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The cottage had everything a retiree could want. Tidy hedges, a fenced-in garden, and a view of the sea that tourist guidebooks would pay to photograph. Inside, there was just enough space for one—or for a couple well-accustomed to each other’s habits. Wood furniture polished to a warm glow, braided rugs, quilts made by some previous generation. There was even a rocking chair on the porch, for crying out loud. In short, it was perfect.
“You do not live here. No way.”
Rusty straightened up from where he’d been kneeling by the garden bed—and, ouch, his back was not as young as it used to be—and frowned at his uninvited guest.
“Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?”
“It’s so,” the visitor waved his arms, indicating the whole area with wordless irritation, “quaint? Do you even have electricity out here?”
“Does it have electricity,” Rusty repeated, with an additional layer of sarcasm, “No, I thought I’d move so far off the grid that my cyborg pancreas would run out of charge and kill me three days into my retirement, saving you the trouble. Of course it has electricity! What it doesn’t have is neighbors, which, thank god for that because you should not be visiting me when you’re dressed like that, Marvin.”
Marvin’s face, what could be seen of it through the form-fitting mask, furrowed into a scowl. “Rusty! You can’t call me that when I’m in uniform!”
“Then don’t show up at my house dressed in your shiny spandex costume, Heliotrope. Besides, like I said,” he mimicked Marvin’s all-encompassing gesture, “no neighbors. An ideal place to retire.”
Heliotrope folded his arms. “See, I don’t believe that, either. After all these years, you just…gave up? The great and terrifying Scorch, whose very name used to leave citizens trembling in their beds, retires to the middle of nowhere to…what are you doing, exactly?”
Rusty shrugged. “I don’t know, what does it look like?” He had grass stains on both knees, (which were also complaining about his age) dirt under his fingernails and sweat in places he didn’t like to think about. Little plastic pots with plants sticking out of them sat in a tidy row on the cobblestone path. And the one plant he’d managed to put in the ground looked…well. He was doing his best.
“It seems like you’re trying to garden,” Heliotrope said. He knelt down and poked the plant. “But also like you’re going to kill all of these plants immediately. Is that your secret evil plan?”
“No!” Rusty swatted him away from the garden bed. The little plant was already looking better, dammit. “For the last time, there is no secret evil plan! I retired, I’m done being a ‘villain’ you have to worry about stopping. I’m going to live in a nice cottage and grow a garden and get old in peace. Maybe get a cat or something. So just,” he started pushing on Heliotrope’s shoulder, as though he’d ever been able to push the hero around with anything besides his actual powers, “go back to the city and find someone new to fight.”
Heliotrope sighed, and all the nearby plants seemed to sigh with him. “I’m going, but you haven’t seen the last of me. I’ll be back to keep an eye on you, Scorch.” He launched himself into the air and sped away.
“Yippee,” Rusty muttered. “Can’t wait.”
True to his word, Heliotrope kept coming back. At first, he maintained the story that he had to “keep an eye” on what his old nemesis was plotting. And then, since the only plots at the cottage were garden plots and Rusty was not keeping them up to his standards, he started coming by “to make sure you’re not killing those poor nasturtiums”. Rusty complained every time, but he had to admit (privately, when the hero was safely back in the city) that the garden did look better after he’d visited.
In between “garden inspections” he made the most of his retirement. He walked by the sea at low tide, went to the nearby village once a week for anything he couldn’t get delivered, and read the newspaper.
Well, he read certain parts of the newspaper. And watched the news in the evening to see if a certain former nemesis had been up to anything interesting. It was all overblown, of course, because that was how reporters made their money, but he’d developed a certain skill for seeing through the bullshit after years of being one of their favorite subjects. A few of them still brought him up, actually, if only to speculate about what he was up to now that he had “disappeared”. Reporters loved a good disappearance. They could write whatever they wanted, and unless the person they were writing about showed up to correct them—and give them an inside scoop—no one could prove them wrong.
But they got some pieces right, which was how he got wind of Heliotrope’s new rival. Some up and coming new villain who called themself…
“Alchemancer?” Heliotrope frowned, even as the hedge he was pruning perked up under his attentive hands. “Yeah, they’re getting to be a nuisance. Haven’t actually seen them in person yet, but they keep interfering with high security labs. Breaking in and moving all the supplies to the wrong place, covering the doorknobs in glitter, messing with files, that kind of thing. There was a big mess when they released what everyone thought were a bunch of lab animals, but it turns out that lab doesn’t use animals at all so they were just. In there. For some reason.” He gave the hedge a decisive snip. “I guess that means you’ve been keeping an eye on me too, huh?” For some reason he smiled when he said it, like it had anything to do with him.
