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sunsetcurve · 2 years ago

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i still want to move mountains, i still want to change the world

wow, okay, it has been a very very very long time since i wrote anything here, but — i had to break off my writing hiatus, because it is @zackmartin ‘s birthday!!! nikki, i want you to know that even though i’ve been on and off a lot for a while, you’re still one of the brightest, bravest, and kindest people i know, and you’ve always been one of my biggest supporters. you show so much love to everyone around you, and you deserve all the love in the world in return! i am so so proud i get to know you and so happy to be able to call you my friend. i wanted to write a little one-shot for the amazing @zenryverse for you today, because i love and miss them all, and i’m a little rusty in writing anything beyond scripts but i really hope you like it! once again, happy birthday, and i hope today is spectacular and brings you so many good things. the title is from “when she grows up” by craig campbell.

summary: He remembers being fifteen, is the thing. The restlessness of it, the dauntless way of looking at everything. None of Ray’s attempts to shut him down, tell him he was too young, not good enough, had ever worked — they’d only made him want it more. He can see it in her eyes; Izzy is itching for something to prove, and he knows where she got that from.

word count: 1,720

Henry had seen this coming, of course.

He’d thought — hoped, really, and in retrospect it just seems overly optimistic — that he could stave it off by a few more years, at least. Izzy is freshly fifteen, solidly in the middle of the teen-angst phase other parents had warned him about, but beyond a bit of door-slamming and incessant texting things have been good. Manageable. He and Zack aren’t perfect parents, by any means, but he thinks they’ve been handling it well.

He’s not sure handling it well extends to him standing outside his daughter’s bedroom window and waiting for her inevitable attempt to crawl out of it, though.

Izzy’s not the type of kid to sneak out much, or at least she hadn’t been before. But there’s been a sudden rash of crime downtown, and she’s been acting shifty this week, and Henry had spent dinner triaging the symptoms of a hero complex over spaghetti. He knows them well. He invented those symptoms. And now he’s passed them down to her, which is terrifying in a way that uncharted-parenting territory has rarely been before.

He doesn’t really have a benchmark for how to handle this. His own parents had been entirely uninvolved in his side job, and Ray was hardly a good role model. All Henry has is the person he was at fifteen, and he really, really does not want Izzy going down that road.

Which is why he’s loitering in the yard, in the dark, like some creepy stalker outside of his own home. It’s been about twenty minutes. He’s distracting himself with one of the phone games that Felix had gotten him hooked on and starting to think that maybe he overreacted when somewhere above him, a lock clicks. The window scrapes open.

Henry watches appraisingly from the ground as Izzy maneuvers herself through the window. She’s dressed in all black — where did she get leather pants? — and there’s a pink-and-black mask covering her eyes. It’s not a bad costume. She’s climbing nimbly into the tree that hangs beside her bedroom, and trying to shimmy her way down. One of the branches under her foot creaks alarmingly, and he hears her swallow a yelp.

“That one won’t hold your weight — try the one to the left!” Henry calls from the ground.

Izzy shifts her foot and breathes an audible sigh of relief. “Thanks, Papa—”

Then, she nearly falls out of the tree. “Papa?”

Henry’s heart skips a beat, but Izzy doesn’t slip despite her falter. She does, however, cast a panicked glance at him over her shoulder, still clinging to the branches. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” Henry replies flatly. “Can you get down so we can talk?”

Izzy bites out something that sounds like a swear under her breath, but Henry chooses not to comment. He waits until both her feet are planted firmly on the ground to say anything at all, actually. It doesn’t take long — Izzy’s always been a climber — but once she meets the ground she turns to look at him with so much self-righteousness in her expression it makes him stumble over the speech he had planned out in his head.

“How’d you know?” she demands, glaring at him through a mask that, now that it’s up close, looks familiar.

“Is that my old mask?” he asks by way of an answer. He can see her flush a little even in the low light. “Did you spray paint it?”

Izzy shrugs, crossing her arms. “It’s just one of them. You weren’t using it.” Henry raises an eyebrow, amused, and she scrunches her nose at him. “Aren’t you going to ask where I’m going?”

“Oh, I know where you were going,” Henry says, trying to sound casual about it, like the whole situation hasn’t got his stomach doing backflips. What if he hadn’t been here, if she’d done this yesterday, if he’d missed her by a minute? He’s doing everything he can not to think about it. “Iz—”

“I know what you’re gonna say, okay? I’m too young, I’m not ready yet, it’s dangerous.” She tilts her chin up at him, fifteen-years-old and already so full of that indomitable defiance. “You’ve said it all before. But you were younger than me when you first started, and you didn’t even have powers! I do. I can use them.”

He wants to say, you’re just a kid. He wants to say, you don’t get it, yet, what you’re signing up for. It’s not that simple. It’s not so easy.

