#superheros

Like you wanted, Atlas bristles. “I would never—” He takes a deep breath. “Look, the Shark, you’re new to the team so I’ll explain my expectations. Every member of my team is expected to show up for at least one support group and one community function a month. I thought you understood that when you volunteered at the Sharkfest Swim.”

You cock your head. “Yeah. Sharkfest Swim.” Now that Hero Force finally lets you go by the name you chose, you have to make up for lost time. You’ve so far gone to the local aquarium’s shark week celebration, six different showings of Sharknado, and done a Jaws themed bar crawl. People are starting to actually call you by name rather than the new hero on Atlas’ team.

“…It’s a nonnegotiable,” Atlas says at last. He points to his chest. “I go to a support group for Leaders. Cypher is part of Victim’s Anonymous—”

“Nice anonymity.”

“—Zig goes to grief group.” Atlas purses his lips. “We’re a team. We tell each other these things. She wouldn’t mind me telling you.”

“Uh huh.” You turn towards the cubbies. “Is there a My Team Leader Tried to Kill Me Anonymous?”

“That one’s yearly.”

You pause picking up your keys and water bottle. You look at him over your shoulder. “Seriously?”

Atlas rolls his eyes and doesn’t answer which probably means yes. He says, “This one is hosted in Sacramento. If you leave now, you’ll be just in time.”

That’s why he wants you to go. This is an opportunity for him to show off his team on his own turf. You flick open the cap of your water bottle and drink before answering. When you look back down, he’s staring at the gills on either side of your neck. You bare your human teeth at him. “Fine. If my team leader insists.”

“Good that you understand—”

“I’m taking the Charger.”

Atlas at least knows how to compromise. “…I’ll let the parking attendant know to release the keys to you.”

You grin and stride out of the gym, taking the stairs three at a time on the way back to your room.

-------.

Your grin lasts as long as you’re at 100 mph which times out about twenty minutes outside of the city. Rush hour traffic. You kill time by calling your old teammate Angel.

“You’re going to the Furry thing?” She sounds appalled. In the background you can hear the sounds of an office – keyboards and copiers and ringing phones. When your last team disbanded, the auditor who caught your old team leader also caught the both of you with active plans to go rogue. While you ended up passing your psych evals after, it was decided Angel needed some desk time before going back into the field. “Really?”

“Thank you!” You knew she’d understand. “I don’t think I—”

“There aren’t any shark furries,” Angel interrupts.

You falter. “Tons of people are into sharks—”

“Maybe.” She sounds doubtful. “But you don’t even look like one usually.”

You prod at your flat teeth. “You think I should transform before I go in?”

“I think you should wait outside, honestly. You’re just gonna ruin the vibe.”

“The vibe?”

“The furry vibe.”

You’re offended. You’ve never ruined a vibe before. “That’s so messed up to say. You know that’s not true.”

“It totally is. There’s gonna be Lynx there, and maybe Dragonfly, for sure Canine, that werewolf guy from Kentucky, and then there’s gonna be you. The big asshole in the muscle tank who just looks like a total normie.”

It’s not a muscle tank. It’s an athletic skin that keeps the combat belt you wear from chafing. “Angel, they’re not furries. They’re there to complain about furries making their jobs harder.”

“Everyone is a furry,” Angel says knowingly. “Deep down.”

“This is why you failed your psych eval.”

“I’m still convinced they just mixed up our names on the test forms.”

“It was in person.”

“The examiner seemed tired.”

“You vandalized our leader’s car.”

“I took out the spark plugs.”

“Yes. Vandalized.”

“Maybe desk work would do you some good,” Angel says. A keyboard clacks authoritatively. “If you did, you’d know that vandalism is intentional damage to property. What I did was theft.”

“…did you just look that up?”

“I hate talking to you,” Angel whines. She doesn’t hang up. “I’m just trying to help you. I was just messing with you about there not being shark furries.”

You perk up as traffic starts moving again. “There are?”

“Yeah.” She types something on her computer. Pauses. “Oh my god, you have a tag on this furry blog.”

“Hell yeah,” you say. “What does it—”

Angel bursts out laughing. “Oh my god. You have to watch this.”

There’s a ding as her message arrives. You scowl. “I’m driving.”

