104

Interlude 10.j: Pater Potestas

"And step."

Danny stepped to the right. Across from him, his partner mirrored the motion and they circled each other, like two fighters in a boxing match.

"And step."

Danny stepped in with his left foot. His partner did the same, and it put them both within striking range of each other.

"Now twist…"

He lifted one arm up behind him, fingers curled into a fist, and twisted his torso and hips around. His strength wound tight like a spring, and his compressed muscles burned with potential.

"— and punch."

Danny punched. With all of his gathered might, his fist swung around, and he knew, if it connected, when it connected, it would be the knockout blow to end all knockout blows —

Except the young woman across from him caught it like it was nothing, and all of the incredible force behind his knuckles vanished instantly the moment they came into contact with the fabric of her glove.

They held there for a moment, a few fractional seconds as Danny's heart pounded and his breath panted out past his lips, and then Taylor smiled at him and her fingers gave the back of his hand a couple of pats before she let go.

"That was great, Dad," she said as she stepped back.

Danny smiled back. "I have a great teacher."

She snorted.

"Flattery doesn't get you anywhere in this class."

"How about if I bribe the teacher, then?" Danny asked. "Say… the old family lasagna recipe? It's been a while since we had that."

Her smile grew wider, but she shook her head.

"Really tempting," she said, laughter in her voice, "but it'll have to wait until tomorrow. I'm going out tonight, remember?"

With Dennis, she meant. One of their date nights, since school was out for the summer and their schedules now both aligned for them to get together.

Danny laughed. "Right, yeah, I forgot."

Her lips tugged further up on the one side. "Getting forgetful in your old age?"

"I might not be any spring chicken, these days," Danny said, flexing one arm, "but don't think your old man is over the hill just yet."

In fact, he was in the best shape of his life. Watching the transformation had been incredible — how, overnight, it seemed, he'd gone from middle-aged stringbean office worker Danny Hebert, complete with paunch and thinning hair, to a lean, muscular fighter who could probably punch out any of the villains who had once made Brockton their home. His hair was still thinning and the training wasn't exactly a fountain of youth, but he felt stronger and more energetic than he had twenty years ago.

If Annette had met this Danny Hebert, Taylor likely wouldn't have been an only child.

"Alright," Taylor said, "let's keep going. Got your ring?"

Danny held up his hand; resting snugly next to his wedding band was a ring of gold with three red gemstones embedded into it.

"Ready when you are."

She nodded. "Okay, then."

She stripped off the gloves she was wearing, and Danny watched her throw them off to the side, where they landed without so much as a bounce.

Momentum cancellation. All of the power behind a blow that connected with the palm of the glove was immediately erased, meaning that neither side suffered any injury from a full power punch coming to a sudden stop. Taylor had made them once training had begun in earnest so that none of them hurt themselves whenever she gave them one-on-one attention like this.

Danny was no physicist, but even he recognized that something like that should violate about ten different laws of physics just by existing. Lisa, as she had to just about every single member of their group at some point or another, had once told him that Taylor's powers were complete bullshit and it was better to just stop trying to make any sense of them. And then she'd said later that most powers were complete bullshit the instant you gave them any real thought, it was just that Taylor's were a whole lot more in your face about it.

He still had a hard time believing it, some days. Something that simple and that innocuous could do something that incredible? What had the world come to?

Taylor turned back to him and rolled her shoulders. He squared himself, too.

"Set," she said.

"Install," Danny echoed.

There was no getting used to the sensation of his body shifting. He could do it a thousand times a day and still he'd find it unsettling to feel his bones moving, his muscles contracting, his hair growing and sprouting anew. The way armor settled onto his chest, arms, and legs, appearing from nowhere, the way he shrunk and his shoulders drew in, the cape that unfolded from empty space and fell down to his ankles.

How his glasses disappeared and he could still see clearly — better, even, than he could with them on.

Danny Hebert took a steadying breath, and Odysseus rested over him like a shell.

