---

There's no word to describe how you might feel looking up at a statue of someone you knew, someone you loved, someone who died fifteen years ago but whose impact is still felt in the city she lived in. The sculptors put a lot of work into every detail, likely poring over every photograph of the Queen of Blades to make sure they got all the details right. Most of the statues are placed in chronological order from the death of the hero each one represents, but the park's planners probably felt like it wouldn't be right to do anything but place hers next to Shining Shield's, even though their deaths were over a decade apart.

And then the word hits me, seeing the two of them standing side by side, the Queen beaming behind a half mask as Shield stands stalwartly beside her in full plate armor: I feel inferior. This is the legacy I come from, the legacy I don't think I'll ever be able to live up to. I'll never be half the hero either of them were.

I've been visiting Memorial Park to look at the statues since before my mom died. Stopped for a few years after she died, then made it a point to visit once a month after that, the only other gap being the time I left Calder to go to college. This is the first time I've been here since I moved back to Calder. When she was alive, mom would take me down here once a month, just me and her, and we'd sit on a bench looking at Shield's statue. She told me stories about him, how he was one of the bravest men she knew, how much passion he held for his work as a hero. He was my favorite hero throughout my childhood, the one I dressed up as every Halloween while my mom would wear her actual heroic attire, her secret identity long gone by that point. "My little Shield," she'd call me with a smile, and my dad would shake his head when he heard it and try to hide a sigh.

Dad never liked Shield. I only started to understand why later in life, doing research on my mom and her heroic partner, digging through archived news and magazine articles on the Wayback Machine. Back in the day, the tabloids and gossip rags would always go on about every small show of care between the Queen of Blades and Shining Shield, how every hand on a shoulder to steady the other during a battle or a celebratory hug after a job well done surely meant they were in love. They had to be, they had saved each other's lives so many times at that point. It just made sense.

While mom tried to maintain a secret identity early in her career, those things tend to be very tenuous, and eventually it was uncovered who she was and that she was dating a civilian who wasn't even a Gray. When that came out, the tabloids shifted to how my dad wasn't good enough for her, how she should be with someone in the same line of work, like Shield. After he died, it just got worse and worse, personal attacks against dad for being alive while Shield wasn't and against mom for letting her partner die and then continuing to date this man like nothing happened. It must have been terrible for both of them.

This is the life I'm trying to break into, the whirlwind of media exposure that won't let you get a moment of rest, the people you protect and save deciding to spit on you and the people you love. I look over the long line of monuments to dead heroes, thinking about how this is the life that every one of them lived, only for them all to be cut short. As a cape, you don't get to die peacefully in your bed surrounded by loved ones. You die in action. You die a hero.

Man, it's always so uplifting coming here.

I let out a sigh, shake my head, then turn away from the statues and begin the walk out of the park. The walkway at the end of the line of statues is cordoned off and diverted onto a temporary path, and I look over to find the cause is the construction of the latest addition, the statue of The Mountain. Shit, he died pretty recently, didn't he? I remember reading about it not even a week ago, scrolling on my phone in bed and trying not to think about how I'd have to be up in three more hours to get ready for my shift at the bar.

That dread of the day to come was forgotten as my heart sank reading the headline, memories of the man flooding in. He was always kind when I met him at galas and other social events held by Vanguard for heroes and their families, and he got along pretty well with my mother. His son Rock and I were friendly too, though we never met outside of those events and I haven't seen him and Saw since mom's funeral. I wonder for a moment how Rock must be taking Saw's death, then shake it off. The past is the past. I have to look to the future.

I keep on walking.

---

The sun is just starting to set, casting Calder City in an orange glow. I'm sitting on the second level of a fire escape in full costume, fiddling with the dials of the worn down police scanner I picked up at a pawn shop today. Probably should have looked up how to get this thing working, but I feel like I'm close.

I'm trying to pick up any voices obscured by the static when a voice sounds off about thirty feed ahead of me:

"ALL THE CASH IN THE REGISTER, RIGHT THE FUCK NOW!"

I look up and see a man stepping into a convenience store across the road, the glass door closing behind him. Alright, looks like I picked the right place to start my patrol. I climb down the fire escape, crossing the street and stepping up to the door to look inside. The gunman is waving his pistol around before setting his aim on the middle aged clerk. The clerk doesn't look too perturbed, like he's done this song and dance dozens if not hundreds of times at this point, simply popping open the register and calmly pulling cash out of it one stack at a time.

The door chimes as I step inside and the gunman turns on his heel to aim the pistol my way. He looks me up and down, looking irritated at the interruption. "Who the fuck are you supposed to be?" he asks, sneering.

Instead of saying anything in response, I summon my sword and fling it at the gun, making sure to dull the blade so I don't slice his hand off. The spectral weapon flies true, knocking the pistol out of his hand. The gun goes off as it falls, the round flying into a rack of magazines, a cloud of shredded paper filling the store. My blade bumps into a wall then clatters to the ground before dissipating. Takes a lot out of me to summon a new one so soon after dispelling the last one, so I'm gonna have to do this the old fashioned way.

The burglar barely has time to blink in surprise before I'm on him, sending a wild punch into his nose that knocks him on his ass. He's still sitting instead of laying prone though, so I lift a leg and send a boot into his chest, sending him to the floor. He groans and wheezes in pain, clutching at his ribs, and I turn to the clerk. His weathered face is pulled into a deep scowl.

"What the hell is your problem?" he asks.

I blink behind the visor of my helmet. "... What?"

"I had it under control. This would've been a write off, now it's a whole fucking fiasco because you stepped in. Trashed my damn magazine rack, too."

Shit. "I was trying to help."

The clerk clicks his tongue, shaking his head in frustration. "Damn capes, you're all the same. Get the fuck out of here."

There's not much else to do than what he asks, so I leave the store. I can hear sirens fast approaching, so I take off sprinting into the alley across the road, heading as far as I can away from the store. That was the first time I stepped in to stop something bigger than a mugging in the street. I took that guy out quickly, efficiently, but that clerk really didn't appreciate it at all. I guess I can understand why, but it stings to get reprimanded for trying to help.

Guess this is my first experience with what I was thinking about the other day, how the people you're trying to help will disparage you at the same time. I'll have to get used to it.

When I can't hear sirens anymore, I duck into a quiet corner and pull out my police scanner again, trying to get it working. Got a long night ahead of me.

---

I step through the front door of Haven, immediately basking in the atmosphere: the dinner crowd filling every seat in the house, the sound of scattered conversations drowning out the live games on the TVs, the smell of every dish on offer being cooked up in the kitchen. A smile makes its way onto my face as I remember the weekends spent as a kid, sitting at a table with a stack of comics and dad's iPod while he tended the bar and mom was flying around the city. She'd drop in sometimes on dad's breaks if nothing was going on and we'd have lunch together as a family.