Mistakes, Mended.

Whack! I completely failed to expect the broom to the face. I mean, I expected to get my ass beat, just not milliseconds after opening the door.

“Ow! FUCK!” I cursed and held my nose as I toppled backwards from the small apartment I used to share. Well, still shared, technically. I hit the hallway floor and curled up sideways to protect my face as my roommate continued to whack me with a broom.

“YOU NEVER EVEN TOLD ME YOU AND ACID SHADOW WERE THE SAME FUCKING PERSON!” my roommate shrieked. God I am so glad I managed to clear out the rest of the building with my lackeys before coming here. I tried to muffle a protest, but he kept screaming. Every word punctuated by another thwack of straw against my body.

“You. Had. Me. Fixing. Injuries. That. I. CAUSED!”

“To be fair, my dear Milo, I was doing the same thing for you.”

“That’s not the POINT, ARIN!” he shrieked. Panting for air as he finally stopped beating the shit out of me with the kitchen broom.

I chanced a glance up at him. My Hero. In all senses of the word, in this case. He was about to cry, like he does when he’s feeling vulnerable. I stood, dusted myself off, and opened my arms, knowing he’d fall into them. He did. And he also teleported the both of us inside, to the cheap couch we pooled together to get. We sat there for a good chunk of time, an hour at least, just holding each other, not saying anything, him silently letting his tears fall, and me, pretending I wasn’t doing the same.

“What are we now?” he said it so quietly I almost didn’t hear him.

“Hmm? What do you mean?” he sat up at my query, looking less distressed, and much more contemplative. He replied as we wiped the tears from each other’s eyes.

“I mean… We’re dating, but we’re also Hero and Villain. We… we can’t change the fact that we both hurt each other, intentionally, as our Alter egos. We-I, god, I talked about how I wanted to kill you to your face and I didn’t realize…” he trailed off, holding his auburn curls between his fists. I set a hand on his back to console him.

“Look, it’s okay. I mean, to be honest, one of the reasons it took me so long to start dating you in the first place was I had a crush on The Conjurer, and didn’t know you were him.” I chuckled as he looked up at me, looking incredibly puzzled.

“Really? So the flirting was genuine? I thought you were just trying to distract me.”

I laughed, tears forming in the corners of my eyes. “No, I’m just a complete disaster gay no matter who I’m trying to flirt with!” he started laughing with me, his shoulders shaking a bit from the effort of trying to keep it somewhat contained.

“Oh, man. I just remembered some of the pick-up lines you started using on me as Milo and not Conjurer, you were so awkward!”

“They were so bad! And I think I re-used a couple lines on you as well! How did neither of us realize who we were until this point?”

Milo laughed even harder, “Because we’re both disaster gays, our other roomies can attest to that.”

“God, how did they survive us and our massive amounts of Unresolved Sexual Tension for so long! It was like, at least six months before either of us even admitted to ourselves we had crushes on each other, and it took us, what? Another half year or so before we even thought about getting together? How did they ever put up with us?”

“Man, I have no idea, but props to them for putting up with us.” Milo’s laughter faded into soft chuckles, as did mine.

Milo looked at me, stars in his eyes. My hero, my savior, and my nemesis. “Do you think we can make this work?” he asked me quietly.

I looked him dead in the eye, all the genuineness I could muster, “Yes. I believe we can.” My hero smiled at me. And then I saw him, not quite the Milo I knew, the Milo I was dating, Milo the former roommate, disappeared. The Conjurer appeared and leaned against me. I wrapped my arms around him.

“This feels weird.”

“I know.”

“I’ll need to tell the Hero’s League.”

“I know that too.”

We sat in silence for a bit longer. That seemed to be the theme of the day. Sitting in silence and ruminating on our lives. I was the one who broke it this time around.

“I know you became a hero long before I became an… Anti-hero,” He snorted at that. “So what made you choose me, out of all the other villains in the city?”

He looked at the ceiling, thinking. His reply startled me a bit, to be honest. “You were the only one that seemed… out of place on the list. Everyone else had incredible track records for murder, arson, vandalism, and so many more worse things. You had just managed to get an entire coalition of people who were downtrodden and organized a strike. The only thing that put you on that list were your powers, and the fact that a bunch of rich people were pissed at you.”

“Clearly ‘just a strike’ escalated” he rolled his eyes at my comment.

“Okay yeah, but at the time it was when you were just starting out. And as I got to know you, anything you did was never for the sake of being a bad person. All you’ve ever done was because the world didn’t give you a way to help people, and so you made one.” I started shaking as he continued. “You’ve given jobs to people who needed them, and you’ve paid them handsomely… you might have gotten money by robbing banks, sure, but you still gave people stability who had none. I chose you, because you looked like the one person I could reason with. The one person who was doing something good.”

Ah. It would seem it’s my turn to feel vulnerable and emotional, I shook, holding onto my hero, and wept. I knew, in my heart of hearts, that this would work.