Chapter Text
Cecil Stedman was not having a good day, which, in his experience, usually meant the rest of the planet was having an even worse one.
Five response units en route were in some form of trouble, lost between Nebraska and the eastern seaboard, mired in the midst of what Donald had described, with diplomatic subtlety, as "multiple concurrent catastrophic events," which, in bureaucratese, meant everything was burning. The hope was that none of the cameras would catch everything happening at once. His wall-holograms displayed pulsating images of maps, heat signatures, casualty estimates, and threats multiplying at an exponential rate, even faster than they could be cleared. According to the analytics department, the latest spike in disasters was caused by Doc Seismic, who apparently believed the most effective way to liberate the planet from "capitalist oppression" was through tectonic destabilization and kaiju warfare. Half of America was overrun by gigantic monsters emerging from earthquake-prone fault lines, as entire cities fled into the night in panicked streams of car lights and smoke.
And somehow this was only the third-worst thing on Cecil’s schedule.
It had been one year since he officially took over as Director of the Global Defense Agency, one year of endless briefings, compromises, funerals, classified reports, and the slow, suffocating realization that no amount of preparation actually made someone ready for this job. Every day, another crisis crawled out of the dark, demanding immediate attention, and every day, people looked at him, expecting certainty, expecting answers, expecting him to possess the magical equation that determined who lived and who didn’t.
Most days, he felt like he was improvising with the weight of the world balanced on a knife’s edge.
Donald helped. God, Donald helped.
The only thing that was consistent in Cecil's life was Donald Ferguson standing three steps behind him, a tablet in hand and contingency plans ready even before he had time to give the order. Efficient, cool-headed, and loyal to a fault. Cecil has dealt with hundreds of analysts, agents, tacticians, and politicians throughout his career, and almost all of them cracked under pressure sooner or later. Donald never cracked.
And this made Cecil even lonelier.
Except for the faint light from computer monitors and holograms floating in the air in front of him, the office was rather dark; the walls seemed bathed in blue and crimson light cast by the projections above his desk. Lying back on his leather armchair, Cecil moved slowly, too used to it to remember the feeling of rest anymore. The glass of whisky in his hand glittered as he rolled it around in his fingers.
Technically, he didn’t need the drink. Technically, he didn’t need sleep either.
The containment fluid had seen to that years ago.
Each day or whenever he rose after being refreshed from the healing suspension tank deep underground at the GDA headquarters, his body and brain healed; he could think more clearly, work better, and operate at maximum capacity despite his objections. No hunger. No fatigue. No physical restraints to hinder his efficiency.
However, they had not realized that depriving him of sleep did not mean depriving him of the feeling of exhaustion. Instead, it became a perpetual state, because there were no moments when his work was done.
Each list of casualties he had compiled stayed with him. Each evacuation has gone wrong. Each block burned into ashes. Each agent is not returning home. Cecil knew numbers just as other people knew birthdays. Without thinking about it. Automatically. Some numbers stayed with him forever. Some numbers stayed in the back of his head, counting each deceased person by mission, location, cause of death, and survival percentage.
Three hundred and twelve in Chicago.
Nineteen during the Hail Mary deployment.
Forty-six because a transport pilot hesitated for two seconds.
Seven because Cecil himself made the wrong call.
He remembered all of them.
Always.
In an ideal world, no one would die. And that was the illusion that politicians liked to project through their rhetoric and interviews, the illusion necessary for civilians to be able to sleep at night. But Cecil knew the price tag too well, the grim reality of knowing that no matter what happened, you had to decide just how many souls were expendable for others to live on.
But at least they had Omni-Man now.
That particular thought made Cecil feel uneasy inside.
He slowly sipped from his glass as he looked up at the giant screen, watching footage of Omni-Man dismantle another of Doc Seismic's creations with sheer ferocity, the way the Viltrumite fought through the beast as if it were nothing more than a storm of shrapnel and cannonballs. Civilians were still breathing, whole cities still standing, because of him.
And Cecil still didn’t trust him for a second.
The first time they met, Omni-Man had descended with that practiced calm, cloth fluttering dramatically in the rotor wash like something out of a propaganda reel. He had sounded perfect. Too perfect. Every answer measured. Every expression carefully controlled. He saw the way Omni-Man’s eyes tracked exits before conversations.
Saw a man constantly deciding how much truth he was willing to reveal. Cecil’s instincts had kept him alive too long to ignore things like that.
