REPLACEMENT PARTS: A CONVERSATION

By Bren Hunter

“Re-e-ed or blue? Red or bl-oo-ue?” Rachel Summers asked in a meaningful tone, although the hidden meaning was largely lost on Brian. As Ray spoke, she telekinetically proffered two tiny jumpers, one was vibrant red and one was shiny blue.

“I can’t decide,” Brian Braddock shrugged. He lifted his hands from the bulky stroller — where Jane was buckled in and humming discordantly — to feel the material of the jumpers between his thumb and index finger. “Maybe if we dressed J–”

“You have described everything that we put on Jaye as the most adorable outfit since the invention of stitched threads,” Rachel pointed out, as she idly scoured a rack of itsy bitsy white and red blouses. Summers herself was clad in a green box-pleat skirt and a goldenrod blouse beneath a green bodice, which covered from just above her breasts down to just above her waist. “You are gonna have to make a decision sometime before she’s picking out bridesmaid dresses.”

“I’ll just get both,” Brian simpled it up pleadingly.

“Right. Okay.” With the needless waggle of a finger, Rachel teke’d two infant-sized denim skirts from a shelf across the store, and
telekinetically sashayed them in spirals around Jane’s stroller. Musically, she asked Brian, “Bl-oo-ue or White? Whi-eee-te or blue?”

“Jane is just a child,” Brian said, with the barest of hard edges to his words. He plucked both skirts from Ray’s telekinetic grasp, and added them to the pile of other clothes to be purchased.

“Did I just timeskip? This conversation is suddenly non-linear,” Ray teasingly accused.

“Can we discuss your little theme for this shopping trip, or do you have a speech already planned?” Brian bluntly asked.

“The flashforward I had late last week — I’m starting to think you had it too, but I don’t think you know who the recipient was either,” Rachel matter-of-factly explained to Brian, solidly holding her eye-contact. “That’s all.”

Despite the fact that neither of them had explicitly mentioned the mental images before, Brian knew exactly what Rachel was talking about: a vision of Brian handing over the mantle of Captain Britain to… someone. “That wasn’t a flashforward,” Brian stated definitively. Having been released from the timestream years before Rachel, Brian had more often experienced the occasional expulsions from his hippocampus that came as a result of not consciously remembering the majority of his time spent outside of time. As such, he pointed out, “It wasn’t visceral enough to make me want to vomit up my large intestines.”

“My brain has been producing them more gently than that. Upshot of being a mutant telepath, I guess. You must have been sharing my flashforward because of the bond we formed in the timestream,” Rachel posited, as she neatly folded the clothes that Brian had piled.

Braddock made his “hunh” sound that accompanied his finding something curious, but the increasing likelihood of the seeming dream being a prophecy made him frown.

“Hit me with a clue-by-four,” Rachel shrugged dramatically. Returning her hands to the task of folding clothes, she lightly asked, “Why are you displeased by the thought of giving up the responsibility, if you want nothing more to do with it?”

Brian slid his hands into his pockets, and shrugged his shoulders up. Almost hurt, but uncertain, Brian replied, “I never said that.”

“You can mean something without saying it,” Rachel slowly affirmed.

“I am going to pay for these,” Brian said with cheery abruptness. He hefted all of Jane’s new clothing against his burgundy-button-down-shirted chest, allowing Rachel to push Jane’s stroller, and headed towards the cash register queue. “How about we leave the fangirl Captain Britain questions to the sales clerk, if she recognises the name on my credit card?”

“Do you think it was Betsy?” Brian wistfully pondered aloud, from the comfort of a plush chair in the waiting room of his new dentist’s office.

Dropping her open copy of HeroStyle magazine into her cross-legged lap, Rachel dizzily asked, “Do I think what was Betsy? What conversation did you start in your head without me?”

“The flashforward,” Brian stated, nearly glowing with hopeful consideration. He set down his pen on top of the blank registration forms for Jane and himself. “Maybe I was telling Elisabeth that I want her to be Captain Britain. She’s the only other person I could conceivably share it with. It’s a family legacy on this Earth.”

