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She was the first, the most important. She got to face the Enemy before anyone else did. The Master named her S-1, because she is version 1. She is the most important, the oldest-
They call her the Commander. She
is
their commander, their leader into battle, the most trusted and most powerful. Speed, strength, lazer bo- she has so many powers.
(She also has an app planted into her brain, controlling her every thought, her every impulse. Her thoughts are repetitive, black holes of words spun by the Master.
Her body has never been her own.)
Then she meets a girl who gives her back her brain and lets her pick her own name.
Is it any question that she would run away?
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The first time he kisses a boy, his nerve endings alight. In the space of a second, he catalogues each reaction. He finds that the positive far outweigh the negative, that he wants more.He goes in for another kiss, feeling more boy than computer for one of the few times in his life.
He falls in love so easily, chasing human feeling. First is Jake, his first kiss, then Haven, who is his first everything else, and then...Then Haven betrays his trust and breaks his heart.He swears not to fall in love with anyone else, to be more computer than boy. Computers can’t get hurt like this.
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He gets bionic stepsiblings, and at first he just thinks about how cool they are. He realizes slowly, through missing memories and flinches and blank stares at familiar concepts, that they are missing out on so much. They aren't normal people, and that isn't a good thing more often than not.
(Sometimes, when their eyes are hollow and their expressions craving something they never had, he wants to yank back his older self's time machine and travel back to his stepsiblings' childhood. He wants to smack Douglas and Mr. Davenport across the face, to scream at them for everything they're about to do.)
When he tells them that they are all heroes, he doesn’t mean that they are all saviors of worlds, leaders and princes. He doesn’t mean that they have to save the day, have to be courageous and beautiful and in love.
He means that they are survivors, and that this, in itself, is a heroic act.
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There are legends, back on her planet, of gods and monsters. No, that’s not quite accurate- back on her planet, she was surrounded by gods and monsters. Violence was a sign of affection.
In her world, monsters never hid in the closet- they were the norm. The good people were the strange ones.
When she becomes a hero, rocket off of their world to save the universe, she is named pariah. She is called
pacifist
with a sneer. Her mentors refuse to touch her, to fight her and show their affection with bruises.
On Earth, things are different. She is lauded as great for saving people, for being kind. Being nice is considered good on this world.
(The first time she is touched gently, in kindness, her skin shivers.)
When she makes friends, she still doesn't entirely understand them. Even after her many attempts to be good, she still isn't always. Sometimes she's a bit too harsh, punches a bit too hard, loves a bit too violently.
It's only when she sees tears that she remembers where she is,
who
she is.
And she hates herself for what she can't get rid of. She can't help but wonder if war is something that travels in her blood, as much a part of her as her bones and powers and skin. She can't help but worry if she's a monster too.
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In the legends that will be told about them someday, she will be forgotten. Her stepchildren, her son and daughter, her husband and brother-in-law and children-in-law, will take center stage.They will forget her comforting her youngest stepson after a first day of school he couldn't remember, forget her teaching her stepdaughter how to hold your shoulders straight when the whole world judges you, forget her teaching her stepson how to cook so that he can make his siblings smile.They will forget her hugging her son tight after he survives a roof falling on him, forget her clutching her daughter after her stepbrother dies on a mission.They will forget her holding her stepson-in-law as he screams over his dead husband, forget her teaching her stepdaughter-in-law how to paint her nails after a lifetime as a mindless soldier.They will forget the protection she gave her family, the love she lavished without a second thought. Her husband sprang children on her, and she took them in. She gave them a family they had never known.They will forget her tongue lashings, her fierceness, her love made sharp and her shields made steel. They will forget kisses placed on her husband's lips, burned cookies, and popcorn shared in front of a movie. They will forget chores and parties and broken birthday gifts.They will forget her, and she will only ever be a footnote to her family's story.
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His name is all he has. Haven- a place of safety and refuge. He kisses Chase, and he believes that this island is a such a place.
“You know,” Chase says between kisses, “It’s been shown that gestures of sexual intimacy have been shown to release positive endorphins in allosexual partnerships.”
He smiles. “We should test that hypothesis out, Davenport.”
That is until he starts watching Chase and his siblings return from missions battered and bruised, with the hatred of normal humans ringing in their ears.
All of this training- and for what? To help save a race, a world, that never protected him and his brothers and sisters?
His affection for Chase turns to bitterness, to resentment. How could he possibly defend a world that has treated them like this? How can Chase stand there, bruises lining his back and his heart, and say that this world is a just one?
“You understand why we did it, right, sweetheart? You understand why Krane had to be destroyed?”