Still, suspicion didn’t outweigh practicality. Whatever secrets Nolan carried around behind those calm blue eyes, the man was undeniably useful, and usefulness mattered more than comfort ever would. That was another lesson the job had carved into Cecil’s bones over the years.
Trust was a luxury.
Results were not.
He exhaled slowly, rubbing two fingers against the scarred side of his face almost absentmindedly, tracing the jagged lines crossing his skin. The scars always itched when he was stressed, phantom nerves firing beneath damaged tissue as if his body itself refused to let him forget.
How many lives had that mistake cost again?
Cecil immediately remembered that number too. Seventeen.
Of course he did.
A sharp knock echoed against the office door, pulling him from the spiral of thought.
He didn’t look up immediately.
“Come in,” he said flatly.
The knock came again, softer this time, followed by the door easing open just enough for Donald Ferguson to lean halfway into the office.
Cecil knew immediately something had gone wrong.
Not because Donald looked panicked—Donald almost never looked panicked—but because of the particular tension sitting behind his eyes, the subtle tightness in his jaw, the way he held the folder in his hands a little too firmly like he was already calculating how catastrophic the next twenty-four hours were about to become. After nonstop hours of working together, Cecil had learned to read Donald’s expressions the same way military analysts read threat assessments.
This was bad.
Donald stepped fully into the office, the door sliding shut behind him. The folder tucked beneath his arm was thick, packed with hastily assembled reports and satellite images, corners bent from being handled too quickly on the way upstairs.
“Sir,” Donald said carefully, “you’re going to want to look at this.”
Cecil didn’t answer right away.
He took another slow sip of whiskey instead, eyes never leaving the glowing map projections floating above his desk. Nebraska was still burning red across multiple counties, evacuation routes collapsing under seismic damage while emergency response times continued to climb. Somewhere on the western side of the state, Omni-Man was currently tearing apart a subterranean creature roughly the size of a football stadium.
And apparently that still wasn’t enough for today.
With a tired exhale, Cecil lowered the glass onto his desk with a muted clink and reached beneath the surface, pressing a hidden control switch. Instantly, the holographic displays dissolved into flickering particles, leaving the office dim.
“What now, Donald?” Cecil asked, the exhaustion in his voice no longer remotely concealed. “I’m already juggling Nebraska, two missing strike teams, and a supervillain trying to split the country. Unless the moon exploded, this can probably wait ten minutes.”
Donald hesitated.
The man glanced down at the file in his hands, then briefly back toward the office door as though debating whether this conversation should even be happening inside four walls at all. When he finally looked back at Cecil, there was something deeply uneasy sitting behind his normally composed expression.
“Sir…” Donald started carefully. “We detected something about six minutes ago. We’re still trying to understand exactly what it is.”
Cecil’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“Is it important?”
Donald nodded once.
“It’s showing signs of a spatial rupture,” he said. “Possibly dimensional in nature.”
For the first time in the conversation, Cecil’s posture changed.
His hand stilled against the edge of the desk.
“A rupture,” Cecil repeated flatly.
“Yes, sir.”
Cecil slowly stood from his chair, every trace of exhaustion instantly buried beneath sharpened focus. Years in the intelligence world had conditioned him to categorize threats instinctively, mentally assigning priorities before most people finished explaining the problem. Alien invasion. Temporal distortion. Interdimensional breach.
None of those belonged in the category of good news.
Donald continued as they moved toward the door.
“There was a massive energy spike roughly twelve miles outside Baltimore,” he explained, walking briskly beside him through the hallway beyond the office. “Initial readings looked similar to localized wormhole activity, but the signature doesn’t match anything in our database. It’s unstable. Fluctuating between visible and non-visible states every few seconds.”
“Cause?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one we’ve got right now.”
Cecil grimaced.
The polished floors of GDA headquarters reflected the harsh overhead lighting as the two men moved quickly down the corridor, agents and technicians stepping instinctively out of their path. Around them, the facility hummed with organized chaos—phones ringing, analysts shouting coordinates, monitors updating in real time with global disaster feeds.
Normal day at the office.
Donald adjusted the folder beneath his arm before continuing.
“At first we thought it might be another superhuman incident,” he said. “Possibly someone experimenting with teleportation or temporal displacement technology. But the deeper scans came back… strange.”
“Strange how?”
Donald looked troubled.
“The portal appears to have been opened from the opposite side.”
That stopped Cecil for half a second.
