The morning after Dark Athena had been banished back to Earth Zeta, while New York City was being rebuilt, Vivian Dent woke up back in Memphis, her arms wrapped protectively around her Master as she spooned around him from behind. Her back still ached from the flames of Cerberus’ breath, though the costume had spared her some of it and her powers had meant at least that it had been merely painful at the time.

She bent her head forward and placed a line of kisses along his shoulderblade. This was not something she was under a compulsion to do, and there had been a time she would have mocked anyone doing such a thing for it.

Vivian would say she knew better now, because she had been lucky in the man that had Mastered her. But she would not have been eager to say this, because she knew it would provoke a difficult conversation.

Vivian had been mentally controlled by her Master now for a little over a year; up until that moment, she had been the villainess also known as Macabre, and had taken some pride in being known as one of the foremost supervillains of the world, her name recognised by everyone.

Up until that moment, too, her nemesis had been the slave of the man who was now Vivian’s Master. Through a set of circumstances Vivian had only entirely understood months afterward, events had ended with her nemesis free, Vivian under the control of her Master, Macabre gone and the new, apparently android heroine Mercy on the scene.

And Mercy and Ms Miracle were close friends, the gulf of their contrary goals finally gone.

Master did not seem to be stirring, but Vivian knew from long experience that once she’d woken up, she would become restless. And she knew from much more recent experience that Master preferred not to have his sleep interrupted.

She lifted slightly off the bed, just a half-inch or so, with the power of flight, and very gently, very slowly, eased her arms out from around the embrace of her Master. Then she flew backward, still moving very slowly, extricating herself from the quilt without disturbing him.

She stood in the air, having established early on in her career that flying just an inch above the ground was one of the stealthiest ways you could move, and drifted over to the window, peering out at the dawn through a crack in the curtains.

Listening to Memphis set her smiling, these days; technically it wasn’t ‘her city’ but then the heroes themselves mostly didn’t think in those terms, that was usually a media thing. In any event, it was only a few months since she’d looked after the city for a while in Ms Miracle’s absence.

It was odd how much she enjoyed protecting the innocent now, when not long ago they’d seemed completely irrelevant. The first time she’d ever saved the world, when she’d still gone by the name Macabre, it had been simply because she too lived on the planet; she had to fight for it, because otherwise there was no more Macabre.

A number of times in the past year, Vivian had done things which likely had saved the world; it was often a little difficult to tell, but unquestionably lives had been saved, cities and even states, if not more.

It surprised her that she still hadn’t got used to it.

She went through into the bathroom and stood for a while under the shower, enjoying the tingles that the hot water sent running across her back and forced the occasional growl of satisfaction from her lips.

Once out of the shower, she made her way into the living room and collected a loose, flowing, near-transparent purple gown that hung nearby. This was one of the items she most commonly wore while in her Master’s home; her costume didn’t lend itself to sex with it on to the same degree that Ms Miracle’s had.

Thus attired, she made her way through the room, collecting the discarded items of her costume and checking them for damage. Made of a fabric devised by Professor Mordecai and topped off with a helmet wrought of a futuristic alloy, they were all in one piece; on the other hand, even a miracle fabric should probably be laundered after facing sulphurous hellfire.

Her nose wrinkled slightly in distaste and she tidied it away quickly, so as not to pollute any enjoyment they might have once Master rose. All the same, her hand unclipped the comm from her costume’s headset and tucked it into place behind one ear automatically.

The man in that bedroom was her Master, but she also owed service to all the people out there, good or bad, who were just trying to live their lives. Master had been quite clear that serving him didn’t justify letting them down.

She thought about making breakfast, but her skills did not lie in that direction, and before too long she set the question aside. Sitting down in one of Master’s chairs, she looked out across the way.

Master had taken an apartment high up in a modern tower complex, looking out over the central open space. Across from his apartment, it had transpired, was the apartment Ms Miracle held in her civilian identity. Looking out, Vivian saw her former nemesis, turned rival, turned friend.

“Heyyyy, Miracle,” she murmured, barely loud enough to be heard. Certainly not loud enough to disturb her Master sleeping just one room away. Between them were three or four hundred yards and two double-glazed windows.