That was how it felt, at least. Like he was wearing someone else's body.

The woman across from him was familiar in her unfamiliarity. He knew who she was, just because Taylor had used Aífe so many times, now, and when he looked, he could see traces of his daughter in her face. But it was still jarring to look at his daughter and see someone else's face looking back.

"Five minutes," she said, and it wasn't even Taylor's voice anymore. "No Noble Phantasms. Starting now."

And then they moved.

Taylor dove in at speeds that would easily have been invisible to Danny back before this all started, thrusting her wicked-looking spear towards his face, but he saw it clearly and the instincts drilled into Odysseus took over: with both hands, he reached up and slapped his palms on either side of the spearhead's blade. It stopped, the deadly sharp tip a scant few inches from his nose.

For a fractional moment, they stood there, stalemated, as a grin slowly stretched over Taylor's face.

If she'd wanted to, she could have hit him. Danny knew that. Odysseus was fast, but Aífe was faster. She wasn't taking this seriously, and that was only natural, since this was a test of his progress with handling an Install.

Danny was still going to give it his all. Taylor had entrusted him with this, and he was going to do his damnedest to prove he still had a place as her father, as someone she could rely on.

The back of the Aigis unfolded, and two drones dropped into the air to float up above him. They took aim in an instant, glowing with power — and then Taylor flung herself out of the way as a pair of beams of bright light shot out at her. They passed through the space she'd just occupied and carved shallow gouges into the ground that smoldered from the heat.

Danny turned and held up his hands; more beams of light fired from both his palms and the drones floating over his shoulders, converging on his target as Odysseus's sharp intellect plotted out exactly where he needed to aim to hem her in. It was like he was seeing the world as it really was for the first time, how he could suddenly predict the exact trajectories needed to overwhelm his opponent.

And Taylor…danced around the beams with an effortless grace that seemed too incredible to be real.

She came closer, swaying just so this way and that, dodging with the absolute minimum effort required. Brutally efficient, he'd heard Taylor describe Aífe once. The epitome of a warrior who had honed her craft to perfection, removing all unnecessary flourishes and aesthetics to achieve the pinnacle of martial arts where no move wasted any energy at all.

Danny's eyes tracked her movements even as his brain concocted half a dozen different plans for how to trap her. What he shouldn't do, Odysseus seemed to say to him, was engage in close combat. Aífe excelled the most there. A competition of pure martial prowess would end in her favor.

Danny kicked back off the ground, higher than a human being had any right to jump unassisted, and the Aigis allowed him a brief moment of flight to put even more distance between them. As his first two drones kept firing, four more peeled off from the panels of his armor and came up to float around him. With a brief flex of his will, they started firing off beams of light, too.

She'll bank left, then duck and dodge right, before trying to close the distance.

Danny landed on the ground from a twenty-foot drop with an ease that would have shocked him just a few years ago. Sure enough, Taylor banked left to avoid the beams of his drones, then ducked under them and dodged to the right before she put on a spurt of speed and dashed in his direction.

Danny swung his arms around and started to take aim — except she was suddenly right there, having closed the distance in an instant without traveling the intervening space.

Vantage of Swiftness, he remembered. When she'd been explaining it to him and her other "students," she'd called it a long-dimension leap technique. When you got good enough, she'd said, you could even bend space when you used it. At that point, your proficiency was measured in how far you could go with a single "step."

Danny hadn't quite gotten to that level. He lagged behind the others just because his age put different limitations on how quickly he could advance. That, and he had a job that took long hours and a lot of energy, so he couldn't always attend each and every one of her lessons.

Danny gritted his teeth, and he blocked the thrust of her spear with the plat of one of his gauntlets. Pushing it so that it deflected up and over his shoulder almost felt like wrestling with a gorilla, the difference between their raw strength was that overwhelming.

She's overextended, came the thought, sharpened by Odysseus. Punish the overcommitment.

