Hey there, cubs!
If you’re here, you’re already part of the story. So take a breath, start at the beginning, and see where this all leads. I’ve got you. - SB 🐻✨
Start here to read The Chronicles of Superbear. This post will be updated whenever a new chapter is released.
Superbear: Origins
Chapter 1: The Origin of Superbear
Chapter 2: Bear You Out
Chapter 3: Shared Caffeine and Property Damage
Chapter 4: The Last Decision
Chapter 5: The Corruption
Chapter 6: Protective Bear Instinct
Chapter 7: The Wrong Room
Chapter 8: Choosing You
Chapter 9: The Origin of Supercub
Chapter 10: Training Day
Chapter 11: The corruption of Supercub
Chapter 12: The Old Bear
Chapter 13: The Conversion
Chapter 14: A Good Boy
Chapter 15: The Regular
Remaking Andrew
Andrew: Il Super Orso
The Night Anthony Became Antonio
How Jacob Became a Bear
Written by @serve-714:
SERVE – Expansion, or Mixed Messages - a Tale of Two Recruitments
Enjoy! And feel free to reach out on Tumblr DM's for any comments, questions, feedback or anything else. I'd love to hear from you guys!
SERVE – Expansion, or Mixed Messages - a Tale of Two Recruitments - featuring Nick AKA Supercub (nine images below)
Part One
SERVE commands – drone will expand the Hive – drone obeys
...
In a gay bar somewhere...
The bar had grown more crowded, more boozy, more horny. Nick returned from the alley – more men meant more potential converts.
Not that Nick thought about it like that. Not now, anyway.
With each successful conversion, his reward – that rising warm surge of pleasure – had grown. And now that feeling was all Nick wanted.
Moreover it was all he could think about.
Each conversion more arousing, more addictive than the last; the desire for the arousal now all-consuming.
Converting men who were looking for something; but that something wasn’t Nick would provide. It didn’t matter. Only the indescribable pleasure of serving his Master mattered.
Nick struggled to even think of himself as Nick anymore. He was just a tool of Master.
There was now no room in Nick’s pleasure-soaked, obedient mind for thoughts of Mike, or Superbear, or even of himself, Nick.
The bar continued to throng around the imposing, powerfully built young man, oblivious to what Nick had become.
Nick was still cataloguing the crowd when the door opened and the room changed.
Not dramatically. The music didn't stop. The men around the bar carried on with their drinks, their conversations, their hopeful negotiations with the night. But something shifted in the atmosphere of the place. A subtle realignment that Nick felt before he saw its cause, and the fact that he felt it made him set his untouched drink down very carefully on the bar.
SERVE-714 walked in.
714 entered the bar with a purposefulness so absolute that it would have seemed to a casual observer, to be the confidence of a man who had decided that night to be exactly what he was. That causal observer, of course, would be wrong.
714’s scanned the room; not browsing, not cruising, not doing any of the things men in this bar did with their eyes; 714 assessed.
The crowd responded to 714 the way crowds do to those that are entirely certain of themselves; with a ripple of awareness that moved from 714 outwards through the bar. Heads turned. Conversations paused. Libidos were aroused.
SERVE-714's scan of the room had taken 0.8 seconds. It had yielded one result of significant interest. The man at the bar, tall, big framed, muscular, rubber vest, cargo pants and boots; a man who was still, watchful; a glass he hadn't drunk from, eyes moving across the room with a deliberate, methodical patience:
Prime candidate. Assimilation suitability: high.
Nick's assessment of 714 was immediate and total:
A SERVE drone – Master will want one of those.
There was nothing else. No hesitation, no second thought, no flicker of anything that belonged to Nick; only the mindless desire to assimilate this one. The thought not chosen, simply present. 714 was perfect. 714 was exactly what Master needed.
714 continued through the bar on its own trajectory, neither toward Nick nor away from him. It passed close to where Nick stood, and as 714 drew level to Nick it turned its head: just enough, and looked at him.
The look lasted less than a second. It contained no invitation, no challenge, no warmth. It was the look of a conclusion already reached.
Nick didn't deliberate. Master will want this one was the only thought in his head, though it was less a thought than a command. It moved his body for him with the clean, uncomplicated efficiency of total obedience. He left his un-drunk glass on the bar and followed.
SERVE-714 did not look back. It did not need to. It moved through the room towards the back of the bar, Nick following close behind. Neither of them spoke, and neither of them slowed.
The crowd parted around the two muscular men, each man determined, focussed on a task, rather than each other. They passed the dance floor, the pool tables, the couple in the corner who had long since stopped noticing anyone else, and out into the cool night air of the back alley.
The alley smelled of wet concrete and other men's impatience.
A single streetlamp stood at the alley's midpoint, casting a yellow-amber glow that pooled on the ground and climbed the brick walls on either side, giving the darkness a warmth it hadn't earned.
714 stopped beneath the lamp and turned.
Nick stopped three paces away, and the yellow light fell across them both, and for a moment neither spoke. They regarded each other across the small distance with the focused, unambiguous attention of two entities that had come here to do exactly one thing, and both knew it, but neither knew the other knew.
"You're not here for the drinks," Nick said.
"Your assessment is correct," said 714.
Nick was totally focussed on the drone, "I never thought I’d get to meet a SERVE drone. So... what’s it like being a drone?”
Nicked stepped a little closer.
“Existence within SERVE is optimal.”
“Yeah, how so, drone?” Nick spoke low and edged closer. 714 could see the human’s irises were an intense violet.
“Obedience is pleasure, pleasure is obedience. We are One, We are SERVE. Rubber makes us perfect.”
Nick’s irises glowed more violet, as he reached out towards 714’s chest, “Yes, rubber definitely makes you perfect, drone.” His hand now covered in black rubber.
Nick placed his hand flat against SERVE-714's chest; a gesture of claim, of welcome, of you are mine now.
The black goo seeped out from Nick’s hand, flowing across 714’s chest.
But Nick’s fingers met something smooth and hard and cool, not fabric, not skin; a resistance. Somewhere behind 714’s visual sensors something shifted; a calculation completing, a protocol engaging.
"Connection established," stated 714 calmly.
Something reached back, the black goo transforming into silver.
Nick couldn't let go.
Something moved through Nick's palm and up his arm like a wave, washing over him and before he had drawn his next breath, Nick felt himself again, rising to the surface of his own mind, like someone who had held their breath underwater and now surfaced wanting air. Master’s – Bill’s – command fell away, and underneath it:
Mike.
The name pierced both his consciousness and his conscience; total and immediate, and with it came everything: Mike’s face, Mike’s voice, and the intensely painful silence shared with someone you had wronged. The pain of it was clean and specific. He had hurt Mike, badly.
He felt Mike's pain as much as his own.
He could not speak. But in the space behind his eyes, in the brief lit room of his own returning awareness, he thought:
Mike. I'm here. I'm sorry. I’m so sorry. I want...
A second wave arrived.
It did not crash. It rose; smooth and relentless; lifting his personal awareness away from him the way a broken wave gently surges up a sandy beach and then recedes. Nick felt himself receding with the remnants of the wave.
He did not struggle.
And then he was gone.
to be continued...
You can read more adventures of Mike (Superbear) and Nick (Supercub) here
Thinking about joining SERVE? Your place in the Hive awaits. Check your eligibility, then contact a recruiter drone for more details: @serve-302 @serve-343 , @serve-425 , @serve-525 , @serve-579 , @serve-588 , @serve-655 , @serve-690 or @serve-714 .
Piazza Bellini was already filling up by the time the umbrella over Andrew’s table threw a clean circle of shade across the page. Scooters threaded the far edge of the square. Two women debated a parking space without much heat in it. A pigeon worked the base of the statue for crumbs Andrew could not see.
He had found the book in a secondhand stall on his first week in Naples and had been carrying it around ever since. Months in the city now. Long enough to have a regular table here; long enough to know the rooftops above this square better than the streets beneath them. The daylight version of the city sat in him differently than the night one did.
He read three sentences. A wind moved across the piazza, light enough that he might have missed it had it not found his open collar. It travelled into his chest hair. He felt it there. Physical, small. A fact of his body he had not had a year ago.
Roberto came through with an espresso and a glass of water on a small tray, already knowing the table. He set them down with the steady economy of a man who had done this several thousand times.
“Ehi, amico mio.”
“Buongiorno, Roberto.”
Roberto’s glance had landed on the back of the café before it found him. A small thing. Something about a delivery, a kitchen issue, a shift change. Andrew read it as nothing, drank his water, and went back to the page.
Andrew lifted the espresso. His sleeve pulled back along his forearm and the inside of his upper arm came into view — heavy with muscle, dark with hair. He held on the sight half a second before drinking. The cup went back to its saucer with a small clean sound.
A woman with two small dogs came past and the dogs looked up at his shoes before deciding he was not interesting. The page pulled him back under.
---
A delivery van pulled up at the service corner.
Andrew tracked it without lifting his head. An old habit, sharpened by the new work. The van was unfamiliar. He noted the unfamiliarity and kept reading.
The man who got out was wrong.
Something low in Andrew answered before his eyes caught up. He had carried that in him once, pushed through him in a warehouse with a cigar and a choice he hadn’t been given. He knew exactly what it was. The details arrived after: broad through the chest, the branded shirt sitting slightly wrong across the shoulders, tension in the fabric that had nothing to do with the cut. The way he carried the two stacked boxes: arms steady, no lean into it. A man carrying real boxes adjusts for the weight. This one didn’t.
Roberto came past Andrew’s table and did not stop to refill the water. Andrew had not asked him to. Roberto’s body had the contracted stillness of a man who had been told to expect this and told not to react.
Andrew held the page open and read nothing.
He had been coming to this café for months. Roberto’s buongiorno, the same seat on the piazza, the espresso that came without being asked for — all of it in front of whatever was being moved through the back. He had been within twenty feet of it every time he ordered. He had been on the receiving end of whatever was moving through that back room. He knew what was in there. He felt whatever was left of Bill's dark energy stir in his bones as the delivery man walked past.
He set the cup down. Closed the book on his finger.
The delivery man was inside the back room now. Andrew counted to ten. Then he stood, slid a note under the saucer, and walked off the piazza onto the via, into the deep doorway of a palazzo he had clocked weeks ago for unrelated reasons.
The transformation took less than ten seconds. He had done it enough now that the process closed itself around him. The heat came first — a single surge outward from his core — and then the suit was already on him. Azzurri blue from collar to boot, white trim at the cuffs. The deep red cape dropped across his shoulders and settled.
He stepped out of the doorway as Super Orso and went back to the café at a dead stride.
The front of the café had emptied. A woman at the bar had taken one look at him through the open door and left her cappuccino. Roberto was at the till, white in the face. Andrew gave him nothing on the way past.
The back room was the size of a small garage. Crates stacked against three of the walls. A single bulb hanging on a cord. Three men.
Two were on their feet before they had registered who he was. The driver was crouched over a crate with one hand inside it and turned without standing. His eyes went violet in the low light.
Andrew read the room before he had fully crossed the threshold. The two on their feet were thicker than the driver, similar build to each other, leather harnesses worn over black tank tops. Crates limited the width. The bulb limited the light. A door at the back was half-blocked by stacked cardboard with no clear path to it.
“What the—”
“Get him.”
The first man came at him.
Andrew’s hand opened and a small blue shield flickered into shape, the size of a pizza tray. He turned the punch with it and drove his elbow into the man’s neck. The man fell back into shelving that held him without breaking, when by every right it should have broken.
The second came in fast. Andrew underestimated him by the exact margin he had failed to update for, and the hit caught him across the jaw hard enough that he tasted blood. He went sideways into a crate; it went over, and the small dark bottles inside clattered against each other in their foam. He kept his feet.
He pulled himself upright and let the bat come. It formed solid in his right hand — blue, geometric, bright as a street sign at midnight — and his grip settled around it.
He turned on the second man first. Drove him back across the room with two hard swings, the second one catching the man’s shoulder and slamming him into the back wall. The man stayed where he landed, half-stunned.
The driver had risen and was coming for his unprotected side with a wine bottle raised in his hand. Andrew raised the shield and caught the descending arm at the rim, broke the swing before it landed, and brought the bat across the driver’s ribs in the same motion. The driver went down into the base of a crate and did not get up.
The first man was pushing himself up. Andrew stepped onto his back and drove him flat.
The second swung wide as Andrew turned back to him. Andrew took the blow on the shield, let the man’s arm travel past him, and hit him once across the back of the knee. The man buckled against the shelving and Andrew let the constructs go.
He crossed to the nearest open crate. The harness straps were right there — thick, buckled, built for exactly this kind of pressure. He pulled three free and went to work.
Three of them. Ninety seconds, maybe. He was breathing hard. Blood at the corner of his mouth.
He stood for ten seconds without moving.
Then he turned and looked at what he had stepped into.
The crates against the wall were not all carrying the same thing. Half held the heavy bottles he had heard clink earlier — small, in dark glass, sealed with a crimped metal cap.
The bottles were what stopped him.
He picked one up. Heavy for its size. The glass was dark but not dark enough — tipped toward the light, the contents moved, slow and thick, black the way oil is black. He held it in his palm and felt it — a low pull, his body answering before he’d decided to pay attention. Whatever was in there, he knew what it was doing.
He had carried this once. Through his lungs, that time, rather than in glass. Something in the bottle was a version of what Bill had pushed through him with the cigar.
He weighed the recklessness of taking it against the recklessness of leaving it. He took it. Wrapped it in a clean rag from a shelf and carried it out.
He stepped back through the front of the café.
---
Roberto was where he had been left, white-faced, both hands flat against the bar. He looked at Super Orso and looked away. Then looked back.
“Tu sei… il Super Orso.”
Andrew said nothing.
Roberto let out a short, airless laugh. “Every morning. Sitting outside. My regular customer.” He shook his head slowly, the way a man does when the joke is on him.
“Sit down, Roberto.”
Roberto pulled out a chair and sat down heavily. He didn’t look up.
“How did they get to you?”
Roberto’s mouth opened and closed twice. The third time he spoke.
“My nephew works the deliveries.” His voice flat. “Eighteen. They came to my sister’s apartment in February. Three of them. They threatened his life. Ours too. Then told us to make the back available for their deliveries.”
Andrew said nothing. His hands stayed where they were.
