FULL GEAR — CHAPTER 17: "Home"
The ride back from Precinct 14 was quieter than the ride there.
That was probably obvious. The ride there had been three people on a half-empty elevated rail car with the particular alertness of professionals heading toward a C-grade consultation. The ride back was an Imperial transport vehicle — standard issue, two bench seats facing each other, partition between passengers and the driver — and it carried the specific silence of people who had used up most of their words for the day.
Hilda was asleep. She'd closed her eyes approximately four minutes after the vehicle started moving, arms crossed, ponytail slightly disheveled, and had not moved since. The bruises on her face were developing properly now that the adrenaline had fully cleared. Her lip had swollen at the cut.
Dean was reading. He'd produced a small notebook from somewhere — not Nate's notebook, his own, smaller, the kind that didn't announce itself — and was writing in it with the focused patience of someone doing something they had promised themselves they would finish today.
Herro was watching North Valor scroll past the window.
The city looked the same. That was the specific thing. Same elevated transit lines, same commercial district giving way to residential, same afternoon light making the buildings look cleaner than they probably were. North Valor had continued being North Valor while they'd spent the day inside a precinct building discovering that one of its officers had been running drug trials on Gearless civilians for four years.
The city didn't know. The city just kept going.
He was still thinking about that when the vehicle slowed at a checkpoint and another passenger was loaded — Grey, in Imperial restraints, guided in by an authorization officer who sat beside the partition.
Grey was placed on the bench opposite Herro.
His broken wrist was splinted now, dressed properly, the joint immobilized. His face had the particular quality of someone who had said everything they had to say and arrived at the other side of it. He didn't look at Herro immediately. He looked at his hands — at the splint, mostly — the way you looked at an injury when you were still deciding what it meant.
Herro looked out the window for another minute.
Then:
"It was a good fight." He paused. "I think."
Grey's eyes moved toward him, registering what had just been said.
"For me," Herro continued. His voice was conversational. Not performing it, not forcing it. "First real one. The kind where somebody actually knew what they were doing."
Grey said nothing for a moment. Outside, the city moved past in its ordinary way — transit stations, storefronts, a school with its lights still on.
"You figured out how to hurt me through my blocks," Grey said finally. Quietly. Like a fact he was still processing. "Without being told what you were doing. In the middle of it." He shifted his weight carefully around the wrist. "That's not nothing."
"I lost basically the whole fight."
"You won the fight."
"At the very end."
"That's still winning."
Herro considered that. Outside, the city was becoming more residential — lower buildings, older infrastructure, the kind of neighborhood where things lasted longer because people couldn't afford to replace them.
"Why'd you really do it," Herro said. Not the recruitment pitch. Not the ideology. He'd heard all of that. "Not the speech. The actual reason."
Grey looked at his hands again.
"Because it worked," he said. "Because I found something that worked and I kept doing it." A pause. "Somewhere in there I stopped asking whether it was right." His voice was flat. Not defensive. Just the statement of a man who had arrived at an honest answer and didn't particularly like it. "That's not the version that makes me look good. But it's what actually happened."
Herro looked at him.
"Yeah," he said. "I know."
A beat.
"That one I believe."
Grey exhaled — short, the particular sound of someone who has been read correctly and decided not to argue with it.
The vehicle slowed at another checkpoint. The authorization officer in the front shifted. Grey looked at his splinted wrist one more time.
"I meant what I said," he said. "On the roof. And in the yard." He didn't look up. "Both things. They don't cancel each other out."
Herro watched him.
Grey looked up. His expression was tired — genuinely tired, the way people looked when they'd stopped holding things up and let them settle where they fell.
"You are a good kid," he said. "I wasn't wrong."
The vehicle slowed to a stop.
The authorization officer stood and gestured. Grey rose — careful with the wrist, measured in every movement — and was guided toward the door. He paused once, just briefly, at the threshold. Not looking back. Just pausing.
"I expect big things from you," he said. "Going forward."
The door closed.
Herro sat in the Imperial transport vehicle and looked at the space where Grey had been.
Dean had not looked up from his notebook.
"He meant that too," Dean said quietly.
"Yeah," Herro said. "I think he might've."
He adjusted his cap forward and looked back out the window.
The vehicle started moving again.
Nate met them at the door.
Not unusual in itself — Nate frequently met people at doors when he'd been informed they were returning, because he was the kind of person who considered door-meeting a baseline hospitality function. What was unusual was his face.
His face was doing several things simultaneously.
The relief portion was genuine and immediate, moving across his features when he saw all three of them in recognizable condition — upright, ambulatory, wearing most of the same clothing they'd left in. That part was real.
Then his eyes moved to the authorization officer standing behind them with a clipboard.
Then to the second authorization officer standing behind the first with a larger clipboard.