The drones hovering over his shoulders all readjusted and took aim —

Taylor let go of her spear and stepped deeper into his guard. Her torso twisted around, and then her other fist swung around and slammed into his chest.

It was like a freight train.

The Aigis protected him from the lion's share of the blow, but the sheer power behind even a diminished Thunder Feat was enough to jar his ribs as it sent him flying backwards. He hit the ground something like twenty feet away, tumbling and rolling as he reeled from the hit and his scrambled brain attempted to parse what had happened.

Somehow, he regained his equilibrium enough to roll to his feet and pull into a crouch, wheezing. A dull ache radiated out from his sternum and across his pectorals.

A stress test. Aífe had absolute control over herself, and therefore so would Taylor. She knew exactly how hard to hit to rattle him without doing serious damage. That attack was designed to see how quickly he could reorient after taking a heavy hit.

He wasn't about to disappoint her.

His drones floated over as he cupped his hands together, forming a prism. The cape fluttering from his shoulders contracted and compressed into vents that released the excess energy away from his body. A surge of power welled up inside of him and he thrust his cupped hands forward —

And the Install evaporated away as he hit his five minute limit.

Danny blinked down at his hands, feeling kind of silly to be standing there with them outstretched like that. On his ring, one of the red gemstones had gone dark.

Fifteen minutes, Taylor had explained. That was the limit of how long any of them could safely host even that fractional portion of a Heroic Spirit. Three intervals of five minutes each, with the power necessary stored in those three gemstones. If they pushed past that, then they could keep going, but they'd burn themselves out from the strain.

Like Taylor had almost done two years ago.

Except worse, because Taylor had her passenger — and the conversation about what that was had been a doozy to wrap his head around — to funnel her the necessary energy. If they kept going after all of their stored power was exhausted, then they would start dipping into their lifeforce, which was also apparently a thing, and that would run out a lot quicker than their rings' energy did.

Coming to terms with all of this stuff had left Danny with a headache for a week straight.

Each of their batteries recharged over the course of three days, as part of the safety features that kept them all from overdoing it. That had been the first thing Taylor had them test, back when she first handed them out.

Across from him, Aífe's face melted back into Taylor's as her body stretched back out to its proper size and shape. Danny didn't think he'd ever get used to that, either.

"You've really gotten the hang of this," she said happily. Danny shook his head. He knew he'd gotten much better than those early days, but it didn't really feel like he had.

"I don't think Odysseus is really suited for frontline fighting," he told her.

She nodded.

"He isn't. He's an incredible strategist and tactician, but his personal combat skills aren't anywhere near as impressive as his brain."

Danny wondered if maybe that was why she had chosen Odysseus as the Heroic Spirit for him. He had a strong defense, but he would be best served observing the battlefield and leading the others, instead of getting in the thick of things. It would put Danny out of the line of fire.

Danny wasn't a cape and he wasn't a superhero. That was probably where he should be.

That didn't mean it was where he needed to be.

Taylor checked her watch and shook her head. "Anyway, I've gotta get going."

Danny checked his watch, too, and his brow furrowed. "You think you're going to need four hours to get ready?"

"Lisa wants to take me out to get a new dress for this thing," Taylor said, rolling her eyes. "Which, I have no idea what's wrong with any of the ones I currently have, but, you know… Lisa."

Danny felt his mouth pull into a smile. "Yeah. I guess so."

He wasn't quite sure why Lisa was so prepared to spend so much money on Taylor — frankly, Danny had to shake his head whenever he saw the price tag on some of the things that girl had gotten his daughter — but Taylor herself had long since stopped questioning it.

"At this point? I've just gotten tired of trying to stop her," she had told him some months ago. "Honestly, I think she's just looking for something to spend all of her money on. That finder's fee from Coil must've been pretty big."

Danny didn't really know about all of that, but even though it felt kind of awkward to think that someone could spend that much money on gifts for her friend, he was happy that Taylor had someone who cared so much.