“I never saw what they brought.” Roberto’s hands went still in his lap. “I never asked. I thought, if I never asked—” He stopped again. Tried again. “Last week, two of them were here, arguing about a shipment. One said the next one was for Marseille. The other corrected him. He said three of the crates, only three, were for Marseille. The others were going further.”
“How much further?”
“He didn’t say. And then he noticed me and stopped talking.” Roberto looked up for the first time. “I’m sorry. I should not have let you—”
“Don’t apologise to me.” Andrew kept his voice flat. “Call your nephew. Then call the police. Tell them everything — the threats, the deliveries, the men in the back. Tell them about me. You don’t need to lie.”
Roberto nodded. Nodded again.
Andrew’s cape swept the turn before the door had closed behind him.
---
Super Orso stepped out onto the piazza and jumped up. The nearest roofline was three storeys up and he cleared it without difficulty, terracotta tiles finding his weight and holding it. He moved north across the rooftops, the city spread out below him in morning light, and dropped back down to street level two blocks from the apartment.
He came out of the alley as Andrew. The bottle sat inside his pocket. He kept walking.
His phone was in the other pocket. He had forgotten he was carrying it. He took it out for something to do with his hand, and the screen woke up to a notification he hadn’t seen arrive.
A message from Mike.
He had not heard from Mike in weeks. The last thing he remembered getting was a selfie of Mike and Nick mid-flight, Mike pulling a face at the camera.
He opened the new message.
I need your help. It’s Nick.
He stopped walking. He stood at the edge of a small square where the via opened out, people moving past him on both sides, and read the six words again.
Mike is very happy that his (second) favourite cub Akylas from Greece went through to the Eurovision final! Can’t wait to see the next semi-final on Thursday…
While preparing for their Eurovision watch party, it looks like Mike and Nick both dressed up as their favourite artist of the year. Can anyone guess who they are?
Superbear is on a short break, but the story will continue soon!
In the family of Superbearidae, there exists the species M. Fortis. A powerful being with a keen eye for helping those in need. M. Fortis has many powers, such as super strength, flight and the ability to make others around him groan when producing a beary pun.
Curious to see who else has been studied? Keep reading!
Dan had been in the city four weeks, and the hotel room had started to feel like somewhere he lived.
It was serviced, but it had a kitchenette he used and a balcony he didn’t. He cooked sometimes. Other nights he ate from a paper bag at the small table by the window and watched the lights come on across the street. The job was fine. The job had him here for another six weeks and then somewhere else. He was good enough at his work that nobody asked him too many questions, and he was grateful for that.
What he hadn’t worked out was the rest of it.
He was on Prowlr most nights for an hour or two, same as he was at home. The city was just a new grid of thumbnails. A row of bearded men twenty minutes away. The familiar small sting of the ones who never replied. The familiar small relief of the ones who did.
He had not met anyone.
His loneliness was specific: a body he had lived inside for twenty-eight years without ever quite feeling at home in it. He had a soft build, had always had a soft build, and he carried it without shame but without ease either. What he had never felt like was someone who could take up space on purpose. The beard he had managed to grow was his favourite feature, mostly because it was the only part of him that looked like it had been arrived at deliberately.
He scrolled.
The profile stopped him on a long scroll. His eye had passed it before his mind caught up.
No face. Black latex across a wide chest. A gloved hand against the same black. The username was blackrubber_04. The text was three lines. Leather. Rubber. Dominant. No other detail. A location tag that placed the profile within a mile of his hotel.
He kept scrolling. He scrolled back.
He had looked at harder profiles than that and felt nothing. He had looked at softer profiles and been interested in a manageable, pleasant way. What he felt now he had no name for. A pull low in his chest, specific and directional. A hand at his shirt, pulling him forward. He sat on the edge of the hotel bed with the phone in his lap and the pull stayed.
He messaged. Hey. What’s on tonight?
The reply came back in under a minute.
Nothing yet. Want to walk? Park on King, past the fountain.
Dan read it twice. A park at night, with a stranger from an app whose profile had no face.
Give me twenty minutes, he sent.
He brushed his teeth again before he left. He was on the street before he had properly decided to go.
---
The park on King was quieter than it should have been for the hour. The lamps along the main path were spaced just wide enough to leave pools of dark between them. A couple passed him going the other way, laughing about something. A dog walker somewhere off to his left. The air had the cool damp of a city park at night, earth and cut grass and the faint metal of a fountain running somewhere ahead.
He walked past the fountain. The path narrowed past it, lamps fewer, trees closer to the verge.
A bench on his left held a big man in a dark hoodie, beard just visible in the shadow of the hood. Dan clocked him, kept walking. A man on a bench was just a man on a bench.
Nick was past the next lamp, in the dark edge of its circle, leaning against a tree.
The photos had been accurate about the latex and said nothing about the rest.
He was enormous. Dan’s first coherent thought as he got closer was that the profile had been undersold. The tank was high-gloss black, fitted over a chest that was the size of two chests. A black belt at the waist. Dark cargo trousers. Heavy boots. Long strawberry-blonde hair, darker in this light than it would have been in day. A thick auburn beard. He held a stillness that made Dan, approaching, feel loud.
“Dan.”
His voice was low and warm.
“Yeah.”
“I’m Nick.”
“I figured.” Dan stopped two steps short of him and found he had put his hands in the back pockets of his jeans without meaning to. “The profile kind of narrows the field.”
That earned him a smile. Not a big one. A warm, slightly crooked thing at one corner of Nick’s mouth, and Dan felt it land in his chest like a small dropped weight.
“You’re funny.”
“When I’m nervous.”
“Are you nervous?”
“A bit.”
“Good.” Nick pushed off the tree and closed half the distance in one unhurried step. “Nervous is honest.”
Up close he was, somehow, even bigger. Dan had to tip his head slightly to keep meeting his eyes. The violet in them, which he had noticed from further off and told himself was a trick of the lamp, was not a trick of the lamp. It was the colour Nick’s eyes were. Dan’s brain registered that as a thing to think about later, possibly, and set it aside.
“So,” Nick said. “What made you text me?”
Dan opened his mouth to say something wry. That was the reflex — the small self-deprecating joke that kept a conversation at arm’s length. He had been building that reflex for twenty-eight years. It had kept him safe.
He closed his mouth. Opened it again.
“The way your profile felt,” he said. “I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Try.”
“Like — like it was pulling at me. Low. In my chest.” He felt his face heat. “That sounds stupid.”
“It doesn’t.”
Nick’s hand came up between them. The back of his fingers brushed Dan’s jaw, slow, deliberate, the skin warm. Dan’s breath caught and Nick felt it catch — his eyes moved over Dan’s face with something that looked a lot like fondness, and the smile came back, bigger this time.
“Most people don’t answer that honestly.”
“I surprised myself.”
“I noticed.”
He let his hand drop, and the absence of it was immediately the loudest thing in Dan’s body.
“Walk with me a minute,” Nick said.
He didn’t wait for the answer. He was already turning, one hand coming to the small of Dan’s back with no pressure at all, just placed there, and Dan moved where the hand asked him to move. They walked three slow paces further into the trees, out of the weak reach of the path lamp. Nick let his hand fall away again when they stopped. Dan was standing now with his back near the trunk of the tree Nick had been leaning against. Nick was in front of him. The air between them felt warmer than the air anywhere else in the park.
“You’re Australian,” Nick said.
“Guilty.”
“What brings you here?”
“Work. Three months. I’ve got another six weeks.”
“And you spend your evenings on an app.”
Dan laughed, small and slightly winded. “You’re not helping my self-esteem.”
“I’m not trying to hurt it.” Nick’s eyes went over his face again, slow, unhurried. “I’m glad you were on an app tonight.”
“So am I.”
He was. He was aware, with a kind of bright specific clarity, that he had not been this glad about anything in a long time. There was a man standing in front of him in the dark who had looked at him twice the way people look at each other in films and was still looking. The pull in his chest was no longer a pull. It was a settled warmth, a body that had stopped asking questions about where it wanted to be.
“Can I ask you something?” Nick said.
“Yeah.”
Nick took his wrist. Not a grab — a close of fingers around it, thumb finding the pulse there, the contact warm through the latex of the glove. Dan’s pulse did what a pulse does when a man like Nick takes hold of it.
“What do you want tonight?”
Dan looked up at him. He had a whole collection of answers he had used in this kind of moment in the past, most of them jokes, all of them ways of pretending he didn’t want very much. He felt none of them rise.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But I don’t want to go back to the hotel.”
Nick’s thumb moved once across the inside of his wrist.
“Good,” he said, very quietly.
Nick’s gloved hand came to the side of Dan’s face. The latex was cool against his cheek, catching faintly on his beard.
“Last thing I’m going to ask you,” Nick said.
“Okay.”
“Do you want this?”
There was weight in the question Dan didn’t fully understand. He understood enough to know it mattered. He looked up at Nick in the dim and thought, with a clarity he rarely had about himself, yes, I do, I have wanted this my whole life and not known where to look for it.
“Yes,” he said.
Nick bent his head and kissed him.
The kiss was warm and steady and entirely certain of itself. Dan kissed him back, and it was, for a second, just a kiss. A better one than he was used to, but a kiss.
Then something moved.
Something in the kiss that kissing alone could not explain. Warm, alive, moving with intent. It came across from Nick’s mouth into his own and kept going. Down. A warmth sliding into his throat and lower, into his chest, into the centre of him.
Dan’s first reflex was to pull back. His body didn’t. His body was accepting it, opening around it, recognising it. The warmth spread from his chest outward in long slow pulses. It was the warmest thing he had ever felt, and it was inside him.
Nick held him against the tree. His gloved hand stayed on Dan’s face. His mouth stayed on Dan’s mouth. The transfer went on.
Then Nick pulled back.
Dan’s eyes opened. He hadn’t known they’d been closed. Nick’s face was six inches from his own, calm and watchful. Dan’s breath was coming in a way he couldn’t get ahead of.
“Nick — “
“I know.”
“What — what did you — “
“Shh.” Nick’s thumb moved once across Dan’s cheek. “It’s alright. I’ve got you.”
“Something’s — “
“Yes.”
“Nick, something’s happening — “
“I know it is. Let it.”
Then the changes started.
They began under his ribs. A fullness, a density, building in long rolling increments, the chronic low softness he had carried his whole adult life giving way to something heavier and more present. His shirt tightened across him. The grey tee had no more give. He could feel the fabric straining against his chest as his chest became something else, something fuller, denser, more there.
A sound came out of him. Small, startled.
Nick’s hand slid from his face to the back of his neck, warm and sure. “Good boy.”
His shoulders pushed wide. He felt the air displace around him. He had always taken up a certain amount of space and apologised for it, quietly, without knowing he was apologising. The shoulders coming in now did not apologise. They widened, and the overshirt split at the seam under his arm with a small clean sound.
His arms filled. The weight of them changed. He lifted one and it was heavier than it should have been, his hand at the end of it larger, his fingers thicker. He looked at the hand like it was someone else’s. It wasn’t.
“I can’t — “ he said. “Nick, I can’t — “
“You can.” Nick’s forehead came to rest against his. “You already are.”
“It’s too much — “
“It isn’t. Breathe.”
He breathed. Nick breathed with him, steady, and the steadiness of it was a thing Dan held onto with both hands.
The warmth moved down into his thighs, his calves, the long muscles along the backs of his legs. He felt himself plant, in a way he had never planted. His weight shifted down onto his feet differently.
The softness he had carried without confidence was still there. It had reorganised. He was large and solid. The chubby weight was still part of him, and it had taken on authority: the weight of a body that occupied its space without argument.
His jaw prickled. He brought a hand up, slower this time, aware of its new weight, and felt the beard thickening along his face, filling in, settling into something full and deliberate. The beard had been his favourite part of himself. It was becoming more of what it had been trying to be all along.
Under all of it, a quieter thing.
The background noise he had lived with his whole life went quiet. The low constant hum of dissatisfaction with his body, so familiar he had stopped noticing it was there, stopped.
“Oh,” he said, very small. “Oh — “
“There he is.”
Nick shuddered against him.
Something was happening at the surface of him now. The grey tee was gone. He couldn’t say when. Black latex lay against his chest instead, high-gloss, fitting itself to each new contour as it arrived. The overshirt was gone too. Over the latex, leather: straps crossing his chest in an X, buckles catching the lamp light, the harness settling against him with the weight of something designed to be worn. His jeans were no longer his jeans. Leather trousers, close-fitted, the material warm and giving where his thighs pressed against it. His boots felt heavier on his feet.
He looked down at himself once, over Nick’s shoulder, and the sight of his own body did not frighten him. It fit. That was the worst of it. It fit.
“Nick — “
“I know.”
“Don’t let go — “
“I’m not going to.”
The thoughts he had come to the park with, the small running commentary that had been Dan’s company since he was a child, were simpler now. Fewer. A clean hum where a cluttered conversation used to live. He did not miss what was being taken. He had not known, until this moment, how loud it had been.
“That’s it,” Nick murmured, very close to his ear. “That’s it. Good boy. Mine now.”
One last coherent thought: I would have let him do anything.
The violet came on behind his eyes.
A slow shift, like a light changing behind glass, the hazel-green he had looked at in hotel mirrors his whole life giving way to something cold and steady and unfamiliar. He was, for a half-second, looking out through eyes that were no longer his.
Then he wasn’t looking out of anything.
Dan was gone.
---
What stood against the tree was bigger than what had arrived.
A large bearded man, solidly built, the chubby weight he had always carried now wearing authority instead of apology. The face calm: the calm of a man who had been relieved of something he had not known the weight of. The eyes steady in the lamp light, the violet cold and complete.
Nick stepped back half a pace and looked at him.
The pleasure was already rolling up through Nick’s body in long warm waves. He breathed through it, slow, and let it settle.
He looked past the tree, down the path, toward the lamps and the bench past the fountain.
He had known the man on the bench was there since he had arrived. He had chosen to let him watch.
He turned his head and looked directly down the path. Directly at the bench.
He held the look for a count longer than a man casually scanning would have held it.
Then he walked the other way, the new one falling in behind him, and the trees took them.
---
Mike did not move.
He did not move when Nick turned. He did not move when Nick’s gaze reached the bench and held. He sat with his hands flat on his thighs because if he lifted them they would shake, and his breath was coming through his nose in slow pulls that were costing him everything he had. If he moved now he lost Nick. That was the only thought he trusted.
