Daddy-Daughter Dysfunction
Training in Paragon. PG [Addiction themes. ], 1,965.

Nicholas Walker stepped out of the cab into the mostly-dark Paragon night and paid the driver with a crinkled ten dollar bill from his pocket. He told the driver to keep the change as he peered over at the prismatic light-show cascading from somewhere among the warehouses in the Folly. The driver leaned out of the window and yelled, "Hey, buddy! That might be like a big cape fight or whatever. You sure you wanna go in there?"

He held up his camera. "It's alright. I'm a photographer." As if that carried with it some sort of invulnerability clause.

The driver shrugged and pulled away, apparently satisfied with Nick's explanation, or content enough with the tip to let Nick throw himself into the middle of what could very well be a free-for-all of superpowered combatants.

Nick, however, knew better. With his camera draped around his neck, hanging over a well-worn plain blue collared shirt and his lazily unzipped leather jacket, he followed the light and the sound of pavement cracking and grinding through the Folly, not particularly worried about getting jumped. No mugger worth his salt would stick around this close to such a display of metahuman power. Even though his own abilities were long gone, a glimmer of his senses still remained, and he could feel the siren's call of the Primal Force, dull and warm and wonderful, pulsing nearby. It made his blood ache in his veins, a cold itch that had every ounce of him hungering for the rush, for the power, once again.

He stopped to lean against a big, wooden crate, supporting himself with his hand and shoulder. The feeling of hunger rippled through him as he shut his eyes and steadied his breathing. He focused his mind on Anne and Phoebe and everything else he'd have to give up if he embraced tat power again.

Slowly, the craving passed, and Nick righted himself. He mopped sweat off his brow, took a deep breath, and focused his eyes on the multicolored conflagration just ahead as he trudged forward.

When he rounded the corner to the main throughway between a bank of old Chase Industries warehouses, he finally found who he was looking for. There, in the center of a maelstrom of the swirling, multicolored Primal Force which caused all the pavement and concrete and wood and metal to warp and shift and twist at impossible angles over and over again was Phoebe, her eyes clenched shut and her fingertips dug a few inches into the pavement. Energy wasn't just pouring out of her form: it was gushing out, driven on by desperation and will alone. The Primal Force surged from Phoebe's arms and cascaded across her hands, singing her flesh before it found the pavement. The instant it touched the rocky material, it caused the tarmac to twist randomly, then buckle as the Primal Force continued to spread out and seek to touch every last particle of the road surface that it could, to unlock all the potential of what that substance could be. And behind it all was the desperate will of a girl of seventeen-and-a-half clamping her jaw shut so tight that her father's jaw ached sympathetically.

He walked carefully across the warping, chaotic throughway on unsteady footing, but confident enough that the light show all around him was just that. Sure, the ground beneath his feet might be buckling and twisting and reshaping itself randomly, and sure the air might be stretched out into howling, driving wind, but in the center of the storm was his daughter, and he knew that she'd never actually hurt him.

A sudden upswelling of pavement took Nick's feet out from under him and sent him face-first into the road, causing him to amend his certainty. She'd never actually hurt him seriously. The former planeswalker rolled to his side and got back onto his knees, then made his way over crouched low to maintain his footing, and to keep his hands ready in case he started to fall again.

Phoebe seemed to sense his approach. Her eyes opened, almost blinding Nick with the impossibly bright glare of the Primal Force boiling inside her head. Nick gave her his best stern look. "You're supposed to tell us if you're running off in the middle of the night, young lady."

The storm of the Primal Force all around them began to die down as the suns behind her eyes dimmed to bonfires, then to dull glows. The pavement stopped warping and reshaping itself randomly, and the wind stopped battering Nick's hair and coat. Phoebe let out what must've been a long-held breath. "I had to practice."

"At two in the morning?" Nick asked as he sat down next to his daughter on a relatively flat bit of pavement. "If Anne knew that you'd run off like this, she'd kill you, and then kill me for letting you get away with it, and then kill us both again just to make sure we learned our lesson."

"Look Wal-... Nick," Phoebe corrected herself. He'd been very insistent that she stop calling him by his last name, but she wasn't ready to bow to his suggestion that she call him "Dad" yet. Not by a long shot. "I have to practice, okay? I couldn't sleep and I figured I might as well at least do something useful with my time. Plus at night, the Folly's totally empty, so I don't have to deal with company. Most of the time." She added a glare to that last part to drop a not-so-subtle hint to her father.

"You're having trouble sleeping?" Nick asked, leaning back on his hands.

"Forget I mentioned it," his daughter ordered. "I'm probably just too wired from all the stuff that's been going on."