Taylor walked over and bent down to pick up the gloves she discarded, then packed them up in a duffle bag with the other gear she'd brought along for their training session. When she was done and the bag zippered up, she slung it over her shoulders and started walking towards the exit that led back to Brockton Bay. Danny followed and fell into step beside her.

"Is Amy going with you?" he asked conversationally.

"Not sure, yet," Taylor replied. "She had something else going on today, said she'll meet us there if she finishes early enough."

"A family thing?"

"Probably."

Danny shook his head and sighed. "You'd think —"

They stepped through the threshold and came out in the Docks.

"— after two years…"

"The whole family's stubborn," Taylor said dryly. "Victoria and Carol especially."

"Amy, too," Danny added.

"The whole lot of them," Taylor agreed. "I think the Pelhams have been trying to get them all to sit down and finally make up, but as far as I know, they're not taking sides, and because they aren't —"

"Carol and Victoria are digging in their heels," Danny finished.

"Stubborn," Taylor repeated, "the whole lot of them."

They chatted amiably for the rest of the walk home, veering off into normal, everyday things as they went. For a little while, Danny could believe that there was nothing at all unusual about either of them, and they were just a man and his daughter bonding.

When they stepped through the front door, Taylor flung the duffle bag off into the corner of the living room and announced, "I'm going to go and catch a quick shower before I leave."

"Don't drown," Danny called at her as she climbed the steps.

"Har, har!" was her sarcastic response.

Danny couldn't help but smile as she went. It was a little belated, but it looked like he was going to have the experience of raising a teenage daughter after all.

He sighed and meandered into the living room. His feet carried him almost of their own will towards the mantle above the fireplace, where a bevy of familiar photos sat, framed and placed in pride of prominence.

The oldest pictures featured a family whole. A much younger, much smaller Taylor was in each of them, capturing one of many cherished moments. A birthday party for toddler Taylor, grinning a gap-toothed smile at her cake. Taylor's first time riding a bike. Taylor curled up on the couch, snuggled into Annette's side as the book she'd been reading lay forgotten under one arm.

The last picture of Annette, with the three of them sat down for dinner at the Barnes's house, laughing and happy. Danny found himself reaching out, picking it up and tracing the contours of her smile through the glass, as though, if he just tried, he could…

There was a large gap after that, from the worst days of Danny's life. The two and a half years where he'd been struggling to go on and neither of them had much cause to smile or many things at all to take pictures of.

And then, suddenly, there were more. Taylor's birthday party from two years back. Taylor and Lisa sat down at the dinner table, chatting — about what, he couldn't even remember, but the grin on Lisa's face and the small smile on Taylor's told him that it must have been a happy one. Taylor, Lisa, and Amy relaxing in the castle courtyard, bathing in the summer sun. Dennis and Taylor sneaking a kiss during her seventeenth birthday while they thought no one was watching.

So many moments that he had thought Annette would be here for — was that five years ago already, now? It felt like it had barely been a week, in some ways, since her casket had been lowered into the ground. Like he could imagine, in the early hours of the morning just as he was waking up, that the other side of his bed was only empty because Annette was up making breakfast and the whole ordeal was nothing more than a bad dream. In others, it was like an old wound, a scar that ached every now and again but had healed over enough that he could ignore it.

Instead, Danny was alone for all of those milestones. Taylor's first boyfriend. Her first date. Giving Dennis the protective father talk — the whole, "break her heart and they won't find your body," only much more kindly, since he remembered being on the other end of that. Watching Taylor graduate from high school, dressed in a gown and cap.

It made Danny's heart ache every time he realized that not only was Annette not there to share in those moments with them, to commiserate and complain about how fast she was growing up and how quickly they were both growing old, but that Taylor had to see the empty spot beside him every time she looked through the crowd to find him.

The sound of footsteps on the stairs jolted Danny out of his thoughts, and when he looked over, Taylor, showered, hair dried, and dressed in casual clothes, looked back.

"I'm heading out," she told him.

