"Hey, Dad." I yawned, shutting the familiar door behind me as I stepped into the kitchen of the family home. It was good to be home. I felt wrung out after spending half the day dealing with David and the Banner. So much of it was a mess of red tape and documents that all stemmed from the fact that I'd been called to intervene in an emergency situation. Whoever would have guessed fighting monsters required doing battle with the most insidious enemy of them all: Paperwork.

  “Son, long day at the office?”

  "Something like that," I paused, looking over suspiciously to where my father sat at the kitchen table. Alone. That was unusual, but also familiar. We'd had conversations just this way many times over the years. I had a feeling I wasn't going to particularly enjoy what was coming next. "Uncle called you?" I questioned. I was mostly certain Uncle Wolf had ratted me out to my father after our last conversation. It looked like I was going to be getting some therapy whether I wanted it or not.

  "He did." My dad was sitting at the kitchen table watching me; he was very clearly waiting for me. It was nearly a picture perfect replica of every serious conversation we'd had growing up when he figured there was something we needed to discuss. Thankfully, even back then, he'd treated me more like an adult than a snot nosed brat who needed to be dictated to. I didn't like thinking of how our relationship might have turned out if we'd become more adversarial in that way. I was not an easy person to get along with at times, I was well aware of that, and my Dad could be just as hard headed as I. It was rather obvious where I got it from. Didn't require much more than a glance in any available reflective surface.

  A bottle of the old scotch and a pair of glasses sat square in the middle of the kitchen table. It was abundantly clear I wasn't going to be escaping the therapy session he had planned. "There were losses?" he asked.

  "Yeah, one," I answered, sitting down at the table opposite my father, slinging an arm over the back of the chair and reclining. It was easy to push the chair onto its back legs and keep it balanced, the benefits of superhuman stats. There wasn't going to be any avoiding this particular ambush, however, no matter what my stats looked like.

  "It was his funeral I went to the other day," I offered, "The banner is declaring him as KIA." I took up the open bottle of scotch and poured both of us a healthy measure of the amber liquid. Not that it mattered how much I drank anymore, I'd been completely unable to get drunk since my system initiation. One of the many effects of stat points, if I wanted a proper buzz, I'd have to get my hands on some System enhanced booze.

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  Which hadn’t even been on the priority list with everything else going on.

  “You knew him?”

  "Not well, but we worked together with the rest of his squad," I said, taking a sip from the glass and enjoying the burn, while I lamented its lacking potency. "Fought them during my initial assessment with the Banner. A few weeks to a couple of months. Not long enough, really." I mused, swirling the amber in the glass, watching the liquid tumble over itself.

  "This is that old thing again, isn't it?" My father questioned, fixing me with a stare over the table as he sipped his own scotch. My only response was a sigh and a healthy shrug. I really didn't want to have this conversation.

  "You really need to let that go, son. People are what they do, not what they think." He looked frustrated. I couldn't blame him. This wasn't the first time we'd had this conversation, or even the tenth. It was a recurring thing ever since my teen years.

  "It's not that simple, Dad." I gulped down the contents of the glass in one go, luxuriating in the burn as it went down, even if it lacked the kick I wanted. If we were going to keep up these little therapy sessions, I was going to have to get better booze. "Not anymore. Not when I could kill someone faster than you could blink. Turn into a monster spider, or do a dozen other things that should be horrifying to consider."

  I let out a heavy sigh, tasting the flavour of the scotch in the back of my throat. "You know what I think about power, we've been over it enough times. It changes nothing, it only reveals what was already there." It was my father's turn to sigh; we'd tread and retread this same argument many times over the years. Though this time around it was much more poignant, more than ever before. "Now that I'm the one with the power, what it reveals is a bit more concerning. You know what I'm like, how I see people." That had been a deeply uncomfortable conversation after my mother's passing. One that I was keen on not revisiting right now.

  "I don't know what to tell you, son, but I think as long as you keep questioning and keep worrying, you'll be alright." He said with another sigh. "Your mother would have been better at these conversations than me."

  "It's not me I worry about Dad, but you know that," I said, rising from the table. I sensed I had the opportunity to make my escape here. "You also know that's not true. I loved Mom, but she had her own laundry list of issues. Just like the rest of us, and god knows when she'd decided to see something a certain way, neither heaven nor hell was going to sway her from it."

  Dad let out a deep laugh, "That is true, your mother wasn't a saint, but she certainly had the conviction of one."

  "Good talk," I said as I headed towards the hallway, "night, Dad."

  “Night, Son.”

  I made my way up to my room to sleep in my own bed for the first time in what felt like ages.

  There was more still to come, and I needed to be ready for it.