He had killed his own son.

Sure it was an accident, sure he didn’t mean to do it. But when did that ever matter?

I twirled the bottle between my fingers vaguely listening to the music filling the room. I replayed the night again in my head. Levi and Miranda thought they were my friends. Well, as much as people like them can have friends. It’s not that they are bad people it’s just that Supers always attract crazies.

It’s the way of the world. No matter what you do, if you manifest any sort of power you will draw enemies. And Supers? They seem to draw people with a penchant for stroking white cats while mumbling dire portents to themselves.

So Levi and Miranda kept most people in their lives at arms length making it difficult to be their friends. When they were trying to bring a child into the world though, there was no way I would not be there for that. They didn’t think someone without Powers should be there but Levi knows me, trusts me enough that he wanted me to watch his back.

How were we supposed to know that the horrific would not come from an outside force?

I took another swallow of the cool beer, killing the bottle and hated myself just a little more. I could not muster the interest to leave my comfy swivel chair to stumble to my little bar fridge. Instead I fished a beer from the box next to me and cracked the top off. Warm. That’s the price I pay for this little pity party though.

The birth was going as smoothly as any involving two Supers could, considering their powers. Levi, Twisted Mirror, he was the one who the doctors were not worried about. His Power is simple in approach but stupidly complex when you stop and really think about it. He had won the Super roulette. It’s not like that arsehole Captain Purple with the “Everything I touch becomes lavender” or the lady who simply calls herself God who can distort both space and time.

No, when Levi suffers a strong enough impact he creates a mirror of himself. Easy enough. Except Levi had never bothered to try and learn to control his Super. He was lazy like that. So every time that a Mirror of him jumps out there is always something magnified about it. Maybe it is a gift for violence or his sense of smell is fantastic. Maybe he loves dogs just a bit too much. Levi never knows what is going to be pulled into existence. Thankfully though the mirrors he creates do not have the same Super, otherwise we would end up with a world overrun by him.

It had been bad enough during his Great Levi Forward, the period when he had created hundreds of copies of himself and sent them out into the world with different Missions. Those were weird times, it felt like every face you saw in Arcadia back then was another Levi. I try to not think of that period, it is too painful.

Brutally though Levi Prime can reabsorb the copies back into himself. Brutally because these copies are flung into existence, everything about them is a functional, normal human. They can go on and live their lives. Love, learn, hate, enjoy romantic poetry, disappoint their lovers, everything a normal person should do. However if Levi Prime touches them they are destroyed and he gains their skills and knowledge, everything they have ever thought. I have seen it happen so many times you would think I was numb to it by now but it still seems to me like a cleaner version of murder.

The music shifts to a more maudlin track, matching my mood as I think back over the birth. Miranda was keeping her Power in check, barely. If she lost control of her siren-like screams she would blow out the floor of the hospital if not the entire wing. The doctors were well versed in Super births though and had Miranda medicated to the gills to prevent such an outcome. Everyone was busy monitoring Miranda to ensure that she did not lose control, that she didn’t somehow self sabotage this birth.

Swigging from the bottle I realised I had already finished it. I couldn’t face another warm one right now so I fought out of the depths of the chair and changed the music to something more upbeat as I made my way to the cold ones. Fridge raided and another one ready to go, the memory of the ending rose up in my mind like a vengeful curry. I hated the bottle in my hands, I thought I had moved on from using it as a crutch but sometimes you have to fall back onto what works.

I had arrived at the hospital after the main event. I had been prowling the corridors trying to keep an eye on Levi Prime and on the off chance that one of the big bads were stupid enough to try and raise their hand on this day. If they did they would have entered into a world of pain. Levi and Miranda had enough Supers guarding them to fend off an army.

I should have seen the real threat coming. Anyone who actually stopped and thought should have seen it coming. Especially me.

Even then I could feel a tickling at the back of the brain but I had put it down to being worried for the happy couple.

Then it was all over. It was done. There was Miranda holding a small pink bundle in the recovery room. Her face still strained and sweating, radiating happiness and pride. My thoughts catch as they have since then, replaying the moment in painful clarity.

“Levi, say hello to your son. Sean.”

Levi, standing there stunned and wearing the mask of all newly minted fathers. Part joy, part pride and total confusion. I see him reaching out and taking the bundle in his arms and a small pink hand starts waving at the air in protest.

Levi, The Twisted Mirror, reaches out and touches the tiny hand. The tiny hand of an almost exact genetic copy of himself.

“MY SON!”

I shudder upright in the chair, the cold beer forgotten in my hands as the ghostly cry of Miranda reverberates through the office. The heart wrenching distress filling the air with its own silence.