He can't look Chase in the eye.
Then he hears that Krane, their Master, their
father
, was destroyed by Chase and the Davenports, and his hatred destroys any affection he may have had left for his once boyfriend.
He now has a mission. He can take back this world for them.
When he betrays Chase, when he throws fire at him and bruises his back, he can still taste the boy’s lips on his from that morning. He doesn’t care. Chase is a traitor to their kind, a traitor to
him
, and must be exterminated.
“I thought you loved me,” Chase gasps.
“How could I love the man who killed my father?”
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Working for Mighty Med, being a superhero, gives him something to die for. In his dreams, he dies defending the world from villains, dies saving the people who save people. This seems the perfectly heroic ending to his story.
Then he meets Chase Davenport- insufferable, headstrong,
wonderful
Chase- and his world shifts.
Chase is afraid of liking him- that much is clear. From the way Chase sometimes flinches away from him after touching him for longer than a few seconds to the way Chase throws up a
literal
forcefield between them when he tells Chase that he likes him.
When he finds Chase’s dead body on a surgical table, his fists light up with flames. He remembers every one of his friends’ almost deaths, the way Chase looked at him when he thought no one was looking, the way Chase and he used to banter and tease. He remembers how Chase looked at him in suspicion when he admitted that liked Chase, how Chase couldn't believe that he was liked.
Fire in hand, he’s ready to destroy an enemy who killed his teammate, his crush, his
friend.
Chase laughs after it's all over. “Welcome back, magic man.”
He smirks. “Looking good, bionic boy.” He looks up and down at Chase’s body (especially his abs- that black t-shirt he’s wearing for the “movie” looks nothing like their mission suits, or even like Chase’s normal clothes, but Kaz is
digging it
nonetheless), seeing the boy who has saved his life over and over again. He sees the leader, the cynic, the nerd.
And he knows that he's been falling in love.
When he kisses Chase for the first time, clutching Chase’s living, warm hands in his, he knows that this is a boy that he is willing to not only die for, but to
live
for.
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Here is what the world thinks of him: he is dumb, seeing only the most base information. That he is only brawn with no brains, that his only interests are food and pranks and irritating his brother. That he is easily occupied with shiny things and toys.Here is what they don't know: he only pretends to be as stupid as he is in order to survive a world he doesn’t completely understand. He uses the stereotype of the strong man as a shield against people’s beliefs.
For the first sixteen years of his life, Adam’s world is only the basement where they are kept and the occasional mission that they are sent on. His only exposure to the idea of high school is through movies and books, and even that presents a bland surface. He is fine, for years, to be the dumb one. There are no other options for him.But then Leo stumbles into their basement, opening up an entirely new world for him, and he is going to see
everything.
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His entire life has been a guessing game. His parents have always been honest with him that he is adopted, but they have never told him who he was adopted from. He has spent as long as he can remember wondering about whose nose he shares, where his love of science comes from (certainly not his music teacher father or history professor mother), where his smile was born.
(For years, questions have dug at his brain: Who gave him up? Who didn’t want him?)
His siblings don’t know that their father is really Douglas- until they do. They don’t know that he exists- until they do. He doesn’t know about his bionics- until he does.
And it’s all because they’ve been lied to their entire lives.
“It’s a bionic lie.”
That’s all this is- that’s all this has
ever
been.
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They’ll never know what she did to protect them. The people she’s hurt, the crimes she’s committed. When they see everything she says as half-truth, they skip right past the
actual
murders and atrocities she’s committed.
She stares into the abyss, and it gazes back. She doesn’t care- these kids (this family) are hers, and she will not let them get hurt.
There is blood staining her hands, but a good wash will get rid of that. And there’s a certain rugged inventor who has an island she can borrow.
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The abuse Krane has wreaked on his mind stretches back decades, and sometimes it’s hard to unravel what were his choices and what were Krane’s. He was a criminal as a kid, and a teen, and an adult, and okay, he’s made a lot of bad decisions, but murder and world domination didn’t enter his mind until he was twenty. When he was twenty five, he created his bionic children. He designed them as weapons, tools, soldiers to be used. When Donnie snatched them away from him, he went berserk, searching for any trace of them. He built androids, gave a megalomaniac bionics trying to find them and take them back.Nothing worked.(Later, he will look back on these memories and thank every possible deity that Donald got the kids away from him. Krane had manipulated him, gaslit him, stolen away every memory and manipulated every good feeling out of him. Krane made him want to deal pain onto others in exponentially higher amounts than he himself had been truly dealt.)(If he had been able to raise the kids, who knows what might have happened to them? What would the world look like if Adam, Bree, and Chase had been used to kill rather than heal?)
