Tobias downed one last swallow and pushed the glass jar aside. The water smelled of wine, but lacked the taste, which ultimately made it a great deal more bland to his senses. He leaned back against the cold steel counter, nose wrinkled up at the bright LEDs.

"You are too sane to go pom," he murmured steadily, perhaps to his nearby reflection.

A long breath filled his lungs and he hung his head. He pressed his hand over his chest and felt the air go out. His heart's rate was level again, his body temperature similarly recovered. Everything seemed fine and well, save for the strange and sudden pain he had experienced twice in the last ten minutes. A burst of force exploded on his scalp, as if he'd been hit, and then receded as if nothing had happened. At the very least, the overwhelming heat was gone and he was beginning to collect himself.

Tobias rubbed his head, the pain receding for its second time. He looked around himself, paranoid that someone may have snuck into the restroom with him.

No. Still alone.

His eyes met their reflection in the tall mirror. Brown. Boring. Poppy Tris had always said he looked ordinary. She had told him that his only distinguishing feature were his eyebrows, thick and dark like two docked terrier tails.

He felt the black of his face, pushing up his glasses, then wiped away a dried clot of blood from his chin.

"You are a beau—oh, a beautiful man," he whispered waveringly, sceptical eyes loathing the shape, the size, the texture, the color of everything that poked from the cover of his sweat-soaked singlet. He related his shape to a lowercase letter 'b', which reminded him of the name Benjamin, or BJ, and the alphabet, which was easy to recite when his mind attempted to wander too far into the future, or too far away from the true north of his morality.

Love handles—how he hated them—bulged on his left side like the curve of the little letter, but were absent on his right. White adipose tissue pockmarked the black remains of what he had been lucky enough to keep of his shrivelled half.

He picked up a long-sleeved spandex undershirt, tailored for him by the three girls' mother and designed by Milk Chocolate. The turtleneck concealed his mottled neck and arm and wrapped him in a thin layer of protection. His old costume had a similar component in a tan color, marked with a hexagon lattice. This one was silver and plain, and it tucked neatly into the tailored waistband of his loose and flexible black breeches.

Over the top, he layered a tunic. The same forest green fabric as his former, but of a slightly different cut that freed his less flexible leg much better. His symbol, a die, was embroidered in silver on his chest. It gave him some comfort and reflected some pride, despite how he covered it.

The last layer, a long cloak, was entirely new to him, flowing in a darker shade of green and trimmed and lined with a silver to match his sleeves. The cloak encircled his shoulders and hid his precious symbol. Two ribbon-like segments dangled from the front, each covering one side from his armpits to just above his ankles. A cape draped from the back, to the same length, and a wide hood fell unused over his shoulder blades.

He fingered the long, smooth pieces of the cloak at the front and admired them. He appreciated the precise color coordination of the whole look, from the cloak, to the black and green boot and matching prosthetic shin-guard.

"You are a beautiful man," he said more confidently. He pulled on two black gloves, then wrapped his watch over the right one. "And you..." He reached under his cloak to wrap a simple black belt around his waist, giving some shape to the tunic. He adjusted the cloak slightly to better hide the b, then smiled at how well it worked.

He turned around to admire the back, and both sides, and the front, and all of it a few times over. He lifted his cane, too. The black and green colors matched the outfit exactly and it filled him with excitement and pleasure.

Satisfied, Tobias reached for the last time into the box on the counter and felt the soft, satiny texture of loose spandex fall through his fingers. He lifted the small piece out and unfolded it. A piece of paper fluttered out and scuffled over the cement floor.

Tobias frowned at the folded paper—origami of some sort, in bright pink—and started to reach for it, then hesitated. He took off his glasses, deciding to fix the last part of his costume in place before going through the effort of bending over.

Half of a mask hugged one half of his head; like the silicon disguise but thin, breathable, and hardly noticeable against only his burnt side. To hold the black half-mask in place over his scalp and his cheek, two elastic silver bands diverged across his face. One arced over his bushy eyebrow and disappeared under his curls, while the other climbed the bridge of his nose and dove under the dark rings around his eyes to snake under his ear.