“Well,” Cecil muttered darkly as they rounded the corner toward Operations, “that’s comforting.”
Ahead of them, doors slid apart automatically with a heavy mechanical rumble, revealing the central operations room in all its sprawling controlled madness.
The room was alive with movement.
Technicians sat at layered command stations surrounded by glowing monitors and tactical projections while giant digital displays stretched across the walls, cycling through live satellite feeds, threat assessments, biometric readings, and emergency communications. The air itself seemed electric, thick with tension and overlapping voices.
At the center of it all, dominating the far wall, was the anomaly.
Cecil slowed as he approached the main screen, arms crossing tightly over his chest while his eyes fixed on the image.
The rupture hung in the middle of a dense forest clearing like reality itself had been cut open with a knife.
It wasn’t stable enough to maintain a consistent shape. The thing pulsed and warped constantly, folding inward before stretching outward again in violent spasms of distortion. Darkness churned at its center—not empty darkness, but something deeper, almost liquid in the way it moved. The edges looked wrong, jagged and uneven, less like a naturally formed portal and more like a rip in paper forced apart by unseen hands.
Trees surrounding the breach bent unnaturally toward it, leaves and debris lifting from the ground only to vanish into the shifting void. Even through the monitor feed, the sight carried an instinctive wrongness that made the hairs on the back of Cecil’s neck stand up.
One of the analysts spoke from across the room.
“Energy output is still climbing.”
“How close are we to containment?” Cecil asked without looking away from the screen.
“We don’t know if it can be contained yet, sir.”
Of course not.
Cecil stared at the anomaly another moment before finally turning toward Donald.
“Tell the techs to prep a teleport insertion.”
Donald blinked.
“…Sir?”
“You heard me.”
Donald’s expression tightened immediately. “We don’t know what that thing is. We haven’t even confirmed whether the surrounding area is stable enough for—”
Cecil cut him off with a single look.
It wasn’t anger.
That would have been easier.
It was the cold, immovable expression Donald had seen a hundred times before—the one that meant Cecil had already made the decision three steps ago.
Donald stopped talking mid-sentence.
For a moment the two men simply stared at each other across the noise of the operations room.
Then Donald sighed quietly through his nose and gave a reluctant nod.
“…Of course, sir,” he said. “I’ll inform the tech team.”
Cecil turned back toward the screen, eyes narrowing at the impossible tear hanging in the forest.
Cecil never really got used to teleportation.
You would think, after years of relying on technology that folded space like paper and threw human beings across continents in less than a second, that his body would eventually adapt to the sensation. It never did. Every single jump still felt fundamentally unnatural, like reality itself briefly forgot where his atoms belonged before carelessly slamming them back together somewhere else. There was always that impossible instant in between—weightless, directionless, suspended in a place the human brain was never designed to perceive.
And if he was being completely honest with himself, there was a part of him that found it exhilarating.
Not the nausea afterward. Not the splitting migraines some of the longer jumps caused. Not the lingering metallic taste in the back of his throat whenever the machinery strained too hard. No, what thrilled him was the proximity to power itself. To stand this close to something impossible and command it—to point at the laws of physics and force them to obey human instruction for even a fraction of a second—scratched at something buried deep inside him that he rarely allowed himself to acknowledge.
Because the truth was, some small ugly part of Cecil Stedman had always wanted powers.
Not for glory. Not for admiration.
For control.
For security.
For the ability to stand in the same room as beings like Omni-Man and not constantly feel the fragile limitations of his own mortality pressing against his spine.
But powers wouldn’t really solve anything, would they?
Unless immortality counted.
And God help him if that ever became an option.
At thirty-seven years old, his body already felt older than some civilizations. Years of stress, old injuries, surgeries, regenerative treatments, and the constant strain of existing in a state somewhere between medically preserved and biologically exhausted had left his bones aching in ways no technology could fully repair. Every morning came with new stiffness. Every old scar carried phantom pain. Every near-death experience left another invisible crack somewhere under the surface.
No super strength in the world fixed the kind of exhaustion he carried around.
The world snapped sideways.
For one disorienting instant, Cecil existed nowhere.
Then suddenly his boots sank into soft grass.
Cool air struck his face immediately, a sharp contrast to the recycled heat and sterile artificial atmosphere of GDA headquarters. Gone were the humming projectors, glowing screens, and suffocating scent of electronics overheating under pressure. Out here the world smelled alive—wet earth, moss, damp bark, rain hanging heavily in the atmosphere before the storm had even begun.
