2103:09:09:02:11:03

  “Ow,” I said in a weird voice as the doctor grabbed me by the nose. She’d put something cool on it beforehand so it didn’t hurt too much, but it was still broken. Couldn’t she be more gentle?

  My hopes were immediately dashed as she twisted it with a scrunch.

  “Ow!” I reiterated, this time more indignant.

  The doctor snorted as she began gently poking my nose with a cotton square, causing me to wince slightly with every pat. “That’s what you get for going out with your friends in the middle of the night.”

  “I fell down the stairs,” I reiterated the same lie I’d told every time the doctor made a stab at guessing what happened.

  “Hm-mm,” she hmm-mmed, clearly not believing me. “Sure, keep telling yourself that. But you better have a more convincing excuse for your mother, cause you sure aren’t fooling anybody here.”

  The moment it was clear that all I had was a broken nose she’d made sure I sent a message to my mom about being in the hospital. Despite my protests, this was apparently non-negotiable. Or rather, she – or the hospital – would find my mom’s contact info and send a message to Mom regardless of my wishes, which she’d warned would turn out far worse for me than if I send one.

  “She got called away for an emergency,” I told her again. “She said she’ll be busy all night.”

  “Then you don’t know mothers,” the doctor threw away the cotton square, removed her rubber gloves and stood up to wash her hands. “Besides, whatever crisis she needed to help at I heard nothing about it here, so it couldn’t have been that bad. Certainly not bad enough to stop mama-bear from getting to her child.”

  The doctor dried her hands and retook the seat in front of me, grabbed her tablet and began taking notes on it with a stylus. “Your nose seems to have set well, despite your best efforts – really, the thing kids get up to these days.” She let out a world-bemoaning sigh.

  “I fell.”

  She ignored me as she made one final note on her tablet, then put the thing on the desk behind her. “Well, just one more thing left to do and you’ll be right as rain in no time,” the doctor said, hand reaching to open a cabinet.

  From it, she retrieved two small items: a chrome cannister with a small plastic nozzle, and a rubbery mold of a nose with a small tube sticking out from under it. She forcefully jammed the nozzle into the tube, then stood up and approached me.

  She placed a steadying hand on my right shoulder while the other held the rubber mold. “Now, hold still and try not to struggle. On the count of three, I want you to take the deepest breath you can. On three – not on two, not when I press it, on three. And the bigger the breath you take, the faster it'll heal. Got it?”

  I nodded and she placed the mold over my nose, stretching the rubber in a such a way as to eliminate any gaps. It covered my face all the way up to the bridge of my eyebrows, my upper lip and even included the bags under my eyes.

  “Alright, here we go. One. Two.” She pressed the button and I could feel a cold air rushing over my nose and into my nostrils. It itched and hurt and made me want to sneeze, but I resisted. “Three.”

  I breathed in as quickly and deeply as I could and felt a cold sharper than any I’d felt – which wasn’t saying much – shoot into my nose and nasal cavities. Less than a second later, it felt like my brain was freezing and some core instinct desperately wanted me to breathe, cough or sneeze it out. Still, I resisted and kept going.

  “You’re doing good. Keep breathing, keep breathing…” the doctor encouraged. Then, the cold began to fade as the device ran out of gas.

  “Aaaand, it’s done!” the doctor said happily. She took the mold off of my nose – I felt no pain, surprisingly – and threw the cannister and fake nose in two separate bins behind her.

  She peered in to look at my nose, prodding at it with her bare hands. “No pain? Or any other feeling?” she asked.

  “Only the pressure,” I responded. After she let go of my nose, I touched it myself and felt something oddly smooth and shell-like covering it. It didn’t hurt one bit, even when I put a bit of pressure on it.

  “That’s fine. Good, even. It shouldn’t numb all feeling in your nose, just the pain,” she explained. “Don’t expect it to last though. By tomorrow- or later today, I should say, you’ll start feeling it again, but hopefully it’ll be far less painful than before. By the third day, it should be healed completely. Now, any questions?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then I think we’re done here,” she said. “Go wait for your mother in the hall.” I opened my mouth to argue she wouldn’t be coming – not anytime soon, at least – but she was already talking before I could start. “Wait for at least an hour, and if she doesn’t show up by then you can leave. And don’t think we won’t notice you leaving early. I’ll be telling the nurses to keep an eye on you, so don’t even try. We don’t want to call the police and say there’s an unattended minor roaming the streets now do we?”

