coveted magics, 9
It all started with a very bored Gwen on a Thursday night, which was usually the start of some kind of shenanigans or other. They’d had a great morning going out to get pancakes with Riri, followed by a laughter-filled walk through Boston’s inner city district. Then midday onward just sort of tapered into more and more boredom as Gwen ground their way through some very boring biochemistry lecture work and eventually gave up. From there, Gwen had jumped from one activity to another, none seeming to give their brain the burst of dopamine they desperately needed. So, they went over to Harry’s place.
“Hi-” Gwen started, noticing she’d arrived at her home away from home right at the end of their dinnertime. She then sized up the body sitting across from Harry, noticing the laid back demeanor and easily determined who was fronting. “Norman, can I steal Harry for the night?”
“Please, be my guest,” Norman answered with an unfazed smile at Gwen’s sudden appearance. “God only knows he’s been cooped up here too long doing work for the company. Would you like a bite to eat before you go?”
Gwen shook their head. “No thanks, I ate before I came over. Though I wouldn’t say no to grabbing any leftovers lying around on my way home?”
Norman gave them a curt nod. “Excellent, I’ll box some up for you once I’m finished with my meal, and leave it in the usual place. And, as usual, you’ll keep my son in once piece for me, won’t you?”
“Father,” Harry groaned, “I can take care of myself.”
Gwen paced up to Harry’s side and put a hand on her best friend’s shoulder. “Don’t you worry, Norman, I’ve got his back. Wanna get out of here?”
Harry, who hadn’t yet managed to say anything about his own preferences for the evening, looked up at Gwen. “You got bored, huh? Sure, let’s bounce.”
After Harry had tidied up his place, Gwen led Harry to his own bedroom. “Wanna suit up and tear apart some anti-homeless infrastructure? I’m kind of in the mood for a good ol’ bit of benign chaos.”
“So not just bored but solidly understimulated, huh?” Harry inferred, proceeding to grab his Witchboy suit from his wardrobe before stripping down to his underwear.
“Yeah, the lectures I had to get through today were dry as shit,” they confirmed.
Gwen, well and truly accustomed to changing in the same space as Harry since not only had they practically grown up around each other, they had been best friends for long enough to get past the awkward stage of changing teenage bodies and simply grown comfortable in their skin together, did the same. She pulled her suit from the satchel she’d brought with, and slipped deftly into it.
“Well, let’s go stick it to the establishment,” Harry said once they were both ready, and opened a portal to some random rooftop elsewhere in the city. Whenever he and Gwen left from either of their homes, Harry always portalled somewhere random first, so that nobody got an accidental glimpse into their private spaces. The next portal was opened up to the west side of Boston Common park, where some new ‘armrest’ handles had been put up on benches for ‘accessibility’. In actuality, the local government authorities had simply decided that homeless people were ruining the inner city’s look.
“Wanna do this the same way as usual?” Gwen asked, having to actively hold back from pumping their body full of electricity until they and Harry had decided what to do. The restlessness was really starting to take over, but it wasn’t long before they’d be able to let loose.
“Mhm,” Harry hummed, and waved a few arcane sigils into the air with his fingers, summoning up a pair of darkened magical blades for each of them. “I watched those tiktoks you sent me earlier, by the way. That Reddit story about the teacher getting fired for letting his students prank the principal was kind of ridiculous.”
“Let tonight’s activities be in his honour.” Gwen bowed their head in joking solemnity. They glanced towards the nearest offending bench, a few metres to their right, walked on over to it, and slashed a dagger at the very base of the obstructive handle, taking it clean off. It was important to get as close to the actual bench seat and back as possible, to ensure there were no sharp bits jutting out if Harry didn’t have time to magically smooth the surface over before the cops showed up.
Gwen then allowed the urgency within their body to take over and generated enough electricity to cross the whole park in half a second. Like the other times they’d gone out with Harry for activities like this, the plan was to split up and reconvene whenever they had thoughts they wanted to share with each other. It was kind of like body doubling or parallel play, both of which Gwen loved.
Two minutes in, Harry almost managed to catch Gwen off-guard by opening a very quiet portal behind her. “So how’s Billy doing? I haven’t had a chance to pop in for a visit since the night Pete and I picked him up.”
Gwen paused their ‘vandalism’ and turned around to face Harry, twirling a dagger around with their wrist in an attempt to copy the baton exercises they’d seen Harley doing every so often. “Oh, yeah! A bit more okay than I’d have expected, honestly. At least, based on what I know of his whole story. I hung out with him and Peter yesterday to mess around with turning some chains into accessories, and we mostly got to chatting about queercore music. I guess he kind of just seems like he’s trying to figure out what his life is gonna look like now, which is to be expected.”