Then to the Imperial vehicle parked in front of the building with its official designation markings and the two additional officers waiting beside it.
"Nate," Dean said.
Nate's face settled into the expression of a man who had sent his cousin on a C-grade consultation and needed to know, precisely and immediately, what had happened to it.
"I need to speak with you," Dean said, "about the quarterly report."
Nate looked at him.
"And several additional reports."
"How many."
"Quite a few."
"Dean. Give me a number."
"I think sitting down first would—"
"A number."
Dean paused. His expression carried the particular calm of someone who had already decided the answer was going to require a sit-down regardless of what he said next. "The good news," he said, "is that Herro is fully official now. Lyra filed it."
Nate's gaze found Herro standing in the doorway — cap forward, right hand wrapped, looking more or less intact. The relief that moved through his face this time was different from the first kind. Quieter. More specific. The kind that appeared when something a person hadn't admitted they were worried about resolved itself without disaster.
He reached out and grabbed Herro in a headlock.
"Hey—"
"You scared me." Flat. Matter-of-fact. "You actually scared me and I'm very glad you're standing there and we will absolutely talk about it later." The headlock tightened slightly. "After the forms."
"Nate, I cannot breathe—"
"I just need a moment."
Hilda walked past both of them. She had no interest in whatever sappy cousin business was happening at the door.
"Welcome home," she said to no one in particular, already heading for the stairs.
Rosa found out approximately eleven minutes later.
The sound this produced traveled through the Ironhide building in a way that confirmed its structural integrity — all the walls held, which was the main concern.
"HE DID WHAT—"
"Rosa—"
"ON HIS SECOND MISSION?!"
"If you could just—"
"CORRUPT COPS AND A JACKAL DRUG RING, HERRO—"
Herro, who had made it as far as the second-floor landing before being intercepted, stood in front of Rosa Tanya and her complete, undivided, maximum-output attention. She had grabbed both of his hands and was holding them with the specific grip of someone making absolutely certain a person was structurally present.
"Are you okay," she said.
"I would say so—"
"Your hands." She turned them over, found the wrapped right hand, the swollen knuckle. Her expression moved through three things very quickly. "Who wrapped this."
"An authorization officer—"
"This doesn't look right." Already checking the bandage. "Does it hurt when you move it?"
"A little, but it's fine, Rosa."
She paused. Something shifted in her expression — less panic, more a kind of wondering. "Jeez. First mission, huh."
It took a moment for that to land properly. He hadn't had space to think about it at the time, but she was right. The thing with JJ on the truck — that had been reactive, unplanned, something that happened to him. Today he had walked in. He had made a choice.
Rosa put her hands over her head in the motion of someone trying to contain something that was not containing well. The energy coming off her was almost as loud as she'd been a moment ago. Dean passed by them in the hallway without stopping, which suggested this was not unusual behavior.
"NEXT TIME I'M GONNA BE THERE TO HELP," Rosa announced.
The sheer difference between Rosa and Hilda was not lost on Herro. What was lost was exactly what Rosa meant by that.
"Next time?" He raised an eyebrow. Her energy alone was enough to make him forget, temporarily, that his hand hurt.
"Well — yeah." She put her fingers together, trailing off as the logic caught up with her. "When there's another mission, I'm gonna be there to... help you." She slowed down on the last part, self-awareness arriving a few seconds too late.
Herro had enough time to determine this was a combination of genuine worry and something that functioned like empathy-adjacent FOMO. For Rosa, it fit perfectly.
"You don't seem that concerned about Hilda," he said.
"Oh. Well." She waved a hand. "I guess I'm just used to it. Hilda's never really been the type to — well, lose a fight. Or come out badly hurt."
"She beat up the big guy."
"She usually beats up everyone. I'm surprised she let you fight the officer."
"I think we can correlate that to luck." He paused. "Or bad luck. Depending on the perspective."
Rosa's face lit up in a way that only made him nervous, because a Tanya smiling regardless of which twin generally meant something was coming that he wasn't going to like.
"I guess this means you're fully-fully — fully!" She gestured broadly. "One of us. Do you need a med kit, by the way?"
"Probably," he admitted — though he was quietly uncertain about Rosa being the one to apply it, given that her attention span did not seem built for medical procedures of any kind.
Rosa studied him. Her amber-brown eyes moved across his face with the focus of someone who was very good at reading people and was currently confirming a conclusion she'd already reached.
"Okay! I'll ask Dean to get me the kit and—" She stopped mid-sentence, pivoted. "OH, MISS LYRA, I NEED—"
She was already moving toward Lyra, which meant Herro was free to be in pain somewhere else. That seemed like the logical outcome.
Room 304 was exactly as he'd left it that morning.
