So after walloping someone on the head with a brick, what do you think you should do?

Do you A, call the police to report the mugging? B, try to comfort the poor lady that was being mugged, that you saved in the process of bludgeoning the poor sap? Or C, tie up the mugger and leave a witty note for the police to find later?

There are other options, but in the beginning that was the route. You had three options or else you were as bad as the muggers themselves.

Originally I was more of an A or B, but the newer rhetoric scratched in the back of my mind that people who chose a life of crime need to be punished explicitly.

To cause criminals fear to prevent them from committing crime again. Fear of what? Depends on the so-called hero. This vigilante justice was what law enforcement and those who called out the first heroes were afraid of.

I just wanted to walk away. Muggings or small crimes like these were such a menial thing that the first option that popped into my mind was to throw the mugger away like the trash he is and go about my day.

I guess it was a side effect of seeing a slideshow of history. That suddenly all the small things don’t matter. The people I saved on my first missions are currently dead. They lived, loved, and died in their own ways and it was hard to see the impacts of things so little like the lady in front of me

The Watch would’ve easily reported the mugger and been standing there to see the hand off. Violet Creme, a later vigilante, would leave these small notes safety pinned to the perpetrators clothes.

Very few, not because we don’t care, would sit down with the mugger and try to sort out why this came about and how to rehabilitate them to be sure that it won’t happen again without the need for criminal charges.

That small number are true heroes.

But as time moved on, the later generations or the ones that are in the more anti-hero anti-vigilante cities had to come up with ways of reporting the crimes they witnessed and stopped without being caught themselves.

Now, I face a situation of my own making. The lady in front of me wore a shocked expression as a stranger just saved her from losing her possessions.

I guess I have to do it the proper way.

As I made my way back to the statue from the police station, I found the person I was waiting for had arrived while I was dealing with the mugger.

It is a strange situation you find yourself in when you see someone that you’re never me before but you’ve met their brother, sister, relative of some sort and you can see your friend in them.

You can see all those people you’ve known, their familiar features altered slightly, usually if its a sister, brother, or parent of someone you know and just can just believe that yes. It is their parent.

Other times they can be drastically different and you don’t know where they get their eyes from or perhaps they changed the color of their hair. Sometimes you never know these things but before me was Sofia’s family.

To make that point, Sofia was present with her mother.

The conversation was brief. I mean, I would say brief. Not as a short as a briefing could be but not as in depth as the long lectures I would have with Maria. No…Not when we were chatting up before and after the mission.

Not one while we were watching the villains base and chatting about our lives. Her curiosity over what my life was like seeing snapshots of history.

Seeing the development of the human race in the modern era. Yada yada yada. But it wall turned out great and I got to ask about her family. The mundane things and the small pockets of joy found in normal life.

It is bittersweet thinking about those times, they were fun, entertaining, and caring paired with adrenaline as we charged into danger together but all together this great bond that we once held.

Now I will be fulfilling Maria’s wish and see Sofia graduate. Luckily for me she skipped a grade, so I don’t have to wait an extra year.

I can’t believe we are still stuck on these small things. Something so simple, I mean for me. Getting to see the home was amazing.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

I stayed at places before, some homes, while others were just a place to sleep. It was strange being in a family’ home, not something pretending to be, and not a foster home but one where you can see the family in action as they fight over the bathroom in the morning.

At the breakfast table in the morning I could see them gathering around. The father, David, read the newspaper while the others checked their phones. Guess he was old school, I did get to read it when he finished. The conversation was engaged and hopeful as they headed out to work and school.

I was welcomed to join them but, I tried to fit in their routines

I had time from my other pressing issues and I slowly got to join the family and it was as if I got to see snapshot into how Maria grew up with her interactions, her little secrets mannerisms.

I could see her on them, mirroring my good friend as they had the same sense of humor, they said the same jokes and phrase, and the particular habit of throwing out the end pieces of bread.

Everything that she grew up with that made her…well…her. I got to see it in Sofia, younger, and a bit more spiteful than Maria but she seems to really look up to her older sister. Almost as much as Maria looked out for her and cared for Sofia.

TO begin everything, my routine was fairly simple. I wake up and go through my morning meditation and exercise.

I try not to inconvenience them too much but I was given the okay to take a shower at five, as most of them don’t wake up for another hour or so. The morning run helped clear the nightmares away, and as the dawn broke, I could watch it from a spot in a small park.