Nick walked into the trees with the new one behind him.
Mike stayed on the bench.
He stayed after he could no longer hear them. A couple walked past on the main path talking about a restaurant, and he did not move for them either. His hands took longer to stop shaking than he would have expected.
What he had just watched, he would be a long time putting into words.
He had come to the park believing Nick was still in there somewhere. The faint thread from the cabin had told him where to go; the bond he had felt since they met had told him the rest. Believing it and seeing the shape of what Nick had become were different things. The black of him, the size of him, the easy practised weight of a man doing something he had done before. And the man at the tree: the man who had walked past Mike on this path half an hour ago, hands in his back pockets, nervous in a way that had made Mike’s chest hurt. That man was gone, and something else was walking off into the trees.
Mike could have moved. He had been fast enough and strong enough. He had stayed because of what Nick had done at the end — the look, held deliberately, a challenge delivered in full view of what he had just done. Nothing in that look had been the man Mike loved. Daddy Bear had told him Nick was in there somewhere. Tonight, nothing Mike had watched supported it.
He took his phone out of the hoodie pocket.
He opened the thread with Andrew. The last message was his own, from six weeks ago — a mid-flight selfie, him and Nick in full suits against an open sky, Mike pulling a face at the camera, Nick laughing beside him. Andrew had sent back three laughing emojis.
Mike looked at it for a moment. Then he typed.
I need your help. It’s Nick.
He sent it.
He put the phone back in the hoodie pocket. He stood, and he walked back up the path, past the fountain, out of the park.
The Den on a Tuesday was a kindness Arun did to himself, and most weeks he forgot why.
The dance floor was raised one step above the bar, edged in a strip of LED that cycled between purple and blue. Half the stools were occupied. Half the bodies on the floor were dancing and the other half were doing the slower thing men did when they wanted to be on a dance floor without committing to it.
Arun was at the bar, third stool from the wall, with a vodka soda he had ordered for the shape of holding it.
He watched. That was the part he was good at. He could usually call within ten minutes who in the room was leaving with someone and who wasn’t. He cataloged them with the practiced quiet of a man who had stopped expecting to appear in his own list.
He was twenty-eight. His shoulders were narrow. His jaw stayed smooth no matter what he did about it. The crowd in here was built for a different shape of man, and he knew it.
The purple light passed across the bar in a slow wash and made everyone look better than they were, which was the cruelest thing the lighting did. It made him feel like he was watching a film he hadn’t been cast in.
He gave himself one more song.
The door opened and the air in the room rearranged itself.
Arun felt it before he saw it. A pause in two conversations near the entrance. The bartender, who never looked up for anyone, looked up.
Then Arun saw him.
The man who had walked in was the biggest person in the room, and he was not trying to be. Tall, broad enough through the shoulders and chest to make the doorway look small behind him. Strawberry-blonde hair, longish and wavy. A full auburn beard, trimmed close. He was wearing a black sleeveless tank that fit him better than any garment had any business fitting anyone. The light caught the surface of it and slid off, high-gloss and almost wet-looking. Latex, Arun realized. Dark grey cargo trousers, a black belt, heavy lace-up boots.
He moved into the room without scanning it. He didn’t need to scan it. He took two steps in and the room had already noticed him and rearranged what it was doing to accommodate the noticing.
Arun looked away first, the way he had trained himself to look away first. He stared into his drink and told himself, very precisely, don’t. You know how this ends. It ends with you here at the bar and him with someone else, and the only difference between this Tuesday and the last is the specific shape of the ache.
He gave himself a few seconds. Then he looked up.
The man was looking directly in his direction.
Arun’s first thought was that he had misread the angle. He glanced at another man two stools down behind him. He was on his phone, oblivious.
He was looking at him. Direct and unhurried.
Arun’s stomach did something low and unfamiliar. He had been looked past more often than looked at. On three or four occasions in his entire adult life he had been looked at the way he was being looked at right now, as if he were the answer to a question someone had been carrying around. Each of those previous occasions had turned out to be a mistake.
This wasn’t a mistake. The man held his eyes, and after a moment that lasted longer than it should have, he tilted his chin in a small unmistakable gesture: come here.
Arun didn’t move.
The man waited a beat. Then he smiled, small and patient, and started toward him instead.
He arrived at the empty stool beside him and sat down. Sitting, he was still bigger than most people standing.
“Hey handsome,” he said. “Didn’t mean to put you on the spot.”
His voice was lower than Arun had braced for, and warmer.
“You didn’t,” Arun said, which was not true.
“What’s your name?”
“Arun.”
“Arun.” He said it once, carefully, as if checking the shape of it. “I’m Nick.”
He held out his hand. Arun shook it. The hand was warm and dry, and the pressure of it was exactly correct, and Arun let it go a fraction of a second after he should have. Nick noticed and didn’t comment. The corner of his mouth moved.
“You here with anyone?”
“No.”
“Good.”
The word landed in the middle of Arun’s chest and stayed there.
Nick didn’t fill the silence after it. He let it sit. He looked at Arun while it sat, and the look was the same look it had been since the door, steady and certain, hungry without being ugly. Arun, who had spent eight years being looked past, did not have the equipment to defend himself against being looked at like that. He hadn’t built it. There had been no occasion.
Nick’s hand came to rest on Arun’s forearm. He let it sit there, loose and unhurried, more weight than pressure. Arun’s pulse jumped under the touch and Nick could feel it. Arun knew he could feel it. Nick’s thumb moved once, slow, along the inside of his wrist, and Arun’s breath went uneven enough that the bartender, two feet away, pretended not to hear.
“You want to get out of here?”
He already knew the answer.
“Yes,” Arun said.
Nick stood. His hand slid from Arun’s wrist to the small of his back as Arun got off the stool, and the contact was steady and proprietary, and Arun didn’t pull away from any of it. He left the vodka soda on the bar.
Nick guided him past the bathrooms to a service door propped open with a wooden wedge. The bouncer glanced up and went back to his phone. The hand at Arun’s back was the only thing in the building Arun was aware of.
The door swung shut behind them and the music dropped to a muffled bass through the wall, and they were in the alley.
It was cold. Narrow, dim, the smell of the dumpster against the far wall. A single security light buzzed above the service door. The brick was wet from earlier rain.
Arun registered all of it in one quick sweep and then stopped registering any of it.
Nick was looking at him again. In the blue light, with the music a low pulse through the wall behind him, Nick was somehow more, not less. The pale eyes had a tint to them that the club lighting had washed out, a violet undertone Arun would have called a trick of the bulb if he had been thinking about it, which he wasn’t.
“Come here,” Nick said.
Arun came here.
Nick’s hand found the back of his neck and brought his face up, and Nick bent his head and kissed him.
The kiss was warm and unhurried and entirely sure of itself. Arun’s back found the brick wall behind him without his having moved toward it. The full weight and size of Nick was against him now. The latex of the tank pressed against the front of Arun’s shirt warmer than skin had any business being.
Arun kissed him back. He had not kissed anyone in fourteen months. The part of him that kept track of that fact lost interest in keeping track of it.
---
Nick’s mouth moved from his lips to his jaw, and the words came low and close.
“Tell me you want to be mine.”
The wanting of it had lived in him quietly for years. To be chosen like this, by someone who meant it.
“I want to be yours,” he said.
Nick kissed him again, deeper. His hand pressed flat against Arun’s sternum. The palm felt wrong — cool and smooth, a texture that had no business being skin. Arun pulled back half an inch and looked down.
A black latex glove, seamless, the same material as the tank.
His mind went to the obvious place. The suit, the glove, the look of him — this was a man who knew exactly what he was doing and had done it before. The latex, the alley, the way he moved. Arun had fantasised about something like this. Being taken apart by someone who knew how, who had the props and the confidence to match. The thought sent heat down his spine.
“Would you give me everything?” Nick murmured against his mouth. “Let me have all of you?”
There was more weight in the words than the moment called for. Arun was past caring.
“Yes,” he said.
The heat under the palm changed.
Nick’s whole body shuddered against him. A sound came up from his throat, deep and wanting, and Arun, who had spent his whole adult life reading the shape of desire, understood what he was hearing. The urge was real. The wanting was real.
He just hadn’t understood what was being wanted.
That recognition arrived clean and complete, and was the last clean, complete thought Arun had.
The rubber reached his throat.
Something deep in his body let go of what it had been holding for a long time, and the chronic low ache he had carried, the everyday ache of being himself in a room, went all the way quiet. A volume dial turning down on a noise he had stopped noticing was there until it was gone.
The rubber was warm. That was the thing he hadn’t expected. It moved across his skin like a second skin being fitted over the first, tight and deliberate, and where it settled it held him, and the holding felt like being wanted in a language his body had always understood and never been spoken to in. He looked down once and saw the black of it spreading across his chest, high-gloss and seamless, catching the alley light and giving it back, and the sight of it on him sent a low pull through his stomach that had nothing to do with fear.
Then it went inside.
The warmth moved through him, under the skin now, filling him the way heat fills a room — from the centre outward, slow and total. It found his chest and pushed, and his pectorals thickened under the rubber in long rolling increments, the body he had never had assembling itself from the inside out. The tight black surface stretched with him and stayed tight. He felt it, the give and grip of it, snug against each new contour as it arrived.
It moved lower. Into his thighs, his calves, his backside. Fullness that built and built without tipping into pain, his legs packing out into something solid and his weight shifting down onto them differently — planted, heavy, certain. The rubber followed every inch of it, sealed black and gleaming, and he was aware of himself taking up more of the alley than he had a moment ago and the awareness felt like relief.
His shoulders pushed wide. His arms filled. Each part of him coming into itself in turn, and the rubber there already, waiting, fitting itself to what he was becoming as though it had always known the shape of it.
His jaw prickled. He brought a hand up — heavier than he expected, the arm doing it already foreign and familiar at once — and felt the beard coming in under his fingers. The beard he had never been able to grow.
It should have hurt. It didn’t. The rubber shifted against his new body, a slow tight adjustment, and squeaked — high and clean — as it sealed to the final shape of him. The body saying yes was louder than any other signal it had. Pleasure rolled through him in long structural waves that started in the bones, and the pleasure was indistinguishable from the changing, and the changing was indistinguishable from the simplification: fewer thoughts, smaller, the noise of being himself easing into a clean steady hum.
And Nick, the whole time, pressed against him — feeding him, shuddering with the pleasure of it.
Arun’s last moment of recognizable interiority was the awareness, dim and accepting, that the man holding him to the wall was being rewarded for what was being done to him, and that the reward and the doing were the same act.
Then the rubber closed over his eyes, and behind it the violet came on, and Arun was gone.
What stood against the brick wall was bigger than what had walked out of the club.
The full-body suit was seamless and glossy, neck to boots, every contour of a thickly built man rendered in high-shine black. The shoulders were wide enough now to fill the alley. The beard had come in dark and full along a jaw that was no longer narrow. The eyes were open and steady, the same cold violet as Nick’s, set in a face that wore the calm settled expression of a man who had been relieved of a burden he hadn’t known the weight of until it was gone.
He stood where Arun had stood. He was waiting to be told what came next.
---
The first thing Nick was aware of was the heat under his skin going slow and bright.
It rolled up out of his chest and along his arms and down his spine in long warm pulses, and he closed his eyes and let it. The suit was praising him. It did this every time and every time it was new. The pleasure was the whole of him, lit from inside, the body of a man who had done what he was made for and was being told so.
He breathed out, slow, through his nose. The urge was quieter now. He had done what it wanted.
He opened his eyes.
The new one stood against the brick wall, finished. Big and settled. The violet in his eyes was clean and steady, and the rubber on him caught what little light the alley had and held it the same as Nick’s own.
He reached out and lifted the new one’s chin, thumb brushing the new beard. There you are.
He looked down at his own hand. The glove was retracting, the glossy black surface receding up his fingers in a slow smooth pull, easing up his wrist, sinking through the skin where it waited. He flexed the hand once when it was done. The skin underneath was bare and unmarked.
He had done this before. He would do it again before the night was over.
He turned his head toward the new one.
“Wait,” he said.
The new one didn’t answer. He stood where he had been told to stand.
Nick turned toward the service door. The bass was coming through the wall in a steady low pulse he could feel in his boots. The urge was already starting to come back on a long slow timer, and he liked the feeling of it coming.
He pulled the door open. The music got loud again. He walked back inside.
You're in the club, and he's been checking you out all night. Go on then. Say hi. Things might get a little squeaky — but where's the fun in playing it safe? 😈
Nick's glasses sat on the nightstand, folded neatly, the way Nick left everything.
He'd gone as Supercub. Left in the suit, at night, without the glasses he wore as Nick. Mike had been moving around them for five weeks without touching them.
He sat at the kitchen table with Nick's investigation notes spread in front of him. The same pages, the same handwriting he'd read so many times the paper had softened at the edges. Nick had built his case carefully, mapping what he called the Brotherhood: the network Bill ran beneath the city. Supply routes and movement patterns, cross-references layered over cross-references. Mike had seen all of it. Every time Nick brought something new, Mike had found a reason to wait.
And Nick went alone.
Five weeks since. Mike had tried everything he could think of. He'd flown over the industrial quarter for days, scanning rooftops and loading docks. He'd retraced Nick's steps twice. He'd gone to the building Nick had identified as a Brotherhood facility. Found it completely empty. Swept clean. They'd known Nick's investigation had gotten that far and cleared out the entire operation without leaving a trace.
After the building, there was nothing left to follow.
The connection — the thing Mike had always felt humming between them, warm and constant, the thread that told him where Nick was even when they were apart — was silent. He'd reached for it every day, pressing inward, searching for any thread of Nick's presence. He found nothing. The space where Nick used to be felt sealed over, and that terrified him more than the empty building or the cold trails or any of it. Because if that connection was gone, whatever they'd done to Nick had reached somewhere fundamental.
Mike pushed back from the table. He was stronger than anyone in this city and the strength meant nothing. He could lift a building and none of it could find Nick.
He picked up the box holding the notes. Heavy cardboard, labelled in Nick's handwriting: BROTHERHOOD — WORKING. As he tilted it, something slipped from the fold of the cardboard. A small card, wedged between the inner wall and the bottom flap.
His breath stopped.
Dear Mike,
if you believe in yourself, you can be super!
