picked to counter a specific strategy of the opposing team. Melody jiggled her stick around, flitting between heroes and grinning at me before she slapped one of her clacky arcade buttons and locked in someone I really wasn’t expecting.

  “LUNG! LUNG!? What the HELL! You never play villains, and of all of them, you pick LUNG!?”

  She cackled gleefully, savoring my reaction. Lung was a badass villain. The dude had literally fought a freaking Endbringer solo for a little while. In the game, he was like this anthropomorphic metal dragon-man who had a flame aura and a bunch of flame attacks. He had high defense, a trait Melody didn’t often prioritize, but was also hard-hitting. A bruiser or brawler type, which was the sort of hero I tended to use in my front-line strategy. His elemental damage was a major weakness of my front-line brawler, Chevalier.

  Lung was also a local. In fact, he was the leader of the gang I’d just been out investigating earlier, the ABB. I considered the trump card I’d been planning on using. Strong against Miss Militia. Strictly fine against Narwhal. Weak against Lung, shit. I stopped to reconsider for a moment. I’d spent a good amount of time making sure I had most of his moveset down. Although he was weak against point-blank area damage characters like Lung, he did have a few moves that could work. And he had a special effect, the same one Lung did, actually. Yeah, I could make the original plan work.

  I locked in Clockblocker to the sound of Melody exclaiming: “WHAT!”

  “All’s fair in love and war, sis. Looooove youuu.” I grinned impishly.

  Similar to Melody’s almost never playing villains, I almost never played any of my teammates. The game only had Vista, Glory Girl and Clockblocker and I always felt it would be weird to play as someone I actually knew in my peer group. Plus, the voice lines were pretty cringeworthy at times. The screen flashed, and a segmented spinning wheel whirled around; the screen background changed for each of the stages as it slowed down. Tick, tick, tick, tick… New York. Nice. Solid map. There were timed hazards you had to avoid in the form of cars and buses you had to jump over, but I never minded them.

  The screen flashed with the round timer, then the announcer called out: “TIME FOR BATTLE! FIGHT!”

  We got straight into the thick of it. Your entire team would be out on the screen at once in the side-scrolling two-dimensional format of the game, but you only ever controlled one character who acted as the front attacker, with the others falling in behind. The two non-active characters would fire off abilities, attacks, and defenses automatically while you piloted your active character, who was the only one who could be targeted. Swapping characters in and out, each of us built attack sequences with the members of our roster.

  I had a broader strategy in mind today, which I used occasionally, but was now really focusing on. As you dealt damage to the enemy team, you built a meter on the side of the screen your team was on. It also went up a little when you took damage, so it wasn’t just an overkill strategy. The meter was used to fire off special superattacks that tended to either swing the course of the battle or clinch a victory. The effect you did was based on executing a sequence of commands into the controller specific to that move. Just having Clockblocker on your team, just like with Lung, gives you a bonus modifier to gaining meter.

  The time limit was approaching, and both Melody’s team and my team were beaten up really badly. But my last attack with Clockblocker capped out my meter. I precisely entered the buttons I wanted for... there! Clockblocker pulled out a pistol and shot a green signal flare into the sky before all three of my team back-flipped off the side of the screen. “Oh come on!” Melody protested as Alexandria streaked down from the sky and cratered the pavement. A cutscene played of her flying like a blur from target to target and uppercutting each of them into the air, where they all hung in slow motion. She then flew up and punched each dead center, and one by one, each of Melody’s heroes smashed into various iconic NYC buildings. The game announced: “PLAYER TWO: VICTORY!”

  “She’s so freaking lame. She does too much damage; if your team is even close to low, she always gets a triple knockout,” grouched Melody. I grinned over at her and made it like I was playing a violin. She stuck her tongue out at me, and we went to round two.

  Melody was no slouch at the game. She was really damn tactical in the way that she played, making the best of every small advantage or good hit and minimizing the shots she took in turn. She’d probably be pretty good at martial arts, if she did them, come to think of it. She slightly altered her tactics this time, and I was on the defensive the entire round. She managed to K.O. Clockblocker, but I traded her and took down Narwhal. I kept having to fight Lung as Chevalier. Lung was low, and a good, solid charge attack would polish him off, for sure. I kept trying to get Lung into position for me to land a charge attack, but Melody was onto my strat. Every time I’d have Chevalier stance and hold his sword at his side, she’d immediately use Lung’s flame-breath attack, which knocked Chevalier out of his stance. “Ugh, stop spamming,” I complained.

  “I think I hear violin music all of a sudden, heh heh!” She taunted back.

  I swapped over for Myrrdin last moment for a finisher on Lung, but she had predicted it. Miss Militia tagged in, and my wizard ate a rocket directly to the face, going: “Noooo, my magic!” She then finished off my mortally wounded Chevalier for the victory. We went to round three for the match point. I pulled out all my stops.

  The fight was explosive right from the start. Each time she’d bring out Lung, I’d bring out Clockblocker and have him use his ranged attack of swinging around a rope and slapping Lung with it. I couldn’t get close to using his normal freezes, but I could get just outside Lung’s wreath of flames and freeze him, turning off his fire and allowing me to land some punches and kicks. Thankfully, his power didn’t actually work like that in real life; that’d be awful. When someone was frozen in time by his power, they were totally unable to be harmed. Things locked in time didn't react to anything at all.