Sean was absorbed back into Levi. How had no-one seen this possibility? How could you possibly deal with this? There is nothing you can say that doesn’t fall flat, that doesn’t sound like empty platitudes. He had destroyed his own son in front of his loving wife. If that is not enough to shatter the man, to reduce him to howling, mindless fury, then I don’t know shit about him.

Miranda had given up, had gone somewhere else in her mind where it no longer hurt. She was keeping herself smacked on pain meds so no one could talk to her and she could avoid her own personal hell. Levi was itching for a fight. He needed to hit something, to kill, to lash out and shift the pain to someone else. He needs an external force to vent on but none of the bad guys are biting. It’s as if even they are aware that something truly terrible has happened and this has brought Levi a respite.

I began to draw my mind away from the circle of events it had been spinning in the last few days. I was not achieving anything. Casting about my office my eyes fell on the piles of clothes, the plates of half-eaten food left around like land mines for the unwary. I have a lady who comes in and pretends to clean the place, I pretend to pay her a decent wage so I call us even.

The music was still running, the system was filling the room with its far too cheery sound, overlaying the gentle hum of the bar fridge. Shouts and sounds of people living their lives and fighting off the darkness surrounding them was flowing in through the window behind my desk. The creak of the hallway outside my office announced to me that Levi had finally managed to work his way too asking for help.

I knew he would show eventually. He always did.

He didn’t knock as he stumbled in, briefly casting around the place taking in the office in one bleary-eyed sweep. I nod to the chair opposite me and watch as he pushes the collection of mostly clean clothes off it onto the floor.

“Levi, good to see you man.” I say as I fish out a beer from the box at my chair and throw it towards him. I can smell him from here, he is practically sweating whiskey right now so hopefully I can slow up his quest to get horizontal as fast as possible.

“Not many people are saying that these days.” He drawls. He puts my theory of slowing him to the test as he guns the beer and lets it fall beside him. “I wanted a drink not a goddamn rental. Got anything more serious?”

I shrug and grab another beer and carefully pass it across. His voice is both languid and clipped at the same time making me think that the alcohol is not feeling lonely in his system. Levi is a not a huge man, clocking in just shy of 180 cm and built like a runner. Before he would have been called ruggedly handsome but not now with his beard gone from ‘stylishly roguish’ to ‘I own a van with blacked out windows’. His eyes, which were usually sharp and penetrating now look like two under cooked eggs, watering and wobbling. His clothes had a memory of being the striking Twisted Mirror outfit now rumpled and covered in questionable stains.

“Always welcome here Levi. You know that, you have interesting jobs and pay enough for a man to enjoy life. So, what is it? Business or pleasure?”

Avoiding the elephant in the room is difficult when it is staring at you with bloodshot eyes and threatening to add to the mess on the floor.

“I want you to bring him back.” He growls, not at me, at the world in general. I just happened to be in the vicinity.

The music built higher and higher, happy to take the stage as neither of us are willing or able to bring anything to that statement. I just stared at Levi, unsure of what he actually wanted from me, him in his own pain-filled hell. The silence between us slowly filling with everything he has been torturing himself about since the event.

I keep revisiting it in my mind. How had we not seen this coming? How in the whole nine months of the pregnancy did no one stop and consider the question, can Levi actually touch his own Son? How had I not seen this possibility?

He drains the second bottle and lets it fall with its brothers. I throw him another.
Someone needed to be the bad guy for him here. I mentally shrugged, I had worn that coat more than once.

“He’s gone Levi. You know that. There is nothing for you to get back.” I load the words into the sentence like rounds into a chamber. He needed to understand and somehow find it in him to move on. Even in the echoes of my own mind though, I knew that was never going to happen. I watched him flinch as my words struck true. I know he needs this, he was one of the toughest sons of bitches I know in his own way, however even he has his breaking point.

Looking at him now, barely staying upright in a chair, I was worried he was long past it.

“I tried, I tried myself to bring him….” he trails off, staring at his own darkness.
I know all too well how his Power works. He has no control over what mirror of him would be jumping out each time. He had never learnt how to control it, had never learnt if it was even possible to control. I grimly thought about how he had sent one of his copies out on that very Mission so many years ago. Strangely enough, never voluntarily returning to die and give up that hard won knowledge.

I had visions of Levi in this state bringing mirror after mirror of himself into this world in search of his now dead son. Forcing himself to keep going, to keep reabsorbing these copies, each one creating the same sucking feeling of destruction from losing his son. How long? How long did he continue until he snapped? I watched him easily empty the bottle and wordlessly threw him another.