“Yeah, sounds about right,” Harry agreed, bending over to inspect Gwen’s precision on a nearby bench. Clearly dissatisfied, he cast a spell that melted down some uneven parts into the rest of the metal bench. “I didn’t interact with the kid much, but he seemed a decent mix of terrified and desperate for something better.”
Gwen felt their chest warm at that. “He’s definitely got it. Kid might not know it yet, but he’s just been taken in by a family that’ll be sure to love him in all the ways he needs. Honestly Har, you need to see how Peter is around him. I know he was raised an only child, but he’s stepping into the role of big brother like an absolute natural. Meanwhile, I’m hearing plenty from my sister about how off-the-walls stressed Wanda is.”
“Hardly surprising,” Harry responded, opening up a portal to another part of town since they were already done with the park. “Speaking of Daisy and Wanda, any progress to report there?”
Gwen let out a sigh, and quickly scoped out their surroundings to make sure there were no cops nearby to mess with their plans of helping people in need. “None whatsoever. I can’t keep telling Daisy to just go for it and tell Wanda how she feels, it’s driving me nuts. In fairness, though, I’m no good at that kind of thing either. I hope they work it out, they’d be cute together.”
“You mean terrifying?” Harry joked. “They’re only two of the most powerful people on the planet, after all. I grew up reading and hearing stories about the Scarlet Witch, not to mention Daisy’s powers.”
“Huh. You know, I never really thought about that,” Gwen said, before zipping down the road to take care of some anti-homeless spikes by a bougie looking storefront, and then returning to Harry’s side. “But you’re right. I mean, I live in a building with three people on the level of the Avengers. Kind of weird to think about them like that when they’re just, you know, our friends and family.”
Harry huffed in amusement. “Tell me about it. Sometimes I forget that my own absentee mother is like, one of the most powerful witches in history. Though I do try not to think about her at all, honestly.”
“Yeah, I wanna punch her,” Gwen started to declare proudly. And they would have kept going, if not for having noticed something out of the corner of their eye. Or, rather, someone. It was the long white hair over a tight black outfit that had tipped Gwen’s brain into red alert, because that sight was kind of burned into her brain. Focusing to get a better look, Gwen confirmed that it was in fact the woman who was starting to become something of a nemesis of hers.
“Heads up,” Gwen whispered to Harry, nodding her head in the direction of Black Cat. If she was here, something was definitely up. Knowing that they didn’t need to wait for Harry to get himself together to play the role of backup, Gwen dashed as close as they knew they could get to their new nemesis without tripping on their face. “What a pleasure it isn’t to see you here.”
Unexpectedly, Black Cat raised her hands in a pacifying gesture. It took a moment for Gwen to notice, but she wasn’t looking at them. No, she was looking at where Gwen had just been practicing their knifework a few minutes back. “Cool it, zappy. You get a free pass tonight, I’m not in the mood to fight.”
Gwen’s eyes narrowed. “And I’m just supposed to believe that?”
“Believe what you want,” Black Cat groaned, rolling her eyes. “I was hired to help out on a nicely paying little assassination, but the sight of you has honestly spoiled my criminal appetite. You’d better watch out though, if you’re going to run off and play hero. The guy I was supposed to be working with is one hell of a sniper. Arrogant, though. I mean, anyone going by the name of Bullseye has to be. Anyway, toodaloo!”
With that, the infuriating woman turned and ran down a dark alley and out of sight. As much as they wanted to, Gwen knew better than to chase. Taking down someone like her took an amount of wit that they simply did not possess after that exchange. What the hell did she mean, assassination. Was she lying just to mess with Gwen? But… no, Black Cat didn’t have any reason to lie about that.
“Wait!” Gwen called out, but no matter how fast they were, Black Cat was good at making getaways. They’d last seen her at the militant inhuman base and taken her down there, but clearly the woman had escaped whatever captivity she’d been taken into. So why was she here, back in Boston? Why now? And why didn’t she stick around to pick a fight, when she had held so much animosity towards Gwen during their last encounter? Why tip them off about a hit going down?
At the very least, it was certainly in character for her to give no further meaningful details, which mean that Gwen and Harry now had to figure the rest of this out on their own, and fast. So, Gwen turned to Harry.