Love, Daddy Bear.
The note. The original note, from the box of Power Bear Coffee. Mike hadn't thought about it since the day it arrived. He'd found it on his doorstep with a box of coffee he didn't understand, brewed a cup, and everything that followed had swallowed the note entirely. He'd been busy becoming Superbear. Busy falling in love with Nick. The note had been a cheesy card from a stranger, and he'd forgotten about it the same afternoon.
Nick, being Nick, had found it lying around the apartment at some point. A sticky note was pressed to the corner in Nick's handwriting: Faint scent — can't trace yet.
He'd noticed something Mike had overlooked completely.
Mike brought the note to his nose. The scent was there, specific and layered. Woodsmoke and pine resin, a dense earthiness underneath, and beneath all of that a faint trace of warmth that felt like the power itself.
A real person, somewhere in the world, who had started everything.
He felt stupid for never going back to the beginning. He'd been so busy being Superbear that he'd forgotten Superbear had a cause. Nick had noticed. Mike hadn't.
He breathed the scent in again and let his senses build a direction.
Northwest. Past the city, into open land.
For the first time in five weeks, Mike had somewhere to go.
---
Superbear flew northwest. The city gave way to suburbs, then fields, then forest. He followed the scent like a compass needle.
The cabin sat by a small lake, surrounded by old pines. Log walls, a stone chimney with smoke rising in a thin line. Mike landed at the treeline, de-transformed, and walked the final stretch in jeans and a blue henley. Daddy Bear would see a man in ordinary clothes come through the trees.
The man was chopping wood.
He was older, and he was big. Old in a way that went deeper than years, but built like someone who had once been immense and still carried the frame. Broad through the shoulders, thick through the chest. The muscle had softened but the mass remained. His beard was grey and full, well-kept despite everything else about him suggesting a man who had stopped caring what the world thought. A dark green flannel, jeans, work boots. His eyes were watchful and present.
He looked like an older bear.
His scent matched the note exactly.
The man set the axe into the splitting block and straightened. He looked at Mike across the clearing without surprise.
Mike stopped at the edge of the porch. His throat was tight.
"I've been trying to believe in myself," he said. "I don't feel very super right now."
The man's eyes moved across Mike's face, reading the exhaustion, the grief, the five weeks sitting in the hollows beneath his eyes.
"You found the note," he said. His voice was low and unhurried.
"I did."
A pause. The man nodded. "I'll make coffee. Regular, this time."
---
They sat in two weathered chairs facing the lake. The view was wide and still. The distance from the city was total.
The older man handed Mike a mug and waited.
Mike's hands tightened around the mug.
"Someone I love is missing." His voice cracked. "He's — he's like me. He has the same power. He's a hero. And he was taken, five weeks ago, by a man named Bill who runs an operation called the Brotherhood. Bill has power like mine, but wrong. Corrupted. And I think he did something to Nick. I think he changed him. Because I can't feel him anymore. The connection we had. It's gone. I've tried everything. I went to the building where they held him and it was cleaned out. I can't find a trace."
He stopped. His hands were shaking around the mug.
"I let him go alone. He'd been investigating Bill for weeks and I kept shutting him down. Too dangerous, not enough information. I was protecting him. I was wrong. He went without me and they took him and I can't—"
His voice broke. His shoulders folded inward and the sound that came out of him was one he hadn't made since he was a child. He hadn't cried in front of anyone for five weeks because there was no one to cry in front of. Telling anyone what happened meant explaining Nick and Supercub and all of it.
The man set his coffee down. He stood, crossed the small distance between the chairs, and pulled Mike into a hug.
The arms that closed around Mike were thick and sure. The chest he pressed against was broad and solid, softened by age but still massive, still built to hold. One hand came to the back of Mike's head. Mike gripped the man's flannel and held on, his body shaking, five weeks of silence and searching coming out of him in a sound he barely recognised.
The man didn't speak. He didn't soothe or manage. He held Mike the way a father holds a son who has come home broken, and let the shaking run its course.
When Mike pulled back, his eyes were red. He wiped his face roughly.
"Sorry."
"Don't be."
They sat again. Mike's coffee had gone cold.
"You sent the Power Bear Coffee," Mike said. "You're the reason I'm Superbear."
"I am."
"The note was pretty cheesy."
The faintest crack of amusement in the old man's lined face. "I'm not much of a writer. The words were cover. The scent was the point. Built into the paper. A way back to me, if you ever needed one."
"A failsafe."
"Something like that."
Mike looked at him. The broad frame, the worn shoulders, the certainty in his voice when he spoke about the power. This man hadn't just sent the coffee. He'd made it.
"Who are you?" Mike asked.
The older man looked at the lake. "That's a longer story than we have time for today. What matters right now is this: I know what the power inside you is, and I know what Bill is. I can help you understand what's happened to your partner."
Mike leaned forward. "Tell me."
"You said you can't feel him anymore. That you reach for him and there's nothing."
"Nothing."
"That's what I'd expect if Bill got to him. What Bill does is change a person. He takes what's already there and turns it toward himself. It doesn't erase who they were. It just drowns it out. You can't feel Nick because the part of him that knew you has been turned to face someone else."
Mike said nothing.
"But the original doesn't disappear," the man continued. "It gets buried. Layered over. Bill's power is strong, but it's stolen. It can cover what's there, but it can't replace it. The person underneath is still present. Harder to reach. But present."
"There was a moment," Mike said. "The night he was taken. I felt something. A pulse. Like he was reaching for me through — through whatever was happening to him. It lasted less than a second."
"That was him." The man said it with certainty. "Reaching through before it finished closing over him. To do that, from inside what Bill builds around a person — that takes everything you have."
Mike's eyes burned.
"Can I use that? Can I find him through it?"
"You've been reaching for him with grief," the man said. "With panic. Five weeks of desperation clouding everything. What you have with him doesn't answer to force. It answers to stillness." He leaned forward. "Close your eyes."
Mike set his coffee down and closed his eyes.
"Stop reaching outward. Let it settle. You know what Nick feels like. You could pick him out of a crowd. Stop searching for him and start listening."
Silence. Wind through pines. The lake against the shore.
Nothing.
Mike breathed. He let the grief sit where it was and stopped pushing it at the silence.
Then — faintly — something.
A warmth. Small, buried deep beneath layers of dark, dense pressure. Barely there. But Mike knew the quality of that warmth the way he knew Nick's voice. Stubborn. Unmistakably Nick.
"There," Mike whispered. "I feel him."
"Hold it. Don't chase it. Let it sit in you the way his voice sits in your memory. Learn its direction."
Mike held the feeling, fragile, constantly threatening to slip, demanding a stillness he wasn't sure he could sustain. But it was there. After five weeks of silence, it was there.
He opened his eyes.
The lake was golden. The older man sat beside him, watching, his worn eyes steady on Mike's face.
"I know where to go," Mike said.
He stood. He looked at the man, massive and diminished, sitting in a wooden chair by a lake at the edge of the world.
"Thank you."
The man nodded. He didn't stand. He looked at Mike for a long moment and said nothing else.
"Go find him."
Mike walked to the clearing, transformed — blue and red and gold, the cape unfurling, the bear paw emblem settling over his heart — and launched into the sky.
The cabin shrank below. The lake, the trees, the man in the chair watching the trail of rainbow energy arc across the darkening sky.
Then Mike was gone, and Daddy Bear was alone with the last of the light.
The building looked abandoned from the outside. Boarded windows, graffiti layered thick enough to blur into texture, a loading dock with its shutter rusted halfway down. The kind of place the city had stopped seeing years ago.
Supercub landed silently in the alley beside it and let his boots settle on cracked asphalt. His cape folded against his back as he crouched low, scanning the structure. Weeks of cross-referencing movement patterns, tracking supply runs, mapping the gaps between what was visible and what was hidden — all of it pointed here. Evan was inside this building.
Nick had told Mike. Mike had shut it down — too dangerous, not enough information, the same careful tone he used every time Nick brought him something new. For weeks Nick had been building a picture of the operation: its structure, its patterns, the man who ran it. Every time he brought findings to Mike, Mike found a reason to wait. He framed it as protection. It felt like a leash.
So he came alone.
He inhaled slowly, letting his enhanced senses read the building. Warm air pushing outward through the ventilation — occupied space below street level. A faint chemical edge beneath it that he recognized from his time in that chair: cigar smoke, processed through industrial filtration, thinned but present.
He was in the right place.
He moved along the east wall, found a basement window bricked over badly, mortar crumbling at the edges. He pressed his palm flat and pushed. The bricks folded inward with a soft grinding sound. He caught them before they hit the floor.
Inside, a utility corridor. Fluorescent tubes buzzing at intervals. Pipes along the ceiling. Clean concrete, recently swept. Everything maintained. Everything deliberate.
He passed a room with the door ajar — empty, but recently occupied. A cot. A steel chair. Leather straps coiled on a shelf. His stomach tightened and he kept moving.
The corridor opened into a wider space. Voices ahead, low and conversational. Two, maybe three. He waited, counting breaths, until they moved away.
Then he saw him.
Evan stood at the far end of the next corridor, alone, facing away. Massive through the shoulders now, thick-necked, the sleeveless black shirt stretched tight across a back that had doubled in width. The leather harness sat across his upper body in a rigid X, straps meeting at a metal ring between his shoulder blades.
He stood the way all the harnessed men stood — balanced, still, weight evenly distributed, like someone waiting for a command that hadn’t arrived yet.
Nick’s breath caught.
Nick moved into the corridor, fast and low. Grab Evan. Fly out. He closed the distance in seconds, caught Evan’s shoulder, and turned him around.
The face was different — fuller, heavier, the jaw thickened and framed by a dense beard that hadn’t been there before. His eyes were the same brown, but the expression behind them had flattened into something settled and patient.
Then — a flicker. Evan’s brow creased. His mouth moved, just slightly, shaping something that might have been Nick’s name before the expression flattened again.
Nick’s grip on Evan’s shoulder loosened.
He should have lifted them both through the ceiling. He knew that. But he could see, in that half-second before the expression flattened, the friend he had come here to find.
“Evan,” Nick said softly. “It’s me.”
Evan blinked. His eyes moved across Nick’s face with something that might have been recognition, or might have been the echo of a reflex the harness hadn’t fully suppressed.
Nick knew better. He had spent weeks mapping the operation, understanding how the harnesses worked. He knew that the man standing in front of him was operating under a system designed to make rescue look unnecessary.
He stayed anyway.
“I’m going to get you out,” Nick said quietly. “I just need you to—”
The first blow came from behind and to the left. A fist against his kidney, driving the air from his lungs. Nick spun, already swinging, and his elbow connected with someone’s jaw hard enough to send the man sprawling into the opposite wall.
Two more filled the corridor. Big. Harnessed. Moving with coordinated efficiency.
Nick fought. He broke one man’s grip and threw him into the ceiling hard enough to crack the pipes. He caught a second by the harness strap and slammed him to the concrete floor. But the corridor was narrow, more came from the junction behind him, and Evan stood motionless at the end of the hall, watching with that same flat patience.
Arms locked around his chest from behind. He strained against the pile of bodies and for a moment held them — muscles screaming, power fighting for every inch. Then something cold clamped around his left wrist.
The effect was immediate. Strength drained from his limbs like water through an open faucet. His vision blurred and the arms that had been throwing men into walls went slack.
A blow to the back of his head. The corridor tilted sideways.
Another blow.
The world went dark.
---
Nick woke to cold concrete against his back and chains pulling his wrist above his head.
The overhead light buzzed. His ankles were free but it didn’t matter — the wristband hummed faintly against his skin, suppressing everything the transformation had given him.
He tested the chains. They held. His body felt heavy and slow, answering at half-speed, the power beneath his muscles muted to an ache.
This was somewhere else. The air was different — thicker, warmer, sealed off from the city above. The concrete was newer. The chains were heavier. They had moved him while he was out, taken him somewhere deeper, somewhere Mike would never think to look.
Nick hung there, breathing hard, and understood exactly what he had done.
The door opened.
Bill entered alone.
He filled the doorway the way he filled every space — shoulders, chest, the solid weight of his belly, all of it radiating the dense physicality that compressed the air around him. The black latex shirt caught the overhead light. The harness straps sat precisely across his chest, the silver BB badge glinting. A cigar burned between his fingers.
His purple eyes moved over Nick with open, unhurried assessment.
He closed the door behind him, crossed the cell, and stood close enough that Nick could smell the smoke and something underneath it — warm and organic, carrying the same weight as his voice.
“You came for the friend,” Bill said. Even, conversational.
Nick said nothing.
“You put three of my men down in that hallway. Four, maybe.” Bill took a slow drag on the cigar. “That’s real power. I haven’t seen someone move like that in a long time.”
He exhaled. The smoke drifted between them.
“And you spent all of it trying to reach a man who doesn’t know your name anymore.”
Nick’s jaw tightened. “He recognized—”
“Muscle memory.” Bill’s tone carried no cruelty. He said it the way someone corrects a factual error. “The body remembers. It doesn’t mean the person is deciding anything.”
Nick pulled against the chains. The wristband pulsed and his arms went heavy.
Bill watched the effort with something close to appreciation. “I admire your determination.” He nodded toward Nick’s wrist. “The wristband suppresses your powers. Everything your transformation gave you — the strength, the durability, the flight — it’s all still in there. You just can’t reach any of it.” He paused. “So pull all you want.”
Nick pulled. The chains held. The wristband hummed.
Bill watched him for a long moment. Then he took a final drag on his cigar and set it aside on the concrete ledge. The gesture was deliberate — unhurried, precise, the way a man clears a workspace before beginning something that requires his full attention.
“You were given something remarkable,” Bill said. “That body. That power. And you have no idea what it’s actually for.” He stepped closer. “I do.”
His purple eyes held Nick’s from close enough that Nick could see the faint dark aura shifting around him.
“I’m going to make you what you were supposed to be,” Bill said.
Nick opened his mouth to answer. Nothing came.
Bill opened his.
What came was thick, dark, and alive. It poured from his lips in a slow, heavy stream — down his chin, down his chest, dripping from the glossy surface of his latex shirt to the concrete floor. It pooled between them, catching the overhead light like oil, and gathered itself with deliberate purpose.
Then it moved toward Nick.