Petrichor.
The sky overhead churned with heavy gray clouds, swollen and dark enough to threaten thunder at any minute. Wind moved through the trees in restless waves, rustling branches overhead while loose leaves skittered across the forest floor.
And roughly a hundred feet to his left, reality itself was bleeding.
The rupture hung suspended in the clearing exactly as it had appeared on the monitors, though seeing it in person was infinitely worse. Video footage hadn’t properly captured the way the thing moved. It didn’t simply exist—it warped. The edges trembled constantly, folding inward and outward in sickening pulses as though the universe was struggling to close around the wound but failing every time. Darkness churned inside it, thick and depthless, and the surrounding air bent subtly toward the anomaly like the entire forest was being dragged toward an invisible drain.
Not enough force to pull a person in.
More like standing several feet away from an industrial vacuum.
Cecil’s tie lifted slightly in the unnatural wind while loose strands of blonde hair brushed against his forehead. His eyes never left the rupture as he pressed two fingers against the earpiece hidden beneath his collar.
“You getting all this?” he asked calmly.
Static crackled briefly before Donald’s voice answered in his ear.
“Affirmative, sir. Telemetry’s stable.”
Another analyst chimed in immediately after.
“No major fluctuations in spatial integrity. So far the breach appears contained.”
“So far,” Cecil repeated dryly.
Behind him, somewhere far beyond the trees, thunder rolled low across the horizon.
The analysts continued feeding him information through the comms—energy output percentages, atmospheric readings, containment projections, probability estimates stacked on top of more probability estimates. The GDA loved statistics. Numbers comforted people. Numbers created the illusion that impossible situations could somehow be controlled if enough data points were gathered.
Cecil had spent too long in this job to trust comfort.
Then the sound changed.
His head snapped toward the rupture instantly.
The warbling distortion filling the clearing suddenly deepened in pitch, vibrating hard enough now that Cecil could physically feel it in his chest. The edges of the tear convulsed violently, blackness inside twisting faster and faster like water circling a drain.
Instinct took over before thought could catch up.
His hand moved immediately to the pistol holstered beneath his jacket.
“Sir?” Donald’s voice sharpened through the earpiece.
The sound grew louder.
And louder.
Yet strangely, the rupture itself didn’t expand. It remained the same jagged size even as reality around it seemed to strain under increasing pressure.
Then something moved inside the darkness.
Cecil narrowed his eyes.
A figure stumbled forward through the tear.
Small.
Human.
A child stepped out of the rupture wearing a white hospital gown.
Every calculation in Cecil’s head halted simultaneously.
For one rare moment, genuine surprise slipped past his carefully controlled expression.
The boy looked no older than seven or eight years old at most. Dirty blond hair hung unevenly around his face like it had been cut months ago and left to grow wild afterward. Pale skin. Blue eyes. Slight frame. Bare feet pressing uncertainly into damp grass as he looked around the clearing with visible confusion.
Frightened confusion.
Cecil’s mind immediately began assembling contingencies anyway.
Alien mimicry.
Psychic infiltration.
Biological weapon.
Shapeshifter.
Bait.
The universe had taught him long ago that things which appeared harmless were often the most dangerous.
Still, none of that reached his face.
Slowly, deliberately, Cecil removed his hand from his holster and straightened his posture instead, adjusting his tie almost casually while the rupture behind the child began collapsing inward with violent flashes of distortion.
The voices in his earpiece grew louder as analysts scrambled to reinterpret the situation in real time.
“Energy levels dropping rapidly.”
“The breach is destabilizing.”
“No additional life signatures detected.”
Cecil ignored all of them.
He stepped forward carefully and extended one hand toward the boy in what he hoped looked non-threatening.
“Cecil Stedman,” he said evenly. “Director of the—”
He stopped.
The child had recoiled backward suddenly, eyes widening with abrupt panic.
“Stay back!” the boy screamed.
And then his eyes glowed red.
Cecil saw the heat before the beam even fired.
Years of survival instincts saved his life.
He barely had time to register the flash of crimson light erupting toward him before the world violently ripped sideways again.
Teleportation slammed into him mid-motion.
One second he was standing in the forest clearing.
The next, he crashed hard against the floor of the GDA operations room, breath exploding from his lungs as momentum carried him backward into the wall. Pain shot through his spine instantly while the smell of burned fabric hit him a fraction of a second later.
