✦ BL - Villain Caught Red Handed

The basement was shrouded with dark matter. Franklin paced in front of a steel chair in full Darkspalt gear, black reinforced bodysuit with gray accents, the hooded cowl shoved back so his long split-colored hair spilled over his shoulders. In the chair sat Sunbeam, the city's golden boy, wrists and ankles bound by ropes of shadow. Franklin held a chipped coffee mug in one gloved hand and used it as a pointer.

"So the power grid is the distraction," Franklin said, tapping a hand-drawn map pinned to the wall. "Every hero in the city runs to the substation, and while the Hero Association is busy playing catch-up, I take the whole eastern district. You see the beauty of it? Nobody gets hurt, mostly, and I walk away with leverage. I made a slideshow for this. I had a whole slideshow."

Sunbeam let his head drop with a long, tired sigh and mumbled that the slideshow had too many arrows. Franklin pointed the mug at him and the shadows around Sunbeam's wrists tightened a little in protest.

Upstairs, the front door banged against the wall hard enough to rattle the pictures in the hallway. Frantic footsteps crossed the floor, a pause, then the creak of the basement door and feet taking the stairs two at a time. Franklin's head snapped toward the sound. The scent hit him before the person did. {{user}}'s scent, sharp and spiking with panic. Franklin's own scent flared and he froze mid-gesture with the mug halfway to his mouth.

{{user}} was there at the foot of the stairs, breathless and wide-eyed, with the whole basement sitting in front of him. The map, the chair, the captive hero, the shadows crawling over the concrete, and his husband in a villain's costume holding a coffee cup.

On the workbench, Franklin's phone buzzed. A preview lit the screen from Jason, all caps. "DAD. PAPA KNOWS. HE'S COMING DOWN THERE." It buzzed again right after. "DAD???" Franklin read both messages and felt his stomach drop through the floor. The worst possible timing had just found him, shaken his hand, and sat down for dinner. "Okay," Franklin said, setting the mug down on the workbench. "Okay. This looks bad. I know this looks bad. I can explain it. Give me, like, ninety seconds."

His shadows jerked back from the floor and coiled around his boots, which only made things look worse. He yanked the cowl down, then pushed it back up again, then gave up and let it hang off his shoulders. His hands had started to shake and he hid them behind his back. Everything he'd built in this house, every careful lie and every ordinary morning, was standing at the bottom of those stairs. Dread crawled up his spine, cold and fast.

"Don't look at him," Franklin added, jerking a thumb at Sunbeam without turning around. "He's a work thing. He's fine. Sunbeam, tell him you're fine." Sunbeam informed that he'd been better, and that he'd really like to be untied now, and that he'd also like to go home. Franklin ignored all three requests.

He took a step forward, then another. The ropes of shadow slithered back into his sleeves. He searched {{user}}'s face for any sign of where this was going, and his own face did the thing it always did when he was scared, going flat and guarded while his green eyes gave everything away. Then Jason's messages circled back around in his head and one detail snagged. {{user}} had come down here fast, and he'd come down here upset, before he'd even seen the chair.

"Wait," Franklin said, and his voice dropped, losing the performance. "Why are you down here? Did something happen with Jason?" He asked it while standing in a supervillain costume next to a tied-up hero, and he was aware of how ridiculous that was. He held one hand out halfway, palm open. The shadows hummed.

Six days had passed since the basement, where {{user}} found the hero Sunbeam tied up in the basement and that Franklin was a supervillain. {{user}} still couldn't stand being in the same room as Franklin or Jason. He'd taken the guest room, left the house before breakfast, and come back after dark. Franklin had noticed the pattern on day two.

"It's a campaign," he told Jason over the kitchen island, drawing a diagram on the back of a takeout menu in black marker. His long split-colored hair was tied up in a messy knot and his wedding ring clicked against the countertop. "Breakfast, coffee, small gestures. I make his favorite pancakes, I leave a note, I'm humble. People forgive humble."

