It was night time in Nebula City. To be more precise, it was some time after Athena’s ultimatum to the Hex Kittens and before Rhyme’s dramatic, acid-spewing-robot-assisted escape.
Tigerlily Binder had made her way to the fully-absorbed suburb of Singleton, to the front porch of a house that looked like it was undergoing an identity crisis. Half of the giant Victorian dollhouse looked dilapidated and neglected. The other half had been carefully restored with a meticulous attention to detail. All of the windows on the bottom floor had been replaced. Some of those on the upper two floors were still boarded up.
Lily opened the storm door and almost started knocking on the heavy oak door behind it before she remembered there was a doorbell. A light went on up on the second floor. Her sensitive ears detected movement within, coming down the creaky staircase. Footsteps traveled well through the wooden frame of the old oak floor.
“It’s me!” Lily called when she heard the figure getting closer.
“Lily?”
“Yeah!”
“Quit shouting, you’ll wake up the neighborhood,” Stacey Bishop said. Lily heard a metallic click… the safety on Stacey’s service pistol. It was nowhere in sight when she opened the door. “You should have called,” Stacey said, her arms folded across her chest. She stood blocking the doorway while Lily smiled and did her best to look abashed.
“Yeah, uh… sorry,” Lily said. “I forgot to charge my cell.”
Lily loved the way Stacey smelled… Stacey hated that kind of talk, but it was true. She especially loved it when she put on the tattered and faded plaid robe she was wearing now. It was the oldest thing she wore and it was unique among her clothes, in that she washed it as rarely as possible so as not to damage it any further. Standing close to her while she wore the robe was like getting a double dose of it.
“You could have used a payphone,” Stacey said. “You can call me collect. You know that.”
“Well, um, I don’t actually know your number,” Lily said. “It’s in the cell phone… so…”
She shrugged, then smiled nervously and ran her fingers through her short orange hair.
“Oh, come inside, you,” Stacey said, grabbing her by the wrist and pulling her through the door. “Honestly, Lilypad, I don’t know how you make it through the day.”
“Neither do I,” Lily said. She put a hand on Stacey’s shoulder. “But the nights are better.”
“When do we see each other at night?” Stacey asked. “If I’m not working, you’re off with your sisters.”
“But you’re on that patrol assignment thingy for the next three weeks, and I’m… well, I’m done,” Lily said.
“With the band, or… the other thing?”
“I don’t know,” Lily said. “But I think… I think with all of it. I mean, I have fun with my sisters… but the band was always Dandy’s idea. She and Will write the songs. I just keep time.”
Stacey laughed.
“What?” Lily asked.
“Sorry, Lilypad, but… timeliness isn’t exactly among your virtues, that I’ve noticed,” she said. “It’s probably for the best that you’re done with them.”
“Well, I’m done with the running around at night… and I might be done with the band thing, but they’re still my sisters, you know?” she said. “Not to get all corny and shit, but they’re all I’ve had for so long…”
“But they aren’t all you have now,” Stacey said. “You need time to find yourself, and they’re probably going to want the same.”
“I don’t know…”
“Take a little break,” she said. “For the rest of the month, I’m going to have the closest thing to regular hours that I’m likely to have all year. I’d hope your sisters can give you up for that long, at least. We can use the time to get to know each other a little better, you can figure out what you want to do going forward.”
“I guess that would be okay,” Lily said.
“Can I ask what brought this on?”
“Well, I kind of ran into my ex,” Lily said. “Or she ran into me.”
“Oh?” Stacey asked, raising an eyebrow. “Anybody famous?”
“Kind of, I guess,” Lily said. “She isn’t really ‘out’, though, so…”
“You can’t tell me?”
“Staces, I l-like you a lot, but we haven’t been going out that long,” Lily said.
“But we trust each other,” Stacey said. “That’s important.”
“If it was just my secret, I’d tell you, I swear,” Lily said. “But it’s her life, not mine… and really, this is what we broke up over, kind of. But anyway, she had some things to say about my sisters and me, and what we’ve been doing… even if she was coming at it from kind of an assy place, she kind of had a point. We don’t really know what we’re doing out there. We just charge in like a bull in a china doll and start busting heads. I think we’ve done some good, but it feels like there should be other, more qualified people…”
Detective Lieutenant Stacey Bishop laughed.
“Oh, Lilypad, I’ve been saying that kind of thing for ages,” she said. “Leave the evil-smiting to the professionals. The world will keep turning without supertypes pushing it… really, it will.” She kissed Lily on the cheek. “Now come on to bed, if you’re coming. I’m meeting Seven at the Old Stationhouse for breakfast in the morning. You’re more than welcome to come along… I’d love to introduce my partner to my partner.”
In a warehouse on the other side of town, Athena hovered in the air imposingly over an impassive Dandelion and an indifferent Pussywillow. In fact, the latter had curled up on the floor and was giving every outward appearance of being asleep. Apart from a few emergency lights high overhead faint brightness around the windows, the only illumination was from the twin coronas of crackling energy in front of Athena’s eyes.
“Turning into a black cat can’t be your only power,” Athena said. After turning half of their shared powers over to her sister and checking in with her errant ward, she’d come to meet the two remaining Hex Kittens in this disused EvCo storage facility, for some initial training. So far, things had not gone according to plan… even ignoring the loss of the Binder sister she had cared the most about. “There’s no way you could have survived this long against the sorts of creatures you face… though all things considered, that’s pretty amazing, anyway.”
