MARK

I decided to tell my parents during breakfast.

I'd rehearsed it in the shower for like, for like half an hour to the point mom thought I was… well, doing something else, that was… awkward for all the parties involved, anyways... The point is, I was super excited, and could anyone blame me? I had been waiting for this moment for as long as I could remember, and now that it had finally come, I wanted to make it cool, memorable. After all, it was my debut as a superhero in the family. Instead I stood in the kitchen doorway holding the orange juice, opened my mouth, and what came out was a simple, "So I broke the counter at work last night."

Mom didn't even look up from her coffee. "What do you mean?"

"With my hands," I said, with a smile so wide it hurt my face. "I just… kind of destroyed it, you know… superstrength and all."

Mom blinked as she set the mug down slowly, and my dad, who had been reading the paper as he does every morning, folded it once, set it on the table, and looked at me for a moment, he didn't say anything, he just stood up, walked over, and held out his hand, palm up.

I stared at it.

"Squeeze," he said.

So I squeezed, I put everything I had into it, everything that had crumpled that counter like a soda can, and my father's hand didn't move. It didn't even tense. He looked down at our hands for a moment, and then something happened in his face that I had never seen before, a genuine smile.

Not the one he used at neighborhood barbecues when someone asked him what he did for a living and he told them he was a writer. This one went all the way up into his eyes, and for a second he wasn't Omni-Man, or the strongest man on the planet, or the man who'd been quietly disappointed in me for years without ever once saying so out loud. He was just my dad, and he was looking at me like I'd finally shown up.

"Debbie," he said, smiling like he had never done before. "He's got them! He finally got them! I told you he would get them!"

Mom made a sound that was half laugh and half annoyed at Dad’s reaction, and then she was hugging me, and I was worried about how hard to hug back, which is a stupid thing to be worried about with your own mother, and which I now understood what Clark had been dealing with every single day.

And he was much stronger than me… just how much does he hold back on a daily basis so as to not hurt others?

“How wonderful!” Dad beamed at me.

"I know right!"

"I knew you were a late bloomer," he repeated with a smile, but something behind that smile had adjusted a fraction of a degree, it was as if he was suddenly tense, I wonder why…. "We are not the first ones to know, aren’t we?"

"I… not really…."

"You went to Clark’s first, didn’t you?"

I hesitated, before letting out a sigh. "I went to Clark's, I know I should’ve come home first, but… I mean, I HAD to tell Clark, you know?" 

Mom's hand paused on my shoulder as she chuckled, while Dad's expression didn't change at all, he simply looked at me, and after a moment or two, he nodded once and turned toward the back door.

"Get dressed," he said. "We're going flying."

When Clark told me Dad was a strict teacher, I took his word at base value… but apparently I had underestimated how strict he actually was, I mean, he didn't teach how to fly so much as he removed the alternatives.

We went up over the treeline behind the house, him carrying me by the back of my shirt like a wet little kitten, and I asked at least four times how high we were going. He didn't answer. The houses went to squares and then to a pattern and then to nothing, the air got cold and thin and stopped tasting like anything, and I stopped asking questions because I was busy having a religious experience about the curvature of the Earth.

I could’t die from a fall like this, right?

Dad wouldn’t let me die.

"Dad."

"Yes."

"Why can I breathe up here?"

"Because you're my son."

“Can Clark breath here?”

“Clark can hold his breath for much longer than I can, son.”

Huh, I didn’t know that. “That’s coo– ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

It was here when he let go of me.

I want to be clear that I did not fly, I fell…. I fell with a great deal of fear and absolutely no idea what to do, tumbling end over end while the planet came up closer and closer, and somewhere in there I remembered Clark saying that for him the trick is deceleration, you can't just stop on a dime, which was extremely unhelpful information to receive from my own memory at terminal velocity.

He caught me about four hundred feet before my face fused with the pavement.

"Again," he said.

He dropped me eleven times, wait no, it was twelve, I was counting because counting was the only thing keeping me from throwing up. But I was learning, I could glide and crash with style, and that amounted to something, or at least that much I wanted to believe.

