October 20, 2022

Maddy had been camped out at a window seat of the cafe for nearly an hour, across the street from the office tower where HBS occupied the 21st floor; this was the third day in a row she’d tried staking out her potential contact. She wore civilian clothes—jeans, a loose grey hoodie, and a cap bearing the team insignia of the recently-renamed TMU Bold, the latter courtesy of her varsity hockey-playing sister—and hid her eyes behind wide sunglasses. The sheep-bear sipped at her increasingly-lukewarm latte, keeping an eye out for Ms. Dunlop. She had to use the building’s front door sometime, didn’t she?

Soon enough, a figure strode out the revolving doors on the other side of Adelaide Street: a chubby deer with petite, swept-back antlers, wearing a blowsy, rich purple maxi dress. It was her. They chugged the rest of the coffee and hustled outside, making sure to keep eyes on their target constantly.

Maddy’s burly frame wasn’t built for stealth, but OH basic training had taught the sheep-bear rudimentary investigative techniques. Walking at a brisk but conspicuously casual pace, it wasn’t difficult to get closer to the deer, then closer still. The Hero weaved through the foot traffic of similar white-collar workers on their way to lunch, eyeing the environment carefully, alert to the motions of every surrounding figure; she had to get the steps right. Suddenly, she realized the deer had slipped from her sight. She whipped her neck back and forth, panicked. That was when the sheep-bear felt a tap on her shoulder, and spun around, already reflexively raising her hands to defend herself, until she looked down and faced—“Ms. Dunlop…!”

The deer’s arms were crossed, and she calmly raised an eyebrow. “Hello, Maddy. I told you, you can call me Grace; ‘Ms. Dunlop’—heavy sarcasm on the ‘Ms.’, and usually prefaced with ‘my learned friend’—is what I get called by asshole opposing counsel. How long have you been waiting to spontaneously run into me while I went out to grab lunch?”

They lowered their hands, and cringed. “I, uh, don’t know what—”

“Maddy.”

The Hero was silent, chagrined.

“Anyway, I am getting lunch, so you may as well come with, if you want to talk; there’s a great noodle place over near Bay and Temperance,” the deer shrugged, looking eastward. “I take it you’re not thrilled with what you found out from the boss, eh?”

Maddy walked alongside, nodding nervously. After half a block, the sheep-bear finally worked up the wherewithal to say something. “...You were right,” they mumbled. “Hagen—the Director—doesn’t trust me. Neither do my teammates. I really am supposed to just smile for the cameras and be the diversity poster child. And I wouldn’t even be on the team if not for my Dad.”

“I am, genuinely, sorry for that,” the doe said sadly. “You deserve better.”

The sheep-bear hesitated briefly, but decided to just say the really worrying part out loud, to get it over with. “Oh, and my boss, he thinks your company is a Korps front. Wild, right…?”

“We know. And he knows we know, and we know that he knows that we know. But he doesn’t know a way to get to us without compromising his own position in several matters.”

“…Wait.” Finally the Hero gasped, inhaling sharply, feeling like her jaw must have comically dropped to the sidewalk. “Oh my God, you are—”

The deer rolled her eyes, and flicked her wrist at Maddy dismissively. “Oh, please, we’re barely even hiding! There are two big magenta flags in our name alone! I’d expect any PHL operative to get at least the one, but a trans Hero ought to catch both, frankly.”

“Huh?”

“Helical. As in, shaped like a helix.” She gestured, drawing the twin lines of the Korps’ insignia in the air with hoof-nailed fingertips. “And, okay, the other one is kind of a deep cut. ‘HBS’ is also a joke on ‘Harry Benjamin Syndrome,’ which—”

Maddy couldn’t help herself. “Which is some antiquated transmed garbage, right up there with ‘autogynephilia’ and ‘true transsexualism.’” The shock of confirming she was making a social call on a supervillain—well, at least, a lawyer to supervillains—was pushed to the back of her mind when she realized that the older woman seemed impressed. The Hero felt pleased, somehow. “You weren’t expecting me to know that at all because I’m so young, huh?”

“I wasn’t, no,” Grace mused as they arrived at the restaurant, cocking one eyebrow. “You just might surprise me yet, Heartforce.” She opened the door to a room decorated in kitschy florals and bright translucent orange plastic highlights, and gestured for Maddy to go inside. The pair joined the lineup to the counter. “So, Madison Skyler Oakes, duly-licensed Hero of the Province of Ontario: What can I do for you?”

The sheep-bear’s eyes darted from side to side, trying to add up all the other customers. “You… you just told me, uh… and you want to talk about this here?” Maddy choked out the words in a low voice, incredulous.

“Why not? We’re just two professional women in high-pressure jobs, bitching about work,” Grace smirked. They came to the cash register, where she ordered the seafood laksa with Hokkien noodles, and a Diet Pepsi. “Want anything? On me, of course!”

“No, thank you,” the Hero insisted. “You’re being way too chill about this. Is this some kind of trick?” Are you—” They dropped their voice to a bare whisper. “Fuck, are you hypnotizing me right now? Is this what happened to Sunrise…?”

“Suit yourself,” the doe shrugged, picking up her tray and navigating to a booth. “Anyway, no, right now I’m about to have some delicious soup, while waiting to hear what you want from me. Sit down, and tell Auntie Grace all about it; no mind control, I promise. I don’t know what you may have heard, but really, we only do that to folks who are into it,” she said with a wink.