He messed with it until it was comfortable, tugging this way and that, then slid his glasses back into place. A grin took over his face. Or, in the mirror, half of it. The rest of his teeth hid beneath the black cover. That small, hopeful, irrational piece of his soul stared at his burnless appearance and imagined that he was normal again and that removing the mask would reveal smooth cheeks, hindered only by the tired lines under his eyes and light scowl marks around his lips.

"You are a beautiful man," he repeated again, glowing with a restoring confidence. "And you are..."

He looked down at the pink t-rex on the floor.

"Loved." He smiled. "You are loved."

Inside the dinosaur, there was a three-word note as long as it needed to be to tell him so. He stooped over his cane with a grunt and pinched the folded paper between his fingers. It smelled like grape soda and chocolate milk and was smudged with faint rubbery traces of latex.

Tobias slotted it neatly into one sleeve, the coarse paper comforting against his skin.

He scratched his face, itching at the frozen smile and his weepy eyes. He did not unfold the t-rex because he feared not being able to fold it again, but he knew what it said.

With the pink dinosaur's support, his back straightened and his posture emboldened. He combed his fingers through his curls until his presentation was as perfect as he could make it and took a long, deep breath.

***

Dizzy saluted him over her last can of soda, letting go of the elevator doors. "I'll have my eye on the cameras. Good luck, Doc."

Tobias stuck his peg foot in front of the doors and leaned out, his brows raised with high expectations. "If things go wrong..."

Dizzy rolled her eyes. "I'll take the boat and go. I promise."

If there was time, and if Dizzy did not fear the nearing future and losing her friend, she might have told him to "wipe that stupid smile" off his face. She told me, when I posed as her auntie to pull her out of school, that teasing him was great fun because the scowl he gave was always comical. But, in that moment, she did not want to see him scowl—he had done enough of that. Instead, to his surprise and her own, she stepped into the elevator and stretched her arms around his middle.

When we sat down in the empty school cafeteria, her with a soda and me with a carton of strawberry milk, I told her that Tobias had appreciated that hug a great deal. In the prison interrogation room, he had mused to me in his resigned, melancholy manner that he had feared the pain of touch in the early days of his injury, but had grown more fearful of the pain of not being touched over time. He remains to this day insecure that no person would ever want to hold his "disgusting" self.

Dizzy told me, "He's stupid."

She also described that hugging him felt right internally, but was a strange experience outwardly. Even over the tunic and undershirt he wore, there was a hardness to his right side that contrasted starkly with the softness of his left. His chest, when her head fell against it, was as level and smooth as a coral reef—that is to say, not at all either.

Tobias held her there a while; long enough to dry his wet eyes and nose without her seeing. Finally, he gave a last squeeze and prodded her gently away. They stood on either side of the elevator doors, watching each other's eyes. Dizzy pursed her lips and gave him as strong a nod as she could. He returned it, but he was still smiling that tight, close-lipped smile that lifted his cheeks so high that his sensitive little tears were hidden.

The doors shuddered on their ancient wheels.

"Goodbye." There was no time for anything else.

The heroes were each alone, thrown back on diverging paths. Dizzy crushed her soda can between her palms and strode towards the control room to do something good for the world. Tobias tapped his foot in the elevator, rising to do something that was no good at all, but felt pleasurably intoxicating nonetheless.

Something deep down saddened him. For once in his lifetime, he had felt a part of a family, a real team, and he was throwing it away.

He breathed in four counts, held his breath for seven, and released for eight counts with a quiet whooshing. He repeated this thrice more, thinking to himself that there was no time to change his mind. His knuckles dragged hard against the rawest parts of his skin, exciting every neuron in his system until he wanted nothing more than to put his energy to use.

He emerged from the elevator wild-eyed and quaking uncontrollably, as if fueled by an obscene amount of caffeine. He started walking without his cane, holding it high like a baton, but staggered and fell onto the control desk.

"MMMPH!" said the woman behind him.

