"We need to talk."
The morning chill of a steadily approaching autumn had me bundled into the kitchen chair nearest to the heating vent, reading for the last few minutes before I needed to catch the bus to my internship. Cautiously, because being told by anyone that you needed to talk was typically a bad sign, I set down my book and waited for my father to continue, frowning when he failed to do so. Instead, he sat across from me and made a show of examining his hands. His prolonged silence indicated they were far more interesting than I gave them credit for.
"Yes?" I prompted. I waited for him to muster up a response. Anything, really. Seeming restless, he stood up again and circled behind his chair, facing away. "Did you want to talk or not?" I sighed, exasperated. "Because if you don't, then you can listen for awhile while I yell at you about keeping secrets, now that Alexia isn't nearby to hear."
"I sent them away."
"Them?" I echoed, a bid for elaboration.
He turned his head, not quite looking at me, but keeping me in his frame of sight. "Adrian and Alexia. I asked him to take her out for a few hours so we could have this conversation."
Trying my best not to sound terribly snide, I asked, "What conversation, exactly? You haven't even said what you mean to talk about."
"No, I haven't."
Cue me beginning to tear my hair out. Frankly, I was tired of fishing for answers, of trying to urge him to speak when he initiated this little talk, so I sat back and crossed my arms tightly over my chest, a not-so-subtle hint for him to get on with it. That wasn't the only reason I didn't press him further, however. It was the way his eyes never stopped roving, how is pointer and middle fingers ceaselessly tapped a discordant rhythm on his upper thigh, the buzz of his thoughts practically permeating the air.
He was nervous, and to talk with me, of all people. This was the same man who changed my diapers and subjected us both to the mortifying ordeal of dealing with period and puberty talks, because I had no close older female women in my life that lived within a hundred mile radius to have those hard discussions on his behalf. We were far past the point of pushing through awkward conversations.
No, better to let him order his thoughts first. Too much pressure and I feared he'd shut down completely; then I wouldn't get any answers at all.
"Do you remember the day of the crash?" he finally asked.
Every lax part of myself awoke and went on full alert. I didn't need to ask which crash, because there could be only one. The crash. The one that changed everything.
We rarely spoke of it, of Charlie and of Mom, partially for Adrian and Alexia's sake, to not make things uncomfortable for our blended family, and partially for our own sake. I didn't keep silent for myself. I wanted to ask questions and learn more about the woman who birthed me and the boy who once shared the whole of my DNA. What memories I retained of them never sated my unquenchable thirst to know them in ways I'd either forgotten or never seen in the first place, but my father scarcely brought them up, and, as a result, neither did I. Why cause further pain when he was obviously still healing internally from what happened? In the end, I valued his peace of mind over my petty curiosity.
For him to not only bring them up now, but also bring up that one pivotal moment in our lives, he must have felt he had no other recourse, and that worried me.
I wet my lips. "Does this have something to do with why you don't like the Guild? Why you don't want me there?"
"In a way, yes." He hesitated, and I wondered if that was the whole truth. "And also no. I guess I really ought to start with my father instead."
"Your father?"
Like my mother and brother, Dad only infrequently mentioned his other family, and I'd never met any relatives on his side. In light of that fact, perhaps I was looking too deep into his avoidance of mentioning Mom and Charlie. Maybe he simply wasn't the sharing sort.
My father nodded tersely, like it hurt him to do so. "Haven't you ever wondered why I took your mom's last name instead of giving you my own?"
"Honestly, I figured you were on a personal feminist journey and decided Mom's name sounded cooler," I said, shrugging at the wry look he shot my direction. Almost enough to break the tension in the air, but not quite.
That expression, one I'd seen a thousand times before, stopped midway up his cheeks, never touching his eyes, just like they always failed to do when he smiled. An empty action meant to grant others ease and never reflected within himself. Prying past his unflappable mask of geniality, the realization of how very sad he always looked, even when pretending otherwise, constricted something in my chest.
"Not quite," he replied. "I did it to get away from my own last name. Pettifor, you see, was too well known back when I married. Still is, to some of the older generations. My father was a complicated man — and a neglectful one, though I don't think he meant to be. He lived for his work, and more so the fame it brought him. I don't suppose you've ever heard of Shadow, the Super famed for catching a thousand criminals in every corner of the world? He could sneak up behind thieves and warp them into prison cells, he could blend into the dark to spy without being seen, and, if he wanted to, he could torment people by depriving them of all their senses until they went mad."
"Wait— my grandfather was a Super?" Subconsciously, I sat up straighter in my chair at the news, intrigued. "You never told me that. What happened to him?"
"No one knows, officially."
I arched a brow at his particular choice of words. "And unofficially?"
His lips pulled into another thin smile. "I have my suspicions."
Almost against my will, threads weaved together in my mind to form parts of a tapestry depicting the much larger situation at hand. "Suspicions relating to your dislike of the Guild? Or do you dislike the Guild because of your 'neglectful' father being a part of it?"
"I never disliked him," he amended. "I had a lonely childhood because of his absence, yes, but I didn't particularly hate him for it. How could I? He had lives to save. It would have been selfish to demand his time, when he could be doing good elsewhere in the world. Alas, I'm veering off topic. My feelings for my father are irrelevant. All that matters is that he had powers that made him as slippery as a snake, uncatchable, and yet one day he never came home."