“Well, that was-” Harry started, but was interrupted by the voice of Black Cat, who was now standing atop the building beside the duo.
“The hit’s on a guy named Steven Plozier! Politician, noisy, bla bla, whatever. Have fun!” Black Cat called out, and then disappeared once more, leaving Gwen to now wonder how she’d scampered up the side of a building so fast — or at all, for that matter.
“Oh, fuck,” Harry uttered. “I know that name. Peter was telling me about the guy a couple weeks ago, he’s a democratic senatorial candidate. He’s known for being extremely progressive, but even a lot of the super progressive folks don’t like him because he calls out anti-zionist encampments and organisations for their anti-semitism.”
“Oh, we are so saving this guy,” Gwen then declared, because although it hadn’t been on her radar before, Gwen had since learned from Peter and Wanda just how much antisemitism came from supposedly progressive spaces and how much harm it caused. The non-Jewish people out there actively defending the Jewish community from harm seemed too few and far between, and there was no way in hell Gwen was letting one get taken down today if she could stop this from happening. “I could scour the city for this guy, but I feel like there are better ways to do this.”
Harry nodded. “Yeah, and we’ve still got that offshoot of DARLENE chipped into our suits. Hey DARLENE, what can you find about Steven Plozier’s schedule this evening?”
The AI’s voice played into Gwen’s ear directly, likely having determined on its own that because of their recent activities and proximity to one another, the information was useful to both Harry and Gwen. “Doctor Plozier is presently giving a lecture at the University Hall Auditorium, at the University of Massachusetts Boston, which will end in approximately fifteen minutes.”
“That’s only a few blocks from here,” Gwen realised, looking at a map that DARLENE was displaying on their visor. They were currently on the east side of Jones Hill, a neighbourhood that was in Harry’s patrol routes lately. This only meant that Black Cat’s intel was more likely to check out, and that the two of them needed to get moving, now. “I’d say I should run ahead and scout out the area, but then this ‘Bullseye’ might catch wind of us coming. Do you know the campus well enough to discretely portal us closer?”
Harry shook his head. “Not well enough to pick a sport where we won’t be seen – but what I can do is portal us about fifty metres into the air and then fly us down. Grab on?”
As instructed, Gwen wrapped their arms around Harry’s waist and held on as he flew the two of them through a portal and up into the sky. With the campus now below them, Gwen continued holding on as Harry picked out a well shadowed spot to lower down and land at, a spot right by the water where the public light had flickered out. Knowing what to expect already, Gwen waited for Harry to cast a concealment spell over the two of them that would make them both harder to notice for anyone untrained in magic – which meant hoping that this Bullseye couldn’t use magic well, or at all.
Scoping out their surroundings, it was immediately clear that the hit probably wasn’t going to go down outside, given how spread out and open the space was. Once Gwen and Harry reached the building in question, they spotted a few security guards stationed around the outside. It wasn’t uncommon for political candidates to have some amount of security, but it didn’t look like they were actually doing much. They probably weren’t expecting an attack. And… how hard would it be for someone to join in on the lecture to just pick a moment and pull off a hit?
“I’ve grown up around cops enough to know that if we tell these coppy looking guys there’s a hit going down, they’ll probably only make things worse,” Gwen whispered to Harry. “We should get inside and see if we can find Bullseye, and at least if we keep eyes on Plozier we can protect him until he’s safely away from here.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Harry agreed. “Once we’re inside and close enough to protect him, I’ll send out a pulse to see if there are any magic-users in range. If there are and they’re any good, it’ll tip them off but we’ll be ready to handle it.”
And so they went inside. The auditorium was about three quarters full. There were people of all adult ages amongst the audience, and Dr Plozier was up front giving his speech. From the slides on display, it looked like he was talking about some kind of inter-community work. If not for the imminent threat, Gwen might’ve even been interested in sitting back and listening to what the guy had to say. But right now, she needed to focus on finding Bullseye.
Harry tapped their shoulder once to let them know he was going to do his thing. A moment later, he tapped again to get Gwen’s attention and shook his head – so nobody here was a magic user. Good to know. Next up it was Gwen’s turn to see if she could spot the culprit. She pulled out an empty battery that she’d asked Harley to design for her a little while back. With their hand on the battery, Gwen could let electricity flow through and immediately out of their body without needing to run anywhere – which allowed Gwen to focus and effectively slow down time around them, giving them a discreet opportunity to visually scan the crowd. Unfortunately nobody looked out of the ordinary, which meant this would be a waiting game. Gwen hated waiting games.