I lay there in the dirt, laughing like an idiot, with corn silk in my teeth.

“You really need to work on that landing…”

“Did Clark have these problems?”

“Clark’s…. Powers are different to ours, his flight especially, so his training consisted of a much different approach.”

His powers are different to ours, I thought he was just like a Viltrumite with laser eyes.

NOLAN

I stood in my kitchen with the phone in my hand, thinking… doing the same math I had been doing every night for the last few years, as much as I had been dreading this moment, the day had finally come… Mark had gotten his powers, which meant I had to make my move or admit defeat.

The mission required the Guardians dead, ideally in a single controlled engagement with no survivors and no witnesses, beyond Superman, who I still believe could be an asset to the Viltrum Empire, the Guardians were the only structure in this world that could organize a coordinated response against me.

Normally, this wouldn’t be much of a problem, years of working with them had allowed me to learn their patterns and weaknesses, the problem was something else.

The problem was Superman, who could hear a heartbeat in a different state, and could cross a continent in the time it took a man to finish a sentence. Clark… who had spent years learning to fight from me, and was now… the biggest obstacle I had in my path.

I was still confident in my ability to kill him, if needed be. But adding the guardians to that equation, would only end with my demise… I had run the engagement in my head perhaps a few thousand times, and the result was never in my favor.

If I wanted to do this, Clark could not be there, I had to make sure he was somewhere else, doing something that mattered to him more than a strange noise on the edge of his hearing.

I flew to the Kent farm.

"Nolan." Clark's father straightened up, wiping his hands on a rag, grinning at me. "You're early. Cards aren't till Sunday."

"Of course I am, but I'm not here for cards."

Clark looked up. He had grown into himself in the last two years — six and a half feet of him, shoulders like a door, despite all my training, he still moved through the world like a man carrying something breakable. He set down the wrench with the exaggerated care of someone who had learned the hard way what happened when he didn't.

"Mr. Grayson," he said. "Do you need anything? If this is about the poster, he lost that fair and square."

Poster? What poster?

"Mark has his powers."

Clark's whole face opened up. "I know! He came by last night, he was—" He caught himself, and I watched him do it, he was probably thinking. He came to me first, and you know that, and I don't know what to do with that. He rubbed the back of his neck. "He was pretty excited."

"He is."

"He is," Clark agreed, and laughed, and there it was — the thing I have never been able to account for. He was delighted. Genuinely, uncomplicatedly delighted that a boy who had been jealous of him for six years was now going to be able to do a fraction of what he could do.

"I have a briefing," I said. "World saving stuff, it may run long."

"Okay."

"Mark wants to go out tonight, to… well, you know, he's been talking about it since this morning and he will do it whether I permit it or not," I sighed, looking at him. "I would rather he didn't do it alone."

Clark blinked. "You want me… to babysit his first hero work?”

"In a way, yes," I nodded. "Teach him what you can, I have confidence in your ability to do so."

I have negotiated the surrender of several planets. I have stood in front of a species' entire governing body and explained to them, in their own language, why resistance would be answered proportionally, and I have watched them agree in fear of what Viltrum could do.

In all my life… I have never made an offer land as cleanly as this one did.

Clark's father made a low sound behind him, something proud and pleased, and clapped his son once on the shoulder. Clark didn't seem to notice, he was looking at me the way he had looked at me when he was twelve years old, sitting in my wife's kitchen with drywall in his hair and five buildings' worth of humiliation on him, and I had told him he kept getting up.

"Of course," he said. "No need to ask."

"Keep him east of the river. Nothing above street level until he can stop."

"Understood."

"And Clark." I paused in the doorway. "Thank you."

CLARK

Mark's first night as a superhero lasted eleven minutes before he tried to fistfight a mailbox by almost crashing into twelve of them… that had to be on purpose, there’s no way that happens so many times by accident.

