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Layla isn’t entirely sure how it happened.
One minute, she was watching her best friend throw a cafeteria table across the room with a flaming hothead on top of it, and the next, she had said hothead trapped against the wall with a tangle of vines.
It wasn’t a fair fight. No one was going to step in. She couldn’t watch Warren take a cheap shot at Will when his back was turned.
So she used her powers.
And now she’s in detention.
With Warren Peace.
Fantastic.
The detention room is blinding white and probably considered a form of torture by the UN. She thinks about bringing that to Principle Powers’ attention later on, but right now, she needs to make peace with, well, Warren Peace.
She sighs. “Look–”
“Don’t talk to me.”
Warren is slumped low in his seat, staring straight at the wall, and even though he can’t use his powers in the detention room, she’s still a little afraid of him. “I don’t have anything against you, Warren. I just don’t like watching someone take a cheap shot while the other person’s back is turned.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says gruffly. His eyes don’t move from their spot on the wall, but his hand clenches on the desk.
She laughs. “Oh, I don’t? Then what do you call flaming up and getting ready to attack someone who was looking in the other direction? Please, enlighten me.”
Warren’s head whips to the side, his eyes meeting hers. Layla wants to shrink back, to break contact. His eyes are full of fury and flames.
“His father ruined my life,” he snaps. “And he got to grow up without any of that hanging over his head. People have been taking cheap shots at me my entire life, while Will Stronghold got coddled.”
“But your dad was a villain,” she says, trying to understand. “He was a bad guy.”
“He might have been a villain, but he was a good man. And a good father.” He turns away again, his fist clenching and unclenching on the desk.
Layla is surprised. She had… never considered that a villain could be a good anything.
She has no idea what to even say to that.
“Do you know what it’s like?” he asks, anger hot in his voice. “Going to the zoo with your dad one day and then watching him be taken away the next? I was five years old, and I remember the Commander and the police coming to my house and taking him away. I remember going to court with my mom and watching him be sentenced to four life sentences.”
Layla is in shock, because while she doesn’t know what it feels like for all that, she does know what it’s like to grow up without a father.
“My dad died when I was five,” she says quietly. “I know it’s not the same, but… I grew up without a father, too.”
Warren freezes. His hand unclenches. He turns to look at her slowly, but he doesn’t seem angry anymore. The fire behind his eyes is a little cooler now.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
Layla shrugs. “There’s no reason you should know. My father… he was a different kind of hero than my mother is. He was a healer. But every time he healed someone, he… gave up some of his own life. And it finally all caught up to him.” She pauses, deciding, before she adds, “I used to be really angry at him, you know? It felt like he chose other people over me. But I understand now. He had the ability to help people, and he couldn’t stand by and do nothing when people were in need.”
Warren looks at her like he might want to say something, but instead he just looks back at the wall.
His hand stays relaxed.
An unforeseen consequence of her actions – besides the detention with Warren and the lecture she received from her mother about how getting into fights at school isn’t an appropriate use of her powers – is that Layla gets moved to the hero class.
She always knew that if she had shown her abilities in power placement, she would have been assigned hero from the start, but she likes the other sidekicks. She doesn’t have to prove anything to them. They’re her friends.
At least Will also gets moved to the hero class, but since the hero kids have a much more varied curriculum, they’re not in all the same classes like with the sidekicks. When they were both told they’d be moving to the hero class, she had allowed herself to hope that maybe this would give him the opportunity to see how in love with him she is, but they’re going to be seeing even less of each other now than they were before.
Layla moves through her new classes without speaking to her new classmates, but they all stare and whisper when she walks by. The girl who refused to participate in power placement. The girl who had Warren Peace pinned to a wall.
She’s happy when it’s time for lunch, and she can sit with her friends and pretend like everything is normal again.
But of course Will has to ruin it all by sitting with Gwen Grayson and her friends. It really didn’t take long for him to get sucked into the popularity of being the son of the Commander and Jetstream.
Even his promise to take her to the Paper Lantern for dinner to make up for it make her feel uneasy.
For Warren, work is an escape.
At school, his walls are firmly in place. He doesn’t even try to make friends. He wouldn’t know what to do with them anyways. Even before Sky High, when he was going to a normal school, he didn’t fit in anywhere. Being the biracial boy with the single mom and the convict father didn’t exactly win him many friends.
At work, surrounded by (an admittedly watered down and Americanized version of) his mother’s culture, speaking the language she taught him, he feels like he belongs somewhere. It doesn’t matter that he can barely see his mother in his face. His connection to his Native roots was severed when his father was taken away. The Chinese side of his heritage is the only thing he has left.
It’s pretty nice to have a little bit of extra spending money after helping out with the bills, too.
Being a busboy is the ideal job for Warren. He gets paid to clear tables and rarely has to interact with the customers.
“Warren, there’s a girl whose been sitting at table 6 all night waiting for some guy,” Jin says, sitting down heavily. “Can you please go take care of her? I want to go home soon.”
