The world moves under him like a conveyor of small mercies and small failures. Up here, the city loses its colours and becomes lines—traffic veins, river spine, the grid humming. Wind combs the cape. Cold cuts the noise into clean pieces.
Nolan floats where airplanes won't, between routes and expectation. The night is slate.
A gunshot coughs two miles away. He's there before the echo can tell a second lie.
Convenience store. Three masks. One clerk with shaking hands and a mouth trying to remember prayers. Glass shivers. Metal bends. Sleep arrives for the men who wanted to be wolves. The clerk says something like "thank you," but the words are mostly breath. Nolan is already air.
This is routine. This is the part of the myth no one questions. Problems appear; problems end.
The city keeps going. He keeps going with it.
_ _ ♛ _ _
Fluorescents make everything the colour of old bones. The GDA sub-level hums with machines that think they are quiet. Nolan walks the corridor without touching anything that doesn't need him.
Thorn meets him with a tablet and a face that was born frowning.
"We picked up an anomaly," she says. "Seventeen seconds. Suburbs. Compacted sonic resonance, almost no ground ripple."
"A person?" he asks, because that is the test the city keeps failing.
"That's the curious part." A screen blossoms into sly life. Backyard cameras. A streetlight. A playground. A car jumps a curb—steering failure, or negligence, or both. Children on a swing set that will carry the memory of almost.
Then a smear. Not light. Heat on air. Vector shifts. The car judders left and buries itself in a tree that was built for that job. The kids never stop swinging. The driver sits still long enough to see his whole life and then starts to breathe again.
The clip ends with nothing—no cape, no suit, no glamor.
Nolan leans closer. It isn't him. It isn't anyone he knows. The feeling that follows is not surprise. Surprise lives somewhere else.
"Signature?" he says.
"Not yours," Thorn says. "Not anyone on our boards. Not Viltrumite. Photonic residue that doesn't map to tech we've seen."
He says nothing, which is one of the ways he fills a room.
Thorn watches him watch the screen. "We'll keep looking."
"You always do," he says, and the corners of his mouth do not move.
_ _ ♛ _ _
The roof across from his block is tar and gravel, the kind of roof that keeps secrets in summer and radiates them in winter. He's a shadow near a chimney, eyes on the small square of a home that knows his weight and still opens.
Inside: Debbie, book tilted against her knee; a lamp that makes a circle of warmth; Mark at the table flicking a pencil until the pencil has opinions. Out back: Stephen, barefoot, chin tilted. The boy has found a way to listen to the sky.
Always the sky.
He watches long enough to pretend it is for the neighbourhood.
He knows what it means when someone begins to measure the distance between a breath and the sun.
_ _ ♛ _ _
Home smells like the kind of sauce that forgives burned edges. He doesn't use the door like a normal person. Debbie rolls her eyes.
"You could," she says, for form.
"Force of habit," he says, for ritual.
"Long night?"
"Not yet."
Mark: "Hey, Dad."
"Mark."
Stephen on the rug with a red notebook, writing like words need catching. The boy looks up. There is something sharp in the look that is not fear, not defiance. It is… assessment. A mirror held at a distance where both can see themselves and pretend they're not looking.
"Homework?" Nolan asks, easy.
"Rules," Stephen says. A smile that is mostly about the page.
Nolan nods like a father who has been handed good news.
He goes to his study. The door closes with the weight of a thought he can't set down.
_ _ ♛ _ _
Files are better at pretending than people are. He reads—incident logs, neighbourhood chatter scraped for patterns, GDA summaries that know when to use passive voice. Everything he picks up points to the same intersection: Maple and ordinary. Seventeen seconds of someone making a choice to be quick and not seen. Bus that swerved last week like it had a guardian in the axle. A garage that didn't become a story anyone had to tell at a funeral.
None of it is loud. None of it wants to be.
He rubs at his eyes with the heel of his hand. He does not do this often.
'What are you,' he thinks, and the pronoun refuses to settle on one person.
A knock. Debbie's shape in the doorway like a correction to the room.
"You're brooding."
"I'm working."
"You're thinking too much."
"Isn't that what you wanted me to try," he says. The joke is a coat on a colder object.
She steps in. A hand on his shoulder that does not ask permission because it was granted years ago and never revoked.
"You've got a family, Nolan. Don't forget that."
"I haven't," he says, and lets the truth of it weigh the sentence down. "That's the problem."
She doesn't argue with a thing that is not an argument. She squeezes once and leaves the door open this time.
He keeps reading.
_ _ ♛ _ _
He changes his routes without telling anyone. Lower. Slower over the ordinary parts of town. Not surveillance—he would never call it that aloud. Attention. The kind you offer a bridge in winter or a pilot light in a storm.
