As it turns out, the rest of the Shadows go down fairly easily. A number of them are already dead by the time Atalanta and I arrive at the locations specified on Teddy the Bull’s list. Victims of the other members of their fraternity, if the lack of visible injuries is anything to judge by. Some of the other locations are completely empty, indicating that the inhabitants have already decided the risks weren’t worth it and fled the city. But there are still a few holed up exactly where we were told they’d be, waiting for their target to pop back up so that they can go after him.

Naturally, we deal with them in the same fashion we did the others. In a handful of cases, no sooner are we done with that do more Shadows show up, having been staking the spot out for a chance to eliminate the competition, and deciding to go after Liv and I instead. None of them get very far. Most of them are low-level, reds and greens, which makes sense. To come into my city, you’d have to either be as foolhardy as them, or as supremely confident in your skills as the white-robe we killed. Either way, it was a mistake. WIth any luck, the effort we put in rooting them out tonight will buy me months, maybe even years, before any more Shadows dare step foot into Pax again.

In the end, we only find about fifty Shadows over the entire night, slightly less than anticipated. That doesn’t mean we’re in the clear yet- a few could still be hiding out in places we didn’t find, waiting until Kingsley shows his face. He agrees, somewhat reluctantly, that it’s safest for him to stay under our protection for the next few days. The man is insistent that he still give his address, which will be a headache for me, because I’ll have to be in the building to protect him, while listening to him give a long-winded speech about how everything I do is wrong. With any luck, the Shadows will have given up by then, and the event will go by without incident.

Once that’s confirmed with him over the radio, Liv and I head back to Baker Street. She’s been there before, but only since I took over for Jason. He didn’t want any outsiders getting a look at our central base of operations, and I agree with the sentiment broadly, even if I trust Atalanta enough not to consider her an outsider. We leave the Continental in the garage, exchange our uniforms for casual wear, and head up into the apartment building above. She’s been to my place plenty of times, even before she knew Baker Street was located beneath it.

We’ve known each other for something like seven years now, and been dating officially for four, though there was plenty of will-they-won’t-they flirtation beforehand. The social circle of unlicensed vigilantes tends to be pretty small, but just about everyone I told I was officially seeing Liv said that it had been a long time coming.

It took a while before she and I discussed her unwillingness to get a hero license. My own reasons for doing so are fairly obvious, considering half the people I go after are cops and government contractors, but Atalanta is more of a traditional crime-fighter. If she wanted to, she could probably apply for a license and get approved easily, even with several years of unlicensed operation under her belt. Better to have her information on file than not. Most people who refuse to get the license just don’t like the idea of the government having their name on file, or undergoing the evaluation process. For her, it’s more to do with the fact that the people she grew up with taught her never to trust the cops, and getting the official government seal of approval for her actions would likely mean a lot of them would never talk to her again. It’s hard to be an effective protector if the people you’re protecting aren’t willing to tell you anything.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moments when you fall for someone, but that was certainly one of them for me.

“I’m gonna crash. See you in a few hours.”

Atalanta nods. She doesn’t get tired, exactly, but non-stop action can still take a mental toll on her. It won’t take long for her to recover, while I still happen to need sleep. Fortunately, she won’t have to wait around for eight hours while I’m unconscious. I take brief one to two hour naps between four and eight times a day, getting the same amount of rest as the average person, but in non-consecutive chunks. The unpredictable nature of the job means I can’t schedule them consistently, but there are a few good times of day when I can sneak them in. Including four in the morning, which it is right now. So when I get into my bedroom, it’s not more than a minute or two before my halfway coherent thoughts fade into dreamless sleep.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had the luxury to slowly fade back into awareness as I wake up. If you get drugged unconscious and kidnapped, you want to be fully alert the moment you’re awake, and that habit is hard to break even in your own home. The back of my brain is already starting to process information, like the position of the sun in the sky, judging by the light filtered in through my blinds. It’s higher than expected, which means I overslept. Checking my phone, I see that it’s nearly seven twenty, over an hour later than I intended to wake up. Still, Liv is here, and she didn’t see fit to rouse me, which means I didn’t miss anything important during that extra hour. And thanks to the Council business, I haven't been getting as much sleep as I should.

Just thinking of the Council is enough to shake the last vestiges of exhaustion from my mental periphery. A quick glance at my implant confirms that I haven’t missed any messages, which is something of a relief, even if I can’t help but wonder what they’ve been up to without me. I need to check up on them soon, and continue my investigation in earnest. Before that, though, I have things to do here. And there’s Liv.