Amy’s head lifted and she turned to look at the window, and the two womens’ eyes met. Amy smiled easily, and Vivian reflected on how big a change that truly was. And what a welcome one… much to their mutual surprise.

Amy lifted her hand and crooked a finger. Vivian was tempted, but she shook her head fractionally; she could justify leaving her Master without instruction to do so if there was a crisis, but not to visit a friend. In response, Amy instead pointed at herself, and then at Vivian, who nodded.

Amy opened the door out to her balcony as Vivian opened her own, and Amy flew across, so fast that no observer who had not already prepared to watch would notice.

The two women met in a friendly embrace. After a few moments, Vivian broke the hold, leaning back slightly to look her friend in the eye. “He’s asleep,” she whispered, knowing that to Amy, it would be as clearly audible as speaking normally.

“That’s fine,” Amy replied, her voice couched around the same volume. “I still feel a little… blackmail-y around him.”

“Heroes always have it worse for guilt than villains.”

Ms Miracle grinned. “Thanks again for lending a hand yesterday,” she said. The pair of them had been in at the final fight, but they’d also spent a little time dealing with a nest of Technoplites, cybernetically-augmented and controlled warriors made out of New York civilians by one of Dark Athena’s allies.

It was such a different approach to the real Athena’s approach that neither of them had quite believed what they were facing until the third or fourth diamond-tipped spear to try to break their skin, and even then it had been a challenge to bring them down without killing the unfortunate citizens within. Professor Mordecai had said he’d look at properly restoring them that morning.

“You already thanked me once,” Vivian answered, slightly uncomfortable.

“Well, now you know I really mean it.”

Amy studied Vivian’s expression thoughtfully. “You think I’m making a big deal out of you saving my life?”

“Well… not when you put it like that.” She sighed. “There’s still parts of me this doesn’t come naturally to, you know.”

Amy nodded. The two of them had started to drift away from the window and toward the apartment’s kitchen, without either of them talking about it. They were still moving an inch or so in the air, not standing on or touching anything, as silent thereby as they could be.

Amy was under no compulsion to obey Vivian’s Master, not anymore, but having been his slave before - and especially having enjoyed it - she still had certain old habits of respect.

“Do you think there are as many as there used to be?” she asked, and Vivian had to run the question back through her head to understand what she meant.

“No,” she said at last. “Less of me pushes back against it. I was worried for a while that it might be some kind of trick, with my old self laying low in my subconscious to trick me into letting my guard down.”

“What changed?”

Vivian shrugged, feeling that the honest answer of I stopped worrying about it might not be as reassuring to her friend as it was to her.

There had been reasons behind it. Lots of little reasons, most of them so small she hadn’t noticed herself. So the worry had left her, not as a conscious decision where she could point to something that tipped the scales for her, but by her getting used to the situation.

She put coffee on to brew, enough for a mug each for herself and a friend and two more for Master, should he wake - and she would have bet on the aroma of coffee as a way to wake him. “It just seems to be holding well,” she said, “and besides, Master has very good reason to make sure it never… well, whatever happened with you never happens.”

Neither of them had spent much time speculating on why Amy had just woken up with free will again one day. Master had kept other people under control for much longer, and Amy had been under incredible stress just before they realised she was free.

But that kind of huge stress came to people like them not infrequently. Vivian, as Mercy, had been through similar huge events, experienced similar levels of challenge, and she had still gone home to Master afterwards. Once Dark Athena was banished the first thought she had was that if she were to kneel before her Master, she could give up her frustrations and her worries, put them aside for a while at least. He had become a source of strength, where beforehand she had always had to be her own.

Maybe that was it, she mused. But she was used to keeping her thoughts from others, so she didn’t say it. “Any other big cases?” she asked Amy, handing across a warm mug.

“I’m not sure,” Ms Miracle said thoughtfully - even without the costume, there were expressions which, when they crossed Amy’s face, definitely said she was in a working frame of mind. “Mostly it’s been pretty calm lately. But… I don’t know.” She took a sip. “I’m sure by now you’ve run into some cases where you know there’s more going on than you can see.”

