No! Oh god no, the pram. The blast had torn it out of my hands, thrown it clear across the street on its side. My hands dug into rubble, my feet skated on dust. I scrambled towards it, reached it as the next blast shattered windows above me. Glass fell. I threw myself across the pram, over its contents. My arms desperately wrapped my head as a thousand tiny blades sliced my skin. The shouts that followed meant nothing as I opened my eyes, saw red dripping from my forehead. It didn't matter. My hair was hanging down in wet red threads. It didn't matter. What was in the pram, that mattered. It was tiny. And red. And silent.

The world narrowed. That little everything that lay there, my everything, wasn't moving, wasn't thinking. My world was still, even as the heroes fought over whatever they thought mattered. Some skirmish over territory, young bucks butting horns before they teamed up to take on the villains. Harmless... If you were a hero. They saved the world. They were ending mine. I needed help, had to get help, but there was none, not with laser blasts, not with people who treated ambulances as ammunition at war on the streets. There were others, small, like me, cowering, I could sense them. They didn't matter. What mattered was here, before me. I brushed my hand across his tiny, tiny, head. So small a thing.

As small as all lives were to those with powers. So easily overlooked. Beneath the gods who flew and soared and fought, and they were just across the street. The scene seemed eeriely still. Jupitus was lifting the front of the building, his power holding the bricks together impossibly as it moved as one lump, ready to be thrown at the soaring Valoria. Laserun was caught flickering from place to place, ready to unleash another of the blasts that had shattered the building, had shattered my world. Impossur was projecting a shield to deflect it, but the angle would reflect it to strike Silverion, and the deflected blast would wipe so many of those little lives out.

They were heroes. They'd grieve afterwards, and use it to drive themselves to be better, and be forgiven by people who were never here because of all the villains they would take out to protect others.

I stood up, my gaze turned downwards. The dust fell from me, moving away from the pram. It was a little thing. It was all I could do, move little things. Granicular tumbled passed me, smashing into the road. He stood up, grabbed a handful of rubble to throw, a giant boulder that would sweep through the pram and through me. I could not move something so large. Just tiny, tiny things.

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How small is a thought in a human head?

Less than a fleeting second, a wordless impulse suggested, and he was still, his hand releasing the rock as he collapsed. I did not look up. I could see it all, all the tiny, tiny, things around me. Impossur's shield dropped, he took the blast full. Silverion began to turn, to run his extended blade through Laserun's neck. Jupitus put the wall down as Valoria froze in mid air, not even my suggestion.

"What are you-?"

Now, now I raised my head. I looked round, slowly, to Jupitus.

"Kill yourself," I whispered. He did. Valoria landed beside me and to make sure she took care I suggested to her that the child was her own. She gathered my son from his pram and took off. She would get him to the hospital in time, her flight was a dimensional shunt.

"Hah!" The laughter came as an unwelcome interruption. Silverion choked and stumbled, clutching at his throat. Villains? Yes, they had been fighting villains I vaguely remembered. Three minor and distasteful ones. Or had they been fighting over villains, over who got to take them out? Or bring them in? It didn't matter.

"Don't know who the hell you are, but that was great," Flayer chortled as Silverion collapsed in the rubble. "Too bad we don't like competition."

He seemed surprised I was not dead, my skin peeling off me in strips and strangling me as he did to so many others. Fool. I had suggested to him his power didn't work when he started gloating. Captain Something, my old nemesis, whatever his name was, would never have made that mistake. He even had a helmet to stop me...once.

Flayer wasn't alone, the weak ones never were. Frenzy and Cannibal were with him, but a simple suggestion to each and they were screaming, begging. They could not see. Or hear. Or touch. I took movement too as an afterthought. It was surprising how easily the old habits came back. Flayer was stumbling back, tripping over his own feet as he tried to run.

"You," I said, and suggested he should use his own power upon himself. He shrieked, as the first strip of skin tore free.

"Who are you?" he screamed and I suggested then that he was mute.

"Nightbringer." I thought, in his head, and left him to die.

Rubble crunched under my feet as I strode, breaking into a jog and then a run. I had a hospital to get to. My son would be safe, Valoria would be treating him as her own, but he was mine. I'd suggest she left when I arrived, and that Nightbringer had left in the other direction. I could hardly pretend I'd never been there with two of my calling card screaming statues flat in the street.

Then I'd stay with my son until he was better. Suggesting things to doctors never went well, I had to trust their skills, but once I knew my son was safe, once I knew he was well...

Then, if the heroes would not make a safer world for my son to grow up in, perhaps I should.