Once I’m showered and dressed, I head out into the rest of the apartment, finding her seated on the couch, her feet resting on my coffee table. The television is off, and she’s reading something on a tablet, though she gives me a nod as I enter the room. Rather than immediately seat myself next to her, I walk around the counter into the kitchenette, and put the kettle on. Just because I’m used to Jason’s erratic sleep schedule doesn’t mean it’s particularly pleasant, especially right after waking up. Without an immediate adrenaline rush, I need an artificial substitute to keep me going. Black tea is my preferred poison, and has been since I was a kid. There was no coffee machine in the house where I grew up, and buying one would have been too expensive, but my parents never noticed when I borrowed some cash to purchase a kettle and some tea bags. They had other things they were concerned with.

The water boils, and I pour it into a mug with ‘I

With my tea still far too hot to drink, I bring it over to the coffee table, walking slowly so as to avoid spilling any on my feet. Liv doesn’t budge her feet, forcing me to take the long way around the table, where I set the mug down and place myself next to her. She takes a second to finish whatever paragraph she’s in the middle of, then turns the tablet off and places it to her right, before leaning into me. I lean right back, so her head is resting on my shoulder, and mine is resting on hers. Her hair smells nice, suggesting she showered while I was out, though it’s dry enough that I can assume it wasn’t that recent. The exact scent is one I can’t place- something floral. She brought a travel bag with her to Pax, which must include whatever new shampoo she’s trying out, because nothing in my bathroom is capable of producing that scent.

Rather than vocalize all that, I merely breathe her in, and whisper a “Good morning.”

“Morning to you too, sleepyhead. That was almost a normal person amount of sleep you got in there.”

While my voice is low because I’m tired, Liv keeps hers down simply out of conscientiousness. She can be thoughtful like that, though I’ve had to ask her to be a little quieter before, thanks to her overabundance of energy. When she’s excited about something, she has a habit of talking louder and louder until she’s nearly shouting, without even realizing that she’s doing it. An endearing quality, except when you’ve just woken up.

“A normal person with insomnia, maybe. Besides, what would you know about it?”

Liv once boasted to me that she could count on one hand the number of times she’s actually slept since her powers manifested. Most of them involve being drugged unconscious somehow, though her rapid metabolism allows her to process those chemicals much faster, and wake up sooner than her would-be captors anticipate. Even when we’re together, she tends to stay with me until I’ve fallen asleep, and then slip off to clean up and do something else. I don’t mind, so long as she’s there when I wake up again.

“Mm, good point.” She’s silent for a few moments, as if trying to remember something. After another second, it comes to her. “Hey, you want to go get breakfast?”

Both of us have unconventional daily schedules, which means that even when we’re both in the same city, there isn’t much time to do normal couple things. There’s plenty of head-cracking, and we usually find some time to spend together during the less eventful hours of the night, but going out and having a meal or seeing a movie isn’t usually an option. Today, I’m awake at a normal hour, and can’t think of anything urgent that would prevent me from having a nice meal with Liv. So, why not?

“Sure. You have somewhere in mind?”

Strictly speaking, Liv doesn’t need to eat, but she isn’t incapable of it either. As far as I know, the only time she really does it is with other people, since she doesn’t get hungry any more than she gets tired.

“It’s your city, dumbass. I dunno where anything is.”

I make a sarcastic sound of disgruntlement, and try to call to memory a few good options for breakfast nearby. It’s not accurate to say I don’t get out much, but most of my excursions are in costume. Most of my meals are either had here, or on the go, in the form of nutrient bars and protein drinks. Still, knowing the city is an important part of my job, and not just from the perspective of a vigilante. I have to be able to see things like an ordinary citizen does, including knowing where to eat breakfast.

“There’s a bagel place a few blocks away.”

Liv considers it for a moment, lips pursed.

“They have pastries?”

Since she doesn’t need to worry about nutrition, Liv is free to indulge her sweet tooth whenever she eats. It’s important to keep in mind when shopping and selecting restaurants with her.

“Yep.”

“Great, let’s go.”

Almost immediately she stands up, while I remain seated, staring forlornly at my still-steaming mug. Forcing myself onto my feet, I grab a thermos out of a cabinet and pour the tea into it, leaving the tea bag inside of the mug on the table. I can’t remember if the bagel place has a no-outside-food-or-drink policy, but even if they do, I’ll probably have emptied the thermos by the time we get there. Liv’s got her shoes and a jacket on already, and checks her phone two separate times while I’m in the process of following suit.