“We’ll just have to be ready when something goes dow-” Gwen started to say, and then the sound of a gunshot echoed through the auditorium.
Well, at least she didn’t have to wait. Gwen surged into action, electricity welling up fast as she leapt out of seat she’d taken at the back. Her first task was to catch the bullet, which was easy enough – Gwen made it half-way across the room and caught the bullet well before it reached its intended target. While time was still slow around her, Gwen turned to find the shooter sitting about four rows from the back, wearing a sleek black suit. He had light skin, a layer of stubble and short brown hair. The gun was a simple pistol, which meant this guy was an expert, if he was that confident in his aim with a pistol across a room of this size.
Depending on just how good he was, the guy might be able to react to Gwen’s speed and have something planned. If he was working with Black Cat and carrying out an attack in Boston, he had to know about the various superpowered folks in this city and what they were capable of. That meant Gwen had to make a choice between rushing him and playing it safer and more cautious.
But Gwen was fast, and they had backup. Knowing they could leave any further protection of Plozier to Harry, Gwen could fully focus their attention on Bullseye. So they turned and shot towards the enemy. The easiest path was to leap from empty seat to empty seat, crossing half the auditorium back to the shooter. It would take less than half a second, and Gwen could rush the guy out of the building and into an open space where he didn’t pose a threat to anybody nearby.
Except for the fact that a high, shrill noise slowly rang out when Gwen’s foot touched the last seat they needed to jump from to reach the guy.
Shit, Gwen though, and looked down to see a light coming from a very well concealed explosive mine. Now they couldn’t go straight for Bullseye anymore, because he’d had setup time in this auditorium and laid traps. Leave the mine unattended and there would be a hell of a lot of deaths. Groaning, Gwen bent down, grabbed the mine and sprinted outside, hurling it into the air just in time for it to blow up in the sky.
“Fuck,” Gwen cursed aloud, and sped back inside. A few more seconds had passed, and Gwen could hear the screams slowly bursting out from the crowd. Harry was already standing by Plozier’s side, and Gwen looked back to where Bullseye was. She wanted to deal with him first, but the problem was that there was about to be chaos in here, and if there were any more explosives, people were in danger.
“DARLENE, do you have the hardware in my suit to scan for any more explosives?” Gwen asked desperately as she made her way towards the centre of the auditorium where she could get anywhere quickly.
“I can do that,” DARLENE confirmed, and three red outlines lit up immediately on the visor display.
Great, Gwen thought, and sped to collect them all and hurl them like frisbees into the air outside. By the time they’d made it back inside, Bullseye was starting to attempt an escape. No way in hell Gwen was letting that happen. Controlling their electricity well enough to not burn any of the chaotic, panicked audience members, Gwen rushed through the crowd, grabbed Bullseye and dragged him outside. This was technically the perfect moment for another attempted assassination, but Gwen had to trust that if there was anyone else trying to kill Plozier inside, Harry would have it handled.
Once she’d reached the grass outside by the water, Gwen threw Bullseye down and clamped her hands around his wrists to shock them just enough that he’d have trouble using them, but not enough to leave any permanent damage, and then stepped back.
“What’s the big idea, asshole?” Gwen demanded as the speed faded away.
Bullseye groaned, the pain immediately reaching him. “Ow, fuck! You bitch!”
“Talk,” Gwen hissed at him. “Who hired you?”
The man tried to buck Gwen off of him, but Daisy had trained them well enough to know how to keep him pinned to the ground. “As if a professional like me would give up his clients!”
Gwen squeezed his wrists a little tighter, the threat hopefully apparent from that alone. “You were trying to kill a good man in there, and I’d like to know why.”
Bullseye managed to shrug just a little. “Money’s money. Someone wanted him dead, and that’s good enough for me. God damn, you hero types are bad for business. I’m never agreeing to work with a rookie again, that Black Cat bitch fucked off and screwed this job.”
“What, you think you’ll be staying in this line of work?” Gwen jabbed at him.
And then Bullseye looked straight up at Gwen and put on an insiduously confident smirk that only made them angrier. “Oh, I know all about you ‘n your disdain for the cops. You ain’t putting me away anywhere I can’t escape from, even if you saved that boring politician tonight.”
“Fuck,” Gwen cursed, and clocked him in the nose with just enough force to knock him out cold. She hated that the only way she was going to put a guy like him out of business was to take justice into her own hands, which she knew was the wrong way to go about things. Well, maybe she’d just leave him to fend for himself and hope he’d think better than to come back to Boston again. “Fuck you.”