“Yeah, I’ll go scare her into leaving.”
Jin smiles at him. “You’re the best.”
Warren grabs a pitcher of water and walks into the dining room. He spots the lone remaining patron immediately. He can’t see her face, just her long red hair as she slumps down in her seat. He’s sure getting stood up sucks, even though it’s never happened to him before.
“Are you still working on that?” he asks as he approaches the booth, the universal code for “Please leave now, we’re about to close.”
The girl looks up and –
Oh no. No no no.
“Hey,” Layla says awkwardly, seemingly taken aback by his sudden appearance.
“Hey,” he responds, equally awkward. “Uh, do you want me to heat that up for you?”
Her eyes go wide and she leans closer. “You’re not supposed to use your powers outside of school,” she whispers.
He eyes the dead orchid on the table, but thinks better than the point it out. Instead, he leans closer, too. “I was just going to put it in the microwave,” he whispers back.
“Oh,” she says, sitting back in her seat. “I was supposed to be meeting…” She trails off, looking at the door. “Do you… do you want to sit down?”
Not really, he thinks, but then… that’s not exactly true? He’s not sure. He wants to hate her for humiliating him in front of everyone yesterday, but at the same time…
He looks back at the kitchen. Jin is sitting at the corner booth, folding napkins for tomorrow, and Cook is shutting down for the night.
“I think I can spare a minute,” he says, settling into the seat across from her. Then, just to mess with her a little bit, he lights the unlit candle on the table with his fingertip.
She laughs, but doesn’t say anything about the obvious rule breaking.
“I’m… I’m sorry about yesterday,” she says, a little embarrassed. “What I did… I’m not usually like that.”
“What, throwing me against a wall with a bunch of vines, or getting me to monologue about my tragic backstory?” he jokes, because joking is easier than admitting that he hasn’t stopped thinking about either event.
“I… both, I guess,” she responds. “I don’t like to use my powers unless I have to. And I didn’t mean to dredge up bad things for you. I just… I guess I had just never even thought…”
“That even villains love their kids?”
She opens her mouth as though to protest, but closes it quickly. “Yeah,” she says quietly.
“Yeah…”
“I’m sorry for bringing it up,” she says. “I know it’s hard growing up without a dad. It must… be even harder knowing that he’s out there and wants to be around.”
“I’m used to it. At least I’m allowed to visit him once a month.”
“That’s nice,” she smiles.
He needs to get them off this topic. Put some emotional distance between himself and this girl with the red hair and the pretty smile and the ability to knock him flat on his ass if she wants.
“So who –”
Just as he’s about to ask who stood her up, his boss yells at him from the window for slacking off, and he yells back at her. “I have to go. I’ll see you around, hippie.”
He heads back into the kitchen, where his boss reprimands him again and then leaves, muttering something about ungrateful children and a favor to his mom.
The days following his encounter with Layla at the Paper Lantern, Warren regrets pretty much all of it.
“Is there something I said last night to make you think that this is okay?” he asks angrily when Layla sits down across from him at lunch the next day.
“So you’re never going to believe this, but I was going to ask Will out to the Homecoming dance, but instead, I told him I was going with you. Funny, right?”
“I don’t remember agreeing to going to a stupid dance with the girl who assaulted me two days ago.”
Will Stronghold walks by with Gwen Grayson. He and Layla lock eyes for a moment, and suddenly she’s putting on the fakest laugh Warren had ever heard in his life. “Oh, Warren, you’re so funny!”
And then her little band of nerdy sidekicks are surrounding him and he’s just dealing with it.
He tries to put up with this weird girl and her weird antics and her weirdly charming smile, but it’s seriously starting to affect his reputation as the stoic antisocial loner. And he’s definitely not going to homecoming with her.
But she’s very persuasive.
Contrary to popular belief, Warren doesn’t like to dwell on the past. He would like nothing more than to forget it and move on, in fact. It’s the rest of the world that refuses to let him.
Before Barron was taken away, he was happy. His family was happy. His mom smiled more back then. They went on family outings and ate dinner together and wore matching pajamas on Christmas. If he had to describe the first five years of his life in one word, it would be idyllic.
Warren shakes those thoughts from his head. He doesn’t want to think about those days, because they’re always accompanied by what came next, like his mother scooping him up and whisking him into the other room when their front door came crashing down, getting dressed in a suit to go to court, watching his mother break down on the stand as she tried to defend his father, crying as the jury read out the sentence, one life sentence after another.
He has homework to think about.
He’s halfway through a paper on working with non-super law enforcement when he hears a light tink, tink sound coming from his window. It’s dark, but he can just see an outline of – are those vines?
Warren throws the window open and looks out onto the street. Sure enough, Layla is standing beneath this bedroom, and a small vine is curling around the frame.
“I’m pretty sure this only happens in bad 80’s movies,” he says. “And how did you even find out where I live?”