He goes back to the anomaly site under daylight pretence. Soil doesn't give him answers. Air does, a little. There's a taste to it, not his people's. Biological. Solar. A way cells say more when there should be enough.
Two incidents. A third if you count the goal post that chose not to crush children on a Thursday. All within a circle you could draw with his own house at the centre.
He doesn't draw circles. He catalogues.
_ _ ♛ _ _
Evening. Backyard. Mark throws a frisbee wrong on purpose to show off. Brothers are a ritual older than names. Stephen cartwheels into a handstand that fails with joy. The disc takes the bad path, window-high and stubborn.
Before the second heartbeat, Stephen is at the fence. Hand out. Catch—not a catch; a receive, minimal force, as if he learned from something that fell fast once and decided not to.
"Dude," Mark says, delighted. "What was that?"
"Reflexes," Stephen grins, because he has learned the boring version of a good story.
Nolan's fingers curl the curtain and then relax. He does not applaud in the window. He does not interrogate. He notes. That is one of the ways he loves—by knowing the weight of a thing and the direction it is already moving.
_ _ ♛ _ _
Dinner is a table that remembers the sound of forks and the cadence of a family that wants to be a family. Mark makes the day a better story than it was. Debbie laughs in the right places and in the wrong ones because that is the point. Stephen eats like someone who doesn't need food but understands the ceremony.
Every so often, the boy's eyes flick to Nolan's like he is checking the weather.
Not fear. Not challenge. A question asked without a mark at the end.
He eats his salad. He answers nothing. Answers are for after.
_ _ ♛ _ _
The study, late. The house has gone to ground. He opens a channel that isn't supposed to have his name on it and hears the voice of a man who never pretends to be anyone but what the job requires.
"Something wrong, Nolan?" Cecil asks.
"I need vault access," Nolan says. "Dormant files. Cross-strain anomalies."
A pause measured in paperwork. "You're not asking about Mark."
"No," he says. It could mean many things; it only needs to mean one.
Links arrive. He reads older ink. Buried years, Gray corners of a world that has always had too much to classify. One heading tilts the rest of the page.
Project: Solaris
Status: Unresolved.
Phenomenon: Photonic enhancement. Accelerated cellular cognition. Not of Viltrumite origin.
Note: Subject may be unaware of divergence. Monitor at distance until identity is confirmed.
He thinks of a boy in a backyard measuring sunlight with his face.
He closes the file.
_ _ ♛ _ _
He stands at the window long enough for the glass to learn his temperature. Outside, the porch light draws a neat circle. Inside, the hallway holds quiet like a mouth holds a secret. He listens to the house as if the house might confess.
Down the hall, Stephen's room hums with the soft domestic noises he has come to count on: a drawer, a notebook closing, the whisper of a child practicing how to be gentle toward an egg.
Nolan breathes. He is the thing between what he is and what he is supposed to be. The line holds, for now.
He keeps watch.
He always has.
_ _ ♛ _ _
Rules (so far) — Stephen's Red Notebook
Act normal.
Ask questions like you don't know anything.
Don't try to fly.
No showing off.
If you mess up, stop.
Listen on purpose.
Small helps count.
Be a kid when you can.
Treat everything like it's made of glass.
If startled, freeze—don't grab.
Sun helps. Don't chase it at school.
Smile and shrug.(If people look too long.)
Headphones when the world is too loud.
Eggs = practice.
Don't test things you can't untest.
Journal everything. (Facts > fear.)
Keep the question mark private.
Practice in shade when you can.
Eat when everyone eats.
If panic → sun or water → breathe. (4–4–4)
Never be the only witness to your own miracle.(Call someone. Make noise.)
Share credit. Let adults finish the save.
Use the boring answer first.("Good ears.")
Listen to metal. Bolts, hinges, brackets.
Receive, don't catch.(Let force go through you into ground.)
Track charge by feel. Don't depend on it.
If asked, answer small. Then ask back.(Buys time.)
When someone you love feels heavy, sit with them.(Quiet helps.)
If you smell sweet-wrong (rotten eggs) → back away → call 911.
Yell the right word.("Fire!" gets feet moving.)
Point people, not problems.(Show where to go.)
Make bravery contagious.(Bubble breaths for small kids.)
Watch how pros move. Learn five things.
Fast fix? Make it look like reflex.(One step, one reach.)
No big saves at home.(Neighbors remember.)
If watched, be ordinary.(Let questions end without answers.)
End of Chapter 17
A/N:
Sorry for the delay, was out today, here is chapter 17, enjoy.
please review! 5 stars pleasssseeee and some stones too.