I Fell For My Nemesis

They crept along inside the facility until Avery pinpointed the best place to set off the bomb with the least amount of casualties. While she armed it she had Christian go find night guards and get them out of the building to a safe distance she had calculated. 

He came back as she was finishing up and looked at the bomb curiously. "Where did you even learn to do this?"

"Angelo looked it up for me," she said with a shrug. "He's the one who makes them. I just arm them. You can find virtually anything on the internet if you look deep enough."

"…Angelo is kind of scary. Aren't you ever concerned about him trying to take over the world?"

Avery laughed. "As if! He doesn't do anything that won't benefit him personally. He's brilliant but doesn't waste his time on things that don't matter to him.. I'm willing to bet that once we finish with all of this that he'll go back to playing video games." 

"He's into video games?"

"Oh yeah. Spent most of his free time on them before all of this happened though he would still go out with people if he was invited. Why?"

Christian shook his head in wonder. "I was just thinking that our brothers/brother figures are more alike than I originally expected. Angelo's a lot more serious than Liam could ever be."

She laughed again. "I don't think anyone can be as goofy as Liam."

"Fair. So how long until you're done?"

"Not long. I should have it just…about…now! We need to get out of here in the next two minutes."

Christian scooped her up and flew out of there immediately to the safe spot where he had left all of the nightguards. They watched the building blow up together and she felt a certain sense of satisfaction. It was always nice seeing a job completed without anyone getting hurt. 

This one would bring them closer to taking Hunsacher down for good. How could she not be happy about that? It was what she had been working toward for the past four years. 

"How many times have you done this?" he asked as he watched the building go up in flames. 

"More than I can count at this point. Why do you ask?"

"Just trying to imagine how many charges of vandalism and arson I might have to defend you against in a worst case scenario."

Avery laughed again. "You worry too much."

"And you don't worry enough."

"Now you sound like Angelo."

She couldn't even see Christian's face from under the gas mask but she could tell he was grimacing. "Don't tell me that. Come on, let's get out of here." 

"Not yet! We need to make sure we know who these people are." She checked all of their ID badges and made sure she had their info so Angelo could track them down later more easily. "Okay, now we can go."

Her husband nodded and picked her up again before flying them home. She retracted the suit as soon as they were inside and he pulled the gas mask off in disgust. 

"Ugh. Still not a fan of this thing. My old costume was a lot easier to deal with."

"Did you wear it all the time?" Avery asked curiously. 

Since he hadn't been aware she knew his secret identity until recently he had never told her about life as a hero. She couldn't deny she wanted to hear about it. It had been a significant part of his life for about half of it. 

"Yeah, underneath my regular clothes. The material is specifically made for that so you don't sweat to death," Christian explained. 

"And your glasses?"

"So you noticed."

"Noticed that one a while ago. They're part of your 'normal person' costume, aren't they?"

"I am a normal person!" 

"A normal person with superpowers. Are our kids going to have them too?" Avery asked with a raised eyebrow. She hadn't considered that before. 

"I'm…not sure, honestly. No one else in my family has them but they had to have come from somewhere. If you have a recessive gene for powers it's possible," Christian admitted. "My mom said if that happened I was going to have to tell you but you already knew."

"We have quite the gene pool, don't we? I'm albino and you have superpowers."

He shrugged and took off the rest of his gear. "It's not boring, that's for sure. Mostly I feel bad for my mom because she didn't know how to deal with a kid who could float away unconsciously." 

"What did she do about that?"

"Put weighted clothes on me. All that really did was make me stronger." 

"So you don't have some sort of additional strength superpower? I could tell it was a lot higher than the average person's but wasn't as much as my suit."

"Nope. The only other power I had was a sixth sense about danger. I had to get that turned off using power suppressors in order to retire. You have no idea what it's like having the whole world screaming at you all the time," Christian said with a sigh. 

So she had been right! That was why he seemed so distracted a lot of the time before retiring and how he was always able to find her when no other hero was. It explained so much. 

"I thought you had something like that," Avery remarked. 

Christian seemed surprised. "No one else ever managed to figure it out. No one else ever figured out my identity either though so I suppose I should have expected it. You're too smart for your own good, you know that?"

"Well, my dad was a nanotechnologist. I suppose I got some of his brains though I don't use them much. Angelo's the man with a plan. Always has been. I just kind of followed his lead unless I really wanted something. He's a year older than me so I used to trail after him all the time." 

"He mentioned something about that once."

"Of course he did." 

Avery thought overall that their first mission working together had gone well. She was optimistic that they would be able to pull this off. Christian was treating her the way he normally did too. 

She was grateful for it but also waiting for the other shoe to drop. He couldn't possibly be as okay with this as he appeared based on some of his questions and teasing earlier. He was worried about what they were doing. 

He continued to worry as the missions continued. They went out destroying things every Saturday night for the next two months while Angelo compiled research on how to take down Nolan Hunsacher's closest lieutenants. 

They hit a few places where Hunsacher had set traps but since they were both impervious to knockout gas with their gear they were able to take down the people waiting for them with ease. Things were going almost too well for their plans until they happened to hit a particular snag.

Hunsacher had over a dozen armed men waiting for them. And Christian wasn't bulletproof. 

Avery had no other choice. She needed to take care of this one herself. Sending a silent apology to both her husband and her baby, she had to do a bit of acrobatics to kick all of their guns away in a flash. 

A few of them shot at her but the bullets bounced off and ricocheted elsewhere. A few hit some of the people working on the gunmen's side in potentially nonfatal places. 

As soon as they realized she was bulletproof they stopped shooting at her and changed their target to Christian. She wasn't about to stand for that when he was only involved in this because of her. He had already been stabbed. He didn't need to be shot too. 

She maneuvered herself directly in front of him for protection despite his protests of "what do you think you're doing?" and she managed to use the newly-discovered stun gun feature of her suit to knock a couple of them out before grabbing their guns. She had never shot a gun before but she had been watching their shooting posture earlier and mimicked it so it looked like she knew what she was doing. 

Avery held one gun in each hand as she continued to block her husband from harm. "Drop the guns or I'll shoot."

They looked at each other hesitantly before another tried to shoot her. She blocked the bullet with ease and it ended up in somebody's leg on the opposite side. 

After seeing that final bit of proof that they couldn't beat her they dropped the guns and slid them over to her. She had Christian grab them so nobody else could try anything funny and stared them down. 

"Do you want to do this the easy way or the hard way? I think you need to get half of your buddies here to the hospital and that won't happen if you fight me."