Chương 113: Approval

There was a looming silence as we all moved up the stairs. It was the entire team alongside Tancred and Agent Richmond. As we reached the admin floor, Tancred pointed at the stairs.

"You all except Leo keep heading up, I'm handling him." Agent Richmond cocked her head.

"That's not how we're supposed to be handling discipline, Abe." Tancred shot a glance to her.

"Well isn't that unfortunate? Because that's how we're going to be handling it. You're dealing with the rest of the team's admonishment. You're all socialized Type B personalities. It'll work better for you."

"And risk another blowout between you and-""If there were a fucking blowout risk I'd put a sedative in his neck and talk to him while he's bound to a stretcher. I get you're new to the culture here and your first impression was a shouting match between me and the beanpole, but if that was a problem we'd have been doing it already. Now get the Hell out of my hair." Agent Richmond began again before Tancred raised a calloused finger and blurted out a "Bup!" which seemed to cease the exchange there.

With a shrug, she moved up to the next floor with the others while I followed Tancred to his office. The auditor didn't say a word until we had entered his office and I had sat down, sitting my mask in my lap. Shivvy squirmed through the crack in the door before climbing up along my back and sitting on my shoulder.

"Alright," he started, rubbing his vast expanse of forehead.

"I'm supposed to grill you and tell you how you are every flavor of stupid asshole for going completely rogue, forging government documents, technically engaging in obstruction of justice, and a few other things."

"Supposed to?" I asked, raising an eyebrow.

"You mean you're not?"

"That plus tell you how the only reason I don't have appropriate punishments for you all is because it would be deemed cruel and unusual. Now don't get me wrong, I still think you're a jackass who could've gotten a lot of people killed if your plan was off by a hair in any number of places. Chris and May were severely injured. If they were just a bit more injured, they'd have likely lost whatever fights they were in." I shook my head.

"You're underestimating them."

"I am not. I looked over the medical evaluations from Samantha." He dug through his desk, before procuring a couple folders and opened one to read through.

"Chris breathed in gympie-gympie fibers and the only reason he's able to soldier it out is because he's on enough painkillers to knock out an elephant. In case you haven't noticed, he's barely a hundred and forty pounds soaking wet. He will likely need surgical intervention on his liver and kidneys." Surgery. I didn't realize how much he had been putting in his body.

"Does that mean he's not going to be able to fight anymore?"

"No, but he'll need recovery time where he will be down for the count. The good news is having a taxpayer-funded existence means he's going to get premier medical treatment with the help of Dr. Way and Agent Lafeuillade. The bad news is even with treatment, he may have permanent health consequences. I don't even know how Sam got her hands on Penthrox. It's banned in the United States. Must've synthesized it herself..." he trailed off, before looking back at me.

"All she did was hand it to me. We haven't really been talking."

"I'm well aware, given the whole situation we're not going to bring up so as to prevent another shouting match."

"Of course you want to avoid it." Tancred groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose.

"I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here, Leo, could you please spare me a goddamn inch in return for the mile I'm offering you?"

"You're the one who brought it up."

"I was just acknowledging it. Moving on!" He closed the first folder, and opened another.

"May similarly is pretty beat. There's some scarring in her cornea, luckily it's not in any of the deeper layers so it should be treatable. The issue isn't that. Sam's worried about internal injuries. The explosives one of the Fathers used was a lot of concussive force. If any of her bones broke in a way that resulted in fragments floating around in her, she's a got a bunch of internal bleeding risks."

"So she's out of commission too."

"Not necessarily, but she'll likely be on light duty until she clears an X-Ray. And Jairo..." he trailed off, closing the book.

"Whatever that woman did pretty clearly was something that gets into people's heads. He'll need psychological evaluations just to verify things are fine."

"He seemed stable to me."

"You also said he went from turning into a lizard monster into some kind of insectoid creature. Going off of his own reports on the parasite in his body, that meant he was taking on more traits similar to it. That's pretty high risk." I crossed my arms.

"Do we know if his parasite is tied to his psychological state at all? His personality's never really changed when he transformed before." Tancred pursed his lips as he set his gaze on one of the random decorations in the office. A picture of him shaking hands with some man in a suit. Didn't look like Casney. Didn't think he'd keep a picture like that anyway.

"... No, you're right, we haven't seen signs of it. The issue is if it was anything currying favor, though, it might turn into a source of resentment in the future."

"What makes you think that?"

"He's still a hormonal teenager. Sam's examinations verify his endocrine system is still functional and he's as pubescent as any seventeen year old boy. If that lady put any thoughts in his head that prompt any sort of superiority or inferiority complexes, it could exacerbate. So he's another risk case we have to examine as well. As you realize, all of this means..." I took a deep breath, before nodding.

"I'll be working solo." If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"Mostly, yes. But it brings me to a matter we needed to discuss anyway. Due to the overall... scale of your strength compared to your teammates, there will be an update to specifically your rules of engagement." I raised an eyebrow.

"What's changing?"

"The biggest one is that you will no longer have a typical superhuman threat limit for engagement in terms of who you can't fight. But there will now need to be a threshold where you have to report it regardless. If you encounter three or more superhumans or general threats comparable to one, you have to inform us before moving in. You can still move in after doing it, it's not for approval. We just need the report so we can note it down and decide if you need back-up as you confront it."

My hands sunk down to my mask, idly moving it between my fingers, taking the textures against my thumbs.

"Why are you doing that?"

"Simply put, the higher ups have recognized you are a bull in a China shop. Trying to put a leash on you as it stands has, provably, caused overcorrections that result in greater issues. Among other things, if you weren't too worried about collateral or leaving allies on their own, you could've taken Gleditsia halfway out to sea and drowned the son of a bitch." The mask was clenched between my fingers at that.