Out of costume, Liv wears her hair down. At some point after I went to sleep, she reapplied her makeup, though she’s never been the kind to go overboard with that stuff. As far as I know, most female capes don’t, because it’s a hassle to deal with in costume. Even if you don’t wear a mask, you’re pretty much guaranteed to work up a sweat, so it’s best to avoid slathering yourself in eyeliner and all the rest of it. I used to spend time making sure my hair looked good, but that was before I wore a helmet, which rendered that part of my routine pointless. If we were going out for a more serious excursion, I might have worried about my own appearance a little more, or even traded out my t-shirt for a button-up or turtleneck, but this is just breakfast. I shrug on a jacket, which feels quite a bit lighter than the trenchcoat I wear in uniform, and grab my keys before heading out the door.

Liv’s outfit is a little more put-together than mine, which makes sense. She’s got more hours in the day, which means a lot of spare time. She occupies herself by worrying about that kind of thing, which I suppose is at least more productive than just watching TV or scrolling endlessly through social media. Dark blue jeans that cling to her legs in a way I can’t help but appreciate, a pastel yellow shirt and a purple jacket.

As we step into the otherwise-empty elevator, Liv slips her hand into mine. The contact serves as a suitable substitute for speech as we make our way down to the ground floor. Despite it, I can’t help but let doubt seep in. It’s hard to tell exactly how serious our relationship is. We’ve been together for about four years, but we don’t even live in the same city, which means our opportunities to spend time together like this are increasingly infrequent. When we are together, I enjoy it, but her carefree attitude is infectious. Before I took over for Jason, that wasn’t a problem at all. I could always be the less serious one, and he would always be the stern authority figure. Now, I have to make sure Liv’s presence doesn’t cause me to slip back into those old patterns. And of course, there are all the things I can’t tell her about. Keeping secrets was always a part of the job, but most of them were ones I could blame on Jason. Now it’s nobody’s fault but mine that I’m keeping her in the dark.

It’s hardly all miserable, of course. Without Liv to keep me honest, I would probably have gone too far into the grim side of things already. Even if I’m filling Jason’s shoes, that doesn’t mean I have to reproduce his personality in full. And in the quiet moments like this, it’s easy to picture spending years with her, even decades. I just need to sort the thing with the Council out first.

The elevator doors open, and I give Liv’s hand a squeeze before releasing it. She seems to take that as an indication that I’m ready to talk.

“So, what was it you were gonna tell me?”

I take a long drink from my thermos and wait until we’re out of the lobby before answering. The building isn’t quite as ostentatiously decorated as some luxury high-rises in this part of town, but the lobby is still well-furnished, with leather couches and polished stone floors that call the Council’s secret base to mind. The uniformed receptionist gives me a nod as we head out the door.

“Huh?”

“Last night, you mentioned you wanted to tell me something once we were finished with... what we were doing.”

Standard operating procedure is never to talk in explicit terms about mask stuff when we’re in public. If I had the device Zero used the other night, which would make our speech indistinct to anyone listening in, it would make things easier, but I don’t, and even if I did, it would be hard to explain to Liv. Fortunately, we’re both familiar with the process of talking around the details of our exploits.

“Oh, right. I forgot about that entirely.”

“Me too,” she chuckles. “That’s why I’m reminding you.”

I hadn’t thought through exactly how I would explain this to her yet, which means I have to do it on the fly, while avoiding anything that might tip a passerby off to the fact that we’re Hawkshaw and Atalanta.

“Well, let me put it this way. There’s a project I’m working on.” A case, in other words. “It’s big. Maybe the biggest I’ve had to deal with. But I can’t tell you about any of it. You know that I would, if it was an option, but it’s really not. So... I wanted to tell you that I can’t tell you, I guess. Otherwise I’d feel dishonest, even if I wasn’t actually lying about anything.”

Liv considers that quietly for a minute, her expression thoughtful. She’s already in danger just by proximity, but if I actually told her about the Council, it wouldn’t go anywhere good. Both because they’d probably take action against her, and because it would be poor information hygiene. That said, I’m not stupid. If the group’s existence is ever revealed, or I get the chance to tell her without fear of reprisals, I don’t want it to be a total shock, otherwise it’ll have been a massive lie of omission.