Tobias pushed himself up, stretching his limbs and rolling his shoulders as he did so. Then, he swiveled, wisely making use of his cane. He smiled tightly up at the lawyer woman, hung on the dangling hook by the ropes that bound her arms against her sides.

"MMMMPH!" she said again. If she were saying something different than the first time, Tobias did not know. Nor did he particularly care.

"Now, now, Mrs. Jones..." His shakes came through in his voice. He raised his hand. "It is almost nine o'clock. Your lover will be here, soon." His smile dripped with a mad pleasure, lips peeling back. "He won't be able to save you. But, it will be so satisfying to watch."

"MmMPH, MM!"

"Oh, hush." Tobias waved his hand in dismissal and turned back to the desk. "You won't be—Ah!"

The volcano shuddered, throwing his weak footing. The chain of the lawyer's hook jangled and her gagged cries increased in loudness, frequency, and desperation. Dust cascaded from the enforced ceiling, filling the air with a thick and difficult to breath cloud. A crack burst open in a basalt chunk from a lava stream that had broken into the hero lobby in the last eruption.

Tobias recovered his composure and studied the crack for a moment. He coughed and waved at the dust, then turned around. The lawyer's chain swung like a pendulum.

"The tremors will be quite frequent," he told the woman. He limped nearer to bring her swinging to a stop. "But don't worry. It's quite unlikely that the lair will collapse—particularly this level that we're on. Down there," he gestured to the hero lobby, "is a little more at risk, but... really, it's not so bad. I had worse. I'm sure you know, being his lawyer."

Tobias's face hardened suddenly and all his quivering moved into his two tense hands, clenching around his cane's head. His eyes narrowed. "He abandoned me," he hissed. "He did not look back. I had only twenty-percent odds for surviving and none in surviving unscathed. He ruined me. And you helped him get out of it, didn't you? Oh Benjamin Jones, the golden hero. Distraught at 'losing' his 'treasured' teammate in 'unbeatable circumstances.' You deserve to hang there, as much as he deserves to helplessly watch." His lips thinned at her squirming and he took ahold of her ropes. "Stop it. I am not going to hurt you. I am better than him."

The ground shook again and Tobias turned his staggering towards the control desk. He waved dust out of the air and fixed his eyes on the large screen ahead, taking up most of the far wall. One gloved hand hovered over the control desk and he focused on his future vision. A large red button, he saw, would trigger an explosion in the lobby that would invite lava in. A small blue button would cause nothing, apparently, to happen. Eventually, his hand hovered over the button that would open a broadcast to Higher Defense Headquarters. It was one of the labeled buttons, rectangular and black in color, with "CALL" written on it in white. Below it, a button labeled with a cheap printed sticker read "voice control". Tobias pressed the second button.

He bit his lip, thinking and gleaning an understanding of the voice control function from his visions.

"Video on."

He appeared on the screen, standing over the control desk in his bold attire. Behind him, the woman continued to squirm and "MMMPH".

"Audio on."

Nothing appeared to happen.

"Test?"

His voice boomed around the chamber and he squealed in delight, feeling a rush and a livening lightheadedness.

He checked his watch and stared at the second hand with eager impatience. He pulled up his hood and looked at himself in the screen, admiring how the cameras no longer picked up his face. Only a small pink glimpse of his chin poked from the shadow of the great green hood. The cloak concealed his unusual shape, and the desk hid his prosthetic. The disguise was, he thought, foolproof.

His eyes flicked from the watch to the call button, to the watch. The tick, tick, tick was in time with the drip, drip, drip of sweat from his brow and the twitch, twitch, twitch of his eye. The very instant that nine o' clock struck, Tobias slammed his hand over the call button and straightened his composure. The screen turned blue and the logo of HQ flickered in its center.

Officials of the Headquarters Dispatch Unit watched him from a long table, dressed in well-cut suits and stern expressions.

"Mr. Might," Tobias demanded through clenched teeth. "Send me Mr. Might and Vine Voodoo alone or the lawyer..." he stepped to one side to gesture to the woman, then bared his teeth threateningly at the cameras, "... gets it."