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Hvergelmir slumped dizzily to the ground, her head pounding. She'd gotten away from Sailor Ate, then stumbled off, covered in blood and sludge, counting mostly on being filthy and disgusting-looking to keep anyone from getting too close to her. It had taken longer to locate someplace she could get pen and paper, but she'd finally found an ATM that had deposit envelopes and a few pens that had recently been replenished, and then she'd made her way into a self-park garage to compose her note and wait for an answer.

To Camelot Knight of Earth, crowned the top of the deposit envelope in cramped letters, slightly smeared.

I got banged up in a fight. Can you come and get me? Parking garage next to this ATM. She circled the address on the envelope.

Hvergelmir

The conciseness made it kind of understated, she supposed: it didn't mention that she'd cut her hand open, or scraped her other arm along the street pretty badly, or that head wounds bled more than you'd think, even when they weren't the fatal kind -- but she had a splitting headache, and she'd decided she didn't need to give her usual life story before Camelot got there. It was embarrassing enough having to bother someone else for help, especially someone as important as Camelot. Writing a long note justifying her request wasn't going to make it any better.

There was a smear of blood on the page from her cut hand. She dipped her signet ring into it, enough to pick up a stain, then pressed her seal into the page.

She knew Camelot. He was the world's nicest person. He'd be there.

Hvergelmir settled back against a big cement pillar and waited, closing her eyes against her rising headache.

If Camelot had arrived haloed in morning sunlight, rather than the dank yellow flourescents of a parking garage, he could not have looked like more of a godsend in Hvergelmir's eyes.

"Hi," she said tiredly, curling up obediently into the cloak as soon as he wrapped it around her. It was soft, and it still held the warmth of the man who'd been wearing it.

She winced as Camelot started dabbing at her injured hand -- not a cut deep enough to have severed any tendons or done any lasting damage, but deep enough to hurt, and certainly deep enough to bleed.

"I can't go to the hospital like this," she argued. It wasn't that she was trying to be stoic or anything, but it seemed like it would just be a bad idea. "There's a dead man in an alley covered in trash," she said slightly hysterically. "They'll know I was there."

Hvergelmir was covered in what had to be several bruises-in-progress from refuse landing on her head and back, and Camelot's armor was every bit as unforgiving as it looked, but she couldn't bring herself to protest as she was scooped up and lifted into his arms, aside an occasional wince and an attempt to resettle herself more comfortably. He carried her with an ease that belied his age or his build: not that he was decrepit or reedy, but it was a mark of his power level that he seemed to be able to lift her as easily as a bag of groceries. Hvergelmir was in awe of him -- but she had been from the moment they'd met. He was safety and solace in human form, comfort and reassurance -- and those were things she craved far more often than she liked to admit.

Too often, going out and being a knight was hard. Too often, she stood in her bedroom with her back pressed against her door, staring at the ceiling, trying to will herself to go out and patrol like other knights did with no hesitation or compunctions. Too often, she left the house only because she didn't want to be holed up in a room with only a coward like herself for company. The path she'd chosen for herself was one she was certain was meant to be walked alone. How had she ever thought she was strong enough for something like that? Had there really been a few moments where she'd felt she could do it? Where had that feeling gone? She couldn't seem to summon it now, to believe in it even a little. All her conviction had done nothing for the dead man in the alleyway.

It would do nothing for Camelot, or for anyone else. It was empty, and she'd backed it with all her power, everything she would ever have -- tied up in that one vow. Now, asking favors of people like Camelot or Babylon was truly to go begging with no promise of repayment -- there would never be anything she could offer them in return. If she told Camelot about her oath, would he still think she was worth so much of his time and indulgence? When she couldn't even pull her own weight anymore?

It was a while before she realized she was crying.

She wiped at her eyes with the soft fabric of Camelot's cloak, bunched in her hands. What must he think? I'm such a child.

"You're unreal," she said finally, tears and snot clogging her voice. "I love corgis."

She tried to pull herself together as they traveled, though not with much success. "Your place is better," she agreed, grateful. "My parents would flip out at me if I had another random hospital visit, it already costs them a ton to COBRA me on their insurance since I'm not in school. If I keep going out all the time and not telling them anything, coming back looking all gang violencey, they'll check me into a place. I can't -- I just can't."