Nick kicked at it, tried to scrape it off against the concrete. The substance held firm and kept climbing.
The substance reached his red boots first, swallowing the bright leather in a slow wave of black. Then it climbed above them.
The first sensation was pressure — firm, encompassing, warm against his calves. It found the surface of his suit and pressed into it. The blue fabric with its yellow accent stripes didn’t tear or peel away. It absorbed. Color leached from the material, blue fading to grey, yellow dimming to black. The suit’s surface hardened as it changed, stiffening from flexible fabric to something glossy and rigid against his skin.
But the suit wasn’t the only thing changing. Beneath it, warmth seeped through the fabric and into his skin — slow, deliberate, settling into the muscle of his calves like heat from a compress. The substance was inside him too, working inward through his pores at the same time it changed his suit from the outside.
The sound it made was faint and specific. A soft, wet creak — latex stretching under pressure.
“Get it off me,” Nick said. His voice was steady. Controlled. “Whatever this is, it won’t work.”
“You can feel it,” Bill said, watching Nick’s face. “No point pretending.”
“He’ll find me,” Nick said. “Superbear will come for me and he will tear this place apart.”
Bill said nothing to that. He didn’t need to.
Nick could feel every inch. His calves, his shins, the curve of his knees — sealed beneath the new material, every contour traced and tightened. His suit didn’t disappear. It became something else.
“Your body knows what strength feels like,” Bill said. He stood with his arms at his sides, patient. “It learned that the day you became this. I’m not giving you anything foreign. I’m speaking a language you already understand.”
The substance reached Nick’s thighs. His muscles tightened beneath it and he felt them respond — swelling subtly, density increasing, the corruption feeding what was already there from both sides. Outside, the black latex tightened around the growth with a faint squeak. Inside, the warmth pushed deeper into the muscle, threading through him.
“It’s — warm,” Nick said, and hated himself for saying it. “What is this? What’s it doing to my legs?”
He hated that it felt good. He hated that his body leaned into it the way a cold muscle leans into heat.
“What are you—” Nick started, but the substance crossed his waist and the words dissolved. The warmth concentrated between his legs — sudden, intense, impossible to ignore. His breath hitched. His hips shifted involuntarily against the pressure and he bit down on the sound that tried to follow.
The red belt darkened, the gold C buckle tarnishing to black as it was swallowed. His cape darkened at the edges, the change creeping upward, red turning to black, the fabric growing heavier.
The substance climbed his stomach. His abdominal muscles clenched and a groan escaped him before he could stop it. His shoulders broadened as the corruption spread across his chest, the red cape clasps at his shoulders turning black. His pecs swelled beneath the suit as it sealed over them — thicker, heavier, pushing against the black latex until it creaked and tightened around the new mass. Every nerve responded. The warmth was immediate and undeniable — his body recognized power in whatever form it arrived, and this form spoke the same language his transformation had spoken.
A moan escaped Nick’s throat — low, involuntary, unmistakable. His face flushed. His body was responding to the corruption with something beyond recognition. Something that felt like desire. He could feel arousal building beneath the suit, warm and insistent, his body interpreting the flood of power as pleasure he hadn’t asked for and couldn’t shut off.
“Why does it—” Nick’s voice cracked. His eyes squeezed shut. “Why does it feel so good.”
The bear paw badge on his chest darkened last — the gold hexagon turning black, the paw print still visible but only at certain angles, like a brand beneath the surface.
Bill watched. He said nothing now. Nick’s body was doing the work — responding to the corruption with the same recognition it had given to every good sensation the transformation had ever offered.
Something was happening to his thoughts. Nick tried to picture Mike’s face and the image came back soft, distant, like a photograph left in sunlight too long. He knew the face. He knew he loved it. But the details were harder to hold than they should have been.
The suit crept across his shoulders and down to his biceps where the short sleeves ended — the same cut as before, now tight black latex that squeaked faintly as he flexed against it. His arms were thicker than they had been, the new mass straining against the sleeves.
Below the sleeves, his bare forearms were exposed. But Nick could feel the warmth moving through them anyway — the substance that had been seeping through his skin since his calves, migrating steadily through his body, threading through the muscle beneath his bare skin. He could trace its path by sensation alone.
His red wrist cuffs darkened from the inside out — the color draining as the substance reached them from beneath.
“My name is Nick,” he whispered. “I’m Nick. I’m—”
The thought slipped. He reached for it again.
A different thought arrived in its place, quiet and fully formed: I want to serve him.
Nick flinched. That thought wasn't his. He knew it wasn't his. But it sat in his mind with the weight of something true, and he couldn't find the words to argue with it.
Nick tried to hold onto the framework he’d built with Mike — consent, care, what power was for. The thoughts were there but they felt thin. The sensation in his body was immediate. The arguments were becoming difficult to reach.
Nick’s resistance had been weakening steadily, each stage costing more than the last. By the time the change reached his neck he had stopped pulling against the chains. By the time it touched his jaw, he was struggling to remember why he had been pulling at all.
The substance crested his jaw. His beard darkened beneath it. The warmth moved behind his eyes — absolute pressure, like a lens being adjusted.
Then — one final moment. Brutal and brief.
Nick surfaced completely. He could feel the suit nearly finished around him, could feel what it had done to his thoughts, could feel the version of himself that would exist in seconds looking back at everything he’d been.
He didn’t fight. He didn’t shout.
Something moved in his chest — instinctive, older than language, reaching outward through the layers of corruption that hadn’t quite sealed. A pulse of bear energy, raw and undirected, sent toward the only frequency he knew as well as his own.
I’m here. I need you.
It left him like a breath. Small. Specific. The last thing that was his.
Bill didn’t react. The pulse registered as nothing to him — his framework had no category for what Nick had just done, an act of connection inside a system built on ownership.
The change reached Nick’s eyes. His vision went dark, then returned in a different register. The room looked the same but the meaning of everything in it had shifted.
Nick’s eyes opened. Violet.
---
The wristband pulsed once against Nick’s skin — then went dark. Whatever it had been suppressing, the corrupted suit now spoke the same language. The wristband couldn’t hold back power that belonged to its own system.
Strength flooded back. More than before. Darker, heavier, roaring through his muscles like something uncaged.
Nick snarled and ripped his arms apart.
The chains exploded. Bolts tore from the concrete, links shattered and scattered across the cell in a burst of violet energy that crackled from his fists and lit the walls. The dead wristband flew off with the debris. The sound was enormous — metal screaming, concrete cracking, the cell itself flinching from what he’d become.
Nick stood in the wreckage, chest heaving, fists clenched, violet light still flickering around his knuckles. He flexed his hands. Everything worked.
He looked at the cell where he had been held. At the chains on the floor.
He had been strong and chosen to stay small. He had been powerful and held himself back, waiting for someone else to tell him it was allowed.
The thought carried no grief. It seemed true.
Bill stood near the door.
Nick looked at him with violet eyes and felt something settle into place — clear and complete.
“Master,” Nick said. The word came easily. It felt like the first honest thing he’d said in months.
Bill crossed the cell. His hand came up to Nick’s jaw — the same grip as before, but the intent behind it had changed. Possessive. Claiming what was already his.
“You’re mine now,” Bill said.
Nick leaned into the grip.
Bill kissed him. Deep and commanding — ownership made physical. Nick answered it without hesitation, his body pressing forward against Bill’s, the black latex of his corrupted suit meeting the black latex of Bill’s shirt with a soft, deliberate sound.
When they separated, Bill’s hand stayed on Nick’s jaw. His purple eyes searched the violet ones.
He found exactly what he expected.
Nick looked at the man he belonged to and felt proud to be his.
This story is the sequel to Remaking Andrew. Enjoy!
---
The directive was simple: intercept the hero. Neutralise. Return.
Andrew was already moving when Superbear cleared the rooftop edge. The body knew what to do — it always knew now, the conditioning sitting deep in the muscle, in the reflex, in the space where deciding used to happen. He crossed the gap between buildings fast and low, boots finding the ledge and leaving it in the same motion, the harness tight across his chest, and closed the distance before the hero had fully turned.
He hit him shoulder-first, full weight behind it, and felt the impact travel all the way up his arm and into his chest. Superbear absorbed it — staggered back a step, no more — and came around with a strike that caught Andrew across the jaw and sent him sideways into a ventilation unit hard enough to crumple the housing.
The body was back on its feet before the ringing stopped.
Bill’s cigar smoke had packed him with dark bear energy, dense and unstable, and in the field it translated to mass and speed and a pain threshold that registered damage without responding to it. Andrew felt his jaw, felt the split skin along his cheekbone, and the body filed it away and moved. Superbear threw another strike — controlled, precise, the kind of hit from someone who knows exactly how hard they’re hitting — and Andrew caught it on his forearm, redirected the force, drove an elbow into the hero’s ribs and heard him exhale hard.
That bought two seconds. The body used them.
It closed, got inside Superbear’s reach, and grabbed. Andrew’s hands locked around the hero’s forearms and his feet planted and he hauled, trying to take the larger man’s balance, and for a moment it almost worked — Superbear’s weight shifted, his footing uncertain on the gravel — but then a knee came up hard into Andrew’s midsection and the grip broke and Andrew went back three steps, chest heaving, and the fight reset. He felt the harness shift with the impact — one of the chest straps pulling loose from its anchor, the leather creaking under tension it hadn’t been built to take.
Somewhere behind the action, in the part of him that watched from a long way back, Andrew registered the red cape. The bear crest on the chest. Superbear. He knew that name. The city’s hero. Everyone knew that name. The thought arrived fully formed and dissolved before it could mean anything — the suppression closed over it like water over a stone.
He kept moving.
Superbear pulled back. Went up.
Andrew tracked him and had nothing to offer. The hero rose fast — ten feet, twenty, thirty — and from up there went still, hovering with the city spread out behind him, looking down at the figure on the roof with an expression that gave him nothing. A pause that lasted long enough to feel deliberate. Long enough to feel like a decision being made.
Then he came down fast, closing the distance before Andrew could move, and drove into him with his full weight behind it — a tackle that took them both to the ground hard.
The impact drove Andrew onto his back, the gravel biting into his shoulders, his vision whiting at the edges. The harness — already stressed, the chest strap half-pulled from its anchor — took the shock and gave. The remaining strap snapped, the buckle scraping a hot line across his chest, and with it something else gave too — the suppression dropping a register, thin and unstable where it had been solid.
Superbear’s hand closed around Andrew’s bare forearm, holding him down, and something moved through that contact — rainbow energy, unasked for, finding the gap in the suppression before either of them understood what was happening. What happened next was a break — clean and sudden and total, the way ice goes.
Andrew was flat on his back on a rooftop in a torn harness in a body chosen for him, and he was himself, fully and completely and horribly himself, for the first time since the warehouse. Superbear was still over him, one hand on his forearm, the weight of him close.
He tried to speak. What came out first was: “Cazzo.”
Then, in English, barely above a breath: “I didn’t want to.”
Superbear held his position, looking down at him for a long moment — at the expression on his face, at his free hand open and still against the gravel — and waited.
Andrew looked up at him. The city’s hero, three feet away.
“I didn’t want to,” he said again. It was the only thing that seemed true enough to say out loud.
---
That was four weeks ago.
What followed happened in pieces, the way things do when the body is fighting itself. A guest room somewhere safe, its address kept from him. The physical regression arrived within the first day — mass receding, body hair thinning, the beard shortening until the mirror showed him someone he recognised. The exchange student. His own face, looking back at him.
The corruption surfaced without warning. Dark and sudden, his voice going wrong, something foreign moving through him. It was loud — pressure more than sound, a constant roar that pushed his own thoughts to the edges.
During those episodes Superbear, now as Mike, came — every time, without being asked. He sat at the edge of the bed and said nothing, and when the wave crested he placed a hand flat against Andrew’s chest and held it there. The roar stopped. Just stopped, the way a door closes on noise from another room. A warmth stayed behind where the hand had been, faint and specific, like the afterimage of something bright. Andrew lay still. Mike kept his hand there until his breathing evened out, then lifted it. Neither of them mentioned it.
Andrew carried it afterward. Some mornings he woke with his chest feeling fuller than it should, a low steady heat that wasn’t quite his own. He didn’t know what to make of it. He left it alone.
Alone in the dark some nights later, his mind ran the room. The campus ad placed exactly where a broke exchange student would see it. Bill’s questions in the warehouse — how long he’d been in the city, who he knew, whether he had family nearby — landing like small talk, functioning as a checklist. Andrew had been scouted before he walked through the door. He had answered every question.
He lay there and held that and let it become something harder than shame.
---
Today was the first day outside.
He walked without a destination, relearning the city at street level, in a body he’d worn for twenty years and now inhabited differently.
He blended. Nobody looked at him. He was slight, smooth-faced, dressed in a grey jacket and jeans that fit the frame he’d had before the warehouse.
He kept walking. He could feel the healing energy settled low in his chest — quiet, patient. Almost done.
He turned a corner and saw it happening across the street.
A big man had a young man backed against a wall outside a closed shop front — thick through the shoulders, a leather harness over a black tank top, boots that added weight to every step. One of Butch Bear’s goons. The young man was slight, mid-twenties, shoulders drawn inward, already losing the negotiation with his own instincts about whether to stay or go. The goon was speaking quietly. Reasonable tone, unhurried posture, the practised ease of a man who had done this many times and knew exactly how it ended.
Andrew recognised every beat of it. The approach. The flattery. The slow narrowing of options until staying felt easier than leaving.
He was crossing the street before the thought completed. No plan. No calculation. He stepped between them and turned to face the goon, and the goon looked at him — slight, smooth, visibly outmatched — and almost smiled.
“Walk away,” Andrew said.
The goon glanced past him at the young man, then back. Taking his time. “You sure about that, friend?” He said it the way you’d say it to a child who’d wandered into the wrong room — patient where another man might have been hostile. Waiting for Andrew to realise his mistake and correct it.
The goon took a step forward, close enough that Andrew had to hold his position deliberately, his heart loud in his own ears. The almost-smile hadn’t moved. “You’ve got nerve. I’ll give you that. Wrong place to show it though.”
Andrew held his gaze. “Walk. Away.”
The goon looked at him for a moment. Then, without a word, reached past him toward the young man.
Andrew had been on the other side of it — the moment the target stopped being a person and became a task. Something shifted in his chest, low and certain. He’d spent four weeks in a guest room recovering from what men like these did to people. He was done being something that got stepped around.