Unsure what to add, Ray offered, “I doubt she could be overly attached to ‘Psylocke’. Does it even mean anything? Wasn’t John ‘Locke’ a liberal philosopher who pondered on governments?”

“He spoke of a conundrum on the nature of identity that’s been called Locke’s Socks. The metaphor involves your favourite pair of socks getting torn, and he poses the question of if they are still the same favourite pair of socks if you’ve patched them up with new material. He wonders if some of their inherent sock-ness has been lost in the tears and replaced with something new in the patches,” Braddock said, recalling something he’d read once, but trailed off at the morbidity of his thoughts. Since taking on the name Psylocke, Elisabeth’s ‘patches’ had included bionic eyes, an entirely new body and mystic blood from the Ebon Vein. “Name calling aside, Betsy was extraordinary as Captain Britain when I…” — Brian considered a rosier view of history, but admitted —
“wasn’t willing. Her tenure ended quite painfully, but she’s stronger now than she’s ever been.”

“Being her second date with destiny, she could even go all the way, instead of just getting felt up. Maybe as Captain Britain she could do more good than any of us can imagine,” Rachel said the words, but didn’t entirely believe them. It wasn’t a matter of Elisabeth’s abilities, Ray simply wasn’t comfortable with Brian using Betsy as a tactic to avoid his grievances with the Captain Britain identity. Regardless, Rachel suggested, “Are you going to tell her about this?”

“The phone number I had for her has been disconnected,” Brian answered flatly. He took up his pen, again, and started writing in the registration form’s designated boxes.

“Oh. God. That’s why you were hoping it was her?” Rachel said, thinking aloud. “Want me to use my mutant phone?”

“I checked into it,” Brian waved the idea off, and continued writing as he spoke. “Betsy’s account didn’t lapse; she cancelled it. This wouldn’t repair our relationship, anyway. The identity of Captain Britain is more of a firebomb than an olive branch.”

“You don’t mean that,” Ray chided, but did it with a supportive grin.

Brian looked up from his papers long enough to seriously ask Rachel, “Who would want to be Captain Britain? I certainly don’t. Where’s the fun?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realise Merlin gave you a choice between the Sword of Might and the Bong of Right,” Rachel said in sarcastic reverence.

His eyes downcast on the paper in his lap, Brian struggled through saying, “Look, I explained this better to Linda. It’s as if I know that I can be Captain Britain, and that I have these ‘responsibilities’, but–”

“There is no ‘but’,” Rachel gently pointed out firmly. “You mean something to all of Britain. Responsibility inherently brings a period,
full stop.”

Brian made no response, or movement of any kind. Completely entranced, he stared at the registration form with a degree of horrified curiosity, and began to slowly pull the pen away from the paper. When his elbow wouldn’t bend back any further, Brian muttered, “I’ll finish this later,” and folded the papers into Jane’s stroller’s back pouch.

Without further comment, Brian stiffly exited the dentist’s office, and Rachel followed, her only question was in her eyes, but Brian wouldn’t meet them. They barely strolled three London blocks, before they spotted Ananym, Jane’s governess, and Ana’s boyfriend, Whitman Knapp, M.D. The couple was walking together instep, in matching sandblasted jeans and silver t-shirts.

“Hey!” Rachel called out to the pair. “What are you two up to in town?”

“Rough sex,” Ananym smoothly stated.

“No!” Rachel amusedly howled in disbelief.

“Ana,” Knapp said, by way of warning her to tone it down, despite the genuine smile on his face.

“Language,” Brian insisted, with a nod to Jane in her restaurant-supplied high chair. The group of five was seated around a table topped with dirty dishes, as they awaited the arrival of the bill for their luncheon.

“Sorry,” Ananym said, and emphasised it with an apologetic shrug. “Cuddly, fluffy, soft sex. That sound better?”

“Ana,” Knapp warned again, sounding more exasperated, but still not overly disapproving.

“What?” Ananym obliviously asked. Straightforwardly, she reminded, “Brian wanted an honest suggestion for non-violently expressing aggressive tendencies, and rough sex is how I — how we — do it. It’s not all the time, mind you, and we manage to keep it within reason. We have a series of rules to ensure that that activity is a separate thing that has nothing to do with the rest of our relationship. I even wrote them down.”