“It isn’t my only power,” Willow said. She rolled over onto her back, her lamp-like eyes luminous in the semi-darkness. “Duh.”
“Oh? What else have you got?” Athena asked. “And don’t say ‘awesomeness’.”
“Like I have to say it,” Willow said.
“What else?”
“I have kitty ears,” Willow said, reaching up and adjusting the headband in her curly black hair.
“Those are cardboard and fabric,” Athena said.
“Meta-awareness.”
“Meta-awareness?” Athena repeated.
“Uh… that’s not so much a superpower as it’s a way of annoying people in another dimension,” Dandy said. “We all have that. I’d explain it, but nobody ever believes me.”
“Strangely, I don’t have any problem believing you three can do that,” Athena said. She turned her crackling gaze onto the curled up form again. “Alright, Pussywillow… if you’ve never bothered to quantify your powers before, let’s try the empirical method. I want you to come at me.”
“No,” Willow said, rolling over and curling back up again.
“I’m not going to strike back,” Athena said. “I promise.”
“Would I care if you did?”
“Come on,” Athena said, floating downward until her feet touched the ground. “Hit me.”
“No.”
“I need you to show me your power if I’m going to help you, Willow.”
“I am,” Willow said.
“You’re just lying there like a lump on the rug!”
“Yes,” Willow said. She yawned and stretched. “While you want me to hit you. See how powerful I am?”
Athena let out a growl of frustration. She turned her head ceilingward as powerful bursts of electricity arced out from her eyes.
“Made you do that, too,” Willow murmured.
“Don’t you dare go to sleep,” Athena said.
“Stop me,” Willow said.
“You see why this isn’t going to work?” Dandy said. “You can’t herd cats… it just doesn’t work.”
“Don’t give me that,” Athena said. “You’re human at heart.”
“But cat in spirit.”
“You’ve been reasonable enough. There’s no reason your sister… both of your sisters… couldn’t be, too,” Athena said.
“I’m a social animal,” Dandy said. She shrugged. “They aren’t.”
“That’s right,” Willow said. She rolled over again, then pushed herself up on her arms and arched her back. “I’m not. Lily’s gone, and I don’t like you,” she said, fixing Athena with her large, lamp-like eyes.
“Yeah, well, you’re stuck with me, kitten…”
“No, I’m not,” Willow said. “You want to see my power, Athena? I can be anywhere and everywhere. I can die and be alive at the same time. I can look into the faces of gods and kings. I can shit inside shoes you’ve forgotten you own, and you won’t know until the time comes that you need them again. And when you want me to be somewhere, I can go somewhere else. I can leave.”
She shook her whole body like she was shaking out the kinks, then got to her feet and started sauntering towards the exit.
“Will… you don’t have to go,” Dandy said. “We’re about done with Athena, I think.”
“No, you damn well aren’t,” Athena said.
“I know we are,” Willow said in her lazy, sleepy voice. She didn’t stop, didn’t look back. “And I’m done being here.”
“Don’t be silly, Will,” Dandy said. “Where are you going to go?”
“Out,” Willow said. “East. I’ll go take care of my art gallery for a while.”
“Will, for Christ’s sake, you don’t have an art gallery,” Dandy said.
“I can stop her,” Athena said to Dandy. “I could stop her from leaving.”
“You think so?” Dandy asked. “Assuming you could, what then? Make her tell you her powers? Provoke her into fighting you? She isn’t going to sit up and beg, or roll over, or play dead for you, Athena! She doesn’t work that way. We don’t work that way. I’ve always been able to keep my family together and functioning… if only just barely… but you’ve managed to break us apart in just under an hour. Is that one of the benefits of the universal wisdom?”
“You think this is my fault?” Athena asked.
“I think we’re done here,” Dandy said, turning and heading towards the door.
Willow was never a fast mover when anybody was watching, but she had already vanished into the night. Dandy had no delusion that she could find Willow if she didn’t want to be found… but she wasn’t that worried. If her “youngest” sister had one power, it was landing on her feet.
“So, you’re quitting, too,” Athena said.
“Fighting the good fight?” Dandy asked. “Hardly. I have a mission. What I’m doing is calling your bluff, Athena. I would have done it earlier, but it wouldn’t have just been my ass on the line.”
“You think I won’t turn you in?”
“I think it won’t matter,” Dandy said. “4B doesn’t want us. Mystic heroes… monster hunters… they don’t want to deal with our kind unless we put on capes and start beating up bank robbers. We’re too hard to pin down, too hard to quantify. They’d rather pretend we don’t exist than admit they can’t control us. More importantly, as long as we stay off the radar, that helps keep the things we deal with under wraps, too… vampires, werewolves, zombies… things humanity isn’t ready to deal with. As long as we’re deniable, all of those things are, too.”
“I think you underestimate Department 4B,” Athena said.
“And I think you do,” Dandy said. “We’re celebrities in one set of lives, Athena. Don’t you think they’ve heard the same rumors as everybody else? Don’t you think they’ve noticed? If you ‘turn me in’, they won’t thank you, and they’ll bury my file and release me with a cover story.”
“This isn’t over,” Athena said.
“It is,” Dandy said. “Go home. Take care of your family. Let me take care of mine.”
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