Voices erupted around him.
“Jesus Christ—”
“Pull security feeds!”
“Containment teams on standby!”
Cecil ignored all of it, breathing hard as he looked down at the front of his suit. The lower half of his tie had been completely singed apart, blackened fabric still faintly smoking where the laser had nearly caught him center mass.
A little closer and his chest cavity would currently be missing.
Mental note: thank the teleportation techs later.
“Jesus,” Cecil muttered under his breath, pushing himself upright.
Donald was suddenly beside him, crouching slightly.
“Sir, are you injured?”
Cecil grabbed the side of Donald’s sleeve and pulled himself fully to his feet before brushing soot from his jacket like this sort of thing happened every afternoon.
“Put me back in,” he ordered immediately.
Donald stared at him.
“…Sir.”
“You heard me.” Cecil adjusted the ruined remains of his tie with visible irritation. “Kid just shot lasers out of his eyes after falling through a dimensional hole. I’d like to know why.”
The second teleportation hit him just as hard as the first.
Reality twisted violently around Cecil in a nauseating blur of fractured light and collapsing sensation, his body momentarily suspended in that impossible space between destinations where direction, gravity, and coherent thought all seemed to dissolve into static. For one unpleasant instant it felt like his skeleton had been peeled apart molecule by molecule before being forced back together somewhere else entirely.
Then the forest air struck him again.
Cold.
His shoes pressed into wet grass while the scent of rain and soil filled his lungs, replacing the sterile recycled atmosphere of the operations room. Somewhere overhead, thunder muttered low behind the heavy clouds gathering thicker now across the sky, the entire forest dim beneath the coming storm.
Cecil steadied himself almost immediately, though his stomach still rolled faintly from the jump.
He wasn’t a religious man. Never had been. The job tended to burn faith out of people eventually. But at this exact moment, with the memory of red heat vision still fresh in his mind and the front of his shirt half-charred beneath his suit jacket, he found himself silently hoping the GDA teleport technicians were fast enough to yank him back out again if things went sideways a second time.
Because the kid was absolutely a threat.
No question about that anymore.
A child capable of firing concentrated laser beams powerful enough to nearly cut through him in under a second automatically qualified as a global security concern whether anybody liked it or not.
But when Cecil looked toward the tree line expecting another attack, what he saw instead made him stop.
The boy was curled against the base of a large oak tree several yards away, knees pulled tightly against his chest while both arms covered the top of his head as though he expected something terrible to crash down on him at any second. His breathing came in sharp, uneven bursts, shoulders trembling faintly with each inhale. The oversized hospital gown hung awkwardly off his thin frame, damp at the edges from the wet grass and dirt beneath him.
Not aggressive.
Terrified.
Back at the operations room, hidden surveillance drones hovered silently overhead, feeding live footage directly into GDA headquarters where analysts were undoubtedly already arguing over containment protocols, worst-case scenarios, and casualty projections.
Cecil exhaled slowly through his nose before reaching up and pulling the ruined tie free from around his collar. The fabric was still blackened and partially melted where the laser had clipped it. He dusted a bit of ash from the end with mild annoyance before folding it loosely and tucking it into his coat pocket.
“You know, kid,” he said evenly, “you make one hell of a first impression.”
He deliberately stayed several feet away this time before lowering himself into a crouch, making sure not to tower over the child.
The boy didn’t move.
His breathing remained fast and shallow, fingers clenched tightly against the sides of his head.
Cecil glanced briefly toward the place where the rupture had once hung. The air there still shimmered faintly with residual distortion, though the tear itself was gone now, reality stitching itself back together as though nothing had happened at all.
Of course.
The universe drops an unidentified laser-eyed child into his jurisdiction through a dimensional hole and then immediately cleans up the evidence.
Typical.
“You also owe me a new tie,” Cecil added dryly.
Still nothing.
No response.
Just shaking breaths and silence.
Cecil studied the kid carefully, watching for signs of deception, aggression, anything that might suggest the fear was an act. Years in intelligence had made him instinctively suspicious of vulnerability because vulnerability was often weaponized by people who knew exactly how effective it could be.
But this?
This looked genuine.
The kid looked exhausted in the way only deeply frightened children did, like his entire nervous system had overloaded hours ago and simply never recovered.
Cecil softened his voice slightly despite himself.
“I’m Cecil,” he said. “What’s your name?”
