The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

She sent me a look that could have peeled paint off the bumper of the car in front of us. I kept my eyes on the road and my mouth shut, which was the correct tactical response to a Fitzgerald woman who had just been told her color expertise was indistinguishable from a box of crayons.

"Pewter has warm undertones," she said, like she was explaining gravity to a toddler. "Slate pulls cool. In your apartment, with the east-facing window, pewter will read as intentional. Slate will read as institutional. You’ll feel like you’re sleeping in a government building."

"I lived in a government building for the first eighteen years of my original life."

The words came out before I caught them.

Diane’s head turned. Not fast. Deliberately, with the same precision she used when a client said something interesting during a negotiation. Sloane’s typing stopped in the back seat. The absence of sound was louder than the sound had been. The silence in the Range Rover went from comfortable to something with actual mass, something I could feel pressing against the sides of my skull.

I could feel both of them recalibrating. Running diagnostics on the quiet orphan boy who’d grown up in their house and apparently had a previous address nobody had ever heard about.

"Figure of speech," I said.

"That’s not a figure of speech, sugar." Diane’s voice was still warm. It was also a wall I wasn’t getting past without answering the question she hadn’t asked yet.

"Close enough."

"It’s not close to anything." She shifted in her seat. I didn’t look, but I felt it. "What government building?"

I changed lanes. Checked my mirrors. Let the question hang in the air between us long enough that answering it would feel like my choice instead of her extraction. Six seconds. Seven. The original Lukas’s memories were already surfacing before I decided to let them, bubbling up like something dredged from cold water.

"Before Diane took me in," I said. My voice came out steady. That was a choice. "The temporary housing after the funeral. State-run facility. Grey walls. Grey floors. Grey sheets that smelled like industrial detergent and felt like they’d been washed nine hundred times. Everything was grey and none of it was pewter or slate. It was just grey. The kind of grey that exists because nobody thought about it hard enough to choose anything else."

The memories fed me details I wasn’t asking for. A cold building with fluorescent lights that buzzed at a frequency designed to make you want to leave. A social worker named Martha who wore cardigans in July and smelled like hand sanitizer, who kept calling him buddy in a tone that suggested she’d said it to forty other kids that month. A cafeteria table with a wobble nobody had fixed. A window that looked out at a parking lot with three spaces marked RESERVED and none of them ever filled.

Six weeks. The original Lukas had spent six weeks in that building between his parents’ funeral and the day Diane Fitzgerald walked through the door with paperwork already signed and a look on her face that suggested the California Department of Child Services could schedule their objections for after she’d already taken him home.

I hadn’t meant to access that memory. I’d been aiming for deflection, maybe a surface-level answer that satisfied the question without opening anything deeper. Instead I’d reached into the file cabinet and pulled out something that still had weight attached to it, something the transmigrant had inherited along with the body and the name and the scar through the left eyebrow.

Now it sat in the front of my consciousness like a photograph I couldn’t fold back up.

Diane’s hand found mine on the center console.

Her fingers laced through mine. The contact was warm and deliberate, her palm pressing against the back of my hand with enough pressure that I felt the intention behind it. She squeezed once. Firm. No hesitation. No performance. Just the single gesture that carried more meaning than most people managed in full paragraphs.

I’m here. That’s over. You’re mine now.

She didn’t say any of it. She didn’t need to. The squeeze said it all.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

"Pewter," I said.

"Good choice."

Sloane’s hand appeared from the back seat and landed on my shoulder. She didn’t say anything either. She just left it there, her palm warm through the henley fabric, her thumb moving once across the muscle where my neck met my shoulder before settling still. The Fitzgerald women communicated through touch the way other families communicated through conversation, and I was learning their language faster than I wanted to admit.

We drove the rest of the way home in a quiet that wasn’t uncomfortable. It was full instead of empty, which was worse in some ways because full meant I was starting to belong here, and belonging meant losing it would actually hurt.

The Oracle Feed pulsed once in my peripheral vision. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

EMOTIONAL RESONANCE WITH HOUSEHOLD MEMBERS INCREASING. CURRENT ATTACHMENT METRICS INDICATE GENUINE BILATERAL INVESTMENT EXCEEDING SYSTEM-DRIVEN PARAMETERS.

NOTE: THIS IS NOT A QUEST NOTIFICATION.

I dismissed it. Even the System sounded confused about what to do when something real happened.

We pulled into the garage at eleven forty-two. Sloane climbed out first, laptop under one arm, already walking toward the house with the urgency of someone who needed a bathroom and would not be admitting it. Diane stayed in the passenger seat after I killed the engine, letting the quiet of the garage settle around us. The only sound was the tick of the cooling engine and the distant thud of Sloane’s footsteps fading through the house.

"Marcus would have liked you."

The name hit different when Diane said it. Marcus Belmont. Vanguard. The original Lukas’s father, who I had never met and never would, whose trust fund was currently paying for walnut desks and smart speakers and a life that had been meant for someone else.

"You think?"

"I know." Diane unbuckled her seatbelt but didn’t open the door. She sat sideways in the passenger seat, one leg tucked beneath her, her blue eyes doing that thing where they stopped being beautiful and started being surgical. "He was quiet like you are sometimes. Not shy. Not withdrawn. He’d go still and you’d realize he was running the numbers on something three conversations ahead of where everyone else was standing. Reina used to call it his ghost face. Said he looked like he was somewhere else even when he was right next to you."

I didn’t know what to say to that. The transmigrant in me had no claim on Marcus Belmont’s legacy or his mannerisms or whatever ghost face his wife used to tease him about. But the body I wore was his son’s body, and Diane was looking at me with an expression that suggested the resemblance went deeper than cheekbones and amber eyes.

"He’d have liked you," she repeated.

"And he’d have hated that interface of yours."