“Would you stop staring at me like that?” A simple request, but one that didn’t seem to pique any response one way or another as he sat across from a small table – four person maximum with enough room for any number of plates and utensils for a proper meal, but six if one wanted to push it – from his sister who seemed adamant, in some way, that she was staring at some carefully primed duplicate of a brother she could swear to the highest of heavens had been cremated and ultimately laid to rest. For that, he couldn’t blame her and he certainly couldn’t either for his sudden intrusion back into her life, but in due time, hours already passed throughout the day some plans shifted to accommodate his sudden arrival, he had thought she would stop staring at him like he was an apparition come to physical fruition – even if, technically, that was what he was.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said, all but throwing her hands up as her attention diverted to the meal in front of them – a simple enough samgyetang ordered from a restaurant nearby and easily shared among two, perhaps even more, people – to start stirring her spoon around her share of the ginseng-infused chicken soup in her bowl, “but you can’t imagine this being easy, Henry. Your own brother, come back from the dead after we saw you.”

There had been adamancy there and he had no arguing remarks knowing well enough what they had witnessed because he had witnessed it – some of it – himself. He, at the time, just wasn’t a presence that they would have been able to recognize and Henry perhaps didn’t either, a ethereal fog of invisibility that was waiting out absolution in the deep cold of dimensions he could only seem to reach through and not breach entirely. No, he couldn’t blame her for it and only shook his head a little bit, bashful and maybe mildly self-effacing as he looked down as well, stirring up his soup all the same before carefully breaking off pieces of tender chicken with his spoon. “I know,” he said, “but it makes it a lot harder to eat when someone is literally watching me.”

Eating was something that ghosts didn’t do.

And eating was something that Henry wanted to do.

There was a brief moment of silence while questions were contemplated, considered before they erupted out of his sister’s mouth among the walls of her hotel room. Thankfully, it meant there was some privacy, not going somewhere smaller like an inn or a hostel or something more low key, but as overwhelmed as she was, she had some consideration not to place it all on Henry’s shoulders all at once. Little by little – that was how it would ultimately come around, one question used as a segue into another that might have driven deeper, hurt more, or otherwise caused him to think far more about the answer he’d ultimately provide; but eventually, she had spoken up after spoonful of broth that warmed up the innards especially against the potential of incoming rain.

“So, tell me again,” she said, “you died? You legitimately died? And then you were brought back… and don’t take this the wrong way, but why? How?”

“I’d ask her that myself,” Henry said, “but she isn’t entirely the speaking type. She’s a kid.” There were additional circumstances to that: She was a kid, but she was also the kid of a woman imbued with more cosmic power in one pinky finger than Henry likely hand in his whole hand no matter the different sources of it. There was no Goblin Force, no Phoenix Force, and given the opportunity to carry either, he couldn’t be sure it would be of use or just more of a detriment to the otherworldly forces he did have his fingers in. The fact that Lily had been a child served little to no concern as much as the ways she had made it so, ripping him out of cold-infested darkness and putting him into the rather embarrassing – not that he had showed as much at the time – situation of borrowed clothes and a raided cereal box.

“This kid then – she was somehow able to bring you back?”

“How many times do I have to explain this?” Henry commented, focusing some of his attention on the meal rather than rehashing the same story of his glorious resurrection from the depths of… Okay, maybe the Darkforce hadn’t been Hell. It didn’t come with fire and brimstone and, these days, he wasn’t even sure he could manipulate it as readily as he had been before with the presence of the Outsider as fortified as it was, but it was a torment all the same.

“There are a lot of things that happen in San Francisco that you probably couldn’t explain to the regular person walking on the street, but there is a rhyme and a reason to everything – well, to most things – and most people just don’t see it,” he explained; it wasn’t like Molly was going to tell the world her child was magical and it wasn’t like there had been much choice in Henry being ousted given the circumstances of a collapsed restaurant in Chinatown, but Henry couldn’t say he was surprised that most people chose to hang onto their secret identities like a security blanket, keeping them maybe not from the eyes of the C.S.A. who seemed to know where they were when they showed up, but the media outlets that would make it the next big story to grace headline news.