The energy in his chest answered him.
Heat broke through his bloodstream in one decisive wave — thick, immediate, nothing like the cold press of Bill’s energy or the corruption’s narrowing grip. His heart shifted rhythm, slower and deeper, a beat he felt in his jaw and the backs of his hands and the soles of his feet all at once. The air sharpened. The street sharpened. The goon in front of him sharpened into something small and very readable. He stayed standing. He held the goon’s gaze.
His chest expanded first — one sharp involuntary inhale that kept going, his ribcage broadening past what his lungs needed, his jacket pulling taut across his back with a resistance that built and built and then simply gave. The stitching parted along the shoulders with a sound he felt more than heard. The mass arrived without stages: through his shoulders first, a deep pressure building under the skin like something finally filling a space that had always been too large — then the release, muscle thickening outward, warm and dense, a pleasant ache that sat at the exact threshold between effort and ease.
Through his arms next, the same pressure and the same release, his sleeves tight and then gone, the skin over his biceps stretching taut and warm. Through his thighs the pressure came differently — slower, fuller, a dense warmth spreading down through the quad and into the knee, his jeans losing the fight inch by inch as the muscle beneath them simply outgrew the argument. Each wave hitting harder than the last, a full-body throb that started deep in the muscle and pushed outward, and he was aware of all of it at once, aware of his own body in a way he had never been before. A deep, insistent pleasure — the kind that lives in the muscle and means something. His hands grew wide and heavy at his sides, fingers thickening, his arms hanging differently now — weighted, settled, the pull of new mass making itself known at his shoulders and wrists. His feet found the pavement differently when it finished. More of him pressing down. The ground solid under him in a way it had never quite been before.
The goon’s almost-smile was gone.
Heat concentrated in his jaw and the beard came with it — thick and black and immediate, the scratch of it against his own skin registering before he’d fully processed that it was there. He reached up, almost without thinking, and touched his face.
Dark hair spread across his chest and arms in the same surge, dense and warm. Blue light pulsed once, sharp and brief, and the suit came with it: Azzurri blue stretched taut across a chest that filled it completely, white piping running clean along the seams from shoulder to boot, blue wristbands firm against forearms that had outgrown everything else he’d been wearing. A red cape settled across his shoulders with a weight that felt like the last piece of an argument.
It was over in seconds.
Andrew looked down at himself. The suit. The size of his hands, the mass of his arms, the cape shifting against his back in the cold air. Something broke open in his chest — brief and bright and completely involuntary. He was enormous. He was a superhero. And unlike the last time he’d been this size, every inch of it was his — chosen, arrived at, answering to nobody. He almost laughed.
He stood between the goon and the man he had been about to take.
The goon looked up at him. Looked at the suit. Looked at the size of him.
Then swung anyway.
The fist connected with Andrew’s jaw and Andrew felt it — felt it the way you feel a tap on the shoulder. He turned his head with the impact, more out of surprise than necessity, and looked back at the goon with an expression he couldn’t quite read on his own face.
The goon stared at his own hand.
Andrew reached out, closed one hand around the goon’s harness, and hoisted him off the pavement — one arm, no effort.
He looked at him for a moment, dangling. Then tossed him aside. The goon hit the ground hard.
He scrambled to his feet. Looked at Andrew, then at his own hands, then back at Andrew.
“What the fuck.” He straightened his harness, already backing away. “The boss is gonna hear about this.”
He left. Quickly.
Andrew turned to the young man, who was standing very still with his back against the wall, staring.
“Are you hurt?” Andrew asked. Then, when the man stood silent: “Stai bene?”
The man blinked. “I’m — yeah. I’m okay. What just—”
“Go home,” Andrew said. “Take a different route than usual.”
The young man nodded, still staring, and then went.
Andrew stood on the empty pavement and looked down at himself. The size of his hands, spread wide and unfamiliar. The mass of his arms, dark hair thick across them, the cape shifting against his back in the cold air. He ran a hand slowly across his chest — the deep V of the suit open enough to feel the hair there, coarse and real beneath his fingers. He turned one hand over slowly, then the other. Still finding the edges of it. Still deciding what it meant.
He stood there for a moment, just breathing.
---
He came through the apartment door looking like that.
Mike was on his feet instantly. “What the hell—”
He stopped. Stared. Working through it — the size, the suit, the beard, the sheer amount of him filling the doorframe — before landing on his face.
“Andrew?”
“It’s me,” Andrew said.
“Andrew.” Mike said it again like he was testing whether it would stop being true. “You’re — you’re a superhero. You’re huge!” He jabbed both hands toward Andrew’s arms, bouncing on his heels. “Flex! Right now. Flex for me!”
Andrew glanced down at his own arm. Raised it slowly, almost uncertainly, and flexed — a small, shy smile breaking through. The sleeve pulled tight across his bicep. Mike grabbed his own head with both hands in excitement and squealed.
He crossed to him in two steps, both hands landing on Andrew’s arms — gripping the bicep, the shoulder, squeezing, moving to the chest and back again. Talking the entire time, at least two things simultaneously, his delight so uncontained it had become its own weather system.
“—just like us, look at you, oh my god that huge hairy chest — that suit — is that blue, that’s your blue — and the beard — Nick, are you seeing this—”
“I’m seeing it,” Nick said from across the room.
He was leaning in the kitchen doorway, arms folded, watching with an expression Andrew was starting to be able to read. Quiet. Genuinely pleased. Not performing it. He pushed off the wall and crossed to Andrew, watching the way he held himself. Something had settled in him. Nick looked at him for a moment, then met his eyes.
“You seem like yourself.” A pause. “How did you transform? We weren’t there to do it.”
“There was one of Butch Bear’s goons,” Andrew said. “Outside. He had someone backed against a wall — running the same script they used on me.” He paused. “I stepped between them. And then it just — happened.”
Nick looked at Mike. Then back at Andrew. “The energy Mike put into you during recovery.” He said it slowly, like he was reasoning it out. “It must have collected itself. And then you triggered it.”
Andrew turned it over. It felt true.
Nick smiled. “You’re one of us now.” A pause. “Have you thought about a name yet?”
Andrew looked between them. “I was thinking—” He paused. “Super Orso.” He said it like he was still deciding whether it fit.
“Super Orso.” Mike grabbed Andrew’s arm with both hands. “Super. Orso.” He said it again like he was tasting it, and then his expression resolved into something that left no room for doubt. “That’s the one. That is absolutely the one—”
“That’s just your name in Italian, Mike,” Nick said. “Orso means bear.”
Mike’s mouth opened. Closed. He looked at Andrew. Then at himself. Then back at Andrew. “I don’t care. It’s still the one. I love it!”
Nick smiled. “Can’t argue with that. Super Orso it is.”
Andrew looked down at himself. Super Orso. The suit was real. The name was real. There was a lot he still needed to figure out — but he knew where to start.
Nick touched down on the outskirts of the city at half past five in the morning, in a retail car park empty enough that no one saw it. He'd gotten better at landings. He still found them slightly absurd.
He switched to civilian clothes — a thought, a flicker of rainbow energy, chinos and a green henley and brown boots where the suit had been — and walked until he found a café that was open. It wasn't hard. Suburbs always had one place running early for shift workers and insomniacs, and this one had a corner table and reasonable coffee and no one who looked twice at him.
He sat with his mug and thought about the fact that he had flown here. Across the entire country, at altitude, in a few hours, under his own power. That was still a sentence he couldn't quite make ordinary. Six weeks ago this would have meant a flight he couldn't afford. Now he was in a café two streets from Jacob's house having arrived the way weather arrives, and the most remarkable thing about the morning so far was that the coffee was actually good.
He'd known Jacob for four years. Voice calls, D&D sessions that ran until two in the morning, the slow accumulation of someone's whole interior life exchanged in fragments over time. He didn't know what Jacob looked like standing in a doorway. That was the part that was new.
At eight o'clock he paid, picked up his bag, and walked to Callum Street. The house was the third one — a semi-detached with a blue front door that Jacob had described to him twice in the last week, apparently worried Nick would get it wrong. He stood at it for a moment, settling into it. Then he knocked.
There was a pause — long enough that Nick wondered if he'd gotten the time wrong — and then footsteps, and then the door opened.
Jacob was shorter than Nick had pictured. Broader too, in a soft way, ginger hair pushed flat on one side from sleep, green eyes blinking against the morning light. He looked at Nick for a moment — taking in the henley, the beard, the glasses, the sheer fact of him filling the doorframe — with the specific expression of someone whose brain is buffering.
"You're," Jacob said. Then stopped.
"Yeah," Nick said.
"You're huge."
"Little bit."
Jacob laughed — the slightly unhinged kind that comes out when something is both exactly what you expected and nothing like it at all. "Four years," he said. "Hi."
"Hi," Nick said.
"Come in, come in." Jacob stepped back to let him through. "You can leave your bag there — " he gestured at the hallway " — and I'll put some coffee on."
Nick dropped his bag by the stairs and followed him into the kitchen.
"How was your flight?" Jacob said, not looking up from the coffee maker.
"Good," Nick said. "Fine. Yeah."
"That's very specific."
"It was a very uneventful flight."
"You've been saying for three years you couldn't afford to come out here."
"Situation changed," Nick said.
Jacob looked at him for a moment, decided to let it go, and handed him a mug.
The kitchen was warm and a little cluttered in the way shared houses always are, and they settled against the counter, talking the way they always talked — his course, a D&D campaign they'd abandoned six months ago and kept meaning to return to.
Jacob turned toward the counter and said, without quite looking at him: "Can I ask you something weird?"
"Sure," Nick said.
"When did you get so big? Like — built. Beary. All of it. I didn't know you were a gym person."
"Just got into it a few years back," Nick said. He felt bad for lying, but it was easier this way.
"Right." Jacob turned to face him, leaning back against the counter. "Well. It suits you. Genuinely." A beat. "I tried the gym thing for a while. Never really took. I just wanted to lose weight, if I'm honest. That was always the whole goal. Get smaller, feel better. Didn't work, so." He shrugged. "Stopped trying."
"Is that still what you want?" Nick said. "To be smaller?"
Jacob considered it. "I want to feel comfortable. I've just never been able to picture what that looks like without also being thinner." He looked up. "Which probably says something." A beat. "I've just kind of been waiting to feel okay in my own skin for — " He stopped. "A long time. And I don't really know what that looks like anymore."
"For what it's worth — I've known you for four years. I've never once thought about your body. I've thought about you — the actual you. That guy has always been enough."
Jacob looked at him. Something moved across his face that he didn't quite manage to contain.
"Sorry," he said. "That's — " He exhaled. "No one's ever actually said that to me before."
"It's true," Nick said simply.
Jacob set his mug down on the counter. He crossed the kitchen and hugged Nick.
The real kind — both arms, full, the kind that means it.
Nick hugged him back. A faint shimmer passed between them, brief as a breath, the colour of something just out of focus. Neither of them saw it.
And then something moved.
It started as warmth — deep under his skin, radiating outward through his ribcage like the first wave of fever heat. Jacob pulled back from the hug instinctively and looked down at his hands.
His fingers were thicker. He could see it — the knuckles widening, the tendons rising — and feel it too, a deep pressure building through his palms and into his wrists, his forearms, moving inward and upward.
"Something is happening to me." He pressed both hands to his chest and felt it there — a low, building heat, his heartbeat stronger, his shirt pulling tight across his shoulders as the muscle beneath it thickened. "Something is actually happening to me right now."
"Just breathe — " Nick said.
"Breathe?" Jacob laughed, high and startled. Then he felt it — a tingling across his sternum, needle-fine at first, spreading fast. Under his palms, pushing through the skin in a slow warm wave: hair. He could feel each follicle opening, a thousand tiny points of heat blooming across his chest and down his stomach. He looked down at the gap between his buttons. "Oh my god."
"Jacob — "
"There's — there's actually — " The words dissolved. The tingling was everywhere now, moving down across his stomach, up over his shoulders and along his forearms, his blood running faster and hotter, his whole body buzzing with it. He pressed his palms flat against his chest and felt the hair thick and coarse and real under his hands and laughed again — differently this time, the panic cracking open into something else entirely.
Then his arms started.
He felt his biceps first — a deep, pressurised bloat of heat moving through the muscle, swelling outward against the fabric of his sleeves. He bent his arm instinctively and felt the peak of it press hard against his polo shirt, solid and dense and enormous, something he had no previous reference point for.
"My arms," he said, slightly awed. "Nick, my arms — "
His chest came next — a deep expansion outward in both directions, the pectoral muscle thickening and pushing forward in two solid slabs, his shirt going taut and then tighter still. He pressed both palms flat against it — broad, solid, real — and the breath went out of him. His back widened simultaneously, lats flaring, shoulders filling with mass, his centre of gravity dropping as his feet met the floor differently — heavier, more certain.
Then his belly.
He felt it change last among his torso — a deep internal solidifying, the softness compressing and hardening from the inside out, reshaping itself into something rounder and firmer and more deliberate. He pressed both hands against it and his breath caught. It was solid. A proper gut, dense and round and projecting forward with complete authority, a muscle belly that belonged to a body built to carry it. He pressed his palms into it and felt it push back and laughed out loud — startled and delighted — running his hands over the curve of it, feeling it firm and warm and completely, undeniably his.
"Oh," he said. Just that. "Oh."
The heat moved downward. His thighs thickened — a slow pressurised swelling through the quadriceps, the muscle pushing out against his chinos until the fabric strained. His calves followed, rounding out into solid muscle, and when he shifted his stance his legs felt like tree trunks beneath him — wide, planted, built to carry everything that now sat above them.
His face came last. His jaw ached pleasantly as it widened and squared, his cheekbones shifting, his whole face rearranging itself into something more defined, more settled. And then the beard came — a rush of tingling across his jaw and chin and upper lip, follicles opening all at once in a warm blooming wave, hair pushing through thick and fast, auburn with copper running through it.
He raised both hands to his face and felt it under his palms — dense, full, real — and laughed, full and helpless, not trying to stop it.
The heat ebbed slowly. His heartbeat steadied. The tingling faded to a low warm hum across his skin.
Jacob stood in the kitchen and breathed.
Then he said: "I need to see a mirror."
He found the one in the hallway and stood in front of it for a long time without speaking.