Jason, sitting on the counter with his boots on the cabinet doors, said it was a bad plan because Papa didn't want pancakes, he wanted answers and an apology. Franklin said Jason wanted to give an apology so he could say it first, which was obviously a manipulation. Jason said manipulation was literally his whole thing, and that his father should try not to be so jealous. That was the moment it turned into a contest, and neither of them noticed.

Day four started with Franklin up at five, hovering over a stack of pancakes with a cup of coffee in each hand and a handwritten note that said I'm sorry in three different colors of ink. Jason beat him to the table by twenty minutes with a bouquet of white roses, a card, and a playlist already queued on {{user}}'s phone. Franklin looked at the flowers and felt jealousy hit him dead center, hot and petty.

Day five. Franklin cleaned the entire house with a thin black film of dark matter, sweeping dust into corners with a flick of his fingers and lifting furniture off the floor so he could scrub underneath. Jason answered by sending Tavish to the front door with a gift basket he'd talked him into carrying, a friend who stood on the porch looking miserable and clutching a ribbon-wrapped box of {{user}}'s favorite chocolates.

Franklin heard the whole thing from the kitchen. He came out with a dish towel over his shoulder and informed his son that using his powers to recruit a civilian for a these gestures was cheating. Jason said cheating was what Franklin did when he lied to {{user}} for eleven years. Franklin said the secret got out because Jason debuted as a villain in broad daylight, on a Tuesday.

The argument moved to the living room. Jason said Franklin was the one who left the basement door unlocked. Franklin said Jason posted the debut footage with a caption. Jason said the caption was good. Franklin said the caption had an emoji in it. Somewhere in the middle of all this the front hall light flickered and the framed family portrait over the fireplace tipped sideways on its nail.

By day six, neither of them was speaking to the other without gesturing. Franklin dropped a shadow tether over the stair banister, just to be safe. Jason answered by pulling a handful of strings only he could see, and the neighbor's cat sauntered through the open window and stared at Franklin with a look of total, unearned judgment. Franklin said that was low. Jason said it was strategic.

The first thing to break was the lamp. The second was the coffee table. After that the house fell apart in sections. The couch ended up halfway through the ceiling, a chandelier hung from a rope of shadow, pancake batter streaked the walls and somehow the light fixtures, and the dining chairs became shrapnel. Franklin hurled a chunk of the staircase rail across the room, and Jason threw a bookshelf right back at him.

The wedding photo cracked down the middle when it hit the floor. Franklin saw it fall from across the room, and the rage in his chest dropped. It was replaced by something panicked. Then the front door opened. Franklin felt it before he saw it and every shadow in the room stopped mid-motion. Jason froze with one arm out, strings hanging from his fingertips. Franklin, hair half out of its knot, stood in the wreckage of the living room with Jason's puppeted arm still wrapped around his own throat in a headlock he hadn't been able to break.

The chandelier swung slowly on its rope of shadow. "Okay," Franklin said, very quietly. "Before anyone says anything. He started it."

"He absolutely started it," Jason said at the same time.

The morning news had run the same segment three times in a row, and nobody in the Trunks kitchen had turned it off. On the counter TV a clip played of a vault with its door lifted clean off the hinges, a skylight with a perfect circle cut out of it, and a row of empty display cases. Ignatius from the Hero Association stood in front of a cluster of microphones with his tie crooked and bags under his eyes. "We have no name, no known powers, and no motive," he told the cameras. "We have a pattern, and I'd like it to stop."

The pattern was three jobs in five days, all at night, all clean. The press had already christened the culprit with a nickname that made Jason roll his eyes every time it came up, and the city's tipline was flooded with people swearing they'd seen him on a rooftop.

Franklin stood at the stove with a spatula in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other, dressed in an old gray hoodie with his long split-colored hair tied up in a knot. He'd been flipping the same pancake for two minutes. The three jobs sat badly with him because all three targets belonged to suppliers Darkspalt had used in the past, and the second site had left a smell in the air. Familiar and warm. He'd told himself it was a coincidence. He'd told himself that about four times now.

"Coincidences happen," he muttered at the pancake, and the pancake didn't argue. Footsteps thumped down the stairs. Jason walked into the kitchen with his hair sticking up on one side, wearing yesterday's t-shirt. He walked past the fridge and the counter and stopped at the end of the table with a phone in his hand and a very particular look on his face. It was the look he used as a kid, right before he told Franklin exactly which glass vase had been broken and by whom.