“It’s not my fault the journalists love your stupid face. Every time I go looking for the crossword puzzle, there you are. Bright-eyed and bushy-haired, or however the saying goes.”
“Bushy- tailed,” Heliotrope muttered. “And my hair is perfect, thank you very much.”
Of course it was, but Rusty wasn’t going to admit that, so he ignored it. “And when I’m not looking at my newspaper, here you are anyway. Using your plant powers on my begonias while this, this kid wreaks havoc on the city you’re supposed to be protecting.”
“First of all, you don’t have any begonias, this is boxwood. And second of all, I am allowed time off, you know. My sidekicks are looking into the Alchemancer situation. As soon as they have a lead they’ll call me.”
“And you’re…using your time off to do my gardening. While in your uniform.”
“Yes.” Heliotrope held out the hedge clippers. “And don’t think I haven’t noticed that I’m doing all the work. Come on, try clipping one. You can’t mess this up.”
Rusty couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like the hedge whimpered.
A storm rolled in at midnight, and Rusty lay awake.
After so many years in the city, it was hard to get used to the sounds of idyllic seaside life. Or the absence of sounds he expected: sirens, cars backfiring, loud music blaring in the middle of the night. Rusty wouldn’t admit to missing those things—not that anyone asked—but some nights he felt the space where they used to be more strongly than others. Used to be when he couldn’t sleep, he’d go to his secret lab and start plotting his next heist. Or he’d go out the window and onto the fire escape, an easy jump to the roof and from there to anywhere he wanted. Find a fight, find a party, find a warm body that didn’t mind if he called them the wrong name. Or just wander the streets until no one was out but him and the stray cats.
Out here, he couldn’t do any of that. Walking, sure, but with nowhere to walk to he didn’t see the point. Certainly no reason to go out into the storm. No point to anything, other than lay in the dark and listen to the wind cry.
“Iaow!”
Funny thing, wind. Out here, it almost sounded like…
“MIAOW!”
That was not the wind.
Moving with a speed he hadn’t had reason to use since the last time he fought Heliotrope, Rusty flung himself out of bed and through the cottage to the front door. A blast of rain hit him when he flung it open to reveal a sodden, demanding creature huddled on the porch.
“Oh no, poor baby.” Before he could say or do anything else, the cat bolted past him into the house. “Okay, well, that was easier than I expected.” Any shelter in a storm, he supposed. “Let’s get a look at you.”
The cat did not appreciate being picked up. It made its displeasure known with a scratch down his arm, but it couldn’t stop him. It was shaking so hard that it couldn’t put up much of a fight, probably from the cold, so Rusty set about cleaning it up as best he could. Washed clean in warm water and wrapped in a towel to dry, the hissing eventually gave way to a ragged purr.
“That’s better, right?” Rusty asked as he set it down on the kitchen floor. “Let me see what I have to feed you.”
One can of tuna later, Rusty came back from the garden shed with materials for a temporary litter box and found that the cat was no longer in the kitchen. It wasn’t in the living room or the bathroom either.
“Absolutely not,” he said, using the voice that used to strike terror into the hearts of all who heard it. The cat, curled up in a still-damp circle of ginger fur in the center of his bed, simply yawned and turned its head upside down.
Rusty sighed. “Okay, but you have to share with me. I’m not giving up my bed to a cat, no matter how cute you are.” He turned off the lights.
After a brief battle for dominance in which no one was exiled to the floor and no one got to sleep in exactly the spot they wanted to, Rusty had the best night’s sleep since he retired. And if he woke up with a furry weight purring on his chest, well. Surely that was a coincidence.
According to the vet, the cat had no microchip and therefore belonged to no one. It was also healthy, at the top of its weight range, and male. When she asked what the cat’s name was, Rusty panicked and said the first name he could think of.
“Marvin?” The vet noted it down.
“Yeah, uh, Marv for short.”
“That’s nice. I love it when cats have old man names.”
Rusty couldn’t wait to see the look on Heliotrope’s face when he relayed that comment.
According to the cat, the entire trip to the vet had been a gross indignity and should never be repeated. He howled all through the car ride, turned up his nose at the newly-acquired cat food, and stole the hamburger off Rusty’s dinner plate when he wasn’t looking.