For a second he thought the boy hadn’t answered.
There was a sound—small, muffled against his knees, barely audible beneath the rustling trees and distant thunder.
Cecil tilted his head a little closer.
“Sorry,” he said quietly. “Didn’t catch that, bud.”
The boy finally lifted his face.
Red-rimmed blue eyes met Cecil’s cautiously, wet with tears that hadn’t fully fallen yet. Up close he looked even younger somehow. Pale. Frightened. Completely out of place standing in the middle of a Maryland forest after falling through what might have been a rupture.
“…John,” the child whispered.
Cecil held his gaze for a moment before nodding once.
“Okay,” he said gently. “John.”
He released a slow breath through his nose, trying very hard not to let his own stress bleed visibly into the conversation. Kids sensed tension faster than adults did. They picked up on fear instinctively, and right now Cecil was practically radiating controlled anxiety beneath the surface.
Because no matter how small and frightened this kid appeared, the facts remained the facts. Something powerful enough to tear holes through dimensions had dropped him here.
The child had nearly burned a hole through Cecil’s chest on instinct alone.
And if those heat vision abilities scaled upward the way Cecil suspected they might, this scared little boy potentially possessed enough destructive capability to level city blocks before anyone could stop him.
Thousands of people could die if this went wrong.
But sitting there now, curled against the tree with tears in his eyes and panic written across every inch of his posture, John didn’t look like a weapon.
“John,” Cecil repeated carefully, keeping his voice calm and measured, “do you know how you got here?”
The question seemed to hit something inside the boy immediately.
John’s expression tightened, and he shook his head quickly before hiding his face back against his knees again, shoulders curling inward like he was trying to disappear into himself.
“No,” he whispered shakily. “I don’t…”
Cecil nodded slowly, exhaling through his nose as he shifted his weight slightly in the damp grass.
“Okay,” he said after a moment, keeping his voice level and measured in the careful way people spoke around frightened animals and traumatized children. “That’s all right. We’ll figure it out. One step at a time, okay, bud?”
The boy didn’t answer immediately.
He just stared at him.
Big blue eyes locked onto Cecil with an intensity that felt strangely disarming, especially coming from someone so young. There was something deeply unusual about the way John looked at people—not hostile exactly, not even suspicious in the normal sense, but intensely observant, like every expression and movement Cecil made was being dissected in real time. It reminded him less of a child interacting with another person and more of someone encountering humanity for the very first time and trying desperately to understand the rules fast enough not to die.
The vulnerability in those eyes was obvious enough.
So was the alienness.
Not physical alienness. If someone passed this kid on the street, they’d think he was any other exhausted eight-year-old with messy blond hair and bad luck. But there was a disconnect underneath the surface that Cecil couldn’t quite explain. John’s reactions felt delayed in odd places and hyperaware in others, as though certain basic social instincts either hadn’t developed properly or had been replaced with something entirely different.
Cecil found himself wondering what exactly existed on the other side of that rupture.
Maybe this was normal where the kid came from.
Maybe fear looked different there.
The thought sat unpleasantly in his stomach.
John continued staring at him for several long seconds, tears silently tracking down his face while his small hands tightened around the fabric of the hospital gown pooled at his knees.
Then he frowned slightly.
“You’re scared of me,” he said quietly.
Cecil blinked once.
The statement itself wasn’t accusatory.
John tilted his head faintly, eyes unfocused for half a second like he was concentrating on something distant.
“Your heart rate is 124,” he continued softly. “And your breathing changed when I looked at you.”
Well.
That was new.
“You’re scared of me,” John repeated.
For perhaps the first time in years, Cecil Stedman genuinely didn’t know what to say immediately. His mouth opened slightly before shutting again, one hand absently reaching up to scratch the back of his neck.
“I mean…” he admitted carefully, “yeah, kid. Little bit.”
Honesty tended to work better with children.
“You did try to laser my face off about five minutes ago.”
The instant the words left his mouth, John visibly folded inward again.
His head ducked down against his knees while his arms came up protectively over the top of his head, body curling tightly into itself with practiced instinct. Not embarrassment.
Defense.
The movement made something cold settle behind Cecil’s ribs.
“Are you gonna hurt me?” John asked quietly, voice muffled against his arms.
Cecil frowned immediately.
“No,” he said, sharper than intended. “God, no. Of course not.”
John didn’t move.
The kid was trembling now. Slightly, but enough for Cecil to notice.