They squeezed into the opposite banquette, trying to avoid thinking too deeply about what the deer’s last words had meant, and rubbed agitatedly at the back of their neck. “I’m not naive, you know! I know what’s wrong with the system,” Maddy continued morosely. “It’s just that I don’t… I don’t know what to do, or who else I could talk to, even! If I quit, then I feel like I’m letting so many people down! There’d be nobody on the inside of OH trying to make them improve anything. And the kids, oh my God, the kids—I met this adorable little girl a few weeks ago who was able to come out to her parents because she could tell them she’s like me, I’m some kind of role model, and—”

Grace nodded along as she finished slurping a long noodle, and swallowed. “I think the question you need to ask yourself is: Do you want to be a role model in the sanitized little box OH intends to build around you? Will you be able to live with yourself like that? Being their token trans team member, attending press conferences and flag-raising ceremonies and doing little workshops on pronoun best practices, having to explain to the cable pundits every other month how of course you know in your heart that your teammates aren’t bigots, when one gets caught mouthing off about immigrants or sex workers or affirmative action? Can you really ‘Do Good’ or ‘Make a Difference’ from the inside, or will you be compromised by even trying?”

Maddy sighed. “What do your parents do for a living, Grace?”

The doe took a long sip of her drink. “They were teachers, before they retired.”

“Did anyone ever push you to be a teacher?”

“Not specifically? But my parents did impress on me that I had to do something impressive with a higher education. I picked law, and I, uh… I haven’t always felt great about that, admittedly, especially before I signed on with the ‘bad guys.’ But I did have a choice, and I assume you’re about to say—”

“Yeah. I definitely have to live up to my dad’s legacy. I have to ‘make him proud.’ People have been telling me that my whole life, and even if I actually don’t, they’d rather just pretend I am, for the sake of his honour or something, I guess. My grandparents, my teachers, the League… I even met the Prime Minister once, when I was eight; he gave some big speech about valuing the sacrifices of our brave Heroes, fighting against the forces of anarchy.”

“And what do you want?”

There was a long silence between them. The sheep-bear looked away, out the window to the narrowest part of Temperance Street, where a delivery truck was being unloaded. “I wish...I wish I didn’t have to do the legacy thing, or be a Hero, let alone a trans Hero. As great as it feels to be, like, a role model for that girl… it’s like I can’t really be me, if I’m ‘representation.’ For whatever good I can do, I still have to be this big public symbol of progress, above everything else.”

“That must be tough, being under the spotlight,” Grace said kindly.

Maddy continued, growing more agitated as the doe opposite them calmly continued eating. “Nobody asked me, you know? I hoped so hard when I was a kid that I wouldn't get any powers, just like I hoped that my voice wouldn’t get any deeper and that I wouldn’t grow big ram horns,” they groaned. “At least I could get puberty blockers, for the other stuff. But, no, Dad was a big fucking deal, ‘The Pride of Grande Prairie,’ so when the telekinetic flashes started happening, shit, turns out I’ve got powers too… I didn’t get much of a choice, no.”

“Maddy, I’m sorry for everything that happened when you were younger. I truly am. There’s no such thing as ‘parental rights;’ no parent or family should be forcing their children to be anyone other than who they are, and that you weren’t given the choice from the get-go is vile. But you’re an adult now, aren’t you? Independent, capable of making your own decisions? Right here and now, is anyone making you be Heartforce?”

Maddy clenched her jaw. “I mean, you people, if anyone! If he hadn’t died in a fight with a villain, maybe I wouldn’t have had to do all of this...”

Grace held up a finger, indicating she had something to say, while she finished swallowing the last of her noodles; her companion waited with some irritation. The deer kept holding it up as she downed the last of her drink as well. Finally, only after she took a deep breath, did she begin to speak. “That’s not how your father died.”

They narrowed their eyes. “What. What.”

“Roger Keith ‘Heartwood’ Oakes. Born January 26th, 1972 in Clairmont, Alberta; died August 3rd, 2005 in Edmonton. Your father. He didn’t die in a fight, let alone a fight with a Korps operative.”

Maddy huffed, anger rising in her gorge. “Okay, I’m done,” she said in a hoarse whisper, standing up. “You showed me the video of Slider, and thanks for that, I guess, showing me how apparently my teammates think I’m a joke, just some useless diversity hire. Great. Good job. This is how you get me, right? This is… you’re trying to confuse me, aren’t you? Trying to make me quit. Convince me you’re so harmless and innocent and well-meaning, and didn't have anything to do with my dad’s death. Fucking… Hagen was right, you’re trying to recruit me! You’re trying to get me all sympathetic and demoralized so I’d come crawling. Well, fuck you.”

The deer looked disappointed, somehow. “That’s not—”

“And you know what, you didn’t even get the fucking day right! Or the place! I’ve seen the death certificate! He died on August 4th, in Calgary! God.” She pulled down her cap, tears welling up in her eyes, and was about to storm off—until she felt the older woman tug at her sleeve.

The doe’s overall vibe was soft, but in that moment, there was steel in her eyes. She made a small, pained smile. “It’s the truth, and I can prove it. Please, Maddy. Just let me show you something.”