When Hvergelmir powered down, it was to the clothes she'd been wearing when she'd left the house that night -- a red Lifeguard hoodie, Marvin the Martian boxers, and beat-up tennis shoes that had never been used for anything athletic. Some people subscribed to the wardrobe philosophy that, figuratively speaking, you should never leave the house in any underwear you wouldn't want the EMT and the ambulance driver to see -- but where her clothing was concerned when she was going out on patrol, Laney had never bothered. If people like Camelot discovered that, in actuality, she did not clothe herself in elegant dresses on a regular basis, but instead dressed like a highschool dropout, well -- the truth was bound to out sometime or another.

"Now we both smell gross," she lamented, putting a hand up to her scraggly hair and the blood staining her cheek. "Your corgis'll take one whiff and run for cover."

Once she realized they were at his actual house, she moved to get down and onto her feet. "It's okay, I can walk," she promised. "I -- I don't want to freak your family out. Thanks for letting me come here -- I won't stay long. I just need to -- wash up, and -- some aspirin, maybe."

She paused. "It's Laney Sutton, by the way," she introduced herself. "I don't remember if I ever said."

Her head was still pounding -- it made it a little hard to think.

Laney put out a hand for the corgis to sniff, then promptly drew it back again -- her dominant right hand was still sticky and red from where she'd accidentally grabbed a knifeblade while shoving trash aside. The bleeding had all but let up, at least: she'd dropped the blade pretty quickly, so the cut wasn't dangerously deep.

Her head hurt more -- which alerted her to the fact that it was still bleeding, if slowly. She put her fingers to the back of her head and they came back damp, which confirmed her hypothesis. No wonder moving too quickly was making her dizzy every time she tried it.

With her good hand outstretched as a replacement for the right, Laney scratched first one dog, then the other, behind their big, wolfish ears. The bigger corgi looked kind of familiar -- but then, Laney didn't know too many corgi owners, so she figured that was the kind of thing a person had to chalk up to looking at a lot of corgi pictures on the internet. "Hi, babies," she cooed softly, conscious that Tony had a family and they probably valued their sleep at an hour like this.

Laney looked around the living room where Tony'd left her while she waited and socialized with his dogs. It looked well-inhabited -- signs of multiple occupants, a cozy setup, and . . . what was most definitely evidence of at least one baby in the Darrow household. (If it was anything but that, Laney didn't want to know.) Were the Darrows all out facing their deaths at the hands of the Negaverse every week at the same time as they were trying to raise an infant?

These sorts of things always seemed to catch up with Laney at odd times, belated. Her situation was so different: the universe had picked her out for this job, and she'd sort of taken for granted that that had sort of gone hand in hand with her lifestyle, which lent well to secret magical warfare. She was young, jobless, and comfortably enough supported by her family. She had no siblings and no real responsibilities. Nothing really existed in her everyday life to conflict with a knight's life. It had always been a hollow, empty shell of an existence, and some part of her had been believing for a while now, she realized, that she could ascribe some particular meaning to that. That maybe her vacant interpersonal existence was something she could consider fated and just ignore.

Surely it was better that way. Surely people like the Darrows ought to be able to live out their lives while people with less to lose kept them safe.

She didn't know. Laney was glad she didn't have to decide -- but it seemed unfair, all the same. And she had a headache -- it was the wrong time to bother thinking about it.

Fishing a remote control from a nearby coffee table, Laney turned on the TV and lowered the volume to something quiet as quickly as she could. There wasn't much on at this hour, but Laney couldn't really concentrate on it anyway, even if there had been. In the end, she settled on an old Married with Children rerun and went back to entertaining the pair of corgis sitting nearby. She hoped she wasn't bleeding on the Darrows' couch. Bloodstains were probably not baby friendly.

In the months immediately following her coma a few years ago, Laney had been in and out of the hospital a lot -- undergoing tests, checkups, CT scans -- whatever her doctors deemed necessary to satisfy themselves that she had a clean bill of health. She was still used to the fuss and tedium of being a patient, and accepted it without resistance, drinking the water Tony had brought and then letting him start cleaning and dressing her wounds as he saw fit.

She focused on the room around them, trying not to wince too hard or flinch away whenever he was cleaning one of her cuts.

He was so nice to her. To everybody. It wasn't fair.

Laney's eyes settled on a book on the coffee table called Where's My Cow?.

"So, um, you have a baby?" she asked. The evidence of a young life was everywhere in the house around them -- but it could also have been a grandchild, or a daycare gig or something.