Hundreds. It must have been hundreds.

Hundreds of him forced into existence and then destroyed in his search.
This was so far beyond getting wasted, seek out ladies of negotiable affection and soak in debauchery. I know why he is here but not what I could actually give him. I couldn’t take his half-boiled stare much longer though.

“Levi, what do you actually want from me? I have done everything you have ever brought me. That mirror of you that went weird in the head and started collecting the feet of homeless people? I was the one who tracked him down and took care of him.” The memory of that night also took care of me for a good month or so.
“That jade thing from a few months ago? You said you needed it or the world would end. Well I got it for you and the world is still here so I guess that worked out for the good guys. This? I don’t even know what you are asking me here.”

Well, strictly not true but no need in helping him along.

I lent forward, feeling the track change again. I forced myself to meet his red-eyed gaze, made difficult by the scar down my eye pulling more then usual. I had to be ready, there was no handbook for facing off with one of the most powerful Supers who was either insane or laughingly skipping along that path.

“The Seeker.” Levi Prime said.

He was the first to break the silence between us. There was a raucous laugh from the street punctuating his statement. I felt like joining in.

The Seeker. That was the name I had given to the phantom I had chased half a year for Levi. Once Levi had moved to the big leagues of Supers he had to actually spend time thinking about his Power. Before it was street brawls against low level toughs like Iceman, real original name that one, or RockHard, an uncomfortable bastard.

Levi would always rely on creating his own army of Mirrors and beat the crap out of them. Going against the real bad guys, the ones who held entire cities in their grip, his Mirror effect was no longer enough by itself. That’s what had triggered his own version of the Great Leap Forward. Creating hundreds of Mirrors and sending them out into the world, to live their lives and learn. Each given their own separate Mission and ordered to return after two years for Levi Prime to reabsorb all they had become, all that they had learnt. Some were given the simple goal of “Learn French”, others more ethereal like “Find the point of this existence.” I always felt sorry for the ones with things like “Watch every movie ever made.” God, that one was a mess when I found him. An unemployed bastard who had bloated up so far I could hardly tell he was a Levi any more. When I found him he had come back willingly even knowing that it meant his end.

They were all ordered to return after the two year mark. Could you imagine that? To you, you were your own person with thoughts and dreams, you had constructed a life. Some had a family and children, others; business empires run with determination and zeal. All the while you knew you were on a clock, to return and have your existence snuffed out just to help some bastard understand the stock market? Most of them took the simple option of run and hide, others tried to fight it. Some went insane. Levi mostly found them in the end and returned them to the fold. The harder ones? He had taken to turning them over to me when I showed up. I had set myself up as somewhat of a private dick when I hit Arcadia about five years back. Levi Prime was one of my very first clients.

I never found the one I had labelled The Seeker. The one whose Mission was the most important. “Learn to control my Super.” It was a bit of a stretch at the time as how could the Mirror learn about something he didn’t himself have? Being created as a Mirror, lacking the Super to create other Mirrors at the time. It was Levi Prime being lazy or stupid as always, instead of trying to figure it out himself he had delegated.

Levi had not bothered to try and recover the Seeker for so long. He had finally approached me, he needed to find him as Levi was gearing up for some Earth ending calamity or another and so he came to me to try and find the copy known as The Seeker. I searched for six months. I had thought it would be easy. It was my one real failure apart from my social life. I looked at the growing pile of empties, the drinking again as well makes two I suppose.

I was always one lead behind, always finding just one more clue but could never catch the Seeker. I had driven all my friends and contacts away with my constant digging, my obsession. I had needed to find the Seeker to close that chapter on my life.

I knew he was what Levi was after. He could be the key to this whole mess. Levi Prime had told me the Seeker had been missing for the better part of seven years by now. Imagine what Levi could have learned if he had tried to control his Super himself instead of his usual of relying on his Mirrors.

I realised I had been sitting in silence, retreating in my own mind again with that red glare not a metre away, the sounds from the speakers washing over everything.

“The Seeker. He could do it.” Levi prompted when he saw my gaze return to the present.

I nodded slowly. “He could, Levi. But you know that I chased him to the arse end of the world and back. I never found him. What makes you think, three years on, that I stand a chance now?”

I matched his stare. I knew this was what he was here for. I was ready. I had a thousand arguments of why I shouldn’t do this, of why he shouldn’t ask this. Of why it was a waste of time and stupid to even suggest it. Of that his lust for power without putting in the effort was what had brought him to this place.

With all that I was not ready for his reply.

“Please, Sol. Not for me. For my Son…”