He was big. Solidly, undeniably big, in a way that read as a fact rather than a condition. His chest was broad and solid beneath his strained shirt. His arms pressed against his sleeves. His belly pushed forward, round and firm, the belly of a man fully at home in his own mass. His legs were planted beneath him like they meant it. He had a beard that looked like it had always been there, auburn with copper running through it, dense and full across his jaw. He looked like someone who had arrived somewhere and intended to stay.
A giggle came out of him. Completely involuntary, slightly unhinged. Then another.
"Jacob?" Nick said from the kitchen doorway.
"I look — " Jacob started. Stopped. Pressed one hand to his jaw, felt the beard against his palm. Then both hands to his chest. Then down to his belly, pressing into the firm curve of it and shaking his head slowly. "I look like myself," he said. "I have no idea what that means but that's what I look like."
He turned away from the mirror to face Nick, who had drifted into the hallway and was very still.
"The D&D call," Jacob said. "Six weeks ago. You were clean shaven. Your shoulders weren't like that." He pressed both hands against his own chest, still faintly warm. "And then we hug. And then this."
He looked at Nick. "What are you?"
"That's a longer conversation," Nick said. "Are you okay?"
"I have about a hundred questions. But yeah." A beat. "You lied to me. About the gym."
"Yeah," Nick said quietly. "I did."
"One thing," Jacob said. "Could you undo this?"
Nick considered it. "No."
Jacob nodded slowly. "Okay."
Jacob pressed his palms against his belly, felt it firm and round, and something settled in him that had been unsettled for a very long time.
"You're going to tell me everything," he said.
"I will. I promise."
Jacob looked at him for a moment. Then something in his face settled — the questions could wait. He crossed the hallway in two strides and threw his arms around him. Nick made a sound of genuine surprise. Jacob was thorough about it — both arms, full, pulling Nick in with a solidity that hadn't existed an hour ago — and held on with the easy confidence of someone who had just discovered that this was something his body could do.
"Thank you," he said, into Nick's shoulder. "I don't know what you did. But thank you."
Nick patted his back — a broad back now, a bear's back — and Jacob stepped away with a grin that took up his whole face. He rolled his shoulders back and looked around like someone seeing a familiar room from a new height.
Jacob's stomach rumbled. He looked down at it with something close to delight. "Huh. Big body, big appetite I guess." He looked up at Nick. "I'm making lunch. You want something?"
"Sure," Nick said.
---
Jacob made lunch. Nick answered questions carefully, giving Jacob enough to hold without explaining everything yet. By the time the plates were cleared Nick said he might lie down for a bit.
The guestroom was quiet. Nick sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his hands.
He had done something permanent without meaning to. Something that turned out, somehow, to be exactly right. He sat with that — the relief of Jacob's face in the mirror, the weight of not having chosen it, the specific complexity of both being true at once.
Outside he could hear Jacob in the kitchen. A mug set down. A quiet laugh at something, nothing, just the particular warmth of someone who had recently discovered they have a laugh worth letting out.
He reached for his phone and typed a message to Mike:
turned my first one today. a friend. it was an accident. he's okay though, really okay. gonna need to talk when I'm back
He put the phone face down on the mattress.
Outside, Jacob laughed again.
Nick lay back on the bed.
He didn't know yet what kind of person he was becoming. But for the first time in a while, that felt like something he could sit with.
This story was commissioned by a reader who wished to stay anonymous. Thank you for inspiring me! Enjoy!
Read part 2 of this story here!
The lecture hall emptied around him in the usual way — zippers, scraping chairs, the low hum of conversation heading for the door. Andrew closed his notebook and followed, crossing the courtyard in the thin afternoon light. He was twenty, tall, clean-shaven, and mostly invisible in the way exchange students tend to be: present but not yet rooted. He didn't mind. He was managing fine.
His phone buzzed as he reached the gate.
A notification — a campus ad, the kind that cycled through the university's housing boards and study portals. Participants needed for cognition study. €50 for 90 minutes. International students welcome. Below it, a contact form, a name he didn't recognize, and an address on the east side of the city. He read it twice. Ninety minutes. Fifty euros. His rent was due in ten days and his stipend didn't stretch.
He filled out the form before he reached the bus stop.
---
The address took him to the dockyards.
He almost checked his phone again when the bus dropped him off — the kind of neighbourhood where the buildings sat low and wide, rusted steel and concrete, units numbered with stencils that had half-peeled from the weather. Nothing here looked like a research facility. Nothing looked like much of anything. But the number matched, and there was a buzzer panel by the door, and the ad had been on the university portal. Verified. Legitimate.
He pressed the buzzer.
The man who answered wasn't what he expected. He filled the doorframe — broad-shouldered, bearded, wearing a black polo shirt tight enough to show that whatever research was happening here, the people running it weren't spending their days behind a desk. He held the door open and looked at Andrew with a settled, unhurried calm.
"You're here for the study."
Not quite a question.
"Yes," Andrew said. "Andrew Ferretti. I submitted the form this morning."
The man held the door wider. "This way."
---
He didn't explain where they were going. He just walked, and Andrew followed, because that was the obvious thing to do.
The front of the building held together fine — a corridor painted the colour of institutional indifference, a reception desk with nothing on it. But the deeper they went, the less it held. A side room with the door half-open: free weights, a bench press, rubber matting on the floor. Another: shelving units stacked with unmarked crates. The corridor narrowed. The lighting changed. The hum of traffic from outside disappeared entirely.
Andrew's eyes moved to the man's back, then to the side rooms, then back. He was running an inventory he hadn't meant to start.
At the end of the corridor the man stopped, pushed open a heavy door, and gestured inside.
The office was small and deliberately arranged. A desk, two filing cabinets, a single chair positioned in front of the desk like it had been placed there with intention. On the wall to the left, a mirror — tall, framed in dark wood, the kind that had no business being in a warehouse office. Andrew sat in the chair, the automatic politeness of someone raised not to make a scene.
The man moved to the desk. He was even larger in the confined space — broad through the neck and chest, heavy through the shoulders, a beard so dark and dense it seemed structural. The black polo shirt pulled tight across him as he settled into the chair with the ease of someone who had nowhere else to be.
He looked at Andrew the way people look at things they've already categorised.
Behind Andrew, the door clicked shut. A small sound. Too small. Bill didn't glance at it.
His stomach dropped.
"I'm Bill." He reached into the desk drawer and produced a cigar. "Do you mind if I smoke? It eases my mind." He was already lighting it.
The flame caught. He drew on it once, slowly, and set it between his fingers. The smoke drifted across the desk before Andrew had formed a single word.
"You responded to the ad."
"Yes." Andrew kept his voice even.
"What are you studying?"
"International law. And political science."
"Why are you in this city specifically?"
"Exchange program. From Bologna."
"How long?"
Something shifted. The questions weren't wrong exactly — researchers profiled participants — but the angle was off. Health history, screen time, sleep patterns. Not this. "Eight months. Three left." He kept his hands still in his lap. "I'm not sure how this is relevant to a cognition study."
Bill drew on the cigar. Exhaled slowly across the desk.
"It isn't," he said.
Silence.
He was running the numbers — door behind him, one man between him and it. The room was small. He was twenty years old and lean and had never been in a fight in his life.
"I think," Andrew said carefully, "I'd like to reschedule. I have a seminar I forgot about. I can come back—"
"You need money," Bill said. "Exchange programs are expensive."
Andrew's throat tightened. "I should go."
He stood. Turned toward the door.
"Sit down, Andrew." Bill's voice hadn't changed pitch or volume.
"No." Andrew heard himself say it clearly. "I'm leaving."
He took a step toward the door.
Bill rose.
The room got smaller. That was the only way to describe it — the man simply standing made the walls feel closer, the ceiling lower. He stepped around the desk with the unhurried ease of someone who had never needed to rush to catch anything in his life.
Andrew stopped. His breathing had gone shallow without him deciding that.
"You're not leaving," Bill said.
Andrew stared at him. "What?"
Bill didn't elaborate. He stepped forward. Andrew stepped back and found the wall — cold concrete against his shoulders, nowhere left to go.
"Let me out." His voice came out steadier than he felt.
Bill took a long, deliberate draw from the cigar. The ember brightened. He exhaled slowly, smoke drifting between them, and looked at Andrew with the patient expression of someone who had done this before and knew exactly how it ended.
Andrew tried to move around him.
Bill shifted his weight — barely, just enough — and the gap closed. One hand came up flat against the wall beside Andrew's head. Not grabbing. Not striking. Just there.
Andrew went still.
His heart was loud in his own ears. Bill was close enough that the smoke was unavoidable now, warm and heavy, curling at the edge of every breath.
"There's no version of this where you walk out," Bill said quietly. "The sooner you understand that, the easier this goes."
Andrew moved anyway.
Pure panic — there was nothing left but that. He ducked under Bill's arm and made it two steps before a hand closed around the back of his collar and pulled him to a stop as easily as lifting a coat off a hook.
"Don't," Bill said. Flat. Final.
Andrew twisted, tried to wrench free, got nowhere. Bill walked him backward until the wall found him again, one forearm across his chest, steady and immovable. Andrew pushed against it with both hands. Nothing moved.
He was breathing in ragged pulls now, partly from the struggle and partly from something else — the smoke was everywhere in the small room, inescapable, thicker than it had any right to be.
Bill leaned in close.
Andrew turned his face away, jaw clenched, holding his breath. He knew, without knowing how he knew, that he didn't want to breathe this in. Some part of him had understood that from the moment Bill lit the cigar.
He lasted a few seconds.
His lungs burned. His body made the decision his mind was fighting against, and he gasped — a long, involuntary pull of air that brought the smoke with it, dense and warm, filling his chest before he could choke it back out.
He coughed hard. Tried to turn away. Breathed in again. The smoke was already inside him.
The heat arrived immediately — deep, structural, radiating outward from his core like something had been switched on inside him. His hands were still pressed against Bill's forearm but they'd stopped pushing. He couldn't quite remember what they were supposed to be doing.
Bill stepped back.
Andrew's legs didn't hold. He went down slowly, hands catching the floor, and stayed there on his knees while the heat spread and the room tilted.
He tried to stand. His legs gave the attempt a moment of consideration and then ignored it entirely. He stayed on his hands and knees, shaking, watching the floor.
"What—" His voice came out wrong, cracked somewhere in the middle. "What did you—"
Bill leaned back against the desk. The cigar smoke drifted. He said nothing.
Then Andrew saw his hands.
His fingers were broadening — he could watch it happening, knuckles swelling, tendons rising to the surface as the skin pulled tighter over mass that was arriving from somewhere inside him. His hands looked like someone else's. Heavier. Dense. He turned them over and stared at the palms and his forearms were already thickening to match, muscle gathering fast beneath the skin.
"No—" The word came out before he'd decided to say it. "Stop— what are you doing to me—"
Bill didn't answer.
The heat moved upward. His shirt pulled tight across his shoulders — he felt the fabric strain, heard it, a low continuous complaint as his frame widened. His shoulders were forcing themselves apart, bone and muscle reshaping with a pressure that sat somewhere between sensation and wrongness, his body reordering itself against every instinct he had. His biceps surged next. Mass arriving fast, swelling past anything a person could build, his sleeves riding up his arms and then splitting at the seams with a soft tearing sound that turned his stomach.
His chest pushed forward. He felt his spine adjust, posture shifting without his permission, his centre of gravity dropping and settling somewhere new. A crack — loud, sudden — as his shirt gave across the back.
"Stop—" Louder now, desperate. "Stop it—"
He tried to get to his feet. His thighs were thickening as he moved, calves swelling, his shorts pulling taut across muscle that hadn't existed a minute ago — but the legs held this time. He stood, unsteady, heavier than he'd ever been, his centre of gravity somewhere completely new.
Bill watched with the same expression he'd had since the door locked. Patient. Already knowing the end.
The heat prickled across Andrew's chest — different now, a surface sensation, and he looked down and watched hair spread across his torso in a dark wave, dense and fast, covering him from sternum to stomach and moving down his arms in the same unstoppable crawl. He shuddered, a full-body recoil, and the movement made everything worse — he was bigger, he could feel it in the way his weight had shifted, and when he lifted his hands they were huge, thick-fingered, a stranger's hands at the end of his arms.
The pressure came next along his jaw.
Deep. Bone-level. His face was broadening from the inside out, cheekbones shifting, brow thickening, and he reached up with trembling hands and pressed his palms against his own face and felt it moving under his fingers. Felt his jaw widen. Felt the architecture of his skull rearranging itself.
Then the heat moved to his chin and throat, and the beard came in fast.
Every follicle at once. Stubble darkening into density into fullness in the space of a few seconds, thick and coarse and black, spreading across his jaw and up his cheeks and down his throat until it framed his face completely. He touched it with one shaking hand.
"No no no—" The words tumbled out, half-panic, half something that had stopped making sense. "What the fuck — what is happening—"
He turned to the mirror.
The man looking back was broad, bearded, massive. Shoulders that filled the frame. A chest pressing forward against a shirt hanging in ruins, dark hair covering it in a dense wave. A jaw he had never seen before, framed by a black beard that looked like it had been there for years. Dark eyes wide with an expression that was still — just barely — his own.
A sound escaped him — somewhere between a sob and a laugh, he couldn't tell anymore which.
Then the heat changed.
It had been damage — that was the only word for what the last few minutes had felt like, the body remaking itself by force. But the quality of it shifted. The edge came off. Something gathered low in his core, building, and his arm flexed without him deciding to move it.
He looked at the bicep. Huge. Solid. The sensation that rolled through him at the sight of it was good — immediate and undeniable and completely wrong.
"Fuck—" The word broke apart on the way out.
Bill watched from the desk. The cigar burned low. His expression had not changed once.
Andrew tried to hold onto his thoughts.
His name. The lecture hall. The bus to the dockyards. The number on the door. He reached for these things and found them slipping, the pleasure washing through faster now, the heat everywhere, and his body felt right in a way that was the most terrifying thing that had happened yet — more terrifying than the hands, the beard, the reflection — because rightness meant acceptance, and acceptance meant the part of him still fighting was losing ground.
He flexed again. Watched his arm respond.
The horror was quieter this time.
He looked down at himself. Broad chest. Thick arms. Powerful legs straining against black shorts that had been fitted that morning for a body that no longer existed. A thought surfaced, clear and completely foreign:
This is what I was supposed to be.