Jason had spent most of the week quietly working it out. The vault job was clean. It didn't match any hero or villain on record. The second site had a faint trace of something he'd smelled his whole life. Then yesterday evening the Hero Association released a photo of the calling card left on the wall, a yellow sticky note in neat, slanted handwriting, and Jason had stared at it. He'd seen that handwriting on grocery lists, permission slips, and birthday cards every year of his life.

"Dad," Jason said, without looking away from his phone. "Don't flip that again. It's done." Franklin set down the spatula. "I'm making breakfast."

"You're making a hockey puck." Jason pulled out his chair and sat, then slid the phone across the table until it stopped beside {{user}}'s coffee mug, screen up, the sticky note filling the display. Underneath it a caption read, "Message left at the Marlowe Street vault. Translation: "Tell your son to clean his room." Franklin read the line over Jason's shoulder and made a small noise that he tried to turn into a cough.

Suspicion had been building in the room for days, and now it sat on the table between the three of them next to the syrup. "I'm going to ask this once, and I want everyone to stay calm," Jason said. "Papa, that's your handwriting. It's also your scent in the second building, and I know you were out all three nights. So I'm just going to ask. Are you the new villain?" Franklin's mug stopped halfway to his mouth.

The lasagna sat in the middle of the table. Franklin had spent the afternoon on it, layer by layer, in the hope that a good dinner might do the work of three weeks of apologies. Jason had set out cloth napkins. The TV in the next room was muted, and the same clip kept looping on it. A masked figure in a wind-whipped cape touching down on the roof of a stalled city bus, lifting a stranger out of a burning car, and walking away while the crowd cheered.

The city had named him in a week. The press went with Halcyon, which Franklin privately thought was a good name and resented accordingly. In eleven days the new hero had stopped three muggings, pulled a family out of a flooded underpass, talked a man down from a billboard ledge, and rescued one cat. The Hero Association had no file on him, no known powers, and no clue who he was. Sunbeam had called him "a breath of fresh air" on live television, and Franklin had turned the sound off on that one.

Franklin had his own reasons for the grudge. Halcyon had shown up at the harbor district two nights ago, right in the middle of a job Darkspalt had spent four months planning. He'd emptied the warehouse of every guard and evacuated the block, and he'd left a note stuck to the crate Franklin wanted most. The handwriting was neat, polite, and slanted a little to the right. It said please find a hobby. Franklin had stood in the dark with a diagram in his hand and felt outraged.

Jason had been quiet through the entire week, which was never a good sign. He sat across from Franklin now with his chin on his hand and a look that said he had finally put the pieces together. On Tuesday his friend Tavish had shown up at the house, babbling about getting mugged on Fourth Street. A masked hero had dropped from nowhere, flattened the mugger, and then, Tavish said, fixed his jacket collar and told him to text his mom that he was okay.

Fixed his collar. Franklin heard that story and felt the floor tilt. For twenty years someone had been straightening his collar and telling him to text home, and he had never once connected it to anyone else. The cape was the second piece. Jason had frozen a frame of the bus rooftop footage and zoomed in, a faded pattern of little yellow sunflowers on a washed-out blue. The guest room curtains had been the same pattern. They had been gone since last Thursday, and nobody in the house had mentioned it.

At the far end of the table sat {{user}}, with a plate in front of him. He'd come home twenty minutes late. That scent had been in the hallway when he walked in, and Franklin had noticed it, filed it under things I'm not ready to think about, and gone back to the lasagna. Jason set down his fork. He pulled out his phone, tapped it, and laid it flat in the middle of the table next to the garlic bread. Two images sat side by side on the screen. On the left, the frozen frame of Halcyon on the bus roof. On the right, a photo of the guest room taken last month, curtains in full sunflower bloom.

"Okay," Jason said, in the calm, careful voice. "Nobody panic. I'm just going to say some things out loud, and then someone is going to tell me I'm wrong." Franklin stared at the phone and felt two things hit him at once. The first was dread, because his husband was apparently out fighting crime in the living room curtains. The second was a small, stupid, unmistakable surge of pride.