“I laminated them,” Knapp tacked on, with a bemused grin plastered in his expression.

“What kind of rules?” Rachel had to ask.

“Safety words. Maximum number of times per month. Or per night,” Ananym evenly listed.

“And absolutely never engaging when either of us is actually angry or annoyed with the other,” Knapp shared the most important rule, while gazing at Ana. “We end up talking about it more than we do it, but that’s kept us from getting hurt.” He put an arm around Ananym’s shoulders. “I mean, except for the time she broke my arm.”

“I didn’t ‘break’ his arm,” Ananym stridently insisted without raising her voice. “It was a tiny fracture. And it wasn’t anything compared to what I almost did to him, before we were dating, when I nearly lost my me to the violence in my blood.” –She lightly shook her head in disbelief at the recollections she felt so disconnected from– “It was always too easy for me to literally lose what made me ‘me’ once I was steeped in adrenaline and desire for destruction. There is no balance to it; nothing comes from violence, except more violence. For Whit and I, we must be extra careful. I’m half demon, addiction to violence runs in my bloodline, and Whitman’s got the various urges of primeval man.”

“Does that mean Manikin has retired from super-heroics too?” Rachel wondered, having assumed that Whitman, who could transform his body into different forms up and down the evolutionary chain, had kept his spandex.

“Not hired lately is more accurate,” Whitman admitted wryly. “To be honest, I can’t help taking the Hippocratic Oath more seriously since I graduated. Should my services be needed with Alpha Flight again, I hope the only power they need from me is my medical skills.” He grinned self-consciously then: “Most importantly, it would be with my new mutant name, Phylogeny.”

Rachel’s lips curled up into a grin as she thought on the word; “I am all about the geek-hot, and you, my friend, are all kinds of geek-hot.”

“There ought to be a better way,” Brian said distantly. Since he’d last spoken, Brian had been glassy-eyed helping Jane to eat the baby food he’d brought in the stroller. “Better way than violence, I mean. Force was inherent in every weapon Merlin and Roma gave me, but it’s not enough. Even they are learning that now. Linda told me that the Corps training is focusing on mending and defending.”

If Ray was thrown by the jaunt to the earlier point in the conversation, she didn’t show it this time. With delicate care not to aggravate this tender topic, she asked, “Is this the why for you not wanting to be Captain Britain anymore? You don’t want to fight?”

“Maybe I don’t,” Brian tentatively replied, as if he were cautiously testing the idea.

Baffled, Rachel challenged, “How would you and Linda have defeated the Fury without violence? You’ve told me the stories; I’ve seen the memories like a movie. That thing couldn’t be reasoned with or captured in a forcefield or defended against. It just wanted to kill costumed heroes, and it would have killed you a second time if you and she hadn’t bludgeoned it to death.”

“Okay. Sometimes, violence is the only way,” Brian agreed, adding it up in his head. “But it wasn’t right for that to be my only weapon when I was in Excalibur. I’m certain I must have escalated risky situations through my actions.”

“And who decides when it’s so-called ‘right’ or so-called ‘wrong’?” Rachel asked, clearly finding Brian’s change in position to be
preposterous.

Brian’s brow furrowed the more he thought on it, but finally shrugged, “I don’t know.”

“No, I’m curious,” Ray pushed further, “Ananym believes in deontological pacifism, but–”

“I’m more of a consequentialist pacifist,” Ananym interjected.

“Ananym believes in consequentialist pacifism, but you, what?” Rachel demanded.

“I don’t know,” Brian repeated, more frustrated.

Sitting forward, Rachel sharply asked, “Are you a pacifist because of ideals, or a passivist because you’re lazy?”

“I don’t want Jane’s first memory of my face to be bruised and bloodied,” Brian defensively said.

“That’s not keeping you from helping people,” Rachel insistently told him. “You said it yourself: there ought to be better ways to help people than through violence. Why don’t you join Scott and me when—”

Expelling his growing frustration, Brian asked, in sudden clarity, “Why do you want me to be Captain Britain?”

“It’s who you are. You’re at your best when you’re not fighting it,” Rachel said simply, and attempted to smile. “I’m trying to be your friend.”