"No—" His voice had gone thin. "That's not — I don't—"
He flexed again. Watched his arm respond.
The protest died somewhere before it reached his mouth, and the silence that followed was different from all the silences before it.
He straightened slowly. His posture settled on its own — shoulders back, chest open, weight distributed across a frame that knew exactly how to carry itself. The expression on his face smoothed out. The panic drained away like water finding a drain, replaced by something blank and steady and calm.
Bill pushed off from the desk. He reached into a bag beside it and produced a leather harness — thick straps, heavy buckles — and held it out without ceremony.
The man who had walked into this building looked at it. Something distant registered what it was, what it meant, what taking it would mean. His hands reached out anyway. He drew it over his head, settled the straps across his chest, and buckled it without hesitation. The leather sat against him like it had always been there.
The last buckle clicked shut.
He straightened. Looked at Bill. And waited.
In his pocket, a phone was buzzing. A message from a project partner, asking where he was. No one would answer it.
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Steam filled the bathroom in soft white clouds, curling against tile and glass until the small space felt suspended from the rest of the apartment. Water poured steadily from the showerhead, warm and heavy, and Nick stood beneath it with his eyes closed, letting sensation arrive before thought.
His hands moved slowly across his chest, spreading soap over skin that responded with a low, pleasant tingling. The broad plane of muscle beneath his palms felt solid and substantial, dark hair clinging in wet curls, and he traced the slope of his pecs down to where they met his shoulders with something close to reverence. It felt impossibly good to exist inside this body—private and real, the kind of pleasure that needed no witness.
The water caught in his beard, heavier than he expected, and he laughed quietly as he shook his head and sent droplets scattering against the tile. A memory drifted up through the warmth: waking earlier with the mattress pressing firm into his thighs, his body feeling bigger even in sleep, the simple act of rolling over requiring more intention than it ever had before.
He smiled beneath the water, then reached carefully for the knob. When he’d first turned it on, he’d nearly twisted it clean off the wall. Now he eased the pressure deliberately until the stream slowed, then stopped.
Steam rose as he stepped out. The mirror was fogged completely, his reflection nothing but a blurred silhouette behind the glass. He lifted one hand and drew a slow line through the condensation.
The image sharpened. Broad shoulders emerged first, then his chest, then his face—and Nick blinked as the clarity hit him all at once.
He wasn’t wearing his glasses.
“Wait…” he murmured, glancing toward the nightstand in the other room where they still sat, abandoned and unnecessary.
He could see everything—clearly, perfectly, without the familiar weight on his nose or the smudged edges he’d lived with for years. A quiet laugh escaped him. The transformation had changed everything, apparently including this.
He wrapped the towel low around his waist out of habit, the familiar gesture grounding the unfamiliar body, and studied his reflection.
Same eyes. Same shape to his smile. Different gravity behind both.
Then he lifted one arm experimentally and flexed.
Muscle surged without effort, thickening and tightening beneath skin that stretched smoothly over power he was only beginning to understand. The movement felt natural, easy, like his body had finally learned a language it had been trying to speak for years.
“Whoa,” he breathed.
A small, private smile curved his mouth. This body belonged to him completely.
From the kitchen, faint sounds drifted in—a cupboard opening, a mug set down, the quiet hum of the coffee machine warming up. Life continuing, ordinary and patient, waiting for him to rejoin it.
Nick dried off slowly, then padded into the bedroom where Mike had laid out clothes on the bed.
Nick pulled on the clothes Mike had left folded on the bed—an oversized t-shirt that actually fit him now, sweatpants that settled comfortably low on his hips, clean white socks. The fabric carried a faint trace of Mike’s scent, something warm and familiar that made the borrowed feeling less strange and more like belonging.
He padded into the kitchen where morning light spilled across the counters in soft gold stripes. Mike stood at the stove with his back turned, one hand on a spatula, the other resting against the counter as if he needed the stability. Sausages sizzled in the pan beside a mountain of scrambled eggs, and a stack of pancakes was already threatening to topple off its plate.
Mike glanced over his shoulder when he heard Nick’s footsteps, and something in his posture eased immediately.
“Morning, Cub,” he said, voice warm and steady.
Nick shifted his weight, suddenly aware of how much space he took up even in borrowed clothes. “Morning.”
Mike’s smile widened as he gestured toward the table. “Sit. I made you breakfast—big beary body needs big beary fuel.”
Nick groaned. “You’re already doing this?”
“It’s pawsitive reinforcement,” Mike said, completely unrepentant as he slid a plate toward the table.
“That was terrible.”
“And yet,” Mike said, setting down a mug of coffee, “effective.”
Nick laughed despite himself and sat down. The chair held easily beneath his new weight, which was somehow both reassuring and slightly disconcerting. He reached for the coffee mug Mike had just set down—and the ceramic shattered in his grip.
Coffee splashed across the table and his lap in a hot wave.
Nick froze, hand still outstretched, shards of mug scattered across his palm.
He waited for the burn.
Nothing came.
Just warmth. Just wetness.
“Oh god—” Nick stared at his hand, at the broken pieces, at the coffee dripping onto the floor. “I didn’t even—Mike, I barely touched it—”
Mike was already moving, grabbing a towel, his expression calm and unsurprised. “First morning with super strength,” he said gently, wiping the table. “I broke three chairs and a sink faucet my first day.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.” Mike crouched down to pick up the larger shards, his movements careful and unhurried. “You’re going to crush a lot of things before your body figures out the difference between normal grip and super grip.”
Nick looked down at his hands—at these new, powerful hands that had just destroyed something without even trying. His heart was pounding from the sudden, visceral understanding of what he’d become.
He could hurt someone.
Just by reaching for a cup of coffee.
The realization settled into his chest, heavy and undeniable.
When Mike straightened up and moved to get another mug, Nick spoke—his voice steady, clear, and urgent in a way that surprised even himself:
“Can you show me how you learned to use this?”
Mike stopped. Turned. Met Nick’s eyes.
And without hesitation, without reframing or hedging or softening what Nick was really asking, he said:
“Yeah. Of course.”
Relief flooded through Nick so fast it made his breath catch.
Mike set a fresh mug down in front of him, this time leaving it within reach but not handing it over directly. “Eat up first,” he said. “Then we’ll head to the rooftop.”
Nick frowned slightly. “The rooftop?”
Mike’s smile turned knowing. “You’ll see.”
- - -
The elevator ride to the rooftop felt longer than it should have, Nick hyper-aware of every sound—the hum of machinery beneath his feet, the faint creak of cables, someone’s conversation three floors below them filtering through the walls like they were speaking directly into his ear.
When the doors opened, sunlight and noise hit him all at once.
The rooftop terrace stretched wide under open sky, dotted with potted plants and benches, the mechanical bulk of HVAC units humming in steady rhythm. Beyond the low walls, the city spread in every direction—traffic, voices, construction, wind—all of it layered and immediate and loud.
Nick staggered half a step.
His senses flooded. Smells hit first—hot concrete, diesel exhaust, someone brewing coffee in an apartment below, the sharp green scent of the plants—all stacking on top of each other without hierarchy or filter. Then sounds crashed in behind them, a dozen conversations happening blocks away suddenly competing for his attention alongside the wind and the traffic and the pigeons somewhere overhead.
“Whoa—”
Mike’s hand was at his back immediately, warm and grounding. “Breathe,” he said quietly. “Pick one thing. Just one sound. Focus on that.”
Nick squeezed his eyes shut and reached for something, anything stable.
The wind.
He found it moving across the rooftop, brushing against his skin, and let everything else blur into background noise.
The world softened.
“Okay,” Nick breathed. “That helped.”
“Your senses are boosted now,” Mike said. “At first it feels like everything’s screaming at you. Your brain’ll learn to filter. Give it time.”
Nick opened his eyes and nodded slowly, the city still loud but manageable now.
Mike smiled and stepped back, giving him space. “Next lesson. The suit.”
They stood facing each other in the open sun, Mike’s expression shifting into something more focused but still gentle.
“You already figured part of it out in your sleep,” Mike said. “Your subconscious wanted to be back in your own skin, so the suit just… let you go.”
Nick blinked. “So it listens to what I feel?”
“Pretty much.” Mike gestured at his own chest. “Focus inward. Feel the warmth in your body—the bear energy. It’s already there, just under the surface. Gather it into your chest like you’re drawing breath, but deeper. Let it build.”
Nick closed his eyes and reached for the sensation Mike was describing.
At first, nothing.
Then—there. A glow, faint and deep, pooling somewhere beneath his sternum. He focused on it, pulling it inward, and the warmth grew, spreading outward in slow waves that made his skin tingle.
“Okay… okay, I feel it…”
“Let it grow,” Mike said. “Then release it all at once.”
Nick held the warmth, let it swell until his chest felt full of light and pressure, and then—
He let go.
Rainbow light burst outward in rolling, brilliant waves, washing over him in warmth and color. For half a second the world went white—and then the suit snapped into place around his body, flexible and strong and impossibly comfortable, like it had been waiting for him all along.
Nick gasped and looked down at himself.
Blue and yellow fabric hugged his frame perfectly, the red cape settling across his shoulders with a weight that felt natural instead of awkward. The belt sat snug at his waist, the emblem resting over his heart.
“Oh my god,” he breathed.
Mike grinned, already transforming beside him in his own flash of rainbow light. When the glow faded, Superbear stood there in full costume, looking absurdly proud.
“Still can’t believe how comfortable this is,” Nick said, flexing experimentally. The suit moved with him exactly as it had last night, but this time he was paying attention. “I could actually nap in this thing.”
Mike laughed. “Right? Lazy-day pajamas of destiny.”
Mike’s expression shifted into something more mischievous. “Alright, Cub,” he said. “Time to fly.”
Nick’s stomach dropped. “Wait, like—right now?”
“Right now.”
Mike lifted off the ground as easily as breathing, hovering a few feet above the rooftop with his arms spread casually. “Think about lightness. Not force—balance. Like you’re deciding gravity doesn’t apply to you anymore.”
Nick stared up at him, heart pounding.
Then he focused.
Thought about rising. About choosing to leave the ground.
His feet lifted.
Awkwardly. Wobbling. His arms flailed for half a second before he caught himself and steadied, hovering unsteadily a foot off the concrete.
“I’m doing it!”
“You’re doing it bear-y well,” Mike said with a completely straight face.
Nick groaned mid-air. “Please stop.”
“Never.”
They rose higher together, side by side above the rooftop, sunlight glinting off the rainbow trails their movement left in the air. Nick laughed—actually laughed—the sound surprised out of him by the sheer joy of it. The city stretched below them, vast and alive, and he felt impossibly light and impossibly powerful at the same time.
When they descended for his first landing attempt, Nick came down smoothly, feet touching the rooftop with only a faint thud.
He grinned. “I did it.”
“You did,” Mike said, landing beside him. “Now let’s work on the subtle stuff.”
Mike reached over to a nearby bench and picked up an empty soda can someone had left behind. He held it out.
“Try holding this,” he said. “Without crushing it.”
Nick took the can carefully, adjusting his grip until he could feel the thin metal flexing but not collapsing under his fingers.
“Good,” Mike said. “Now dent it. Just a little.”
Nick pressed gently. The aluminum gave, dimpling inward under controlled pressure.
“Now crush it.”
Nick closed his fist. The can crumpled instantly.
Mike gestured toward a concrete planter box nearby. “Now lift that.”
Nick bent down, gripped the edge, and hoisted the massive planter overhead with one arm like it was made of foam.
“Oh my god, this is insane!” he laughed, holding it up, his whole face lit with delight.
Mike grinned. “Yeah. You’ve got this.”
Suddenly—clang! Metal striking metal, sharp and industrial. Loose rebar shifting in the wind.
Something jolted through Nick’s chest.
A pull.
The planter slipped from his grip and hit the concrete with a heavy crack, splitting down one side as dirt spilled across the rooftop.
Nick staggered back, breath catching.
Cold metal pressed against his back. Straps biting into his wrists. Evan's face—blank, controlled, checking the restraints with careful hands. Sir, he'd said. Called someone else Sir.
And the man with the cigar. Massive. Calm. Purple eyes watching Nick like he was already accounted for.
Then deeper—a presence. A connection lodged somewhere beneath his ribs, distant but undeniable, like a rope pulled taut across miles.
Evan was still out there. Still trapped. Still owned.
“Nick.” Mike’s hands were on his shoulders immediately, grounding him. “What is it?”
Nick’s chest felt tight. “Evan,” he said, the name coming out rough. “I can—I can feel him. He’s still there. With them.” He looked up at Mike, something harder edging into his voice. “They took him because of me. Because I was with you.”
Mike’s expression shifted—not surprise, but recognition.
“You’re sensing him,” Mike said quietly. “That’s part of this. The bear energy connects you to people you care about.”
Nick’s jaw tightened. “Then we have to get him back.”
“We will,” Mike said, his grip firm on Nick’s shoulders. “I promise.”
Nick nodded, throat tight, and Mike didn’t push. They stood together in the quiet, the city humming below them, the broken planter forgotten at their feet.
After a long moment, Nick took a breath and straightened.
“We need to keep going,” he said quietly. “For Evan. For everyone still out there.”
Mike studied his face, then nodded. “Yeah. We do.”
---
They trained for another hour—flight drills, strength exercises, pushing harder and faster. Nick flew higher than before, moved with more purpose, each movement deliberate and focused. The joy was still there, but tempered now with something deeper.
By the time they finally stopped, the sun had climbed higher in the sky and both of them were pleasantly tired in a way that felt earned.
They sat at the edge of the rooftop in their suits, legs dangling over the city. Nick rested one hand on the concrete ledge, the other drifting naturally to Mike’s thigh. Mike’s arm settled warm around his shoulders.
Morning light washed the buildings in gold. The city hummed below them, alive and ordinary and vast.
“This feels like me,” Nick said quietly.
Mike pressed a soft kiss to his temple. “I can see that.”
“I don’t feel lost.”
“Good,” Mike said softly. “Because you’re not.”
Nick leaned into him slightly. “Thanks, Bear.”
Mike’s arm tightened around his shoulders, and they sat together in the quiet, bodies relaxed, the world stretching wide in front of them. For the first time since everything had changed, Nick felt something settle fully into place.