  I was creeping in on a victory, but it was going to be a close one. I was focused on landing my parries with Chevalier. Unfortunately, my attention to the tight timing of the parry counters was distracting my greater awareness of the game state, and Melody had maxed her meter out without me realizing it. When her team suddenly withdrew, I knew the game was over, and I set the controller aside and leaned back on my palms to watch the fireworks and cutscene.

  I wondered who Melody was going to call in for her finisher, and wasn’t disappointed. With a scream of jet turbines and a whooshing roar, Dragon strafed over the top of my team, covering them in containment foam and immobilizing them. Flying off the side of the screen, she dropped down from the top a moment later in a vertical hover. She opened her mech suit’s mouth, and a flashing purple beam zig-zagged all over my side of the screen. A moment later, my remaining characters exploded in a shower of blood and precisely laser-cut meat chunks. The graphics were disgusting, but done in an over-the-top, unrealistic, violent way.

  “Dang, Mel. Good work. You really have been doing your homework, huh?” She turned and grinned over at me, a slight sheen of sweat on her forehead, and she wiped her sweaty palms on her yoga pants.

  She responded with a “Yup!” Holding down a button for several seconds on her controller, she shut off the game, and my TV went to sleep moments later, the room going more or less dark with just the two of us in here without the lights on and the door closed. She set her controller on the table next to my bed, and I reached over the side of the bed, set mine on the floor, and slid it under the bed so it wouldn’t get stepped on. Bringing my legs up and over the side, I stretched out on the bed and brought my hands under the back of my head.

  I yawned softly, and Melody snuggled up against me, pressing her front against my left side. We used to sleep together a lot, even as teens, until I’d triggered and started having regular vivid dreams and nightmares. With those came accidents and flailing around, and after I had elbowed her in the face and given her a wicked bloody nose one night, we’d stopped doing it.

  Speaking quietly, she asked me, “Do you like it? Being a hero, I mean. Having powers?”

  I went to speak but realized I was saying a kneejerk response, the one that came to memory simply from the sheer number of times I’d been asked it as Phoenix Strike doing tours and outreach. I closed my mouth and thought through my feelings. Feelings that weren’t always really easy to parse, understand, or properly handle.

  “It’s… It’s complicated, Melody. I have a lot of feelings and thoughts about it, and not all of them make any sense or are reasonable. I’ve been trying to sort through them and iron them out so I can think about them with Jessica’s help. I do love aspects of being a hero. And it’s for sure what I want to do with my life. The stuff the other Wards complain about? I actually like some of it. The paperwork. The reports. The meetings. Documentation. Investigation. The fighting, of course.”

  Melody was quiet as she listened to me, then asked: “I sense there’s a but coming?”

  I let out a soft sigh. “Yeah. I have regrets. I mean, we’ve talked about it plenty. Getting soft discriminated against for being a parahuman. The baggage that comes with being one, the experience, and the toll it can have. Some people get awesome powers, and some people get shitty powers. But even for people with awesome powers, there is often like… I’m not sure how to put it exactly, but it changes people, and often not for the better. Jessica says we’re all shaped and changed by our traumatic experiences, and then further by the realization that we’re now parahumans.”

  “Do you think your power is one of the shitty ones? Is that why you don’t use it much?”

  “No, that’s not why I don’t use it much, Melody. The truth of the matter is that just…” I trailed off, and my lip trembled, and my eyes itched. I wasn’t going to cry here and now, but damn if it didn’t hurt to say outside my therapy appointments. I sniffed, and she hugged me tightly. I choked up a bit, took a few deep breaths, and let them out slowly before saying what I wanted to say: “My power scares me. Not like spooky haunted house jump scares Mel, but like… deeply terrifying.” I let out a trembling breath. “I wish I could be like Alexandria or Victoria. They’re strong, and they’re beautiful.”

  She squeezed me again and told me: “No matter what you might look like when you’re using your power, you’re still my sister and I love you, now and forever. Even if you look like Medusa with your hair and eyes, you’re still my dumb, gay sister who’s too stupid to ask out a crush.”

  I sniffed and let out a “Hah.” It did make me feel better, though.

  “I mean it,” she said to me fiercely.

  I slid my hands out from under my head and hugged her back tightly. “I know you do, and it means a lot to me to hear it. Thank you. I think… I’m maybe just more sensitive to seeing people jump or jolt because I’m projecting my own fears. It’s something we’ve been talking about. That and how I need to keep practicing using it so I can wear away at that apprehension and fear, through exposure.”

  We held each other in silence for what felt like long minutes. I thought Melody might have drifted off when she finally spoke: “I wish I could be a parahuman like you. I know a lot of people say that because they want powers, fame, or money. But I wish I could have them just so I could be with you in this new life you’re moving on to.”

  That got the waterworks flowing. I really felt like I didn’t deserve to have a sister like her. Choked up and with my voice thick with emotion, I said: “Sometimes I do too. But I don’t want you to ever wind up in such a horrible situation. The kind of stuff that can cause you to trigger Melody, it… It really fucks you up for life. I don’t want that for you, no matter what. I love you too much to ever want to see you experience something like that.”

  The two of us sniffled and held one another, and at some point, I drifted off into a blessedly dreamless sleep.