(SHATTERPOINT) IMPLICATIONS III

Ethan had always known.

It wasn't in any concrete sense, with names or evidence or anything he could have pointed to if pressed, but in the quiet intuition that came from years of shared mornings, guarded pauses, and half-finished conversations. Battery had never liked talking about her powers. She deflected with humor, brushed it aside with vague answers, or gently changed the subject when his questions edged toward anything too specific. Over time, he had learned to recognize the signs, the tension that crept into her shoulders, the way her eyes flicked away for just a moment too long, and the carefulness in her voice whenever trigger events were being traded during private conversations.

He had noticed all of it, and he had still chosen not to push.

He told himself that if it truly mattered, if it was something she needed him to know, she would tell him when she was ready. That was what trust was supposed to look like, wasn’t it? Patience, faith, and the belief that the person you loved would not keep something truly terrible from you forever. So he waited, content to let time do the work he refused to force.

Now, sitting alone in their shared bedroom with the blinds half drawn and the distant sounds of the city filling the background, Ethan found himself wishing he had asked harder questions, or at least been brave enough to press when every instinct told him to let it go.

A secret organization that sold powers in a vial.

Even thinking about it made his head ache.

It was a lot to process, and he was not blind to that fact. The revelation upended everything the world claimed to know about trigger events and parahumans, everything they had been taught to accept as unshakable truth, undermining decades of policy, research, and hard-earned assumptions. Worse still, it meant that his wife was tied, in some way he still did not fully understand, to an organization that operated completely outside the law, beyond anything resembling accountability. On paper, that alone should have terrified him.

Yet when he pictured Battery, when he thought of the woman who threw herself into burning buildings, who put herself between civilians and monsters when things went wrong, and who refused to quit even when her body was screaming for rest, he could not reconcile that image with the idea of a pawn in some shadowy conspiracy.

She was a hero, and a damn good one at that.

Whatever Cauldron was, whatever bargains had been struck in some dark room years ago, it had not stopped her from choosing to do the right thing every single day since. It had not twisted her into a monster, or a tyrant, or someone who abused the power she had been given as a tool for cruelty or selfish gain. If anything, she had worked twice as hard to prove she deserved to wear the uniform, that she belonged among people who put their lives on the line for strangers.

So yes, it was a big deal. He was not naive enough to pretend otherwise. But it was not unforgivable.

Not to him.

The problem, of course, was that Piggot was not him.

Piggot dealt in risk assessments, optics, and worst-case scenarios, focusing less on what had gone right than on what could still go catastrophically wrong. To her, Battery would not be a woman who had saved lives for years. She would be a liability, a security breach waiting to happen or one that already had, and proof that an unknown organization might already have its hooks buried deep inside the PRT.

And as much as he hated it, Ethan could see that logic. He could understand why a Director responsible for thousands of lives would look at this situation and see only danger. But it left him with the same question he had been circling for the past hour.

How was he supposed to convince Piggot otherwise? 

He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, one hand rubbing at his face as if he could physically wipe the exhaustion away. He ran through the options again, even though he already knew where they led.

Arguing on principle would get him nowhere. Piggot did not care about ideals when the safety of her people and the integrity of the organization were on the line. Pointing to Battery’s record might help, but only up to a point, because past performance meant very little when the concern centered on hidden loyalties and unknown leverage.

And begging was out of the question too. Piggot already had a well-earned reputation for disliking parahumans, and this situation would only reinforce every negative assumption she had ever held. Watching a husband plead for leniency on behalf of his wife would not soften her stance. If anything, it would convince her that emotions were already compromising judgment.

She would not listen.

“Fuck,” he muttered, dragging a hand through his hair hard enough to sting.

Frustration boiled up, sharp and helpless, with nowhere to go. He felt like he was standing in front of a locked door with no key, watching the clock tick down while everything that mattered to him waited on the other side.

And then, inevitably, his thoughts turned to the man who had started all of this.

Anakin Skywalker.

The name tasted bitter in his mouth.

If Skywalker had kept to himself, if he had focused on tearing apart villain gangs instead of provoking a confrontation with a Protectorate hero, none of this would have happened. Battery would still be well-respected, Cauldron would still be a buried secret, and Ethan would not be sitting here wondering if his wife would ever recover from this mess.

Who the hell did this guy think he was?

Some random nobody from another universe who had arrived in Brockton Bay and decided he knew better than everyone else how things should work. He had no badge, no authority, no understanding of the kind of pressure they lived under every day, and yet he had taken it upon himself to blow everything wide open.

The anger came easily, fueled by fear more than anything else.

How dare he come here and ruin everything?

Ethan pushed himself up from his chair and began pacing the small room, hands clenched at his sides as his thoughts raced. He needed something, anything, that could change Piggot’s mind, and every path he saw led right back to the same dead end.

There was nothing. No argument strong enough, no leverage he could use, and no miracle solution waiting to be found if he just thought hard enough.

And then an idea surfaced, unwelcome but persistent.

Maybe Piggot was not the one he needed to convince.

He slowed, stopping near the window, his reflection staring back at him from the glass. 

Anakin Skywalker was at the center of this mess. The incident, the rumors, the scrutiny, all of it traced back to him. If Piggot saw Battery as a liability now, it was because of what had happened with that man.

So what if he went to the source?

The thought unsettled him even as it took shape in his mind. Skywalker had already proven he was dangerous, skilled enough to put Battery down in a fight without using any powers. Confronting him was not exactly a safe idea, especially not alone.

But safety felt like a luxury he no longer had.

If he could talk to him, really talk to him, maybe he could get a sense of what he wanted. Maybe he could convince him to back off, to stop pushing, to let this die before it took everything with it. Or maybe he could find some angle, some piece of common ground or understanding that could be turned into a way out.

He did not know.

All he knew was that sitting here and doing nothing was no longer an option.

Ethan exhaled slowly, his jaw tightening as he made up his mind.

“Yeah,” he murmured to himself. “Maybe you and I need to have a talk. One-on-one.”