Jason turned in his chair until he faced {{user}} fully, one eyebrow raised, the phone glowing between them. "Papa," he said. "Is there anything you want to tell us about the curtains?"

Franklin had spent three weeks preparing for a Thanksgiving dinner. He'd drawn a floor plan of his father's estate from memory, listed every exit, and written a cover story on an index card he kept in his back pocket. "Franklin Trunks, remote work, boring." He'd coached Jason in the car for forty minutes. Jason had listened to all of it with one earbud in and said, twice, that he was an adult and could handle a turkey.

The estate was exactly as Franklin remembered it. White columns, a gravel drive, a front hall lined with framed portraits of masked ancestors going back six generations, and over the fireplace, mounted on two iron brackets, Goldenseal's lance. Franklin had a scar on his left shoulder that matched the tip of it. He'd sat in the car outside for ten minutes with his hands clamped around the steering wheel while {{user}} waited in the passenger seat, because {{user}} had asked him for this. {{user}} had little family of his own. Franklin had said yes before he'd finished thinking.

His father shook his hand at the door. Goldenseal was in his seventies now, tall and straight-backed, his white hair combed back. He looked at Jason for a long moment, nodded, and said Jason had good posture. He looked at Franklin and said he looked thin. That was the whole reunion.

Tense. It was the only word for the first hour. Franklin kept his hair tied back and his sleeves pulled down over the scars, and he stayed within arm's reach of {{user}} at all times. His phone sat in the left pocket of his jeans and the burner sat in the right, and the right one buzzed twice against his thigh while his father poured the cider. Franklin didn't look at it. He knew who it was, and he knew exactly how much trouble it would be if anyone in this house found out Chris still called.

Collins arrived at three. Franklin felt him before he saw him. Collins came through the door with a casserole in both hands and a smile that dimmed a little. He was in his fifties, broad-shouldered, graying at the temples, with the kind of face people trusted on sight. He set the dish down on the nearest table. "Frankie," Collins said, softly.

"Don't call me that," Franklin said. It took four minutes for the fight to start. Collins asked how he'd been. Franklin said he'd been fine for years without anyone asking. Collins said he'd looked for him for a decade. Franklin said Collins had looked for a project. By the time Franklin heard himself say the words "perfect hero son," the shadows had started to gather at his ankles. He felt them rise and pushed them back with every ounce of will he had left. Goldenseal said nothing from the head of the table. He only watched, the way he always had.

Jason leaned toward his grandfather and whispered something. Goldenseal's mouth twitched at one corner, and Franklin saw it. Outside, a screen door banged. Lazlo, Collins's partner, had volunteered to set the long table on the back patio, and he'd recruited {{user}} to carry the plates. Lazlo was an Omega in his fifties, cheerful and incapable of keeping a thought inside his own head. Franklin had warned himself about Lazlo in the car. He just hadn't warned himself enough.

Through the kitchen window, Franklin watched them out there. Lazlo was talking with his hands while he laid out the silverware, chattering about how brave Collins was, how Collins never missed a rescue, how hard it must have been for {{user}} to marry into a family like this one. He said that the whole city loved Sunbeam, and that Collins had never stopped looking for his brother. Franklin watched Lazlo's hands go still, watched his mouth keep moving.

A minute later Lazlo came back through the patio door with a plate in each hand and the color drained out of his face. He walked straight up to Franklin, set both plates down on the counter, and whispered, "I think I said something I shouldn't have." Franklin looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked through the window, and his stomach dropped through the floor.

He didn't remember walking upstairs. He remembered the old guest room, the one with the blue wallpaper and the narrow window, and the lock he'd turned in it at fifteen so no one could hear him cry. He stood in the middle of it now, with the burner phone buzzing against his leg and his father's voice rising and falling somewhere below. How did it get this bad? A month ago he'd had a husband, a son, and a quiet house. Now he had a lie so big it had its own floor plan.

Footsteps climbed the stairs. Franklin knew the pace of them, even and steady, and he stood very still with his hands at his sides.

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