She started to rub her arms, a sure sign that something was making her feel uncomfortable, and Nick noticed the burns. He reached over and grabbed her hand, pulling it closer for inspection. Before Phoebe could slither her amorphous form from his grasp, he could see that she had burned and charred her flesh down to the bone in tiny patches (the largest of which was no bigger than a dime) up and down her arm. "You're hurting yourself," Nick gasped.

"I'm fine," Phoebe assured him. She held up her newly reformed arm, which was free from burns or injury of any sort. "See? All better."

"If you're channeling enough of the Primal Force that it actually burns your body, then you're doing something very wrong, Phoebe." Nick held out his hands. "Why don't you let me help you?"

"You wouldn't understand," Phoebe grumbled, shutting her eyes.

He shook his head. "I've been where you are. I know that channeling the Primal Force isn't easy. Why don't you tell me what you're trying to do, and I can help guide you in the right direction at least."

Phoebe was silent for a long time before she muttered, "I'm trying to turn the pavement into wood."

"You're trying to-" Nick shook his head. "The Primal Force doesn't work like that, Phoebe. You know that. It can only change what's already there. You can't use it to turn a substance into something completely different."

"But Aurum can do it," Phoebe protested. "And he can even reshape matter like I can. So if he can do it, then if I try really hard to figure it out, I should be able to."

"That's alchemy," Nick reminded her. "You can't blame yourself for not being able to do something with the Primal Force that the Primal Force can't do."

She punched the pavement in frustration, crushing it. "I have to figure it out! I've got to figure out my powers! I'm so sick of being the only one who can't even use her powers right!"

"Is that what this is all about?" the former planeswalker asked quietly.

Phoebe balled up her fists one last time, but didn't strike the pavement. "I hate being useless."

"You're not-"

"Yes I am!" Phoebe countered. "I mean, what can I even do?" She started counting on her fingers. "I can shape stuff, but what's the point? Aurum can shape stuff and turn it into whatever he wants, and Phoenix can just create anything whenever he wants. I can change my shape, but so what? Selena can actually change, like, her biology all over, and Vicky can actually copy other people's powers. I'm not as strong as Aurum or Reiko or anyone, and Phoenix can heal people better than I ever could." She lowered her eyes to the pavement so Nick couldn't see her face behind her bangs. "I can't even fly without falling on my face. What kind of superhero can't even fly?"

Nick reached over and put his hand on Phoebe's shoulder in what he hoped was a comforting gesture. He felt a slight tingle pass through his body, and he had to fight the urge to touch the Primal Force again, to draw her power into himself and to feel it surge through his very being and-

He shook his head and dismissed the urge. "You're looking at it all wrong, Phoebe. Do you think your friends think you're useless?"

"I would if I were them," Phoebe muttered, still rubbing her arms.

"You don't think that they depend on you?" Nick asked. "That they count on you to be there to help them? You're part of a team, and a team depends on everyone being there working together."

"But they'd do better if someone else took my place," she countered. "Someone whose powers were actually useful. Or at least someone who could control their powers right."

"You'll learn to control your powers," he assured the girl. "Channeling the Primal Force isn't easy. Compared to the other fundamental energies of the multiverse, the Primal Force is..." he trailed off, lost for a moment in a blissful memory of the sweet embrace of that power, tainted with the longing to feel it once again.

Nick quickly dragged his thoughts back to where they needed to be. "Channeling the Primal Force is like trying to contain an avalanche, or a tidal wave. And that's coming from someone who wielded it as an immortal." He smiled sadly. "I can only imagine how tough it is for you."

"I suck at it," Phoebe agreed grimly.

"You'll get better," Nick promised. "Remember what Selena said about you in the future?"

"I don't believe what she said," Phoebe muttered. "There's no way I could open holes in time or whatever. Or be okay with killing people..."

Nick searched for painful minutes, trying to think of some way to comfort his daughter. But try as he might, he couldn't think of anything. It killed him: he just didn't know Phoebe that well. He didn't know what he could say to make her feel better. So he did the next best thing.

"Come on," Nick said, standing up. "We should get home before your mother wakes up and has a fit."

Reluctantly, Phoebe got up and brushed her backside off. "Fine. What time is it?"

Fishing his cell phone out of his pocket, Nick checked the screen and reported, "Almost four."

"I'll make some coffee when we get home," Phoebe volunteered as she started walking back towards the main road on the outskirts of the Folly.

"You're not going to try to get some more sleep before school?" he asked, walking alongside the girl. "Usually, Anne says she has to drag you out of bed."

"I haven't been... I mean, it'll be fine," she assured him as they both disappeared around the corner, leaving the strange, twisted, Lovecraftean landscape that had once been an ordinary stretch of pavement behind them. "I could use some coffee anyway."