“Okay.”

For obvious reasons, she doesn’t sound thrilled, but there’s no real annoyance or resentment in her tone. It’s clear, I hope, that I don’t want to be keeping her in the dark. And she knows I’m not the kind of person who would do that to keep her safe unless there was a legitimate threat involved. She’s not some fragile porcelain doll- if I thought she was, I wouldn’t be willing to take her along with me for things like what we did last night.

“Great. I’m... glad you understand.”

“Of course. If the circumstances change, you’ll tell me, right?”

“Obviously.”

“Then we’re good.”

Talking about mask stuff tends to dampen the mood somewhat. Unfortunately, neither of us have a ton of other things going on in our lives to talk about, so we spend the rest of the short walk enjoying each other’s company quietly. It’s a pretty big weight off my mind to have let her know about the secrets I’m keeping, even if all she knows right now is that they exist. She knows that I’m not stupid, and that I wouldn’t be trying to protect her from something if it wasn’t genuinely dangerous.

At the bagel place, I order a toasted everything with avocado, and Liv orders an apple scone. While they’re being prepared, I pay for our food and Liv’s smoothie, and we find seats. In a city as big as Pax, even a small place like this gets so many customers that it’s virtually impossible to remember any of them. That makes it easier for us to blend in as part of the crowd. I’ve got no idea how small-town heroes with secret identities manage not to get discovered immediately.

“Your dad doing okay?”

Taking a drink, Liv shrugs her shoulders.

“He’s managing. Not much luck finding a job, though.”

One of the reasons there aren’t many unlicensed capes is that it’s hard to juggle a nine-to-five while spending your nights in a mask. Doing that while supporting an unemployed ex-con parent is even harder. Liv’s got some advantages because she doesn’t need to eat or sleep, but her dad certainly does, and most places still won’t hire someone who’s been to prison, even for a nonviolent drug offense more than ten years in the past. If it weren’t for a recent push to commute the sentences of ‘criminals’ like him, he’d likely still be behind bars. Something tells me the Council is behind that change in federal policy, because it’s not a political issue anyone with ambition would normally touch with a ten foot pole.

With Jason’s blessing, and a bit of his money, I helped her get her dad on his feet, but our money pit isn’t bottomless, and I don’t think he particularly likes living on charity regardless. Hopefully they’ll figure something out. Problems like that, a vigilante isn’t really equipped to solve. The Council, however, is- which is why I feel a little guilty about how much time I spend thinking about fighting them.

“Anything I can do to help, you let me know.”

“Course. His unemployment check just got bigger, so he’s doing fine, but he still insists on supporting himself. Won’t even let me help him use a website to find work, I think he’s started cold-calling businesses out of the phonebook and asking if they have openings.”

Liv laughs, but there’s a bit of frustration and sadness behind it. I know better than to push. If the stress starts to get to her, she’ll tell me. Right now, I get the sense she’d rather talk about something else.

“You heard from Conrad recently?”

I shake my head.

“Last I checked, he was in Qatar.”

That merits a raised eyebrow.

“Up to something dastardly, I’m sure.”

The discussion of my former archrival’s antics is put on hold by someone calling out our order. I get up and grab the food, placing her scone down before sitting with my bagel in front of me. It’s rare that I indulge in something with as little nutritional value as an apple scone, particularly not the kind topped with powdered sugar, but Liv’s expression as she bites into it almost tempts me to go order one for myself. Instead, I do my best to remain content with the avocado bagel.

Another few minutes pass as we eat, without much in the way of conversation, besides Liv taunting me with her euphoric enjoyment of the pastry. Eventually, both are gone, though hers disappears far faster than mine. I can’t remember the last time I ate out like this. Between the Council, the Front Line, and my regular work here in the city, there’s no time for anything other than microwaved meals, energy bars, and protein drinks.

“So, this project you were talking about.”

Though my instinct is to groan, I restrain myself. Liv knows better than to ask for details about something I’ve said I can’t elaborate on.

“I’m assuming your boss was involved.”

The statement isn’t phrased as a question, which means I don’t have to confirm one way or another. She’s probably just thinking out loud.

“I know you can’t say. But if I’m right, you’re probably driving yourself crazy worrying about whether you’re measuring up to him. Maybe I can’t stop you from thinking like that, but what I’ll say is this. You don’t need to worry about being as good as him. Just worry about being as good as you can be. Because, between you and me, I’m pretty sure your best is a lot better than his.”