“Oh, yeah,” Vivian said. “Once, anyway.”

“That sounds like it was memorable.”

“Well, the solution was, anyway.” Vivian grinned. “I thought it smelled like something Apparition might be up to, so I bought a burner phone and called his old number. Asked him some questions and he spilled the whole setup.”

“You didn’t!”

“Sure did.” She grinned. “Of course, the problem was that once I’d done that, I had to figure out how to bust it up without making it obvious Macabre had gone good.”

Amy burst out laughing, then remembered the apartment’s owner was still trying to sleep. She put two fingers to her mouth apologetically, but her eyes were still alight with amusement. “How did you get out of that one?”

“I had a couple of weeks wiggle room before they were going to put that part of the plan live. Mercy hit a keystone of it two nights after I talked to Apparition, then didn’t follow up on those clues for a few days and targeted side stuff. I wanted it to look like I’d hit something important by accident and didn’t realise what I’d managed.

“Then a couple days later I went back with Osprey and hit another key site. Apparition figures Mercy’s no detective, missed some important stuff, and had to ask Osprey for help putting the clues together.” She shrugged. “It got the job done.”

“And you don’t mind Apparition thinking less of you?”

“I think less of him these days. It seems fair.” There had been a stretch of about two years where Macabre and Apparition had been a duo, enough so that many people assumed they were an item. It wasn’t fair, really; Apparition was one of the few married villains whose wife knew all about it and supported him. Vivian had met her a couple of times. Strange woman, but nice enough to talk to.

“I didn’t expect company,” a male voice said from the doorway to the kitchen, “but you’re always welcome here.” Master was framed by the light from the living room; he gave Ms Miracle a smile and favoured Vivian with a nod. Amy smiled back at him,

“Thank you,” she said while Vivian prepared his coffee. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”

“Well, the world’s still here,” he said, “and if it’s run by evil people, by and large they’re the ones we elected, not malign goddesses. I think the least I can offer is a little compassion.”

Master’s eyes were endlessly hypnotic, but only when he chose for them to be. He didn’t choose it terribly often anymore. Unquestionably he was a villain, but neither Mercy nor Macabre would have considered him a supervillain in spite of his powers.

She genuflected, knees touching the floor for a moment as she offered up his coffee mug. It was a good sign of respect, she felt.

“Is this the start of a new team-up?” he offered.

“No, Master,” Vivian said. “I saw she was awake, too, and-”

“Perfectly natural,” he interrupted. Vivian immediately, instinctively, fell silent to let him take the reins. That wasn’t a trait she’d ever had prior to her control. “I’m honestly glad the pair of you have each other.” He slipped an arm around Vivian’s waist and went up on tiptoes to kiss her; she kissed back, needy for him as she was programmed to be, but also wanting, as ever, to give him the best experience possible. “Honestly I was surprised to have a visitor last night, too.”

“I needed you,” Vivian said quietly. It wasn’t an apology or an excuse, and so he smiled back at her. “Good girl,” he said. She shivered.

“I think someone hasn’t been told that often enough lately,” Amy teased. Vivian blushed.

“I have her tell herself, often enough,” Master said. “Vivian? Mantra, please.”

“I’m a good girl,” she heard herself say. “Good girls obey Master. Good girls give pleasure. Good girls earn pleasure. I’m a good girl.”

She stopped there. She hadn’t been told to repeat the mantra. But even from one recitation she was, she knew, smiling broadly and dreamily. The world seemed to be in soft focus as her gaze had become less intent. Her head felt lighter, somehow, and everything felt righter.

It didn’t take many repetitions before she didn’t have room in her head for other thoughts. But she would repeat it many more times than that when instructed to.

Amy was chewing on her lower lip looking at her. Vivian was, she knew, a hypnosis slut because Amy was; a chance turn of phrasing had caused her to adopt her friend’s fetish. Seeing Vivian irresistibly compelled to her mantra so easily gave Amy pleasure, Vivian knew, and that earned Vivian pleasure in her turn. Her eyes rolled back into her head briefly and, with nobody who didn’t understand in earshot, her programming did not cut in to stop her from moaning with bliss.

“Amazing,” Amy breathed.