Though I suppose that in his defense, he was aiming for a mugger. In the mailbox's defense, it had been there since 1974 and had done nothing to anybody. Mark came in low and fast and… a bit too enthusiastic and about forty degrees off the angle he should have taken, the mugger stepped left, and Mark hit the mailbox at roughly the speed of a city bus passing through the dangerous part of town. 

The mugger, to his credit, took one look at the two of us, put the wallet on the ground, and ran.

"That counts," Mark said, from inside the mailbox.

"It absolutely does not count."

"He fled, and left the wallet...."

"That doesn't make it better." I got a hand under the mailbox and peeled it off him. "Also… stopping a crime by doing crime? It kind of erases the score, I mean, have you forgotten that hurting the mail and anything connected to it it's a felony?"

"You're making that up."

"I'm not, actually. I read the code."

"Why would you read the mail code?"

"Why wouldn't I?" I said, crossing my arms.

I could still hear the mugger’s heart, he was about… six blocks away, I would let him think he escaped for now. I’ll catch him later, when Mark goes back home.

“Let’s practice your landing,” I added, looking at the poor mailbox. May it rest in peace.

Smiling, I flew with Mark to a rooftop and we sat on the ledge, and I made him do it again, the landing part, most people think this is  easy… because in the comics heroes just do it, they touch down on the balls of their feet with the cape settling behind them, and nobody explains that a hundred and eighty pounds moving at two hundred miles an hour has to put that energy somewhere, and if it isn't into your legs then it's into the sidewalk, and if it's into the sidewalk then it's into the water main under the sidewalk, and then you're standing there at two in the morning explaining to a very tired man from Public Works that you're so sorry, and yes, you'll pay for it, and no, you don't actually have a job, because this doesn’t actually pay, unlike some people think.

I've had that conversation four times. I would like Mark to have it zero.

"Slower," I said. "You're not stopping, you're deciding to stop, but you keep your momentum without any change until the last second, and those are different things. Come down the last thirty feet like you're setting down a glass of water."

"What kind of stupid example is that?"

"It's not stupid, and you know what I mean!"

He got it on the sixth try, not bad after killing twelve mailboxes in a single night. Cracked the tar paper instead of the roof, which was progress, and he came up grinning with his arms out like he'd stuck a landing at the Olympics, and I laughed.

“Feeling good?” I asked.

“Damn right!”

I wonder how his powers will progress now that they finally awaken… Viltrumites usually get their powers young according to Mr. Nolan, but it took Mark a lot more than normal Viltrumites… it’s too bad I don’t have a book about them… and Mr. Nolan is very… reserved about his people.

"You're doing the thing," Mark said.

"What thing?"

"The zoning-out thing. William's right, it's unsettling."

"I was thinking about how much I like you."

Mark recoiled so hard he nearly went off the roof. "Ugh. Don't."

"As if anyone could love your ugly face, maybe that’s your real superpower, being incredibly hideous."

"Very funny."

“I mean… am I wrong though?” I asked, grinning. “How many girlfriends have you had since we entered highschool?”

“The same amount as you! AKA ZERO!”

“The difference being I’m the one to reject them, you have nothing to reject.”

“Which talks more about you than me, don’t you think?!”

I stared at him, he started at me, and then we both began to laugh, and that's when I heard the bank.

It came in the way they always do, out of the wash of the city, a rising note that separates itself from the usual noise: three heartbeats moving too fast, glass giving up, and then a voice, one that I unfortunately recognized, saying, very distinctly, "—because you soldered it BACKWARD, you absolute—"

I closed my eyes. "Oh, come on."

"What?" Mark said. "What is it?"

"The Maulers are out."

"The what?"

"The Mauler Twins. Big blue guys, geniuses, they hate each other, but also love each other? They are the same, but also not? It’s complicated," I stood up. "I put them in containment eight weeks ago. Cecil said the new cells were rated for them."

"Were they?"

"Evidently not..."

We hit the financial district in under a minute, mostly because I had to make sure Mark didn’t crash as he followed me. The Teen Team had gotten there first, I could see Eve's constructs from six blocks out, big pink slabs of light stacked into a wall across Cortland Street.