  I shook my head rapidly and rose from my seat. I slowly made my way to the door, when I heard the doctor shout one last thing behind me. “And don’t forget to send her a message you’re going home if the hour’s up, alright?”

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  I opened the door and took one step outside before remembering something. I turned around and said, “Thank you,” to the doctor. Though she was already back behind her computer and busily typing, she stretched out one hand and waved me off.

  I left the doctor’s office and sat down in one of the chairs in the waiting room outside.

  With my injury taken care off and some free time on my hand, I took a moment to analyze both my memories and memcordings. The day had been an emotional one to say the least, far more than any I’d had before. My excitement and adrenaline had made a lot of it a blur – my first time fighting criminals was already starting to fog – but now that both had worn off, I could think more clearly on the events.

  And although one could say that all’s well that ends well, I found that I didn’t feel well about my first time out at all.

  I thought that I knew all there was to know of my situation. The limits of my android body, the lack of libraries full of information, the lack of combat routines and fighting skills, the lack of powers, the lack of social skills and barebones personality; from the moment I woke up I was lacking in many things, and I both knew it and had come to terms with it.

  And maybe I did on some level, but apparently there was a difference between knowing something as a fact, and knowing something through experiencing it.

  I didn’t just lack combat skills, I lacked combat experience. I didn’t just lack the powers my creator had promised me, I lacked the experience to know how best to use the powers I had. I didn’t just lack information, I didn’t know what I was doing.

  And the only reason things turned out as well as they did – with a broken nose and four criminals caught – was thanks to Crowsong.

  Armed with lethal powers for lethal weapons, she’d taken out her opponents without giving them so much as a scratch. Meanwhile, I had to be told to use my crow form to scout the opposition, and in the fight itself, I’d left my opponent with scratches and pecking wounds while suffering a broken nose myself.

  I’d rushed in without a plan, without even considering how I could use my powers to my advantage, and paid for it. Why hadn’t I transformed in a cat before my charge? I’d already seen my base form didn’t heal if I transformed back into it while my mimicked forms did, and I was faster and more agile in my cat form than my human form. I could’ve repositioned myself behind them as a cat, transformed back and taken him out from there. Yet instead, I just charged head-on in arguably my most vulnerable form.

  I always knew I needed to be better, but now I was sure I couldn’t do so on my own. I needed guidance, a teacher, a mentor. Hopefully, Crowsong would be willing to take me on.

  I was also sure that becoming the leader of a hero team was looking to be less of a goal and more a long-term ambition. It wasn’t just the practical side of heroics I was lacking in, but also on what it meant to be a hero, at least if Crowsong’s example had been anything to go by.

  Also, tonight hadn’t been what I’d expected of hero work. Our opponents had been smalltime drug dealers – and probably drug users themselves as well – and we hadn’t given them the chance to surrender, hadn’t even tried to convince them to turn themselves in and start on the path of rehabilitation. Nor had we done our heroics in the light of day, out in the open and in front of onlookers, nor as an effort to defend civilians. Instead, we’d gone in at the dead of night, hiding in the shadows and tranquilizing our opponents before they could so much as see us coming.

  Was this what heroism was like? More specifically, was this what my heroism would be like? My shifter power didn’t lend itself to the more flashy style I’d imagined heroics to be, but I never thought I would tread the path of a ‘dark hero’ or vigilante. I hadn’t really imagined what I would be like as a hero at all, beside the overambitious daydreams I had of leadership, being a defender of the innocent, the bane of villains, etcetera, etcetera.

  I realized the problem wasn’t that I didn’t think, but that my thinking was limited, like it was stuffed inside a small box it couldn’t break free out of. I wasn’t imaginative enough, I wasn’t creative enough to think outside of it. Which had already turned out to be a problem when fighting average criminals, so I could guess how bad things would turn out if I fought with villainous masked with unknown, esoteric or outright incomprehensible powers. It was a problem that, looking back, I’d had since the start, but it had largely gone without impact due to me coasting on my status as achronally displaced.

  While absorbed in thought, I didn’t see Mom approach until she got close enough for me to hear her footsteps echoing in the otherwise empty space. When I lifted my head and my eyes met hers, the look of stress and worry in her eyes made my stomach turn. Thankfully, upon seeing me fully, my mom’s shoulders sagged in relief and her expression changed, though not fully for the better. It had turned into a mix of worry and… disappointment? Sadness? Guilt? Something I couldn’t quite place.