With that sorted, Gwen got off the unconscious hitman and sped back inside to see what was going on in the auditorium, passing a pack of fleeing audience members on their way in. There was no further chaos inside with all the mines cleared out. It was just Harry and Plozier standing down on the stage, with Harry maintaining a dark, shimmering barrier around the two of them. Gwen ran up to the barrier, vented out all remaining electricity from their body into the ground, and waved.
“Everything’s taken care of,” Gwen announced, prompting Harry to lower the barrier. Taking a closer look, Gwen could see that Plozier was shaking a little, but there was no fear showing on his face. “Are you okay, sir?”
Plozier nodded. “I am, thank you. I’m grateful that you both were here. I wish I could say I had no idea why someone would try to put out a hit on me – as this young man explained to me – but unfortunately I do.”
Gwen tilted their head a little to the side. “Is there something we should know? Do you think you’ll need ongoing protection?”
The man let out a sigh, and looked up to where that same slide from his presentation earlier was still on display. The title read ‘Factors creating inter-community tension’ and had a small handful of religious symbols along either side of the screen. “I’m going to speak plainly since there’s no audience here to judge me anymore. All these young anti-zionists populating college campuses are a bloody death cult, willing to stampede over anything that doesn’t line up with their need to feel self-righteous while having someone to hate. I’m really trying here to dissolve the underlying tensions to cut down all the antisemitism and islamophobia of it all, and… well, I suspect that someone wanted to make a statement out of stopping my goal.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me either,” Harry added in. “I remember trying to hand a protester a treatise on cultural Christianity so they might develop an ounce of critical thinking, and got called a ‘genocide apologist’ for my troubles. They don’t want to listen to anyone, not even actual Palestinian people who call them out and much less some white guy trying to stand up for Jews getting harassed.”
“That’s the way of these things,” Plozier said wearily. “Oh look, there’s my security detail. Excuse me, I need to go reassure them that they couldn’t have expected such a professional killer camping out at my event. Thank you both again, so much.”
Gwen and Harry exchanged a quick glance, and then Gwen spoke for both of them. “We’ll hang around and make sure you get home safe. We also might be able to figure something out to help avoid this happening again.”
Plozier gave them both a weak smile, and then walked over to his security guards to speak with them. While on duty guarding the man for the rest of the night, Gwen started making mental notes about talking to Kamala and Peter and seeing if they could get their respective communities to rally up in support of this guy, because perhaps some interfaith action would make even the smallest shift for the better.
It felt like it had been forever since Harley and Peter had gone to the library together for a little study date, even though in reality it had been… perhaps a week and a half? So much had happened since then, and to Harley it almost felt like aeons. Between Harley officially moving in with Peter, the two of them going to the Lakehouse for Thanksgiving and then everything that had happened with Billy, Harley was glad for little moments of normalcy like this.
They’d been at the campus library for about twenty minutes now, the two of them getting some much needed academic catch-up time together while Billy roamed around on his own for books to read. Harley was working on converting the lecture slides for one of his Mechanical Engineering lectures into a worksheet-like set of notes to fill out with more details as he watched the lecture, and Peter had his headphones on while he watched a lecture of his own.
Well, it wasn’t quite accurate to say that Harley was just working on his notes, since he really couldn’t help but be distracted by his boyfriend. Sneaking looks and feeling his heart go all aflutter quickly turned into plain and simple staring. To Harley, Peter really was a dream come true. He was gorgeous, thoughtful and communicative, and the past few days had only exemplified that more. He’d made so much time for the two of them to discuss the changes that came with taking in a teenager, which meant that Harley felt… well, totally fine with it.
He couldn’t say he expected to be a nineteen year old college student being partly responsible for a teenager like this, but he was certainly okay with it. In all honesty, Harley probably would have made the same choice if put in the position Peter was in when Billy needed rescuing. Besides, he’d done plenty to help raise his own sibling while his mom was busy with work, so it wasn’t exactly new territory.
“You’re staring,” Peter said all of a sudden, snapping Harley out of his thoughts. Peter grinned, and Harley automatically grinned back. “Gay.”
“Like you aren’t?” Harley shot back playfully, kissing the air in Peter’s direction once, quickly. “How’s your lecture?”
Peter shrugged. “As much as I love chemistry, this guest lecturer is dry as shit. Bit hard to focus, so I think I’m just gonna give up and use the learning objectives to do self directed research later instead. What about you?”
