November 9, 2022

Maddy took a deep breath under her motorcycle helmet as she merged into the exit lane for Derry Road. She had parted ways with Lou in Sudbury earlier that day, with both promising to stay in touch; the sheep-bear had tremendously enjoyed her several days riding shotgun with (and nights riding) the trucker. Refreshed by the time off her bike, and the easy warmth of the older butch’s company, the rest of her trip back home to Mississauga had been downright pleasant. This part, though… this was going to be difficult.

They pulled into the bungalow’s driveway and dismounted their beloved V-Max. With no small amount of apprehension, Maddy knocked on the door. Deborah Gillespie appeared a moment later. The petite bighorn ewe smiled when she saw her daughter, before a look of concern overtook her face. “What’s wrong, honey?” she said in a small voice. “You usually call…”

“Hi, Mom,” Maddy said, exuberantly feigning cheerfulness. “Can we talk?”

She nodded, and the two proceeded wordlessly to the kitchen, the sheep-bear softly closing the front door behind her and dropping her duffel bag and helmet in the front hall. Deborah had already taken out two teacups and was filling the electric kettle by the time Maddy sat down at the table, lips pursed, unsure of how to even begin.

“You like that ‘chay’ tea, don’t you? I got some of that to try,” the sheep murmured, as she busied herself rifling through the pantry. “I would have made some coffee cake if I’d known you were coming, but I think there’s some biscuits in here…”

Maddy smirked at that. “It’s chai, Mom. Yes, sure, thank you, but don’t worry about a snack, I’m fine.”

The sheep craned her neck around the pantry’s folding door. “Are you sure, honey?”

“Yes. It’s, um, it’s okay, I promise.”

Maddy went down the hall to the washroom while waiting for the water to boil. On her way back, she peered into her teenage bedroom; after the sheep-bear had stayed the night several weeks ago, Mom had re-covered it with the plastic drop-sheets that cut down on dusting. She sighed, sadly, and wondered when she’d next see this room—or Mom, or Brianna—in person again.

A moment later, cups of President’s Choice Chocolatey Chai in hand, Deborah and Maddy sat at the kitchen table. Maddy took a careful sip, and looked out the window. The gangly Norway maple in the back yard had lost nearly all of its leaves, with only a few die-hard stragglers still holding tight. “I can’t be a Hero any more,” they said bitterly. “It’s just not—it’s that—it’s because of Dad. Sort of. But also because of me.”

“Oh, honey, no! Please don’t give up on your career just because—”

“I never wanted to do this. Never. You know that, don’t you? Dad’s side of the family pushed me into it—pushed you into it—just like they pushed to cover up how he died, or how much he hurt you. It was all about the legacy, and I happened to be a convenient vessel for it.”

Deborah sniffed, wincing. “I know. But you’ve been progressing so fast in your career, and until… until recently… you seemed to be more or less happy about it? I mean, you got to be the LGBT Champion! That’s something,” she said, patting her daughter’s hand.

“LGBTQ2+, there’s more letters now. Not that it matters; I was only ever window dressing, to make Ontario’s Heroes look less backward. They’re still like Dad. They don’t really like me or want me around, and honestly, the coworkers I have to deal with most often are still pretty bigoted. And I found out that I wouldn’t even be on the team if Mr. Hagen wasn’t planning to use me to—uh, use me like that.”

“Oh,” the ewe said in a small voice. “I’m sorry, honey. I thought… I hoped it would be a good place for you.”

Maddy took a deep breath, and smiled weakly at their mother. “I know, Mom. I love you and I know you tried your best. I tried my best too, but I know now that I’m just not welcome there, not as me. What Ontario’s Heroes wanted was a symbol; the ‘Heartwood legacy,’ but make it ‘diverse.’ No accountability, no owning up to the way government Heroes have always been hurting queer people. They were willing to give me a seat at the table only as long as I could be co-opted to defend the status quo,” the sheep-bear sighed. “But those new friends I was telling you about, they helped me figure it out eventually: I just can’t. I respect myself too much for that, you know? I’m not a cop, and I’m not him, and I won’t compromise on that ever again.”