The paper cranes turned slowly in the air that moved through old buildings when nothing else was happening. The succulent sat in the east-facing window, having received the afternoon's light without requiring anything in return. The photo on the desk — seven people on a sagging couch, assembled by what looked like an accident and had not been one — sat exactly where he'd put it.
The cartoon sun on the wall looked at him.
YOU GOT THIS CHAMP!!
Herro sat on the floor, back against the bed, cap forward, and was quiet for a while.
Grey on the roof. Tending vegetables in a precinct building because he needed something living to look at. A man who had found something that worked and stopped asking whether it was right. And on the opposite side of that — whatever Herro had almost done in that corridor before a hand closed around his wrist.
Both things being true simultaneously.
He looked at his wrapped right hand. The knuckle was still swollen. It would be a few days. He'd been hitting things harder than people expected since before he'd understood what hitting meant, and his hands had learned to carry the evidence.
He pressed the back of his head against the side of the bed and stared at the ceiling.
(In retrospect — I know what my Gear is now. Divergent Impact. A second impact when I create one. That's actually really cool.)
The smile that had started forming was gone within a moment.
(I almost did something I couldn't take back.)
(She stopped me.)
He stayed there for a while, not going anywhere.
After a while, there was a knock on his door.
The specific kind that didn't wait for an answer.
The door opened.
JJ stood in the doorway in his usual configuration — black hoodie tied around his waist, grey cargo pants, glasses slightly askew, the general posture of someone who had arrived somewhere and was not fully convinced it was a good idea. His gaze moved across Herro on the floor, then to the cartoon sun poster, then to the succulent on the windowsill. He looked at the succulent for a moment longer than strictly necessary.
"Hey," he said.
"Uh... hey?" Herro said.
Another moment. JJ pushed his glasses up.
"Heard about today."
"Oh."
"That sounds horrific and I'm very relieved it wasn't me." He said it without irony, the way he said most things — like a weather report. "Going to a precinct, having a guy try to kill you, the whole thing. Very bad. Hard pass."
Herro had reached a level of confusion where he wasn't entirely sure what to do with the fact that JJ was here at all. This wasn't usually how JJ operated.
"Well — suppose it's a good thing you didn't go, then." He stretched the end of the sentence slightly, the awkwardness making it hard to sound like a normal person.
"Correct. And I didn't. Smart." JJ leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, looking at the middle distance with the studied nonchalance of someone who had practiced looking casual about the thing they'd actually come to say.
A beat.
"Your first day here," JJ said. "When you saved me from the Jackal truck."
He cleared his throat. The glasses went up again, unnecessarily. "I didn't say anything at the time because there was a lot happening and I didn't particularly know how to say it. But."
He stopped. Started again, with the specific frustration of someone whose actual feelings had decided to be slightly larger than his mouth was comfortable with. "I'm not — look. I'm bad at this. I'm a weird guy. You've probably figured that out by now." He looked at the doorframe rather than Herro. "Thank you. For saving me. Just." He waved a hand. "Yeah."
Herro looked at him.
JJ looked at the doorframe.
Something settled in Herro's expression — not quite a smile, not a frown. The particular feeling of having done something that turned out to actually matter.
"You're welcome," Herro said.
JJ nodded once — decisively, the nod of someone completing a task and preparing to exit before the situation developed any further.
He turned to leave.
"Hey, JJ."
He stopped.
"I don't think you're weird," Herro said. "You don't seem that weird to me." He forced a short laugh and scratched the back of his head. In the moment, at least, it was the most honest thing he could think to say.
Something shifted in JJ's shoulders. Barely. The kind of movement that happened when a person absorbed something unexpected and decided not to make it visible.
"Yeah." He pushed off the doorframe. "Well. Don't die." He paused. "You're bad at not being in dangerous situations. It's extremely concerning. I've noted it."
"I'll work on it."
"Please." One more beat, and then, without turning around: "You're not a bad guy, Touya. For the record. I know bad guys. I have direct personal experience with bad guys targeting me specifically. You're not one." He pushed off the frame. "That's all."
He left.
Footsteps down the hall. Irregular. A little fast.
Herro looked at the open door for a moment.
Then he got up, went to the window, and checked on the succulent.
It seemed fine. He was fairly sure it was fine. He wasn't entirely familiar with how to tell.
Nate found him downstairs an hour later, eating at the kitchen table. Dean had made dinner again — the quantity specific and deliberate in the way Dean's quantities tended to be.
Nate sat across from him with his notebook and a stack of documentation that had the look of something recently organized out of chaos. He set it on the table. Looked at it. Then at Herro.
"How bad," Herro said.
"Manageable." The word carried the weight of forty-five minutes of work to reach that conclusion. "Lyra filed your permanent transfer. Done. The consultation report needs careful language — describing what we found without triggering three separate Imperial compliance reviews at once is a specific kind of problem." He uncapped his pen. "And the other units issue that Dean flagged is going to require—"
"Nate."