“No. That’s not what I asked,” Brian tenaciously asserted. “Why do you want me to be Captain Britain? Why is it best for you?
With Linda, if I give up the icon and the costume, I force her to question why she holds onto it so desperately. I can’t even fathom what it is that you get out of me being a super hero?”

“Nothing,” Rachel spat, her passion for the topic quickly deflating. “I don’t get anything. I don’t need anything.”

“Maybe Ananym has a point,” Rachel said breezily, as their conversation about Grand Tone Music tapered off. With Brian pushing Jane’s stroller by her side, Ray strode briskly atop a sidewalk in the general direction of Bri’s convertible automobile/hovercraft. “Maybe supervillains enjoy hitting people because they’ve been unwillingly abstinent for a while. I know my own urge to pound people” –Ray punched her fist into her open palm– “is so completely visceral. I probably could fool it into thinking it’s been satiated by pounding guys in a more productive manner.” She grinned endearingly at Brian; it wasn’t an apology for needling him in the restaurant, but it was the closest to an ‘I’m sorry’ that she was going to offer. She just wanted the unpleasantness behind
them.

“I dunno…” Brian said in that increasingly-familiar distant tone. He dramatically slowed his pace, as his eyes looked through the plate glass window of a coffee shop/fruit drink bar. “In university I tried to wedge all of my needs for social interaction into sex…”

“Really?” Ray asked in such a way to plead for details.

“Yeah,” Brian said, amid a chagrined look to Rachel. “Just ask Frances.”

“Frances? Are you making this person up? Who is she?” Rachel laughed.

“Her.” Brian walked back a few steps, and nodded towards a woman inside the coffee shop. “Why do you think I went on that verbal tangent in the first place?”

Positioning herself outside the window to eye the tall, lithe, ice-blonde Frances, Ray checked, “Bad breakup?”

“…No,” Brian came to the response after some moments of mental consideration, and a lingering look at the woman of their discussion. “We both knew what was between us; we both knew when it had run out.”

“There’s more destiny in running into her than there is in any timestream dream. You have to talk to her,” Ray emphatically towards the window as she spoke.

“I don’t think I’m ready for–” Brian tried to say.

“Then I’ll talk to her,” Ray saccharinely said to Bri, as if doing him a favour, while she hurriedly made her way into the shop.

“Don’t,” Brian begged, took two steps after Ray, but then took the two steps back to grab hold of Jane’s stroller, and spin it around in order to push it into the shop ahead of him. “Stop.”

“You told me to ask Frances about your tryst,” Rachel pointed out, smiling wickedly, as she waited for Brian in the entryway.

“Figure of speech. I swear to you, I will know when I’m ready for that sort of thing.”

“Frances is well past ready. She may look good for her age, but, still: for. her. age. The alarm on her biological clock has worn out from overuse.”

“Rachel, I can’t even begin to think about more children.”

“Exactly! Ask her for dinner. Or a coffee. I’m not trying to sell you on romance; especially not after I spent years getting over Franklin. I just feel it would be good for you to get out, is all. That way I don’t have to feel guilty about leaving you home alone when I’m out with university friends.”

“Are those the friends whom I haven’t seen around the manor since the end of semester?”

“The more important question is why don’t you want to talk to your ex-girlfriend who’s just waiting to get an ‘n’ and a ‘t’ added to the first half of her title?”

“I don’t care how telepathic you are, I will know when I’m ready for — for anything before you know I know.”

“Ding” Rachel sang-out once she poked Brian in his impressive biceps. “You look golden brown and crispy to me. Plus…” Ray scissored two fingers in front of Bri’s face –snip snip– at the same time that the five bags in Frances’ hands were telekinetically severed from their handles. “She needs your muscles.”

Unable to leave Frances in the lurch, with her bags spilling all over the floor, Brian ultimatumed, “I’ll go help her if you smile back at the guy who has been smiling at you since you sashayed through that threshold.”