The sheep nodded with understanding as she sipped her tea, badly trying to hide that she clearly found the taste… novel. “Oh! Actually, that reminds me,” Deborah said brightly, turning around to pick up a stack of assorted mail from the shelf of the phone nook at her back. Shuffling through it, she found what she was looking for, and handed two envelopes to her daughter. “These came this morning.”

The addresses were from the governments of Ontario and Alberta, and Maddy looked at the envelopes only briefly before carefully opening each one. After a moment, the sheep-bear had in her hands a thick folded parchment, and a thin, translucent polymer document: her change of name and amended birth certificates, respectively. Mom peered at the papers curiously.

“I thought so! I wasn’t sure why you had them sent here, but gosh, that was fast, if you only decided to change your name a few weeks ago,” Deborah mused, a hint of pride in her voice.

Maddy smiled, chuckling delightedly. “I had a little help from those friends for this, too.”

“Then you can thank them again for me. Welcome to being a Gillespie,” the ewe giggled, before standing up with arms open. Maddy joined her, and the two hugged tightly.

“Mom? There’s some other stuff I have to tell you,” the sheep-bear murmured over their mother’s shoulder. They pulled away, and sat down again, motioning for her to join them. “I went to see Granddad. I talked to him about… about Dad.”

“Oh…?”

“If any of the Oakes ask, tell them I said they can all go to hell.”

“Language, Maddy. I’d be happy to, though,” Deborah smirked.

The sheep-bear took a deep breath, and laid a meaty paw on their mother’s arm, squeezing tightly. “Do you trust me?”

“Of course, honey,” Deborah said, worried.

“The PHL is going to tell you some awful things about me, soon. They’re going to say I’m brainwashed. They might say that I’m a danger to you and Bri, or that they need to take me down, institutionalize me, for my own good. Don’t believe them. They’re lying, just like they lied about Dad.”

The ewe grasped her daughter’s hand in her smaller, more delicate, fully ovine ones. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“Maybe not yet, unless someone spotted me at Dad’s monument in Grande Prairie. Soon, though.”

“Maddy!”

“It’s better I don’t tell you too much, but… do you remember you were telling me about that time in Ottawa, at the party? Dad chased after the lizard?”

Deborah nodded. “Yes…?”

“Well… I met them. You have something in common, at least—he hurt you both very badly, that night.” Maddy inhaled sharply, looking away. “They’re pretty cool. Very kind, very thoughtful, very, uh, forgiving. I think you’d like them.”

Realization dawned on the sheep. “So your new friends are…”

“Yeah. Definitely not Heroes.”

“And—and you trust them?”

“After learning everything I have in the last few weeks? Yes. With my life, I think.”

“You know what? I think I trust them too, then,” Deborah said, smiling.

When Maddy finally got home to her apartment—well, admittedly, it wouldn’t be ‘home’ any more, as soon as she abandoned it for KDS; ROSE had assured her that she’d have assigned quarters waiting whenever she decided to make the leap—the space felt empty, almost alien.

The sheep-bear paced through the rooms rifling through shelves and closets for nearly an hour, before coming to a depressing conclusion: they didn’t really have many possessions they valued. The apartment had come furnished, and the small amount of decor was mostly discount pieces from the HomeSense at Erin Mills. Most of their childhood mementos and adolescent nerd detritus were still in their old bedroom in Malton, underneath Mom’s drop-sheets.

Nonetheless, she eventually stuffed her laptop and some personal bric-a-brac into the duffel bag, alongside a few favourite T-shirts. Maddy was about to do one last circuit of the apartment before heading out, forever, when she heard the creak of the front door opening. The sheep-bear urgently jammed on the RCGs from her jacket’s front pocket before sidling up against the back of the bedroom door, peeking through the crack in the hinges into the living room. She saw the shape of a very familiar rat.

Slider.

An exhausted frown crossed the sheep-bear’s features, and she silently messaged a query through her visor’s mental link. “ROSE? Can a new recruit call for backup?”