Nate stopped.
"I'm sorry I scared you," Herro said.
Nate's expression did the specific thing it did when he'd been preparing to say something and found the other person had already said it first. He exhaled. Looked at his notebook. Then at Herro.
"I sent you on a nothing job," he said. "I read the brief. Lyra read the brief. Everything looked clean."
"It was clean. That was kind of the point. That's how Grey kept it running for that long."
"I know that." Nate's jaw tightened. "I still sent you into it. I brought you to this unit and I wanted to ease you in — I know you're not great with new people — and your first real experience here wasn't great, and then I almost sent you to a death trap."
"You sent Dean and Hilda too."
"Should that make me feel better? I sent my cousin."
Herro looked at him for a moment.
"Nate." His voice was even. Not arguing — just laying something down. "I was scared. I won't lie about that. But I'm Ironhide. And in the few days I've been here, I've met people who are actually — good. People weren't like that at school." He gestured with his hands, searching for the right words and not quite finding them. "Whatever I'm going to go through here — I think I'm prepared. So you don't have to carry all of this."
Nate looked up.
"That's the whole thing, right? That's what Lyra said. That's what you said." Herro kept his voice steady. "I worry about you too. This fighting stuff is genuinely terrifying and so are the criminals. But if I don't fight — if I can't do what Hilda and Dean do — then I'm not really Ironhide. I'm just your cousin who lives here."
He paused.
"I'm going to assume that's not what you brought me here for."
Nate was quiet for a moment.
"I brought you here because I knew the people here were loyal," he said. "And wouldn't treat you like a monster."
"And I think you were right." Herro looked at him. "I feel — liked, here. For the first time in a while. And while I don't think they all consider me a close friend yet, I'm ready to help however I can." He paused. "Especially whatever Lyra needs. As scary as she is."
Something moved across Nate's face. Slow, and quiet.
"I guess you really are one of us."
He stood, collected his documentation, and left with the footsteps of someone who had resolved something and was already moving toward the next problem. Which was exactly what they always sounded like.
Lyra was in the common room.
In the recliner, television on at low volume showing something she wasn't watching, a drink that had been refilled once since she'd sat down. Hilda was on the floor with her back against the couch, ice pack pressed against her cheek, doing nothing in particular with the quality of someone who had earned the right to nothing and was exercising it fully.
Nate set the briefing packet on the armrest.
"North Terra Urban District," he said. "Contract came in about twenty minutes ago."
"Nate, we JUST got through something. Not even an hour ago."
"Well, they're giving us another one."
"They really don't entertain the idea of giving us breaks, do they."
"Our model is centered around taking whatever job comes in."
"YOU made that model, you little bastard."
"To which it's kept the lights on and food in our stomachs." Nate produced the specific smug smile he kept exclusively for conversations like this. They happened often.
Lyra picked up the brief.
"Standard disturbance report," Nate continued. "Gear activity on a civilian block. Escalating property damage. Unit consultation requested, possible active engagement depending on assessment." A pause. "Central corridor of the Urban District. Near the transit junction."
Lyra's eye twitched.
Barely. Once. The specific twitch of someone recognizing information they had been hoping not to recognize today.
"That district," Nate said carefully, "is currently—"
"I know what district it is," Lyra said.
Nate stopped.
Hilda took the ice pack off her face and looked at Lyra sideways. Then at Nate. Something moved in her expression — not understanding exactly, just the particular awareness that information was in the room and she wasn't being given it.
"Who's operating there," Hilda said.
"It doesn't matter right now," Lyra said.
"Can you look me in the eye and tell me it doesn't matter?"
"I would be looking at the ice pack on your face."
"Which is a substitute for the unsure and untrusting look I'm giving you."
"That's the look you always give."
"With very good reason," Hilda said, the edge in her voice carrying something more specific than routine friction.
"It's not important tonight." Lyra set the brief on the side table and looked at it with the carefully neutral expression of someone who had decided to process something privately and was being moderately interrupted. "We brief tomorrow. Full team. The pay is good. No reason not to take it."
"Oh my Terra," Hilda said, dragging the sentence out.
Nate produced a second document.
Lyra looked at it. "Another one?"
He shrugged. "If the White Lion Empire knows we have a new member who's actually capable, of course they're going to wring as much out of us as they can."
"Well — fine. I'll read that one too."
"Thank you, Ms. Lyra."
Nate wrote something in his notebook.
Lyra set the brief on the side table and picked up her drink.
The television kept going. The common room settled into the quiet of a space that had been loud enough today and was content to let the evening be ordinary. Somewhere upstairs, paper cranes turned in the slow currents of an old building settling into night.
The brief sat on the side table.
North Terra Urban District. Gear disturbance. Unit consultation requested.
It would still be there in the morning.