Just before he strolled towards Frances, Rachel followed Brian’s eye-line to find a man, in his mid-twenties, grinning at her. He had spiky auburn hair, an angular clean-shaven face, his clothes were clinging to his tight body, and, frankly, Rachel couldn’t blame them. Turning her head to look at the man straight-on, Ray flipped the loose ringlets of her fiery red hair; her lips played into a smile, as she pondered the colour of his eyes. Apparently that was all the inspiration he needed, because the auburn-haired man shouldered his way through the crowded coffee shop to make his way right to Rachel.

Once there were no bystanders between them, Ray introduced herself forthrightly; “Hello. I’m Rachel.” The moment the word came out, her expression turned a shade puzzled, because she pronounced her own name wrong.

“Do you know Samuel?” the man asked her.

“No?” Ray responded, more puzzled than before.

“Do you know where Samuel is?” he asked further.

“No…” Ray responded more surely than before.

Without another word, the auburn-haired man turned, and squeezed his way towards the back of the store. He bumped into the seat of a blonde elfin woman, and brushed against Frances’ back, as she was hugging Brian Braddock tightly.

“–splendiferous to see you. We really must sit down and catch up,” Frances pleasantly said, taking her bags up in her arms. As Brian dragged a chair away from an empty table, Frances told him, “Take me for dinner tonight. I’ve got to jump. Here are my stats.” Before he had a chance to subtly knocked the chair back into place, Frances kissed both of his cheeks, and slipped a business card in Brian’s collar. He pocketed the card, while he dazedly watched Frances flit out of the shop. After she had left, he caught up with Rachel and Jane, and they exited as well.

As a woman, known only as Cooter, blandly watched Brian Braddock stride out of the coffee shop, her elfin features gradually rounded and shifted to become strikingly ordinary. Her hair was still blonde, but not as bouncy or as well-kept; her breasts were just as large, but not as firm as they’d seemed; the last to change were her ears, which lost their distinctive points. It wasn’t her body that changed, it was everyone’s perception of her. She was a mutant illusionist, but her control over her power was quite limited. Her appearance had been shaped by Brian’s want. It had been so strong that it had overwhelmed her, even though she didn’t quite know what it meant or who she had looked like. If she willed it, she could have held onto the elfin illusion, but finding that will was an onerous task.

Cooter was fairly certain that Brian was just the type of man she used to be attracted to. A part of her would have looked forward to him seeing her as one ex-girlfriend or another. She wondered how poetically he might apologise for his past transgressions. She imagined the kinds of gifts he might shower on her. She even brought to mind a single snapshot of a peculiar position he might have put her in, in his bed. Still, she didn’t regret his passing. There would be another; there always was. To Cooter, it was, well, it was nice. At least, ‘nice’ is what she suspected that particular concept to be; sometimes she got them muddled, since they all felt so similar.

“Ohmigod,” Kellin breathed out, at barely a whisper. Kellin was the raven-haired man, of delicate features, seated alone at the table next to Cooter. With utmost hesitance, as if he might awake from a dream, Kellin asked of Cooter, “Vixen?”

Knowing that she shouldn’t like being called that, Cooter asked back, “Asshole?”

Kellin only regarded her with awe and devotion, which prompted Cooter to wonder if she should feel bad for her poor first impression. She was no telepath, but she could catch glimpses, sometimes, of how her mutant power would hide her body. She felt half of a smile in her stomach at the young man looking at her in such a way, when she was looking so elderly, with an unflatteringly triangular face, and big 80’s hair.

“I never stopped believing,” Kellin whispered. “Some of the boys, they tried to join Black Air, but I never lost faith. Never. I have to tell them — you have to show them. The one’s who believed, and the one’s who gave up. They need to know you’re alive.”

Staring at Kellin wide-eyed, Cooter just muttered, “Uhm… okay?”

Dressed in a semi-formal two-piece suit, without the tie, Brian rolled a silver marble beneath his index finger along the top of his
waist-high bureau.

“I only have one word of advice. Well, seven,” Rachel said, peeking her head into Brian’s bedroom with her hands over her eyes, in case he hadn’t finished dressing. “Don’t get too in your own head.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Brian chuckled, but put the marble in his pocket, just in case.