  She rushed the last steps and all but lifted me from my chair, hands on my cheeks and turning my head as if inspecting an expensive vase. “God, Sammy,” she said gently, sounding exhausted. “Are you alright?”

  “I broke my nose,” I said.

  “I can see that,” Mom replied, the worry in her voice not lifting one bit. “But what I’m asking is, are you alright? How are you feeling?”

  I hadn’t really thought about that, but now I did. “It hurts,” I said. “Well, not anymore, but it hurt before. It hurt a lot.”

  And only now did I really realize how much the pain had sucked. Although I spend a lot of time after in crow or cat form, which had stopped the pain, the time’s spent out of it, and especially with the doctor poking at it had been… well, not great. I could say it was the worst pain I’d felt in my life, but that didn’t mean much considering how little life I’d lived. So let’s just say it hurt a lot.

  “But it’s fine now,” I said hurriedly, seeing Mom’s eyes start to water.

  Instead of calming her down, Mom went in and hugged me fiercely, to the point I felt the air being forced out of my lungs. Still, I did not have to courage to mention it and returned the hug instead.

  “When I got your message, I was so worried!” she said, her hug tightening even further – something I thought impossible, but she was a strong woman. “Couldn’t you have at least explained it a bit more in your message? Something more than ‘I’m at the hospital’?”

  I… hadn’t really considered that. “Sorry,” I told her honestly. I didn’t even want to send the message in the first place, not while she was dealing with an emergency that needed her all night. In hindsight, I really should’ve thought more about what to send than argue over whether I should send something.

  “And my messages?” she asked pleadingly. “My calls?”

  I winced and murmured a soft, “Sorry.” I hadn’t checked my phone after the doctor made me send the message, and it was always on silent – the pinging and vibrating irritated me. I still hadn’t had the opportunity to use it that much – outside of looking things up online or using it to navigate the city – so I’d yet to build the habit of checking it from time to time. “I’m sorry Mom,” I whispered again, hoping the guilt I felt came through.

  I heard Mom take a deep breath in and out, then loosen her hug to create some distance. She looked me in the eyes again, and while I saw the expected frustration and exhaustion in hers, there was also understanding and, above all else, something I’d come to identify as love.

  “I know that everything’s difficult for you, with all that’s going on and such,” she began, voice wobbly. “But just… try, please? That’s all I need from you. Not to be perfect, or- or to get things right all the time. I just want you to try, okay?”

  I nodded, feeling a lump building in my throat. She went in for a hug again, and while much less fierce, it lasted longer than the ones before. It took a while for her to let go and afterward, we both took a seat.

  “Can you tell me what happened for you to break your nose?” she asked.

  “I fell from the stairs,” I said with a shrug.

  “Fell from the stairs?” she asked, furrowing her brows in thought. “In the middle of the night? Why were you going downstairs?”

  Oh. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I couldn’t say I was going to the bathroom – the most common excuse I found for waking up in the middle of the night, something I’d read up on the moment I figured I wouldn’t have to sleep – since the closest bathroom was on the second floor, same as our bedrooms.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I said instead. “I thought maybe lying on the couch in the living room would help.” I shrugged and looked away as I said it, fearing she could see the lie through my eyes.

  She was silent for a moment. “Do you often have trouble sleeping?”

  I didn’t need to sleep, but I couldn’t say that. “No,” I said. “Just last night.”

  For some reason, Mom was the one looking guilty now, which reinforced my own guilt again.

  She seemed to struggle with her words for a moment, like she wanted to ask something but didn’t know how to put it. Eventually, her shoulders slumped and she went in for a side hug, arm draping over my shoulder. I leaned into it.

  “You know you can tell me anything, right?” she asked, rubbing my shoulder comfortingly. I felt that wasn’t what she really wanted to ask, but without knowing the real question, all I could do was answer this one.

  Even if I didn’t like the answer I had to give.

  “I know,” I murmured softly, heart heavy with the lie.

  We stayed like that for a moment longer until, after some unseen, unheard signal, we both separated and stood up. We made our way through the hospital and to its exit, then to Mom’s car since the night bus would take too long and the subways weren’t running.

  Within moments, we were on the road and bound for home, ready to put the night behind us.