“You know how when a shark attacks, you’re supposed to push on its nose and turn it away? It’s a compilation of Atlas redirecting you by touching your shoulder or back. And it’s so true. The vacant look in your eyes is exactly the same.”

“Hey--!”

“The first comment is The Shark has one braincell and leaves it at home regularly.”

Your grip tightens on the steering wheel. “I thought furries were supposed to be, like, rabid fans. Not fucking bullies.”

“There’s that too,” she assures you. “They think it’s hot how empty your head is.”

“Does anyone have anything nice to say?”

Angel hums as she types. “This one says they want you to eat them.”

You feel relieved. “Like sexually, right? That’s more like—”

“No,” Angel says cheerfully. “Not sexually, actually.”

Maybe you need this meeting after all.

----.

By the time you arrive in Sacramento, you know too much about your furry fandom and their terrifying vocabulary. You’re also aware that while some members of the community are horny internet fucks, a lot of them aren’t. You’re also aware that no matter which category a furry falls into, that doesn’t make them safe.

You kind of do need a support group as it turns out.

You burst into the meeting room without introducing yourself to the guard standing in front of the cafeteria-like doors. Judging by how his eyes widen behind his standard-issue black mask and how he leaps out of your way, he knows who you are.

“These disgusting rats have to be stopped,” you announce to the people sitting in a circle in the center of the room. You pause as you take in the folding chairs, the red solo cups, and the table set to the side piled high with donut boxes and finger sandwiches. “Wow, this is more depressing than I expected.”

“I take offense to the rat comment,” Panya says. His heavy brow descends as he frowns and he rubs one of the rounded ears sitting on top of his bald head. A long prehensile, fleshy tail twitches behind him. “Rats are actually pretty clean.”

“I think I speak for the room when I take offense to the rest of that,” Lynx says. Unlike Panya, she still has her mask on. Besides how the fake fur shines under the artificial lighting, it’s a perfect match for her own tail which she has curled in her lap. “Canine finally let us bring booze.”

“Wow,” you breathe. You stare as you walk up to the circle and take one of the empty chairs. There are eight set up, but only four are filled. “You can really tell powers are mutations, huh? Otherwise, you wouldn’t have two sets of ears.”

Panya – formerly known as Rat to you before you bothered to read his file – bears his teeth at you. You smile back at him with all four rows of yours.

“I told you it was good they declined,” Flare tells the hero sitting in the only wheely chair in the circle. Her dragonfly wings are out which means she has to hunch forward to keep them from hitting the back of her chair. Her icy blue gaze cuts. “The Shark doesn’t have a filter.”

“Nice to see you again,” you say. Flare had been one of the instructors at the Hero academy when you were a student. You turn your attention to the last hero. “Thanks for inviting me, Canine.”

You know which side of your bread is buttered.

Canine looks less dog-like without the muzzle and vest that make up his normal uniform. His quick brown eyes remind you more of a fox than a dog. Unlike the other mammals in the circle, he’s able to control his transformation enough to hide his ears. He’s one of the older heroes you’ve ever seen, easily the oldest in the room by a decade.

Which, considering he looks like he’s pushing his mid-forties, is depressing.

“We might as well get started,” he says. There’s a rasp in his voice that sounds like it comes from vocal damage. His file says his bark is way worse than his bite. “Boar won’t be able to make it to the west coast and Pretty Kitty once again sends his well wishes.”

“He should only be invited if he changes his name,” Flare says waspishly. She picks her red cup from the ground and takes a healthy sip. Purple stains the corners of her mouth which she wipes off with the back of her hand. “He’s feeding into it with a name like that.”

“Wait, he’s actually named Pretty Kitty?” you ask. You know of the feline hero from Angel. Apparently most of the blogs are dedicated to him. “Seriously?”

Canine misreads why you’re upset. He holds up one hand. “I know, it may feel disrespectful, however it’s important to remember that, as heroes, we need to respect each other’s choices—”

“I had to petition for a year to be called The Shark,” you say, “and this guy gets to call himself pretty? That’s favoritism.”

“Allegedly,” Panya says, rolling his eyes, “it’s because Pretty Kitty operated as a vigilante before making a deal with Hero Force. So he was already known by that name.”

“That’s just encouraging vigilantism,” you say as if you weren’t planning to become one yourself less than 6 months ago. “We shouldn’t be encouraging rogue agents.”