Ray was right. From the moment I saw Frances again, I immediately found myself ‘too in my own head’. I could almost watch myself perform my whims, but I wouldn’t exactly call it an out-of-body experience. It felt as if I was buried deep down in my own flesh, and was then wrapped in cotton and bubble-wrap, to numb me from any of the experiences I might feel from external stimuli. Even when I pinpointed how distant I felt, I managed to keep my expectations high.

It was after the Irish waitress set down our menus, after turning only two pages into the artistically bound menu that I felt it. A paper cut, almost. My skin is too impervious to be pierced by ordinary paper, but there was that half-second of pain anticipation — almost worse than the real thing — and the realisation that my grunt and pinched facial expression was for an imagined something that never happened. I should have taken that as a borrowed precognition, from Elizabeth, of what the evening was to become.

“So, Brian;” Frances paused to smile, her eyes half-lidded. In spite of all the ways she’d aged, her smile hadn’t changed since university. “You’re Captain Britain now. That’s… well, that’s good for you,” Frances congratulated. The sprinkle of patronisation atop her words made me meet her eyes, and lay the menu on the table’s edge. Almost immediately, she asked, “Are you wearing your costume underneath that suit.”

“I — Ah– I’m between masks,” I replied tightly, evasively. Clearly I had transferred some of my annoyance at Ray onto Frances.

“How did you get into that, anyway?” she asked, attempting a casual attitude to drown away any signature of curiosity. “Did you respond to an advert?”

“No.” I made no effort to hide my own confusion at her implication. “Being near to death was the catalyst. It made me see that there were more choices than I thought, that there was very little more important than helping people.”

“Oh.” Frances’ simple word — a letter, really — bore the personification of an eye-roll. “Right.”

“Are you accusing me of lying?” I asked, all but sputtering defensiveness.

“I don’t believe in them,” Frances stated clearly. “I don’t believe in super-heroes. They’re a creation of the media. CGI and all that.”

“Is that so?” I asked, fighting the need to laugh.

“Don’t be that guy,” Frances pouted.

“What guy?” I asked, expecting to find humour in her rationale.

“The guy who looks down on any opinion he did not create,” Frances replied, her words offered with classic elocution.

I narrowed my gaze on her, and gave into the kind of snark I usually knew to bottle. Completely deadpan, I said, “I will need to ask my agent for permission first.”

The words were beneath me, but it made Frances shut her mouth. My attention roaming, I noticed a woman, over Frances’ shoulder, who was eating an appetizer made from asparagus. I wondered how similar it was to the asparagus dish Rachel had taught me to prepare the other night. Without any more remarks coming from Frances, I scanned through the menu again, curious to discover if the asparagus appetiser contained garlic or mustardseed.

“Would you care to order something to start?,” the waitress returned to ask before I found the menu entry I was looking for.

“No, thank you,” I replied automatically. “All we need is some more time to look at the menu.”

Over Frances’ other shoulder, there was a man wearing a suit exactly the same colour of something my father used to wear. A nigh-perfect photograph of a memory developed itself in my mind. My father would sometimes wear Otherworld armour-skin. I can’t remember if he would wear it for the strength amplification or if he would simply test it after modifying it, but I’m sure I saw him in it when I was very young. I don’t know how I forgot about that. It would begin to explain how I never flinched at the idea of wearing a costume as thin as a butterfly’s wings in bright primary colours. It’s strange the things we think of as ‘normal’, simply because we were exposed to them as children.

When the waitress returned, Frances didn’t look up from her menu. I found myself abruptly self-conscious. I didn’t want the waitress to know that Frances and I hadn’t spoken since she’d last been here. I’d noticed a glint of recognition in her eyes earlier. I had taken Ray and Jane here a week ago, and now this waitress though that I was cheating on my much-younger-than-me wife, with an older empty-headed woman.

Alysande Stuart lay stretched out on the peak of a grassy hill in Otherworld. The Starlight Citadel shone dazzlingly in the sky, but it was never the air that called to her, like it did to so many others in the Captain Britain Corps. It was the ground beneath ‘Sande that she longed to remain connected with. She squirmed slightly, to feel the soft grass scratching at her back, and, in doing so, accidentally kicked someone. Lolling her head to the side, Alysande pensively looked to the person who had not been there moments before. Her eyes found the delicate Roma, Omniversal Guardian, languidly laying alongside her in the grass; showing no fear of staining her white and gold robes.