He has so many kids, or almost kids, or stepchildren, or nephews, and...fuck, he's screwed with everything. Everything that he’s done, everything that Krane has coerced him into or convinced him to do, is at least partially his fault. He has fucked up his family’s lives so many times, tried to destroy them.He jokes about being evil, about trying to kill them, but his hands shake. Every moment he sees Adam, Bree, Chase, Daniel, or Leo in danger, his heart seizes. His all-too-human fingertips feel powerless to save them.He cannot be forgiven for everything that he's done, but maybe if he can help Bree with her chip, give Leo bionics so that he’ll never get hurt again, he can start to make it up to them.
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His world is like a game of Jenga: fragile, balancing precariously over an edge he is constantly too aware of.
He tries to ignore the fact that his mother tried to kill him, tried to destroy the world.
(It doesn't work.)
He watches as his mother tries to destroy the world, as Skylar nearly dies trying to get her powers back. Kaz has to watch his husband die saving them from a sadistic shapeshifter.
By the time he, Bree, and Alex finally get to Kaz, he has been tortured for weeks. Kaz’s husband’s corpse is in the room with him, and Kaz’s hands are shaking. Kaz barely remembers who they are and he screams as they pull him away from his husband's body.
He has to hold his best friend through nightmares and panic attacks and desperate cries for his husband. He has to watch Kaz deteriorate without his husband. He watches Kaz go quietly insane, mind breaking under the stress of seeing his husband's destroyed body.
And he falls right alongside Kaz.
-
He ends up becoming the very thing he once fought against. He becomes a supervillain, fighting against the newest batch of heroes to end up in the Elite Force. These are the people who insist on tearing Kaz away from him.
He will not let them rip away the only thing he has left.
-
So this is how hope dies: unleashed from Pandora’s box, it is devoured by fear, by pain, by tragedy.
The world rues the day it let Kaz break.
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He sees what his brother is making of his creations, his children. He sees how Douglas would turn these children into weapons, into instruments of destruction. He wants the world to survive beyond his life, beyond the lives of these children.So he steals them. He needs to give them better lives, even if he doesn't know how to be a parent. He doesn't even know how to be a family member, a son or a brother.He feeds the bionic children, trains them, tells them stories, and tries his best. He just doesn't know how to be a parent.(The kids never call him Dad, only Mr. Davenport, and it hurts less (and more, sometimes) than it probably should.)
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She is standing on the cliff edge and there is nowhere left to run.She is the final person left for Oliver to try to turn.Her brother is dead, her brother-in-law is a mindless husk, and her best friend is a supervillain. Her wife kissed her goodbye months ago, love in her eyes as she promised to meet her whenever she made her decision.“So,” Oliver says, “It all comes to this.”Her world is gone, dead in a storm she couldn't prevent. Her family is splintered into pieces.The new Elite Force is run by men who have been searching, scraping, aching for a chance to do right by this world. Mr. Davenport has always been convinced that he knows what ‘Right’ is, while Douglas has spent years drowning in guilt, doing anything and everything to make up for the years he spent under Krane's influence. Neither of them ever listened to Oliver's pleas about them valuing humans over bionic humans, about the flaws in their plans that could have kept Chase alive.Oliver fell, and they didn’t try to prevent it.
They just fought him afterwards, thinking themselves righteous, unwilling to question their own choices.Skylar, driven by a desire to be Good, is the captain of the new Elite Force. After a life of violence and destruction, Skylar would do anything to be a hero. She took over when Chase- breathe in, don't panic- died.(Her fingers clench into fists at the thought of dead brother's name. She will spend the rest of her life hunting down the shifters who killed him, who broke Kaz. Mr. Davenport told her that they deserved to be listened to, that everyone deserves a second chance, but she won't listen. She doesn't have to listen. They hurt her family, and she will hurt them.)Now, her world is gone.The original Elite Force is gone. Chase is dead. Kaz is broken. Leo, Adam, Daniel, Alex, and Oliver are fighting a new generation of heroes. Everything she ever loved is lost to the winds, broken and gone.This is how the world ends: not with a bang, but with a breath.“You coming, Bree?” Alex asks, eyes dark.She remembers when Alex's eyes lit up poison green. She remembers the despair she felt when she thought that her entire family was going to die in an empty warehouse yard. She remembers finding Chase’s body by Kaz’s crying form. She remembers every tragedy that has happened to her family.She nods.She steps forward, feet trembling, into a brave new world, and hopes that this decision is the right one.Bree Davenport does as she always does, and she runs.