After the others left I did some reading and worked on a small side project.

I was putting in time and a request to go visit Sofia’s school as an observer. Was it to evaluate the safety of the building? Not really. Did I want to see what a high school class looked like from the inside? Yeah, I didn’t have the chance to finish school when I as her age.

And while I did have a chance to go to school and I kind of squandered it. I don’t want to say it was my fault.

I just kind of blame my father, I guess. He got me into the life of crime at an early age. I started learning ways to lie, cheat, and steal.

I got pretty good at it so when he vanished off the face of the earth, I thought well, no one else is looking out for me.

I hopped between foster home to foster home and I left. Cutting myself loose I made a new identity for myself, which unfortunately I set at a few years older so I could not get caught playing hooky.

Turns out that it was too well done and when I ended up at the Agency they took it at face value and here I am.

That’s how I skipped high school, what a stupid decision. I’m not saying that the numbers or the history facts are useful in everyday life. Nor the tests and getting along with everyone else in a small building complex for eight hours a day with a shared cafeteria is the perfect environment to learn about society.

But there are shared experiences that help to define society. As an outsider, you don’t understand something that could be so simple to those who experienced it their entire academic career.

There’s a lot of life that looks, well, more interesting. The grass is always greener and all that. But it is very clear that sometimes you just want to fit in and even if you want to strike out on your own when you’re young. There’s still that feeling of connection that you’ll long for. So if I could maybe check out a high school then I might as well try.

I look young enough to try to pass for 18, 19 and I had to retake a year because of poor transferring time.

It was this project that I worked on for the first week while at Maria’s family.

So on the Monday of the second week, I finished working out, took a shower, ate breakfast with the rest of them, and then headed off to school.

****

I met a lot of people in the agency. I watched some of them grow old as I stayed relatively young and it was sad to see some of them go, to get used to the new faces.

But the interesting thing is this is not the first time it has happened.

I would work with someone for 20 years. For them 20 straight years in a very linear progression, day by day. For me it was on and off.

When they retired they didn’t just go away. Now the agency could have you employed all the way up to retirement age.

Some of them usually move on pretty quickly as your skills are the drama of being in such a high stress environment.

The turnover rate was pretty extreme. Not that they got fired but most people would not want to be in strenuous situations.

So, that’s why when I needed to make my cover ID slash actual ID slash…i don’t know, birth certificate?

That actually made sense. Some of them did retire into more mundane jobs, usually working for the government as they had plenty of clearance. They had steady pay and already knew all the routines and strange fixings of federal work.

In these new positions they also assisted the agency, like now when I needed to get documentation that made me a legal persons again.

Then I took a week to prepare them, I swung by the office and found the person who put it all together and signed off on everything, including the thousands of forms and backlogs to prove someone has been alive for more than a day in the government’s system.

The one that did all that was Madeline. My good friend who was one of the first people that was assigned to me.

Not as an undercover agent, not as a handler but something of a secretary at times. She was one that briefed me when I came to.

I just called it waking up because that’s what it was. I would sleep and wake up, sometimes a couple months would pass, once it was ten years.

Regardless it was a lot harder. Madeline was pretty intense when I first met her. She looked 30 something, maybe late 20s as my ability to judge age wasn’t great when I was younger.

She looked mature and shouldn’t be assigned to the reckless ice agent who they put in the freezer when she messes up or they want to save for later like some Thanksgiving leftovers.

So it came as a surprise when I saw her again. For me it was years since I last saw her face. For her, it was a couple decades, her cold serious demeanor softened over time and she was more grandmotherly as she sorted the papers into an almost perfect pile as she peered up from her classes at me.

Seeing her like this made me feel less human. Everyone around me aged and well…died. I stood face to face with her once again and I still look like me. Yes with more bangs, scrapes, and bruises. Some of them are more recent than others, some scars she could recognize but they are still new to me, old history for her but they have barely started to fade. For her, it's been decades, for me a couple years.

Man, that's a sad thing when I am experiencing years as weeks, maybe months, while everyone else is dealing with them day by bloody day.

“...Tessa?” Madeline’s voice was quiet and sharp with shock

“Miss Madeline. I heard you retired, I’ve put in my time and decided to do the same. How’s life?”