“And it’s been how long now?”

“Two years – at least soon to be,” he said, nodding. It wasn’t something he thought about often, but to say that he didn’t think about it at all would have been a lie. Two years of abominations spilling out of his stomach, at first on their own whims and now on his. Two years of being able to vanish in this air and walk through walls, using particles of air in a varying shift of atomic density as if steps to hover in thin air. Two years of combating whatever it was the collision of universes collectively known as the multiverse, full of people he recognized from the pages of comic books to those he didn’t know anything about filling the space, and either coming out triumphant or getting himself dragged through the dirt; and for what? Purpose? He didn’t know how long it had been since he had purpose and though there were moments it where it had been found – moments that he might not have been proud of in retrospect, but saw no reason to stop in present action – it was only ever fleeting. It was two years since he had been shot through the air like a squid-infested cannonball during a carnival from Hell and he couldn’t say it had changed –

– except for the fact he might as well have been the one behind the wick, aiming a loaded cannon at a spike wall target, and no longer a victim of such troubles when he had ways to escape them.

“You didn’t think maybe to tell us? To tell dad?”

“And what would dad have done?” Henry asked, shaking his head a little bit. “Besides, it came out eventually. ‘Man walks away from restaurant collapse in Chinatown’ might have been a better headline than viral evidence of being a mutant, but you know dad already knows. He watches the news like it will suddenly go off the air – it’s like doom scrolling for the internet unfriendly.” Perhaps some bitterness still resided there - that he had been so readily ousted for nothing more than protecting people during an unintended earthquake born of someone’s uncontrolled powers who, imbued with some means of covering her own rear end, could camouflage herself from the masses thanks to a green ring – one not unlike the yellow on resting on his finger, untapped, unused and, currently, inactive and offline with a simple twist. There was no one to scare here.

“You and Danny might have just thought I had lost it – what, after losing my apartment and having to move around, losing my job thanks to the pandemic, and just ultimately having the worst time of my life,” Henry pointed out, reaching for the small shot glass of soju in front of him, his sister’s full as well though she made no gesture of the same. Instead, it had been her phone in her hands at a telling chime, flipping it over to look at the message that had come through. “I still can’t even talk to people or find a boyfriend, which is probably making mom roll in her grave.”

“I mean, you can ask him – Danny, if you really want to,” she said, phone placed face down on the table next to her place setting, “because he’s coming over.”

“What?” Henry nearly choked on the sip of broth he had been taking, hastily picking up the napkin off of his lap to put up to his lips lest he make some sort of faux pas in surprise. It would have happened eventually, but so soon? Henry couldn’t say he was expecting it.

“It’s taken him some time to get away from grandma and grandpa, but he’s on his way.” And at such a hour, even during the busy holiday season when people were going out to shop and gather gifts for their family members, Henry didn’t imagine it taking too long to get from one house to the hotel though he might have prayed to the parking Gods that finding a spot and getting to the room would take a little bit longer, buying him some minutes of preparation which suddenly felt like they were quickly fleeting if they even existed to begin with.

“And you told him?”

“What else was I supposed to do, Henry? Lie?”

“It could have been a start,” Henry commented, the napkin set down on the table rather than back into his lap as he sat back, arms crossed. The minutes – they’d tick by, by and by, until there was a knock at the door and Lisa excused herself from the table to answer. Quickly, he could feel the energy in the room shift as his gaze connected with his brother who, despite anything that might have been treasonous to his emotions in his expression, seemed to come in hot and angry with the knowledge that Henry might have been around all this time and, in his stead of supposed death, they had taken on all the responsibility.

And there had only been one question – one that seemed to hang in the air well before it had been spoken and for plenty of time after Danny had discarded his shoes and stepped into the studio living space. Thankfully, it was one that Henry had expected.

“How are you still alive?”