But he remembers being fifteen, is the thing. The restlessness of it, the dauntless way of looking at everything. None of Ray’s attempts to shut him down, tell him he was too young, not good enough, had ever worked — they’d only made him want it more. He can see it in her eyes; Izzy is itching for something to prove, and he knows where she got that from.

“C’mere,” he says, and jerks his head for her to follow as he rounds the corner of the house towards the front door. Izzy looks at him questioningly but obliges, and then they’re sitting on the porch steps, the driveway sprawling out in front of them and the streetlights glowing in pinpricks of gold down the road.

“I started fighting crime when I was thirteen,” Henry starts, and then has to tamp down a laugh when Izzy makes a face like she’s bracing herself for another dad-lecture. “Listen, just listen for a sec. Look…being Kid Danger meant the world to me. I loved my job. I helped a lot of people. But I made a lot of sacrifices for it. I didn’t go to prom, or graduate high school, or go to college — I didn’t have a normal childhood, and, look, I wouldn’t have traded it, but it wasn’t easy. Back then it seemed like nothing was more important than being a superhero.” Izzy’s looking at him with huge brown eyes, and Henry smiles a little. “And then I met your dad, and everything changed.”

“Gross, Papa,” she says, but it’s half-hearted, and Henry laughs.

“What I’m trying to say,” he continues, “is that…I know how you feel. I get it, okay? Right now, it feels like the only thing that matters is…is putting on a mask, and using your powers, and saving the world. I just want you to know that you have time for that.” He tucks a lock of her hair behind her ear. “The world isn’t going to end tomorrow. Your life is gonna be a lot bigger than that suit.”

Izzy’s mouth twists, and when she ducks her head he’s afraid, for a moment, that he’s said the wrong thing. Then she sort of leans into where his hand is resting on her cheek, and the tight thing in his chest loosens. “I know it’s not gonna be easy,” she says finally. “I’m not doing it for…for the laughs, or the excitement, okay? I’m doing it ‘cause I wanna help people.” Her voice goes small, then: “I wanna be like you.”

Henry wishes she were still young enough to wrap in blankets and pull into his lap and shelter from everything else, because he wants to keep the world away from his daughter. Instead he tucks an arm around her, and puts his chin against her hair, and tries to just breathe. His kid is here, right now, and that’s what matters.

“How long can I stop you for?” he sighs after a while, and he can feel her smile.

“That depends. How many nights are you planning to spend camped outside my window?”

Henry laughs, and then he pulls back to look her in the eyes. She’s staring right back at him, determined, fifteen-years-old and so much of him and Zack and herself. She’s growing up. He takes a steady breath. Then: “I want to do this right, okay?”

“Okay,” she nods, and tilts her head at him. “What does that mean?”

“It means none of the sneaking out at night,” Henry begins, ticking things off on his fingers. “Absolutely no running headlong into danger, especially alone, ever. School comes first, and I want you to stick with your friends, and your clubs, and your normal teenage experiences. No fighting crime until I say you’re ready—”

“But—”

“Iz,” he says seriously, with both hands on her shoulders, “I’m gonna train you. I’m gonna show you the ropes, and when you’re older, and you’re ready, I’ll let you come on some missions with me.” He watches her eyes light up, and smiles at her. “But if we’re gonna do this, we need to trust each other, alright? No lying. No secrets. I mean it. If you really want to do this, we do it together.”

He gives it a moment to sink in, the gravity of it. If they go through with this, things are going to be different, almost surely for good. He watches that understanding settle behind Izzy’s eyes. Slowly, she nods back at him. “Okay, Papa.”

He sticks a pinky out towards her and smiles. “Swear?”

She rolls her eyes, but loops her finger through his. “Swear.”

“Good.” He ruffles her hair, grinning, and she squawks out a protest but laughs anyway. “Now get to bed, okay? You’ve got school tomorrow.”

“What? I thought we were gonna train—”

“Yeah, on a Tuesday night? No way. We’ll start this weekend.”

“But Papa,” she starts to protest, and he stands up and cuts her off with a grin.

“Hey, if you focus on school this week and do well in training, I’ll talk to Aunt Char about making you a brand-new suit.”

She leaps to her feet, beaming, all protests dying immediately. “Are you serious?”

“If!”

Izzy stands on her toes to kiss his cheek and then scrambles for the door. “Gotta go, I’ve got school bright and early tomorrow!” she grins, throwing the door open, and he laughs.

“Good night to you too. Oh, and Iz?”

She stops for a moment in the doorway, silhouetted by the warm light from the house. Young and brave and so full of life. He loves her more every single day.

“You’re not gonna be like me,” he tells her, and smiles. “You’re gonna be a whole lot better.”

#i hope you like this ashgdjksf #nikki i love you so much!#dangerverse #henry hart #zack martin #izzy hartin #one shot #writing #my writing #//umanawrites #usernicolette #zenryverse

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