[Of course! I can definitely request assistance for emergency extraction, if you need it. Would you like me to do that now?]

“Not… yet. If it’s just him…”

[Confirmed. Also, I’ve taken the initiative of tapping into your building’s security system; the management really should go to the trouble of changing the default router password and updating their camera interface software. It appears he’s alone, and I’m not detecting any incoming or outgoing signals from his communication device.]

Maddy shifted to a sly smirk, upon learning that tidbit. “Thanks, ROSE. Stand by, but I think I can handle this one on my own.”

The sheep-bear grasped the living room rug with her powers, and pulled it sharply; Slider tried to steady himself, but stumbled and fell on his chest with a grunt. She strode into the living room, and mentally pinned him to the ground. “I thought I told you to keep your skeevy ass out of here,” Maddy growled. “How’d you know I was back in town, anyway?”

The rat chuckled smugly into the floor. “What, you think I haven’t been watching your mom’s house?” As he craned his neck over his shoulder to face the sheep-bear, he looked Maddy up and down with an expression of disgust. “I knew it,” he screeched upon registering that they were wearing a pink visor, before his expression turned to panic. “Wait, shit, already? You’ve already got a set? Oh fuck, Hagen’s gonna be pissed…”

The sheep-bear folded her arms, looking down her muzzle at Slider. “Hey, about that. How much of the past couple weeks of jerking me around has been from our fearless leader, and how much was just you freelancing?”

The rat struggled, whining in a thin, scratchy voice when Maddy responded by holding him down even more tightly. “All of it was me, okay? All of it! I figured you were planning to defect for real if you could, once I saw the pills. I was going to let it happen, then ambush you once I knew you had a pair of RCGs, and show Hagen the bottle. You’d at least be in deep shit for not following orders, enough to get kicked off the team; and maybe, if I got lucky and it triggered you into a big public meltdown or whatever, you’d catch a couple of conspiracy and terrorism charges on the way out too. I didn’t think you’d actually done it yet, though, knowing how fucking useless you’ve been until now,” he whined bitterly.

“So Hagen, right now, he thinks I’m doing what exactly?”

“Still tailing that fat dyke deer,” he sneered, rolling his eyes. Neal then began hacking and coughing, as if he was trying to clear his throat without success. It took several more seconds before he realized that the cause of the obstruction was Maddy, slowly tightening her telekinetic grip around his neck with the gesture of a closing hand. “What’re—you—thhhhhk—doing…?”

“Oh, I’m choking you out. You know, Reclaimer always wanted me to practice this, when I was in the Prairie League Cadets? ‘Just in case,’ he’d say. They even rigged up this whole dummy with a crushable windpipe for me. I refused, because I thought—I thought, in the infinite wisdom of a squeamish thirteen-year-old!—that I could never do that to a person. I’d never be in a situation where I’d have to seriously hurt anyone for real; there would always be an option to fight defensively, and take opponents down without doing lasting damage.” They scoffed, and flexed their control slightly to allow Slider a deeper breath, tilting their broad ursine head to flash Slider a menacing grin. “Kids, eh? So innocent. So optimistic.”

The rat stared daggers at the erstwhile Hero as he scrabbled at his neck with both hands, fruitlessly trying to gain purchase on the invisible force of Maddy’s powers. “H-how are you even this strhhhhk…”

“Oh my God. Do you not get it yet? Neal, you colossal asshole, I have been holding back. I have been restraining myself for years, because I knew that podcasting maniacs, and fascist wine moms, and insecure little fuckboys like you, would bitch about how being aggressive—being powerful—means I’m ‘really a man,’” Maddy roared, as she telekinetically lifted him off the ground and tightened her grip around his throat.