Harley glanced down at the half-filled page in front of him. “I’ve had more productive days, honestly.”
Peter hummed, a thoughtful look crossing his face. “I think I can guess what might help. We need some us time, don’t we?”
Harley blushed a little. He remembered telling Peter early in their relationship about how he really wanted them to make sure they were making time to do romantic things together, and loved how much his boyfriend had taken that to heart. “You know me too well, darlin’. Any ideas?”
“Hah,” Peter chuckled. “You do get a bit pent up when life gets in the way of us having one on one time together. Well… what if we get takeaway from that Israeli place I took you to for your introduction to middle eastern food? We could take it to a nice rooftop somewhere, maybe. And then… well, I’ve been thinking, and I feel like I’m ready to, uh. Take things further? So if you want, we could do that after. If you want.”
Harley’s blush then immediately surged to a deep red across his face. “Oh! Fuck, okay. How am I supposed to concentrate under these conditions, darlin’? Sounds like a plan. Maybe… maybe later we should talk a bit more about what we wanna do for that?”
“Yeah,” Peter nodded, his own blush rising to match Harley’s. Then he had the audacity to wink. “Looking forward to it.”
That particular conversation was brought to a sharp stop by the arrival of Billy, who had marched into their little library study room with a stack of manga in his arms. “I really always seem to be interrupting your gayness, huh? Is it okay if I sit here and read?”
“Course,” Peter quickly assured him, and sized up the collection Billy had brought in. “Remind me to show you the comic book store near here sometime, they have a pretty huge manga collection!”
Billy lit up. “Oh, sick! That’d be so cool. My, uh, my parents never really let me just go out and buy stuff.”
Peter’s posture straightened up, and Harley watched as his boyfriend went into his parent slash big brother mode that he’d recently acquired. “Well, money isn’t a barrier at all for us and you deserve to get nice things that make you happy. That said… what if we sit down together and go over some budgeting concepts?”
“You mean like an allowance or something?” Billy asked as he set down his pile of manga and sat on the end of the desk.
“Exactly,” Peter answered. “My aunt made sure to teach me all about financial responsibility when I was about your age, and it’s made a big difference for me. You get the freedom to spend that money on whatever you want, and I can help you learn how to manage it effectively!”
“That sounds… really nice,” Billy said quietly. Harley decided that he wanted to sit in on those sessions too, because his mom never had time to properly teach him how to budget and before he came into his inheritance, Harley was always running out of money to buy things he wanted. “Um… there was something I wanted to ask, but it might be a bit weird?”
“Weird is good in this family,” Harley offered, hoping it would encourage Billy to continue feeling safer and safer. Hopefully the use of the word family wasn’t too much too soon, but Harley truly felt like this was a family. Not just him, Peter and Billy, but everyone in the friend group.
Billy smiled at that, and his body lost some of its tension. “I, uh… can I go to school? I mean, school kind of sucked back in Chicago, but I want to learn things and be around people my age, you know?”
“As a proud nerd, I fully understand,” Peter declared solemnly – and very cutely, in Harley’s totally unbiased opinion. “In fact, I think I know just the school for you to check out, and if you like it I’ll see what it takes to get you enrolled there. We’ll need to get Daisy to help, though.”
Billy snorted. “What, are you gonna get her to hack me onto the school records?”
Peter chuckled at that, and so did Harley. “No, not that! I mean, uh, it’s more of a safety thing. You can’t exactly get enrolled at a school as Billy Kaplan, because we could end up in a bunch of legal trouble and whatnot. So Daisy could help set up a new identity for you on paper.”
“Oh,” Billy uttered, the amusement fading from his face. “That, uh, makes sense, I guess? A lot to think about, though.”
Peter’s expression grew serious. “I don’t want you to ever have to go back to the Kaplans against your will. If you’re down, we can talk to Daisy about getting that set up, and then I’ll investigate getting a visit at the school some friends of ours go to. Maybe I can have a chat with the rabbi since one of his kids goes there, and see if he can help out!”
“Cool,” Billy grinned. “Also, how do I get these books checked out? I don’t exactly have a membership here, so can I use one of yours?”
“Oh for sure,” Peter agreed quickly. “We can put them on my library card. Pretty neat that there’s so much manga and stuff here, hey? I think the student union made that happen.”
“Neat,” Billy said, and then picked up the first issue of manga in the pile and started reading, a broad smile on his face from just how well Peter was supporting him.
After watching that? All Harley could feel was pride.