Cecil glanced briefly upward toward one of the invisible surveillance drones hovering somewhere above the treeline. He could practically feel Operations watching this unfold through the cameras, analysts and tacticians likely tearing each other apart over protocol recommendations right now.
Maintain distance.
Secure containment.
Neutralize if necessary.
The GDA had procedures for everything, though none of those procedures included comforting crying children in the woods.
Cecil sighed quietly before speaking again, gentler this time.
“Look,” he said, “I’m trying to figure out what happened here, same as you. I want to know who brought you here, where you came from, whether anybody else came through that hole with you. That’s it.”
Still no response.
“I know you’re scared,” Cecil continued carefully. “And I know you probably didn’t mean to laser at me.”
That earned the smallest reaction, John’s shoulders twitched faintly beneath his arms.
Cecil’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“Are you gonna hurt me?” he asked again.
Not what are you going to do.
Not where am I.
Not even who are you.
Cecil had spent too much time around abused assets, trafficked metahumans, and weaponized child soldiers not to recognize conditioned fear when he saw it.
His gaze drifted briefly over the oversized hospital gown again.
Thin material.
Institutional design.
No shoes.
Something ugly was starting to assemble itself in the back of Cecil’s mind. John swallowed hard before speaking again, voice tiny and uneven.
“I won’t do it again,” he whispered quickly. “I promise.”
Cecil stayed silent.
“I just…” John’s breathing hitched slightly. “I thought… I thought they were putting me back in.”
A knot tightened slowly in Cecil’s chest.
“Back in where?” he asked.
John hesitated.
Then:
“The oven.”
Cecil’s expression didn’t visibly change, but internally several disconnected pieces abruptly slammed together with enough force to make his stomach turn.
Cecil’s jaw tightened subtly.
“Okay,” he said slowly.
His voice had gone very calm now. Dangerously calm.
“Okay, kid.”
John still hadn’t looked up.
Rain began lightly tapping through the canopy overhead, soft droplets pattering against leaves and damp earth around them.
Behind his earpiece, someone from Operations started speaking urgently.
“Sir, recommend maintaining current distance until we can establish—”
Cecil muted the comm channel without a second thought.
He knew this was a bad idea.
Objectively, strategically, professionally—this was an unbelievably bad idea.
The child in front of him possessed unknown abilities, unknown origins, and enough raw destructive potential to turn the entire clearing into molten glass if startled badly enough. Every survival instinct the GDA had drilled into him over the years screamed not to close the distance further.
But Cecil Stedman had never been particularly good at standing still while someone suffered in front of him.
Even after all these years, even after prison.
Slowly, carefully, he pushed himself to his feet before taking several deliberate steps closer. Every movement was measured, visible, non-threatening. He made sure John could see his hands the entire time.
The boy stiffened immediately as Cecil approached but didn’t lash out.
Good sign.
Cecil lowered himself beside him against the tree trunk, close enough now to feel the faint trembling running through the child’s shoulders. The bark pressed rough against the back of his coat while rainwater dripped steadily through the branches overhead.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Then Cecil rested one careful hand against the middle of John’s back.
The kid flinched hard but he didn’t pull away.
Cecil kept his hand there lightly, steady and deliberate, the same way one might approach a frightened stray animal that had spent its entire life learning human hands only brought pain. He could feel every muscle in the boy’s body locked tight beneath the thin hospital gown, tension wound so severely into him that it seemed less like anxiety and more like instinct. That realization made something ugly twist in Cecil’s chest.
“Look at me for a second, John,” he said quietly.
The boy hesitated before finally lifting his head just enough for one tear-reddened eye to peek out from behind his arms.
Cecil spoke slowly, carefully choosing every word.
“I don’t know what happened to you before you got here,” he said. “And right now I honestly don’t even know where here is for you. But nobody’s putting you back into anything. Not while I’m standing here.”
John stared at him uncertainly.
“You understand me?”
A tiny nod.
Good enough.
Cecil exhaled softly through his nose, eyes drifting upward toward the gray clouds overhead for half a second while his mind worked furiously behind the scenes.
This was bad.
Not catastrophic yet.
But potentially bad in ways that made his teeth hurt.
A frightened superpowered child was already dangerous on principle. A frightened superpowered child who had apparently been experimented on, isolated, and taught to associate authority figures with physical suffering? That was the kind of situation that turned into national tragedies if mishandled for even a second.