"He might have run off," I suggested, merely tossing the option out there, not that I particularly believed it. By his own accounts, the man had been an absentee figure, after all. "Gone out to buy a pack of cigarettes. You know the drill."
"And abandon his superhero fame? No." Dad shook his head. "Never. I'm sure he's in a shallow ditch somewhere. Unfortunately for him, his abilities made him a source of distrust for many people in high places who worried he could be paid off to uncover their dirty little secrets. It didn't matter how many people he rescued, or how his integrity would never have allowed him to stoop to villainy. It made him unpopular with politicians. To make matters worse, his love of recognition led to him being one of the few Supers to operate with their full identity commonly known to the public, allowing anyone who searched to know exactly where to find him. He also supported the Thaumaturge Registration Act, in opposition to most of his Guild colleagues, which left him with no strong allies to protect him."
The TRA, or Thaumaturge Registration Act, mandated that all superpowers be reported to appropriate authorities upon their discovery in order to maintain public order and weed out future villain identities by matching powers to the corresponding registered Thaumaturges. They painted it as a crime fighting tool, but its critics claimed it was unfairly invasive to target people who may never commit a crime at all. Who would have access to the information? It was as dangerous to the heroes as it was the villains, if not more so.
"Okay..." I tried to sound reasonable. Beseeching. "That explains why you might have a distrust of government. So far, by your own account, the Guild is guilty of nothing more than not liking his politics. I'm not even sure I like his politics."
"Because no one has ever killed for politics," he said through a low, tired breath, though it lacked any real intent. He shifted to face me. "Think about it for a second, Lily. No regular person could have taken him down. I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I can read between the lines enough to tell that the most reasonable explanation for his disappearance would be that money changed hands between the right people to get certain members of the Guild to betray him."
Unnerved by the implications, I offered, "They could have paid off a villain."
He shot me down immediately. "At that time, there were no villains capable of such a thing. Besides, even if there were, if finding them to solicit murder was so easy, they wouldn't have remained on the streets for very long."
Against the overwhelming strength of my desire to trust Tempest and, by extension, the rest of his comrades, I found myself agreeing that something fishy had indeed gone on within Guild hierarchy. It did seem odd. Suspicious, even.
But that was around thirty years ago. Not a pressing danger, unlike the danger I currently stood of being late.
I checked the time on my phone under the table, 6:47, and pushed up to my feet, inserting my book into my bag for later. "I believe you. In your shoes, I wouldn't trust them, either."
Which was admittedly a lot, coming from me, loathe as I was to agree with anyone on anything. I enjoyed arguing the way others enjoyed sports. In another life, one where my grades looked less dismal, I'd have gone to Law School. I had poked as many holes into his claim as I could with the information I had at hand and it was still afloat, so I grudgingly tipped my proverbial hat and admitted defeat.
For now.
My father's shoulders slumped with relief, tension visibly draining from his tired face. "Then you understand why I don't want you to intern there. Talk to that Ren guy and come to another arrangement."
Shouldering my bag, I said, "Oh, I understand, alright. Someone ganked my grandfather, and I'm in the perfect position to find out who."
Realization of what I meant to do crept at first slowly through his features, then all at once, dawning with the equally subtle force of if I had tossed a grenade onto the kitchen counter. My father practically chased me on my way to the door.
"You can't be serious!" he exclaimed. "Of all the stupid things, Lily! Are you actively trying to get yourself killed?"
I paused with my hand on the doorknob, sensing that perhaps this wasn't the sort of conversation to be carried out on our front doorstep where all the neighbors could hear. "Dad," I began haltingly, "I appreciate that you worry so much — really, you could do to worry less — but the Guild has a vested interest in keeping me alive. I'm their live bait to catch Shade, remember? I'm safe with them. Just because they may or may not have done away with your father — still unproven! — doesn't mean they have any reason to do the same to me."
"That's not the point!" Scrubbing a hand down his face, he started over, more level-toned, a twin to the voice I had used only minutes earlier when I tried to convince him that perhaps he'd been jumping the gun on his Guild conspiracies. "Think of it this way: do you think I'd want you working at a coffee shop if there was a reasonable suspicion that a manager had murdered a former employee and gotten away with it? That's not even considering what they will do to you if they discover you snooping. These are powerful people, Lily."
"One might even say super powerful..."
A muscle in his cheek twitched in response, leading me to believe he had no appreciation for punny jokes.
I loosed an exasperated breath and carried on, more serious, "I don't plan on getting caught. You changed your last name, so they have no reason to suspect I'm at all related to Shadow."
"It's simple enough for them to go through the records and find out I'm his son."
"I won't give them a reason to do that," I countered.
"You will get caught," he insisted with, frankly, an insulting amount of certainty.
Seeing how the conversation had begun a circular loop, I yanked the door open and stepped onto the welcome mat outside.
"Bye, Dad," I said in a way I hope he understood to mean I was done discussing the matter. I was going to my internship again today, and there was nothing he could say to stop me.
"I never told you what this had to do with the crash."
I froze.
Except that.
There was nothing he could say to stop me, except that.