“Miraculous,” Master said, his tone amused but indisputably still corrective. “Can I offer you ladies both breakfast?”

“Anything you wish, Master,” Vivian answered, as she almost always did when he phrased things as a question. Amy simply smiled and nodded.

“Good.” His hand came down on Vivian’s buttock with a loud crack. “See to it, Vivian.”

“Yes, Master,” she said, and busied herself in the kitchen while Master and their guest chatted in the living room, lost in what she thought of as ‘the good girl fog’.

*

Amy’s visit had been a very pleasant way to start the day, but once she’d left again to prepare for her patrol, Master turned back to Vivian. “Are you planning to patrol soon?”

“I should do,” she admitted. Vivian could not deceive her Master. Not if she was asked a direct question, not even by omission. “But if you have a use for me, Master, I would rather stay a while.”

He grinned. “Amy was right,” he said. “I don’t call you a good girl often enough.”

Again, her eyes crossed and rolled; she gave voice to a louder moan than before, and shuddered heavily enough that her body quivered for moments after, drawing his attention most satisfactorily.

It was a genuine (if programmed) pleasure response, but she did amplify them slightly when she and Master were alone, because she knew how much it excited him to see his power over someone so powerful so visibly and audibly indicated. If he had realised she did this, he’d never remarked on it.

It was possible he hadn’t realised, or that he knew and simply considered it his due, or that he knew and had programmed the desire to do so into her and had her forget. She knew that some of her programming she had consciously forgotten; Master had been quite open about that.

He had explained to her that he was telling her this so she wouldn’t be surprised if at some point she discovered other hidden programming.

Master beckoned her to him and she approached. He was standing just to one side of his favourite armchair; as she came to a halt a foot in front of him, he put his hands on her hips. “Recline,” he said, “at waist height.”

“Yes, Master,” she answered. She began to lean backward, at the same time lifting both feet forward and up, and with his hands braced on her hips and his feet crossing her calves, he was lifted into the air to lie above her as she floated horizontally, as stable and sturdy a surface as the apartment floor, if softer, more yielding, and certainly more fuckable.

She smiled up at him as his hands moved from her hips to her breasts, shifting position to brace his thighs against hers. “Thank you, Master,” she said. She didn’t need to say what for; they both understood.

He hooked his feet in behind her calves, then widened the gap between them. Her legs obediently parted, her long sheer gown hanging down from her body. Muscles that could kick tanks across football fields meant nothing against the hint that he wanted her legs wider.

Using her hovering form as a platform and a mount, he slid into her, their faces close together/ His eyes were alight with the joy of possession, of ownership; She smiled up at him, so proud that he had kept her, so thankful that his control had steered her to a place of contented fulfilment in her life.

Not that Vivian had been unfulfilled as Macabre, at least some of the time, but it had often been interrupted by long bursts of frustration.

She reached up, her arms slipping across his shoulders and curving round to his back, and her nails traced down his back, scoring trails that made him give that growl in the back of her throat, the one she really craved.

She heard it now, felt it too through the tips of her fingers, and suddenly between pleasure, pleasure reward, and her own satisfaction she lost her focus, her eyes going from staring eagerly into his to roll back, focused only on the sound, the sensation, the programmed mental accompaniment, lost in a pleasure wave that nothing in her pre-brainwashing life had matched.

*

It was nearly lunchtime before she donned the Mercy costume again and took to the skies, headed home, but it wasn’t long at all before she was landing in the back garden, the huge firs she’d planted helping to hide her descent and landing from a casual glance.

Like most supers, Vivian figured anyone who was based close enough to a flyer’s home and was willing to put in the work and the financial investment could narrow their location down with time. There were some things not worth the effort to try and solve.

She briskly stripped off the costume and shrugged on a pair of terrycloth shorts and a faded old blue tee before taking her costume through to start the process of cleaning it. Showing up to somewhere else still smelling of hellhound wasn’t a prospect she exactly relished.

That done she settled down on her sofa and turned on the TV. She was killing time, mostly, but she’d long ago developed an addiction to game shows and whenever she got the opportunity she liked to indulge.