“I don’t know what you’re complaining about,” Rusty said, “it’s not like you had to pay for it. And whenever I go to the doctor and have to get needles jabbed into me, nobody holds me and makes soothing noises. You should be grateful.” He’d just finished changing the infusion set for his insulin pump, which Marv the Cat had watched with interest. Probably thought the tubing was a toy. Rusty would have to keep an eye on that.
For now, he had something else to watch. “Time for the evening news,” he said, reaching for the remote control. “I guess we’ll see what Marvin—the human Marvin, I mean,” and god, he was going to have a field day when he found out about his cat namesake, “is up to.”
But the news was oddly light on the subject of Heliotrope. There were reports of another suspected Alchemancer action, and a brief statement from one of Heliotrope’s sidekicks that they had the situation under control. Then it switched over to the weather. Rusty sat through a few minutes of mindless blathering about last night’s storm before he shut it off.
“I’m not disappointed,” he informed Marv the cat, “just bored. Slow news day.”
The next few days were slow in general. Rainclouds settled in to soak the cottage and its environs, making gardening a wetter and trickier business than usual. Rusty still went on his walks, but the weather made it less and less pleasant.
And Heliotrope was nowhere to be found.
He hadn’t visited, which wouldn’t have been unusual by itself—Rusty knew how busy the life of a caped crusader could get—but his name was absent from the headlines and the evening news had reached a record number of days without showing his face. By the end of the week, the reporters were starting to speculate on what Rusty was beginning to suspect himself. Heliotrope was missing.
“That dumbass has gotten himself in some kind of trouble,” Rusty announced, shutting the door behind him. His hair and clothes were already steaming; he’d be dry soon enough in spite of the rain. “Even the people at the grocery store were talking about it. You’d think they’d have better things to do with their time, but no.”
The cat watched with interest as he put away the groceries. It made an approving noise at the large quantity of meat—if it was going to steal his dinner, he might as well just make enough for two—and made an attempt to bite into the carton of ice cream before he shooed it away.
“Hey, no, that’s not for you. Cats and dairy aren’t a good match, no matter what the cartoons want you to think.” He put Cat Marvin on his shoulder and finished with the groceries. “I swear, you’re just like Marvin—the human one, I mean. Got a sweet tooth. Now come on, let’s watch the news.”
Rusty had just settled on the couch with Cat Marvin in his lap when Human Marvin’s face—masked, of course—showed up on the screen. Which would have been a relief, if not for the words below it.
Beloved hero Heliotrope confirmed missing.
The news anchor launched into a spiel about how one of Heliotrope’s sidekicks had given an exclusive interview and moved into speculation about possible causes.
Rusty growled and turned it off. He didn’t want speculation, he wanted answers.
Cat Marvin apparently agreed, because he hissed at the TV and ran into the bedroom.
“It’s just…it’s not like him to just go away, right? Even when he’s ‘taking time off’ he just comes here to bother me. And since he’s not here, he’s obviously in trouble, right? Not that it’s any of my concern. I just want to know, you know?”
Rusty was venting his pent-up agitation about Heliotrope’s disappearance on the garden. The weeds needed weeding, and the sun had finally come out for long enough that Cat Marvin decided to join him. It felt good to pull up the intruding plants, which shriveled and blackened in his hands as he went down the rows.
“And after this whole Alchemancer business…I don’t like it. New nemesis in town with unknown motive and uncertain powers? Nothing good ever came from that. Those assholes on the news don’t know what they’re talking about. And those sidekicks—” He reached for a plant, and the cat swatted his hand. “Ow! What was that for?”
Cat Marvin glared at him, then pawed at the plant, which was not, in fact, a weed.
“Oh. Thanks, buddy.” Rusty reached for another weed, then paused. “Hang on. How did you know that was one of the good ones?”
Cat Marvin just stared. The plant, apparently grateful for the rescue, leaned toward him and seemed to rub against him. Cat Marvin rubbed his cheek against it, and Rusty would swear a new leaf unfurled.
That was…weird.
“Marv,” Rusty said, carefully, “you really are…a lot like him. I don’t suppose you know what happened to the human Marvin?” He felt ridiculous asking a cat, but it was worth a try.
Cat Marvin tipped his head to the side, then nodded.
Okay. “And…do you know where I can find him?”
Cat Marvin stared at him, blinked once, then pawed at the plant again.
The plant shivered, shook as though caught by the wind, and grew an additional six inches and several new leaves.
“Holy shit. Marvin, what happened to you?”