Flare, who knows your history, glances at you askance.

Lynx has no prior bias. She throws her hands up in the air. “That’s what I said! I wanted to be called Feral but noooo the connotations—”

Panya snorts. “Connotations? Man calls himself Kitty which is basically infantilization. Cat would have been—"

“—if I’d gone vigilante instead of to the Hero Academy, I could’ve—”

“—adding to the fire, really, normalizing the general infantilization for all of us—”

“—not too late, we could do it now, all of us—”

“Since the Shark is new here,” Canine says loudly, “why don’t we have them share first?”

You lean back in your chair and it groans. You’re fascinated. “No, no, don’t let me interrupt.”

But it’s too late. Lynx and Panya are already looking at the ground guiltily, children caught in the same fight again. Flare gets up to pour herself another glass of wine.

“Introduce yourself, your power, and then share what brought you to group,” Canine says. He throws a longing look at the snack table and the bottles of wine adorning it. When Flare raises a second cup with one brow raised, he regretfully shakes his head. “This is a safe place.”

“The Shark, super strength and amazing teeth,” you rattle off. You lean forward. “What I wanna know is what I gotta do to get more thirsty fans and less bloodthirsty ones, if you get my drift.”

“I do not,” Flare says, looking disturbed.

“You know,” you say with a wink. When she continues to stare at you blankly, you open your mouth and point to your teeth. “They want me to—"

“Not going to happen,” Panya says. He uses his tail to snag a donut from the table. “You don’t get to choose who likes you or how.” He sounds like he’s quoting someone.

“That’s why we’re here,” Canine agrees. He spreads his hands. “We’re public figures. We can’t control how people react to us. We can only control how we react to that attention.”

“I run away,” Lynx says. She picks dust from her tail. “Up the side of buildings usually, or by jumping up to fire escapes that I know a regular person can’t reach.” Her ears droop. “There’s a new compilation of it on YouTube.” She buries her face in her hands. “It’s called Kitty Parkour. Pretty Kitty is in it too.”

You who also has a compilation of yourself featuring one of your least favorite people is sympathetic. “Mine is called Atlas redirecting the Shark for 10 minutes straight.”

“I love that one,” Flare says. She doesn’t flinch when you glare. “Also The Shark not knowing how big they are. It’s you trying to fit in a cable car.”

It’d been during the Jaws bar crawl and you’d already had a little too much to drink. When your new shark fan friends got on to get to the next bar, you didn’t think twice following. Everyone was cheering for you as you tried to fit your shoulders through the antique wood door.

You’d ended up having to jog alongside it up the hill when the conductor ran out of patience.

“Flare,” Canine says. If he had a tail, it’d be drooping. “You know better. We don’t feed into that content. We don’t make fun of each other.”

Flare winces. “Sor—”

“I really like all the fancasts of you as Tinkerbell,” you say. You squint at her. “Didn’t realize you’d be short enough for it too until today though.”

Flare’s mouth drops open.

“But now I know,” you say and smile.

The silence is brutal. Panya and Lynx have frozen in the way only an animal can. Complete stillness from ears to tail, eyes fixed into the far distance, peripheral vision fully activated so they can keep an eye on both you and Flare.

Even Canine seems like he’s at a loss for words. He crosses his legs. Clears his throat. Opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. “Okay, Shark, that was—”

“The Shark,” Flare and you correct at the same time.

You never stop smiling. “Aw, thanks.”

“That was funny,” Flare says. She raises her cup. “But the last time you bring up the fancasts, yeah?”

You can agree to that. “Fair enough.”

The vibe eases.

“My fancasts aren’t funny,” Panya says. “They just want me to be Peter Pettigrew.”

Lynx scrunches her nose. “Who?”

“Rat man from Harry Potter.”

“Gross.”

“Also weird considering that guy’s like five foot and white.”

The group studies Panya who, even not counting his tail, is almost as tall as your seven feet. Combined with his dark skin, he couldn’t be further from the description.

“What the fuck?” you finally say.

“Yeah,” Panya says. “Though I’m mostly at group because of the people who want me to live in their walls.”

“What?”

Panya nods sagely. “And chew on their wires.”

You think you’re going to have a great time at support group.

---

Thanks for reading! Raise your hand if you also want Panya to live in your walls and chew on your wires!

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