Then she heard it; a low, intermittent shudder, something vibrating in a drawer on and off. She frowned. Her comm had been in her ear until she landed, and she hadn’t put it away since but instead had left it on the kitchen table.

So what was -

Oh.

She rose and made her way into what she still called the spare bedroom, even though she had no intentions of hosting any guest who wouldn’t share her bed - which for the time being was Master alone, and she’d rather go to him where everything was as he liked it.

The vibrating was louder, and it was coming from a small green soapstone box resting on the dresser, one which concealed a thumbprint scanner cunningly beneath the latch, along with enough electromagnetic power that an opportunist thief couldn’t open it.

She put her thumb against the scanner and flipped the latch, then took out the slim device beneath it.

It had the word KARD stamped across the back, because its original designer insisted on branding everything, even the things he made available only to a very specific market. Inside was a tiny power source good for fifty years of sustained operation, a clock that was accurate to the picosecond, a transceiver tuned to frequencies emitted by a small network of stealthed satellites, a microphone and speaker, and a gyroscopic sensor and signal booster, all of which were controlled by a computer that was shockingly capable for its size, tracking the orientation of those stealthed satellites meticulously and realigning the transceiver to continuously point at one.

The Kard was access to a tiny, exclusive cellphone network that almost nobody in the world knew about, which was now continuously maintaining itself as its designer and marketer had been in prison now for some while. He went by Vulcan, and he and Macabre had worked together on a couple of occasions when she’d been just starting out.

The name on the display read MacTavish. Mac was well known in North American supervillain circles as a smoothly efficient fixer. If you needed a team of lackeys, a warehouse you could chill to ten degrees above absolute zero, three refrigerated haulage trucks, and a spaceplane, Mac could sort you out. For a price.

She hesitated for a long moment. Macabre would have hated the woman Vivian now was, and all that kept her from revenge was being buried deep in a head that now gave Mercy more space. But any time she brought her old self out to any degree, she worried that her newer, better life would be sabotaged.

She answered the call. “How long have you been trying my number, Mac?”

“On and off for a week now,” he said. “I hasten to add, it’s not my idea.”

“Yeah?”

“You’ve never been quiet this long when you haven’t been locked up,” he said. “I figured you were either dead or you’d actually managed to get a retirement. And you know I don’t like to disturb the successfully retired.” It had been a bone of contention more than once. Mac considered that most villains were too driven to ever do it, but that the ones who hit that big enough score or got that final satisfying revenge deserved the chance to rest. He wouldn’t contact them. Not unless it was someone big leaning on him.

“I’ve appreciated that, Mac,” she said. “I won’t go into details.”

“Good for you,” he said, and he seemed to genuinely mean it.

“Not missing your finders fee?”

“There’s always someone new to bill,” he said. “I’ll survive.”

“So who put you up to reach out to me?”

“We’re talking on something he built,” Mac said. “Vulcan’s lawyer had a sit-down with him a month ago, and a week ago the surveillance on him had relaxed enough for him to call me.”

Vivian felt a sinking feeling. “Go on.”

“You might have seen, his old nemesis Hornet is back on the street,” Mac continued. “Only that makes no sense. Vulcan’s had her in a control chamber for years. Someone would have to let her out, and that means-”

“Someone’s pulling her strings.”

“Right. And nobody but Vulcan gets to pull her strings is the way he sees it. He figures nobody would bat an eyelid if Macabre decided to go play there, but he wants whoever did it taken out.”

“Uh huh,” she answered heavily, thinking back. She’d seen those control chambers, back in the prototype stages. Now she knew what guilt was, she felt it about all that, a bit.

“I’m not going to ask you to come out of retirement,” Mac stressed. “I’m just relaying the offer.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Well, tell him I’m not interested. And Mac?”

“Yeah?”

“Lose my number.”

She hung up the phone, her good mood chilled around the edges by the implications.

She went back through to her sofa and sat down, still thinking.

Vulcan wouldn’t stop with her. Mac was probably moving on to the next name on his list already. And Vivian didn’t want to argue against mind control, exactly, but she had standards now for how a mind controller should act.

Maybe Mercy should pay a call out to San Francisco soon. Have herself a good old-fashioned team-up.