And why the hell, he thought to himself, did you come to me of all people?
Cat Marvin—or, well, just Marvin? Hissed in apparent frustration.
“Right, okay, you’re a cat and can’t talk.” Think, Rusty, think. “Was it an accident?”
Head shake.
“So it was on purpose. Did you see who did it?”
Head shake.
“Great. Helpful.” Rusty got to his feet. “I can’t believe you’re making me do this, but. I guess it’s time for a trip to the city.” He started to open a portal to Heliotrope’s secret base, then stopped, sighed, and opened the closet door instead. This required a wardrobe change.
Heliotrope’s sidekicks were worse than useless.
“So what I’m trying to say is—please stop screaming—I need to find out what happened to Heliotrope and—”
“He’s GONE! He’s gone and now Scorch is back and we’re all going to be KILLED—”
“We’ll never tell you anything, villain! You’ll have to torture it out of us, and even then we won’t—”
“—going to die and we’ll never see our hero’s beautiful face again—”
“—go out fighting like the boss would have wanted—”
“If they don’t stop talking right now,” Rusty said, turning to look at the cat on his shoulder, “I’m going to stun them both and leave you on the side of the road somewhere.”
If cats could roll their eyes, Marvin would have. Instead, he jumped off Rusty’s shoulder, crossed the room to one of the potted plants by the window—of course Heliotrope’s secret base had potted plants—and tapped it with his paw. A tendril grew from it, stretched all the way to where the sidekicks were having their respective meltdowns, and slapped first one and then the other on the face.
For some goddamn reason, that shut them up.
Then one of them blinked and said, “ohhhhh. Boss, why are you a cat?”
The babble started up again. Rusty was about to turn around and leave when the door opened and another voice joined the fray.
“What are you two idiots doing in here? I told you, Heliotrope is—oh, it’s you. What the hell are you doing here?”
Thank goodness for the third sidekick. Rusty could never remember any of their names, but he vaguely remembered that this one had more of a brain than the other two.
“Heliotrope has been turned into a cat,” he said, before either of the other sidekicks could start talking again, “and he showed up at my house. I’m trying to find out what happened so I can go back to my peaceful retirement, but he can’t explain what happened.”
Sidekick Three walked over to one of the empty chairs—which, judging from its central location, was probably Heliotrope’s—and sat down. “A cat, huh? That’s a surprise. How do you know it’s him?”
In answer, the plant tendril slapped Sidekick Two again.
“Ow!”
“Right, okay.” Sidekick Three allowed Rusty to explain what had happened. When he was done, they said, “What have you done to try to turn him back?”
Rusty scowled at them. “What do you mean, what have I tried? I brought him back here so you all could figure this out, none of this is my problem anymore. Although I have to say, I overestimated the competence around here. Hasn’t Heliotrope taught any of you anything?” None of them had even threatened to arrest him yet, for crying out loud.
Sidekicks One and Two made noises of protest, but Sidekick Three waved them back to silence. “I just meant, since he went to find you, maybe you have part of what he needs to reverse the transformation. Have you tried using any of your powers on him?”
“Have I—no, of course not! I’m not going to burn him, he’s a cat!” Even knowing it was Heliotrope in there, he didn’t want to make a cat suffer, and there was no way to know if the hero’s burn healing abilities had carried over into his new body.
“Really? Not taking the opportunity to kill your nemesis while you have a chance. Interesting.” Sidekick Three spun their chair to face the bank of computer monitors and typed something in. “And you haven’t tried any of the standard cures? Reverse polarity on the weapon that caused the transformation? True love’s kiss? Wizard?”
“I don’t—what?” Rusty shook his head. So much for this sidekick having a brain. True love’s kiss, honestly. “Why would I do any of that? And we don’t even know for sure that this was caused by a weapon.”
“Oh, right, I forgot.” The sidekick entered a few more notes. “Well, I guess we’ll have to go to the lab to do some tests. You two, stay here and make sure no other supervillains get in, okay?” They stood up from their chair with a flourish that Rusty found wholly unnecessary. Heroes, honestly. Either no one had bothered to give this kid the cape lecture (“do not, under any circumstances, actually wear a cape”) or they had ignored it. With the way they started ordering the other two sidekicks around, Rusty suspected he knew which one it was.
Rusty was not so easily ordered about. “What makes you think I’m following you to a secondary location? I did my job, you can take it from here.”
Marvin—it was too weird to think of a cat as Heliotrope—hissed at him. Sidekick Three simply smiled.