"You're trying to get me to kill him."

"Yeah. This is the kill approval you've been criticizing us over. He's a psychotic terrorist who exclusively wants to kill. He knows full well what he is doing hurts other people and does not care. I heard plenty from your earpiece, Leo. You're well within your rights to punch this bastard so hard he becomes hamburger." He paused for a moment, brows furrowing.

"Guacamole, given how plant-y he is, I guess."

"I-""This isn't me handing you a gun and saying 'kill every guy who jaywalks,' Leo. I'm aware of your hang-ups with taking lives. I didn't want to really make a ruthless killer out of you, if I was gonna make superheroes in colored outfits from a pack of kids I'd rather you all be pacifists. But I am, unfortunately to myself and the world around me, a vindictive bastard who only knows how to aim guns at people." I dragged a hand across my face, inhaling.

"I'm not interested in becoming your contract killer, either. I'm not against killing someone who's an active threat and has no chance of being redeemed. Some guys need to die, I'm well aware of it. But what kind of person would I be if I did it because you gave me the clearance for it? I'd just be your dog. I'm not a dog, Tancred. Casney tried putting that on me, too, and you saw what I did to him."

"If it's any consolation, you definitely pissed him off, and that makes you a better person than him. Never seen him hate a bad man."

"Why are you doing this?"

"What?"

"The soft act. Are you just trying to placate me and convince me to go through with your orders so it feels like I'm doing it myself, out of some kind of way to bond with the suddenly nicer you?" Tancred shook his head, standing up from his seat as he opened the blinds to the window behind him, staring out at the city.

"Absolutely not. There's no placating someone like you, from a man like me. Your heart is a roiling one. The few who can soothe you are those with some kind of parental bone in them. I think half the reason you're pissed at Sam is because she was mothering you before the collar thing, and you can't handle the closest thing you had to a parent doing that to you." I pushed out of my chair, Shivvy rolling off of me before suddenly becoming a little hedge of barbs. There was a clean shot at him.

It was just so eas-"Sit the fuck down," Tancred said, not even turning to face me. His words echoed through me, making me feel all too aware of every twitch of my arms and legs.

"I'm not saying it like you're wrong for it. Half the reason for my divorce was feeling betrayed by Wendy. She always says it's because I went Super Commission after we met at the CIA. What she doesn't say is I went Super Commission because her and I were both offered spots in local governance. Would've been a commissioner. Paid better, but that was too small scale. Sure, less work, more money, could directly help some communities, but I didn't go under Uncle Sam's wing to help a few people."

He finally looked at me, slipping his glasses off and shooting those beady dark eyes into me.

"I'm here to help the entire country, because they can't all help themselves. Be the protector they themselves wouldn't have otherwise. Sound familiar, right?" He asked. I felt a coldness up my back at those words. Couldn't stand being read by this asshole, but he hit me right between the ribs. I refused to sit, but my body didn't let me lunge for him either.

"Not going to throw some 'We're not so different, you and I' in your face. Mostly because I'm terrible at doing Charles Laughton's voice, but also because that's not the point. But I'm trying to say I have perspective on you. I know what you're going through. But we're getting off tangent. I was just explaining why I knew there's no placating you. You wanted to know why I'm doing this."

"Yeah. I do. No more mind games bullshit. Give it to me straight." He slowly brought his hands up, palms forward. Defensive posture.

"I'm going to. I was talking to Barry, May's father. You met him at the dinner, I mentioned we go way back. I imagine she told you about his cancer, right?" I nodded.

"Yeah," he nodded in return.

"It's pretty much set in stone he's not going to see Christmas. He's been getting his affairs in order, and that required making sure some legal documents he and I worked on were all signed off back in the day. And we were talking about death, finality, all of that. I'm in my forties, so the grave's a lot closer to me than you." I could feel a warmth in my neck. Where the bullet grazed me.

"Made me realize I didn't want to die a bastard. I'm not going to lie to you and say I'd change everything I did in the past. I'd do it all the exact same way in those moments, because they got the results that were necessary. I'm still going to Hell regardless of what I'm doing, but I can at least soften the trip up by trying to be more reasonable from here on." He took a deep breath before returning to his seat, leaning back in it.

"I'm not asking you to forgive me or forgive anyone else or anything like that. Know full well what I did was bad. If you forgave it, I don't think you'd really be doing what was right. I'm just explaining to you that I want to cooperate better with you and the team. I might still make some snipes because I'm not going to censor myself, but I recognize the problems of my more recent decisions."

"Like?"

"There's clearly a problem with my command if you could convince the entire team to undermine it, and end up saving everyone flawlessly. Since it got to that point, I clearly need to make a different approach and I plan on doing it to the best of my ability." My face curled.

"... You're being too reasonable. There's something else to this, isn't there?"

"You can assume there is, I don't determine how you trust me, but I'm telling you God's honest truth. It's up to you to believe in me. You don't owe me anything. But maybe we can get something half-normal out of this team if I try being reasonable." I stared at him. Every horrible word, every awful plan, every threat that could've killed my team went through my head. But then I remembered the letter, the look on his face when I told him about my memory issues. Deep inhale. Heavy exhale.

"I'll think about it." Tancred just nodded.

"Thank you. I had one more thing I needed to bring up."

"What was that?"

"We got the equipment Sam needed to run a test for your powers. No shock collars or anything. Just some external measuring tools. You're gonna take some time to rest and recover, and once you're all set, we'll be running the exams and figuring out how you tick. Further changes to rules of engagement will happen from there. You will be put under zero duress, I swear my life on it. Are you willing to give it a shot?" Another deep breath.

"If you're lying to me about it, I'll kill you."