The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

The alarm screamed at six-fifteen and I killed it with a spectral construct before it finished the first note.

Sloane groaned and burrowed deeper into my neck. Diane’s hand slid from my chest to my stomach and stayed there, her fingernails tracing a lazy line above my waistband that communicated her opinion about waking up at this particular hour with unmistakable clarity.

"Five minutes," Sloane said.

"We have to be at campus by nine," I said.

"I don’t care if we have to be at campus by the rapture. Five minutes."

Diane’s voice came from somewhere in the vicinity of my left shoulder, hoarse from sleep and from the things she’d done with her throat the previous evening. "Sugar, if you don’t get out of this bed in the next thirty seconds, I will make sure you regret it."

This was directed at Sloane, who responded by pulling the sheet over her head and going completely boneless against my ribs like a pink-haired anchor.

I extracted myself from both of them with the careful choreography of a man who has learned that disturbing either Fitzgerald woman before they have completed their waking sequence carries consequences ranging from verbal assault to small-yield explosions. Sloane made a noise of displeasure as I slid my arm out from beneath her. Diane opened one eye, tracked my movement across the room with the lazy focus of a lioness watching something cross her territory, and then closed it again.

I grabbed sweatpants from the floor and pulled them on. Found a shirt. Didn’t look at the bed again because looking at the bed would mean seeing two women I had spent the night with tangled in sheets that cost more than most people’s rent, and that particular image would derail the entire morning.

The next ninety minutes were chaos.

Not organized chaos. Not the productive kind you see in montages where everyone moves with purpose and things get packed into neat boxes and somebody makes coffee at the right moment. This was the Fitzgerald version of chaos, which meant Diane was on her phone before she finished brushing her teeth, Sloane was yelling about missing sports bras from three rooms away, and I was carrying boxes downstairs at a pace that would have looked suspicious to anyone who didn’t know my Agility was sitting at eighty.

"LUKAS."

Sloane’s voice hit me from the top of the stairs as I descended with a box marked KITCHEN in Diane’s handwriting.

"HAVE YOU SEEN MY BLACK COMPRESSION TOP. THE GOOD ONE. NOT THE ONE WITH THE WEIRD SEAM."

"Which weird seam."

"THE WEIRD SEAM. You know which one."

"I genuinely do not know which one."

"The one that sits wrong across the chest area. Mom bought me a size too small and I told her it was too small and she told me I’d grow into it and I didn’t grow into it because that’s not how bras work and now it just sits there in my drawer judging me."

I set the box down by the front door. "I haven’t seen the black one."

"THEN WHERE IS IT."

"Check the laundry room. Bottom of the dryer. You left it there after Tuesday’s session."

Silence. Then footsteps thundering toward the laundry room. Then, faintly: "Oh."

I loaded the box into the back of the Range Rover and went back for the next one.

The plan was simple in theory. Diane would drive both of us to campus in the Range Rover, which she had loaded the previous night with furniture purchases, boxes, and the new electronics, packed with the kind of obsessive spatial awareness that made me wonder if she had an unregistered Tetris Aspect. Sloane’s car would follow with Sloane’s personal belongings and the overflow that didn’t fit in the Rover. I would ride with Diane. Sloane would drive herself.

This was the plan. The plan lasted approximately eleven minutes before Sloane realized that her laptop charger was in Diane’s car, that Diane had packed the wrong bathroom box in Sloane’s car, and that somebody had left a bag of protein bars in the kitchen that belonged to nobody and everybody simultaneously.

Diane stood in the kitchen holding a clipboard.

A clipboard.

She had made a checklist. Handwritten. With subcategories.

"Sloane, your hero costume prototype is in garment bag three, labeled and hanging. Do not crumple it. Do not stuff it into the trunk with your boxing gloves."

"I wasn’t going to."

"You were going to. I can see you thinking about it."

"I have never once crumpled a garment bag in my—"

"June fourteenth, twenty-twenty-three. Your cousin’s wedding. That white dress looked like you’d slept in a washing machine."

Sloane’s mouth opened. Closed. Her cheeks went pink. She grabbed garment bag three with aggressive care and marched toward the garage.

I leaned against the kitchen counter and watched this happen with a mug of coffee in one hand, showered and dressed and carrying absolutely nothing, because everything I owned for the move had been packed three days ago in under forty minutes.

Diane noticed. Her blue eyes landed on me with the particular sharpness that meant she was reading the room and did not appreciate what she found.

"You’re very calm."

"I packed on Wednesday."

"I’m aware."

"Helps to not be stressed about things when the things are already done."

"Lukas."

"Yes."

"Wipe that look off your face before I do it for you."

I sipped my coffee. My stress level was somewhere around a three out of ten, which was insulting to both women who were currently operating at approximately eleven out of ten. Here’s the thing about cortisol that nobody talks about. When your body has been through transmigration, a System that threatens your anatomy, two months of training that would break professional athletes, stat allocations that feel like being fed through a meat grinder feet-first, and the navigational complexity of sleeping with your guardian and her daughter simultaneously, the prospect of moving into a luxury apartment at the world’s best Hero Academy registers as something close to a vacation.

I was calm because everything that could have gone catastrophically wrong already had, and I was still standing here drinking coffee in a kitchen that smelled like Diane’s perfume and the lavender dryer sheets Sloane used for her training gear.