“Oh, so you don’t want to know how this plays out? I would have thought the fearsome Scorch would want to know if his nemesis lives another day. But sure, go back to your retirement, I can take it from here.” They reached down to pick up the cat.
Marvin hissed at them, too, and further made his point with a swipe of his paw.
“Ahh! Damn cat.” The sidekick stepped back. “Sorry, I mean, please come with me, boss. I’m not good with cats,” they added.
Obviously.
Rusty folded his arms and glared at Marvin. “Come on. You want their help turning back, right? Get them to help you.”
Another hiss.
“Yeah, well, I’m not the one who made them my sidekick in the first place, if you have a problem with their methods that’s on you. What makes you think I can do a better job?”
Cat Marvin didn’t even bother to hiss this time, just stared at him.
“Again, your fault. If I’d had a henchperson and this happened to me, they’d have fixed me by now. Or killed me so they could take my place, I guess, but at least they’d be competent. I’m not acting as your personal cat carrier just because you don’t trust your sidekicks to fix you.”
A yawn.
Okay, he had a point with that one. “Fine! But only because I have nothing better to do.” He really needed to pick up some more retirement hobbies. There was only so much gardening a man could do. “If anyone tries to arrest me though, I’m throwing each of your sidekicks through a different window.” The secret hideout had a lot of windows, on account of all the plants. It offended Rusty’s views on secrecy. “Now get up here.”
Cat Marvin jumped onto Rusty’s shoulder and settled there like he’d been doing it for years.
Rusty sighed. “We can go now.”
Sidekick Three had paused to type several more lines into the computer, but straightened up and struck a pose. “Excellent!”
They never made it to the lab. Not because of a villain attack or because Sidekick Three turned out to be secretly evil, but because Heliotrope turned human again halfway there.
One minute, Rusty was sitting in the passenger’s seat of Heliotrope’s fancy super-car—which the sidekick had insisted on driving, of course— with a cat in his lap. The next, he had a lapful of muscular man in entirely too much spandex, and the sidekick swerved so hard that they almost crashed.
“Pull over NOW,” Rusty said, though it came out more like a wheeze from the sudden weight pressed against his—well, everything. The sidekick turned into an alley and all three of them tumbled out of the car.
“What the hell? How did you do that? I swear, Marvin, if this was some kind of trick to get me to come back—”
“I didn’t do it on purpose, Scorch, and need I remind you that you can not call me that when I’m in costume—”
“Well forgive me for using the wrong name when you’ve been walking around in the wrong body and sleeping in my bed for the past week, I was starting to think you were dead but nooo, you were on vacation from being human—”
“It wasn’t a vacation, someone did that to me and I was trying to find somewhere safe to recover!”
“Then why would you come to me?”
Even outside of the car, there was no space between them. Heliotrope gripped Rusty by the shoulders—even in his old uniform, he still couldn’t call himself Scorch, not anymore—and leaned in close. Rusty could have easily pushed him away, hands pressed against his chest, but he didn’t. He needed to hear the answer.
“Why do you think, dumbass? Someone needs to make sure you don’t kill that poor garden.” And then Heliotrope closed the distance between them.
As kisses went, it could have been a lot worse. Rusty had spent years watching Heliotrope’s mouth, watching the shape of his smirk as he cracked a joke or the way his smile firmed up whenever he declared his intent to uphold justice. They’d spent so much time facing each other, learning each other, that it was inevitable they’d pick up some ideas about how things worked when the masks came off. So they fit together like they’d been doing this for decades, like this moment boiled down to one thing: their mouths, aligned at long last.
“Ha! Finally!”
Of course, it could have been a lot better, too. Because the masks weren’t off, not really. And they weren’t alone.
Rusty pulled away, reluctantly, from Heliotrope. “What do you mean by that, Sidekick?”
Sidekick Three grinned. “Oh, just that I’ve been waiting for this forever. And now the other two owe me twenty bucks and their undying loyalty. Sorry for betting on your love life, boss,” they said, not sounding sorry at all, “but it was getting ridiculous.”
“But—I—” Heliotrope seemed incapable of putting a sentence together. “You knew?”
“Anyone with a brain could see it,” Sidekick Three said. “All that ‘comp time’ you were taking, when you’d never taken a day off before? And it just so happened to coincide with Scorch’s ‘disappearance’? Come on. I told those two my plan would work, and I was right!”