And the Maulers had already put one of them through a bus.

"Superman!" Rex shouted, because Rex has never in his life been able to just keep working. "Oh thank fuck—"

"Language, we've got a new guy—"

"We've got a WHAT?"

Mark, to be fair to him, did everything right for about two and a half seconds. He came in high, out of the light, exactly the way I'd told him to, and he hit the nearer Mauler in the side of the head with everything he had.

The Mauler flew into a wall, and came out saying. "Who is this?"

"No idea, but he looks dumb," said the other one, not even glancing over. 

"I’m not dumb! I'm Invincible," Mark, I mean, Invincible said, glaring at the Maulers.

The other Mauler picked Mark up and hurled him across the room. I intercepted him halfway through the flight, catching him in midair before turning to the twins with a disappointed look. 

"...Ah," said the left one.

"I told you he was going to come eventually," said the right one, unhelpfully.

"I am aware he was going to come eventually!"

"You said the window was six minutes."

"The window WAS six minutes! You just had to feel strong beating Team Idiots."

Ignoring their fight, I moved, and hit them so fast the sound arrived afterward, knocking them out with a single punch each, then I was able to zip-tie two ten-foot-tall geniuses to a lamppost with the cable off a construction crane and still hear one of them mumbling, semiconscious, "...substrate ratio was fine..."

Eve landed next to me. She had a cut over one eyebrow and a hard look on her face, and she jerked her chin toward Mark, I mean, Invincible… that’s going to take a while to get used to, who was being hit on by two Kates.

"That the new one?"

"Yep."

"He's fast," she said. "He's also a bit reckless."

"Aren’t we all?"

"Fair enough." She wiped the blood out of her eye with the back of her wrist. "So, what are you doing? Teaching him the ropes?"

I nodded.

“It’s weird they were stealing a bank though…” I muttered, wondering why the Twins would do such a low level job.

The Maulers do not rob banks as a general rule, not for a long as I have known them, they are more… supervillain type, so to speak, they are the type of guys to build a machine that turns the moon into a threat and then explain it to you in detail while one of them corrects their math. 

There was nothing in that building worth their time. There was nothing in that building worth anyone's time.

I stood in the middle of Cortland Street with the sirens coming in, and I let my hearing open all the way up for the first time in three hours, all the way, the whole horrible flood of it, the city and the state and the long empty spaces past the state, and I turned my head slowly to the west, the way you do when you think you've heard your name in a crowd.

CECIL

The room was seventy feet by ninety.

Seventy by ninety, reinforced, six inches of tungsten laminate in the walls… 

Aquarus was in four pieces against the north wall and Green Ghost had gone through the ceiling, and Red Rush was cut in half.

War Woman's mace was buried eight inches into the far wall, alongside the remaining parts of her skull… Martian Man was torn to pieces.

Immortal was… decapitated.

And in the middle of it, in the middle of it all, face-down in a pool of his own blood with his skull caved in on one side and his ribs showing through his back, was Nolan Grayson.

Breathing.

The medics were already on him, I watched them work and I did not feel one single thing about it, which told me everything I needed to know about where my head had gone.

"Sir," Donald said quietly. "Immortal's head is—"

"I know."

"He might…"

"I know, Donald."

I turned in a slow circle in the middle of that room, and I did the thing I have always done, I counted the bodies.

Seven of the strongest people on this planet, dead in under a minute, in a facility whose location was known to nine individuals. One survivor, and he was the one man in that room who should have been the hardest thing in it to kill.

And the eighth strongest person on the planet — the one with hearing that could pick a heartbeat out of a rainstorm four hundred miles away, the one who could have been through that door in ninety seconds flat, the one variable I had been quietly building toward for five years, had spent this evening in the financial district, at a bank robbery that made no sense, committed by two men who don't rob banks, escorting a brand-new seventeen-year-old superhero on his very first night out.

On whose instruction?

I already knew. I'd known since the second I walked through the door and saw who was still breathing.

"Donald," I said. "Get me the Kent boy."