“I must have you to thank f’r my freedom,” Alysande asked in her Scottish brogue, which she could begrudgingly admit had been Americanized in recent years.

“Your exile had reached its ultimate duration,” Roma said offhandedly, shrugging as best she could while laying on her back.

“Exile?” Alysande echoed disbelievingly.

“Despite your crime, Otherworld never intended to imprison you, or to force you into hard labour;” Roma turned her head, on the pillow of her lengthy black hair, to meet Alysande’s eyes as she spoke. “Your escape with the Fantastic Four was orchestrated, in the hopes that you would learn their values. Your performance today, among the new recruits in the Training Corps, suggests that your exile had the desired effect. I am proud of you. I have to admit, I was surprise at the speed with which you moved in defense of innocents whom you knew to be simulacrums created by magic illusions.”

“I am Caledonia,” Alysande took strength from her mythic hero identity. “How could I not help those in need?”

Looking back up at the sky, Roma smiled sadly. “That is what I always wondered.”

All of our attempts at small talk had dried up by the time the waitress returned for the fifth time. Frances still couldn’t decide what to  order. I had tried to help Frances narrow down the decision, but not even that would lubricate our conversation.

“Just a little bit more time,” Frances tightly requested.

“You must not be very hungry,” the waitress genially supposed.

“You would know all about hunger, wouldn’t you?” Frances disdainfully stated, looking the slim waitress up and down.

My hand instinctively reached for the wine list, even after these past dry years. I didn’t touch it, though; I wouldn’t use Frances as an excuse. I just ordered the bowtie pasta with red pepper sauce, and Frances put her nose back in her menu.

Who would want to be Captain Britain? I certainly don’t. Where’s the fun? I can hear the words in my head, but I still can’t believe I said them. I don’t talk like that. Why was it so terribly difficult to talk to Rachel about this? She said that I mean something to all of Britain; why can’t she understand that Jane is a part of all of Britain. All that can matter — all that does matter — is that I mean something to Jane. If I am going to do that, I have to be there for her. I have to be present. I won’t let Jane’s first memory of me to be coloured by my blood dripping in her eyes.

Is there even a relevance to Captain Britain today? The Knights of Pendragon may not work as a team any longer, but every one of their members continue to be worthy role models and heroes in their individual fights against crime, injustice, suffering, and ‘evil’. All Captain Britain can do is punch things. Is there even anyone left to punch? The men and women who actively threaten lives are just confused or desperate, without anything better in their lives. They don’t deserve abuse. They’re just the tools of men or women or even concepts that can’t be punched because of their awesome powers — be it money, mutant ability, man’s law or magic.

I remained securely in my head with these thoughts and others until my food arrived. By then, I couldn’t even look at Frances without being awkwardly baffled at what to possibly say, while she continued to scour through the menu. I stared out one of the restaurant’s windows, even though I had to turn my head at an uncomfortable angle, and ate my meal in complete silence. When my plate was half empty, I waited for the waitress to pass by our table again, and I told her that I was done.

Frances announced that she would have the house salad, then.

I didn’t know whether to congratulate her patronisingly, or to ask her why she wanted to elongate this evening further. I said nothing. She did likewise.

The waitress returned with the salad much quicker than I would have expected, and Frances took a delicate bite out of it the moment it was placed in front of her. After only her second bite, something fluttered out from under a leaf of lettuce. Frances’ eyes bulged with utmost horror, and her whole body shook. She vomited up what must have been a large lunch onto her salad, and ran towards the toilets before she could continue retching.

Without thinking about it, I was on my feet and heading for the exit. When I reached into my pocket, the waitress arrived and said something about ‘complimentary’. I hadn’t been reaching for my wallet, in fact. I had pinched the silver marble between my fingers and thumbed the small notch on it.

Diving her hand into the back pocket of Jane’s stroller, paper crunched in Ananym’s palm. She withdrew the folded page, and smoothed it out. It seemed mundane at initial glance; a standard registration form for a dental office. It was only when she read the details that she noticed that Brian had written in every designated box until the one that asked for ‘marital status’.