“Your plan?” Rusty asked. Now that the rush of adrenaline from the argument and the kiss had worn off, his brain was starting to reassert itself, and he had a bad feeling about what he was about to hear. “What plan was that, exactly?”
“Well, the first plan was just to give him a new nemesis to focus on, but clearly that didn’t work. He just told the three of us to ‘investigate Alchemancer’ and went off to visit you. So, clearly we had to pull you back in. But the boss was watching you too closely for any of us to contact you directly, so I had to take more drastic steps.”
Heliotrope shook his head. “Drastic steps? What are you talking about?”
But Rusty had a feeling he knew. “Let me guess,” he said. “If we had actually gotten to ‘the lab’, I would have found some kind of weapon that turns people into animals. And I was supposed to figure out how to reverse it, right? But it didn’t work as well as you thought, so it wore off before we got there.”
The sidekick scowled. “Yes, I don’t know why that happened. I had wanted to do more tests on it—reversing the transformation beam or a true love’s kiss should have worked on it, but maybe all the time you spent together had an effect…but it doesn’t matter. I won! And now that you’re back, the boss will stop moping around and actually do something interesting again. And I,” they held up a camera, “have evidence that will win my bet and be very interesting to the media.”
Rusty sighed. “Well, he will need to step up his game if he’s going to train you into any kind of hero. If I was ten years younger I’d lure you over to my side, you have great villain potential. Unfortunately,” he turned to Heliotrope, “I’m not ‘back’, I only put on this stupid outfit one more time to get you back to your sidekicks. Now that that’s done…sorry for the mess, but I think you can handle it from here.” He turned to go.
“But…wait…you can’t just kiss me and walk away!”
Oh, finally a sentence from Heliotrope.
“What I can’t do,” Rusty said, “is date a superhero. I’m retired. I’m done. And I’m done telling you the same thing over and over. If you want to talk about that kiss…” and damn, it was such a good kiss, “Marvin is always welcome to drop by for a visit.”
“You can’t go!” the sidekick said. “I have evidence! I’ll come after you! I’ll—ow!”
The camera—what was left of it—hit the ground in a heap of sizzling plastic. Eyes never leaving Heliotrope, Rusty said, “if I read about this in the newspapers, I’m kicking this kid’s ass so hard they’ll have to eat standing up. And I’ll probably burn the begonias by accident. Handle your shit, Heliotrope.” With that, he walked away.
A quiet month passed at the cottage. The only hint the newspapers gave about the whole series of events, apart from a few articles about Heliotrope’s return, was a short interview in which the hero made a case for better sidekick training. Rusty’s walks on the beach got longer and longer. It wasn’t that he wanted to go back to the city and sort out Heliotrope’s mess, of course not. He just needed more hobbies. Or at least, different hobbies.
“Your garden beds desperately need to be weeded.”
Rusty didn’t look up. “Oh yeah?”
“Yes. And your hedges are getting overgrown again.”
“Hmm.”
“And your nasturtiums—are you listening to me? What are you doing?”
“I’m building a catio.”
“A what?”
“A catio. It’s an enclosed space that’s still outside, so indoor cats can enjoy the outdoors while staying safe.”
“And why are you—Rusty! Will you look at me?”
Rusty looked up.
“Why are you building a catio when you don’t have a cat anymore?”
Marvin looked good out of uniform. The plaid shirt and denim shorts combination worked for him, and the floppy hat would keep the sun off even if it was ridiculous. A pair of gardening gloves hung out of his pocket.
“I’m thinking about getting one,” Rusty said, when he’d found his voice again. “Or two. House was too quiet. What are you doing here? Besides critiquing my garden.”
“I guess the news doesn’t travel fast out here, does it?” Marvin pulled a newspaper from his other pocket and handed it over. When Rusty unfolded it, the headline read, Heliotrope Announces Retirement.
Rusty stared at it for a long time. When he looked back up, Marvin was watching him. “Retiring? With a potentially-villainous sidekick running around?”
Marvin shrugged. “Not running, exactly. More like flying. I convinced them to show me how their experimental weapon worked, and it turns out they make an excellent bird. I told the other two that whichever of them figures out how to reverse the transformation gets to be in charge. I’m sorry it took me so long to wrap that up.”
“Huh.” Rusty didn’t envy Sidekick Three that adventure. “So what are you going to do now?”
“Well,” Marvin said, stepping forward and taking the newspaper from Rusty’s hands, “I was thinking about doing some gardening, for one thing.”
“Oh? And what then?”
“This.”
As kisses went, Rusty couldn’t find a single reason to complain.