“I have repressed so much to keep other people comfortable. Do you know what that got me? All that caution and restraint and ‘respectability,’ making myself smaller, being polite and earnest and not making waves, and just forever, endlessly volunteering to patiently educate you people that I’m a real person with a right to exist? Nothing. Nothing! It was worthless, you abusive piece of shit! It made Hagen see me as a pawn for his stupid cloak-and-dagger game, it made my family think they could railroad me into carrying on a wife-beating bigot’s legacy, and it made you think you could gaslight and manipulate me for this… this petty little ego trip.”

The sheep-bear panted, teeth bared, nostrils flaring in anger. “You know what, ‘pal?’ I don’t deserve to be barely tolerated as OH’s pet diversity mascot. I deserve to thrive. I deserve to have a goddamn life, and love, and a motherfucking purpose. One that isn’t betraying my fellow queers as, basically, a cop. The only people in the super business offering me any of those things are the Korps.”

The rat sputtered weakly, kicking his legs in the air. With a glance, the sheep-bear’s rage shaped itself into a cage of force around his lower body, locking down his movement there forcefully enough that they heard the sickening snap of a tibia. Tears streamed from Slider’s bugged-out eyes, and for once—for once!—Maddy could see in his expression that he was truly afraid of something.

Maddy cackled with sinister glee, lowering her RCGs to give the rat a direct, baleful leer. “How’s that for a goddamn ‘diversity hire,’ huh?” With a flourish of her hand, she contemptuously flung him to one side—leaving a Slider-shaped dent in the drywall—and then released him entirely, letting the rat crumple to the ground on his back, sobbing and gasping.

“You’re… you’re fucking crazy, you bitch,” he roughly croaked through moans of pain, nose bleeding and face bruised. “You’re—aaaagh—just as fucked up as Hagen about this stupid Cold War shit!” At that, Slider began making deep, gurgling heaving noises, interspersed with his coughs.

Maddy, disgusted, half-kicked the rat with a sturdy motorcycle boot to flip him onto his front. She’d felt no compunctions about hurting him after all he’d done, but she wasn’t going to let Neal Salton (vile little creep though he might be) die from aspirating his own vomit. Her timing in tipping him over turned out to be impeccable, as he began weakly puking on the hardwood floor. With a gesture, she telekinetically pulled his communicator earpiece to fly into her hand; dropping it, the sheep-bear proceeded to crush it under her heel.

“I am telling you this once, Neal. Pass it on to Lightbox, to the director, to the deputy minister, to fucking CP24 if you want. I’m done. I’m out of the Hero game. I’m not being a double agent, and frankly, I don’t feel up to committing any more crimes past this—what would a Crown call it, aggravated assault?—today. Leave me alone, especially leave my family alone, and you’ll never hear from me again; I’ll just chill at those Korps ‘reefer-den hypno-slave orgies’ that Hagen likes to get worked up about,” Maddy growled. “If you or him or any part of the PHL ever give me a reason to want more catharsis than I’m experiencing at this exact moment, though… well, you’re not going to like it, the next time you see this ‘diversity hire.’ Are we understood?”

Slider, still heaving and shaking, said nothing. Maddy used her powers to forcibly lift and turn his head in her direction. She bent low, and howled in his face; he shrank away, sobbing.

“I said, are we fucking understood?”

“Hrrrrk—yes, fuck, okauuuuurgh…”

“Yes who? What’s my goddamn name, Neal?”

“Y-yes, hngh, Madi–Maddy…”

The sheep-bear released the pathetic rat to slump back down to the floor, where he continued to periodically gurgle into the puddle around his snout, moaning in pain.

Maddy made one last sweep of the apartment—ignoring the piteous noises Slider was making from the floor—before throwing the stuffed duffel bag over her shoulder, and opening the front door. She looked back over her shoulder, and feeling the briefest pang of sympathy for the rat, awful as he was, huffed.

“Uh. ROSE? Can you make an anonymous call for an ambulance after I leave? I don’t actually want this asshole dead.”

[Of course.]

“Thanks, ROSE.”

The sheep-bear casually walked down the stairs and out to the parking lot, where snow was beginning to lightly fall. They straddled their motorcycle and gunned the engine, pulling out to the street in the direction of KDS.

It was time to start enjoying her new life.