“What are you doing going through Brian’s personal private property?” Rachel Summers shrilly tore the words from her throat, seconds after she entered Jane’s nursery.

Staring at the paper with wide eyes, Ananym rolled her baffled gaze over to Ray, and then pulled another object out of the pocket of Jane’s bulky stroller. Ana evenly explained, “Jane needed her Jolly Farm Review blanket.”

“God! I’m sorry,” Rachel blurted out with shock at her own vitriol. “I’m just tired? Now is clearly a bad time for me to check in on Jane. I’ll let you get back to… yeah…” Ray hurried out of the room before Ananym could reply.

With her honey-blonde hair all pulled up into a high ponytail, except for the bangs framing her face, Linda McQuillan was dressed casually and seated comfortably in the Study off the main foyer of Braddock Manor. Expecting to find his household asleep, Brian tensed in irrational startle when he first glanced through the open doorway and noticed Linda sitting in the dimly lit room. It was irrational since it was he who had called upon her. The silver marble in his pocket was a piece of Widget, the mechanical dimension-jaunting lifeform that was enabling Linda to protect two alternate earths, and to journey to Earth-616, when signaled by Brian.

Without prelude or question of how long she’d been waiting, Brian wearily stated, “I was sure I would know when I was ready to start…” –the ‘d’ word held almost as much hesitance as ‘death’– “dating. I know the importance of balance; I tried to be optimistic about the whole thing… I didn’t think I was ready, and now I’m certain that I actually was, but, now… Now I’m really not ready.”

“Christ, you’re thinking about it too much,” Linda had to laugh, but was soon on her feet to offer a hug to mend Brian’s hurt look. With her arms draped over his shoulders, Linda reminisced, “When I first started dating again, I attempted to be cerebral and rational about it. I refused to date anyone who reminded me of Rick in appearance, in behaviour, in scent, in attitude. I knew it couldn’t be healthy to try to replace my husband. Only, by the fourth anti-Rick, I recognised that I was trying so hard to think about everything that Rick was not, my attempts at dating were still all about him. And to top the fact that I was still wading in Rick’s shadow, I was bedding ugly rough-and-tumble greasers.”

Brian joined Linda in a too-brief chuckle, which was replaced by battle-ready poise, on both their parts, when the room lit up with a pink flare. The light quickly dissolved, leaving behind its source: an exceedingly long-limbed woman who appeared to be mostly human, except for her notably avian features. Her eyes were very big and very blue, and her hair was feathered — both in style and in substance — pink, black and white feathers haloed her head.

Inhumanly dulcet tones came from the alien woman’s mouth the moment her form coalesced: “I am Cerise; genestock of Subruki, Zarstok, and Kulika. By Shi’ar Majestrix Lilandra Neramani, I have been charged with the critical chare of message-bearer. My message is that of a desperate plea. Countless inhabited planets between the nearest arm of the Shi’ar Galaxy and this precious orb are in direct threat of being slashed down to bloody flames and ashes. Only you can save us all.”

“I don’t think so,” Brian replied softly, but hard. “Why won’t any of you get it? I am not Captain Britain anymore.”

“Britannic?” Cerise guessed as his identity. Rose sparkles spiraled through the room to light it up above the dim that was beneath what Cerise was comfortable with. “Sincerest apologies. Your current worth is negligible. The Phoenix is whom I seek.”

Abashed, Brian muttered a simple, “…Oh.”

“I’ll,” –Linda hovered several inches off the floor, and started to back out of the room– “Go get Rachel.”

“Check on Jane too, would you?” Brian asked, watching Cerise warily.

“I offer you an opportunity to earn the redemption that your soul craves,” Cerise entreated, not long after Linda glided out of the room. The focus of her words, Rachel, padded barefoot into the study, while wearing quickly-thrown-on saffron athletic shorts and a thick charcoal hoodie sweater, with lilac sequins covering the hood.

Idly scratching the back of her neck, as she blinked the sleep out of her eyes, Rachel said, “…Uhh, my soul craves a sour kiwi smoothie.”