Suddenly, Layla is floating up to his window on a giant vine, coming to rest on the roof outcrop. He raises an eyebrow. So much for no using powers outside of school.
“Is this weird?” she asks, the vines shrinking down to the ground. “Because I can go –”
“No!” he replies, a little too loud. He’s so bad at this. But he can see that her eyes are red a puffy, and he does know what that means. “Are you, uh… is everything alright?”
She just stares at him for a moment, tears filling her eyes, before shaking her head.
Warren sighs. “Come on. Come inside.” He reaches toward her and takes her arm to help her through the window and guides her to sit on his bed. It’s hard to believe that this is the same girl that just a few days ago had beaten him in a fight. “What happened?” he asks, reaching over to his desk for a box of tissues. She takes one and dabs at her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I just… I was just over at Will’s house. I wanted to talk to him, because we haven’t really gotten a chance to talk since we both got moved to hero class and… he was throwing a party, and all the hero kids were there and he didn’t even bother to invite any of hero support. And then when I was looking for him, Gwen Grayson came up to me and said that Will knew I had a crush on him and that he was just too nice to tell me he wasn’t interested, and that he resented that I’ve been hanging out with you. I just feel so stupid. Everyone’s been laughing at me behind my back this whole time.”
Warren isn’t really sure what to do, and he’s definitely not sure why of all the people Layla is friends with, she chose to come to him. He awkwardly rubs her back.
“I’m sorry, that, uh, sucks,” he says. God, he’s so bad at this. “I, um, I’m not really sure how I can help. I’m… not really used to people talking to me about their problems. I’m not really used to people talking to me at all.”
“I know, I’m sorry. I just… you were the first person I thought of and…” she looks up at him, her green eyes still glittering with tears and bloodshot. “I think you’re a really kind person, Warren. And I… would really like to… get to know you better, I guess.”
Warren feels too close to her. Closeness is danger. Closeness is weakness. But he wants to be close to Layla. That scares him a little.
And not just because she can kick his ass.
“Well, uh, I –” he starts.
“Warren!” a voice calls from downstairs. “Dinner is ready!”
“That would be my mom,” he says, thankful for the save. He stands up and then pauses for a moment. He rubs the back of his neck. “Would you… would you like to stay for dinner?”
Layla isn’t sure what to expect when she follows Warren down the stairs of his house. She’s not sure what to expect of his mother, the former hero who fell in love with one of the most fearsome villains in living memory.
The smell coming from the kitchen is incredible. She can smell it from halfway down the stairs, a perfume of spices that make her mouth water.
When they reach the entrance to the kitchen, Warren’s mom has her back turned, still stirring something on the stove.
“Curried lentils for dinner tonight,” she says. “Not like you probably couldn’t – oh, hello.” His mom turns around mid-sentence and catches sight of Layla. She looks younger than Layla would have expected. Her hair is short and glossy black and her dark eyes are bright, though confused. There’s a light sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and very delicate laugh lines around her mouth.
“Warren, who is your friend?” she asks, wiping her hands on a kitchen towel.
“Mom, this is Layla Williams,” Warren says, gesturing to her. The two seem to be communicating something with their eyes, a conversation that Layla can’t comprehend. “Layla, this is my mom.”
“Sybil,” his mom says, walking towards her to extend a hand. Layla takes her hand, suddenly feeling embarrassed by her appearance. “It’s very nice to meet you, Layla. It’s so rare for Warren to have guests over.”
“Mom,” Warren mumbles, clearly embarrassed.
“Set an extra place at the table, Warren,” she tells him. “So, Layla, would I know your parents, or…?”
“Oh, uh, well, my mother is a zoolingualist and my father was a healer, before he died ten years ago.”
Sybil’s face falls into something like pity. “You’re Kat and Jason’s daughter. I knew your parents back in my hero days, before I left the business to be with…. I was so sorry to hear about Jason. He was a good man. I wanted to reach out to your family, to give my condolences, but… I wasn’t the most popular person back then.”
Layla smiles at her. “It’s okay. It was a long time ago.”
“Table’s set,” Warren says, gesturing to the three place settings he’s put out, complete with proper cutlery placement and folded napkins. Layla is surprised… and impressed.
“Well, Layla, please help yourself to however much you like,” Sybil says, resting a hand on Layla’s shoulder. “Any friend of Warren’s is welcome here whenever they like. Just maybe next time,” she glances at Warren with a smile before turning her attention back on Layla, “come in through the front door.”
Layla feels her face grow hot. Warren is running a hand through his hair, equally embarrassed. Both of them grab their plates from the table and rush to the stove to load up on the delicious lentils and vegetables Sybil prepared.
They lock eyes for a moment, and Layla smiles at Warren. She feels something warm in her chest, a feeling that she almost recognizes but not quite. Whatever it is, Warren smiles back at her, still a little uncomfortable, but genuine none the less. A few days ago, she’d thought that Warren Peace was just another villain in the making.
Not anymore.