"Tell Lisa I said hi," he said. "Amy too, if you see her."

She nodded.

"Will do."

And then she came over to him and pulled him into a quick hug.

"I'm still sweaty," he pointed out with a laugh.

"Don't care," she muttered.

She pulled away and turned to go. "Later."

"Later," Danny said.

The door clicked shut behind her, and Danny looked back down at the pictures on the mantle.

Moments of normalcy. Moments where there were no great battles being fought, no unimaginably important goals to race towards, no life or death struggles for them to strive against. Moments where they were just a man and his daughter.

These were what Danny was fighting for, the reason that he had decided to stay beside his daughter and join her Round Table. So that he and Taylor could have days like these, where they could just relax and be family and nothing was dragging them away into some terrible battle.

In some ways, it was just another battlefield in the war he'd been fighting for the last decade.

Danny sighed and pulled himself away.

Take these moments where you can, Taylor had once told him. Step away and find a moment to breathe, so that you can keep going when it really matters.

He wasn't fool enough not to understand what that meant. The woman his daughter was becoming was far too much like her mother. Scion was their great battle, the final enemy that they needed to defeat before they could work on rebuilding the world, but it wouldn't end there. She didn't have it in her to sit back and do nothing if there was something that needed fixing, not as long as there was something she could do about it.

Danny looked back through the house. It was filled with the signs of life, but it felt empty and barren with only him there.

Take these moments where you can.

He made his way to the phone, dialed up a familiar number.

"Hello?"

"Kurt? It's Danny."

"Danny!" the voice on the other end exclaimed. "Hey, how have you been?" As an aside, he added, "Lacey, it's Danny."

"Oh, you know how it is," Danny said. "Been hanging in there, holding on, trying to keep up with a teenage daughter."

Kurt chuckled. "Yeah, sounds rough. Like trying to bottle lightning, yeah?"

"Yeah. Hey, Kurt?"

"Yeah, Danny?"

"Listen, Taylor's out for the evening and I don't have anything pressing I need to handle. You and Lacey up for a night on the town?"

"Uh, sure? We ain't got anything going on, right, Lacey?"

In the background, Danny heard Lacey say no.

"Yeah, we're good to go."

"I'm gonna grab a shower, first. Meet you at Joey's? Say, in about an hour?"

"Yeah, sounds good. See you then?"

"See you then, Kurt. Give my love to Lacey."

Kurt laughed. "Tell her yourself in an hour."

Click.

Danny hung up the phone and looked back towards the collection of pictures on the mantle, the collection of normal moments that Danny cherished more than anything. There would be more to add to it, he decided. One day, that mantle would be filled with an entirely new set of pictures, each of them capturing another moment of normal happiness.

His own weakness had cost him two years of his daughter's life, and those were two years he wasn't going to get back. Danny wasn't going to let that happen again. Whatever he needed to do, whatever Taylor needed him to be, he would be damned if he missed another minute. He would be there for her, no matter what.

— o.0.O.O.0.o —

NOTES

So, how are those rings supposed to work?

I went back and forth on who Danny should have as his Heroic Spirit. I thought about Sigurd, Lancelot, and Odysseus and considered which one was the best fit. The editing team and I eventually decided on Odysseus.

Pater Potestas wasn't originally planned to be a part of this arc, and the Patrons actually said, "No, go straight to Dwarf in the Flask," but I felt like Danny had a place in this arc and it would be good to get a grasp on where he is, right now.

Next week is the final chapter of arc 10 and the end of the timeskip montage. After that, I'll be taking my customary month-long hiatus to piece together arc 11, Pyrite. Essence should be back for October 31st — and I might even have a Halloween present to go along with it. A long overdue oneshot from my original fiction with a character the SV crowd should recognize. A certain vampire in her natural habitat, as it were.

Special thanks to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best.

If you want to support me and my writing, you can do so here:

P a treon . com (slash) James_D_Fawkes

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As always, read, review, and enjoy.