A tiny movement pulled Cecil from his thoughts.
John was looking at him fully now, eyes wet and uncertain, lower lip trembling faintly as though he still expected this entire interaction to suddenly shift into cruelty without warning.
“You’re not lying?” he asked quietly.
There was no accusation in it.
Cecil swallowed once before answering.
“No,” he said honestly.
The kid studied his face with unnerving intensity for several long seconds.
Then, very carefully:
“…Okay.”
Behind the muted comms in Cecil’s ear, he could see warning lights blinking faintly against the side of his vision where the interface projected telemetry updates directly onto his contact lens.
“You have to promise me something though,” Cecil continued after a moment, his tone shifting slightly firmer. “Can you do that?”
John nodded slowly.
“No more lasers,” Cecil said. “No hurting anybody. My people are nervous enough already and I’d rather not spend the afternoon explaining why you hurt someone.”
The attempt at humor clearly missed the mark because John’s expression immediately crumpled with worry.
“I said I was sorry,” he whispered quickly, panic creeping back into his voice. “I didn’t mean to—I thought—I thought you were gonna—”
“Hey.”
Cecil’s hand pressed slightly firmer against his back, grounding him before the spiral could start.
“I know,” he interrupted calmly. “I know you didn’t mean to.”
John’s breathing hitched unevenly.
For a second, Cecil saw it very clearly—the impossible contradiction sitting in front of him. Under any other circumstances, this kid would probably still be worrying about cartoons and scraped knees and whether vegetables counted as torture. Instead someone had somehow managed to hand a frightened child enough power to level buildings and then apparently locked him in a laboratory until his first instinct became fear.
It was like watching someone hand a loaded gun to a toddler and then act surprised when people got hurt.
Nolan was difficult enough because Nolan represented controlled power. Calculated power. Adult power. Omni-Man could destroy cities too, but he understood consequence, restraint, social structure. Even if Cecil didn’t trust him completely, he at least trusted Nolan understood the scale of what he was capable of.
This was different.
This was raw unchecked ability fused directly to childhood trauma.
A baby born holding a weapon.
And God help them all if somebody mishandled that combination.
John wiped clumsily at his face with the sleeve of the gown before speaking again.
“Am I in trouble?”
The question came so quietly Cecil almost missed it. He looked at the boy for a long moment before answering.
“No,” he said finally. “You’re not in trouble.”
Not with me, anyway.
Though he kept that part to himself.
Rain was falling more steadily now, soft droplets filtering through the leaves overhead and darkening the fabric of Cecil’s suit jacket. Somewhere deeper in the forest, thunder rolled again.
Cecil made the decision then, probably career-ending if this blew up in his face.
But leaving the kid here wasn’t an option, and sending armed containment squads after him definitely wasn’t either.
Slowly, carefully, Cecil rose to his feet.
John tensed immediately before looking up at him nervously.
“It’s okay,” Cecil said. “We’re gonna head somewhere safer.”
“…Where?”
“My workplace.”
John looked alarmed by that answer.
Cecil sighed internally.
“Not a prison,” he clarified quickly. “Just somewhere secure. Warm. Dry. Full of people significantly smarter than me who can maybe figure out where that giant hole in reality came from.”
John hesitated before slowly uncurling himself from against the tree.
Standing now, he looked painfully small.
The hospital gown hung awkwardly around his knees, damp and wrinkled, while muddy bare feet shifted uncertainly against the grass.
Carefully, Cecil extended a hand.
John stared at it for a second before taking it hesitantly.
The kid’s fingers were freezing cold.
He lifted a hand to his earpiece and reactivated the comm line.
Immediately a dozen overlapping voices flooded his ear.
“—Sir what the hell are you doing—”
“—Containment teams are standing by—”
“Donald,” Cecil interrupted flatly.
The room instantly quieted.
Donald answered a second later.
“…Sir.”
“Pull us back in,” Cecil said. “Dock One.”
There was a noticeable pause.
Dock One wasn’t technically a prison, but it was close enough that most people inside the GDA treated it like one. Reinforced containment wing. Adaptive holding cells. Medical isolation units. The sort of place designed specifically for individuals capable of tearing through conventional infrastructure without effort.
Normally, taking someone there meant they were considered dangerous.
In this case? Cecil honestly didn’t know what else to do.
Donald’s voice returned carefully.
“Understood, sir. Teleport team standing by.”
Cecil looked down at John once more before the teleportation sequence engaged.