"I never pictured you as a cook."
Yuls Sinclair's voice cut through the rhythmic sound of a knife against a cutting board. She was sitting on a high stool at the kitchen island, an untouched glass of red wine in front of her, watching Gamma Jack. He moved through the space with a fluidity that contradicted his size. He wore a simple black t-shirt and jeans, looking more like a chef in his element than a man who could level a building.
"Didn't you?" Jack replied without turning. His knife didn't falter as he reduced a bunch of parsley to fine green shreds. "Most people can't picture me doing anything that doesn't involve breaking things."
"Well, there's that. And the smell," Yuls said, making a vague gesture with her hand. "Your apartment smells like garlic and basil, not… I don't know, more villainous things."
Jack finally stopped and turned, leaning against the counter. A smile touched his lips. "I'm offended you think I smell like trouble." He picked up a wine glass and poured for himself, the dark liquid swirling in the glass. "And for the record, the satisfaction of creating a perfect pasta sauce from scratch is almost as good as throwing a car through the air. Almost."
He walked over and slid the wine glass toward her. "Drink. You look like you need it."
"I've had a long day," she admitted, taking the glass. The crystal was cool to the touch. "I almost killed a baby with a pipe."
"But you didn't," he retorted instantly. "And you stopped a multi-ton scaffold. Most people focus on the scaffolding part. You should try it." He returned to his sauce, stirring it slowly with a wooden spoon. "Besides, cooking is control. You take a bunch of ingredients that have nothing to do with each other—tomatoes, herbs, a little wine—and you turn them into something… coherent. Orderly."
"I guess that makes sense," Yuls murmured, sipping the wine. It was good, much better than anything she could afford. "Controlling the chaos."
"Exactly. And it's delicious. Those two things rarely go together." He winked at her over his shoulder. "Do you cook?"
"I can boil water without burning it. Most of the time," she said with a half-smile. "My specialty is takeout. The delivery guys at my old building knew me by name."
"A tragedy," Jack declared with mock solemnity. "Well, no takeout tonight. Tonight, you're eating something real."
While he focused on the stove, Yuls let her gaze wander around the apartment. It was huge, with a glass wall offering a panoramic view of Metroville. It looked more like a luxury hotel suite than a superhero's hideout. Her attention landed on an imposing bookshelf. She expected to find engineering manuals or physics textbooks, but it was filled with leather-bound books. She got up and walked over, running her fingers along the spines.
"Plato? Marcus Aurelius?" she murmured to herself, and then her finger stopped on an entire section. "Procedural Law? Seriously?"
Jack's laugh echoed from the kitchen. "Everyone has a dark past."
"This is more than dark, it's boring," she teased, pulling out a heavy volume. "I didn't picture you reading about legal precedents and objections."
"There was a time I thought you could change the world with the right words in the right order," he said. He came up quietly behind her, his voice now lower, right next to her ear. "I found out a well-aimed punch is far more eloquent."
Yuls startled slightly, not from fear, but from the sudden proximity. She placed the book back on the shelf.
"So you're a lawyer?" she asked, turning to face him.
"I've got the degree in a box gathering dust somewhere," he admitted with a shrug. "It took me three years of study and about six months of practice to realize that laws are there to protect the people who write them. For everyone else, they're just rules telling you how slowly you have to walk inside the cage. I got tired of it."
"And you decided to start knocking down the cages?"
"Something like that," he said with a grin. "But enough about my boring, failed career. You, however… you stand in front of a bookshelf of philosophy and law and you look… comfortable. Don't tell me you fell into that trap too."
Yuls smiled, a genuine and slightly shy smile this time. "Worse. I graduated."
Jack blinked, his joking expression vanishing, replaced by genuine surprise. "What?"
"With honors. University of Arizona," she confirmed, enjoying his astonishment. "My parents already had the sign for my 'Sinclair & Daughter' law firm ready to print. I was going to be the best lawyer the state had ever seen."
Jack stared at her for a moment and then let out a laugh, a deep, sincere one. "No way. You're a quantum physicist. You talk about string theory like you're ordering a pizza. How the hell do you go from that to being a lawyer?"
"The other way around," she corrected. "I went from lawyer to physicist. The same day I picked up my law degree, I enrolled in the science faculty for my second bachelor's. It was… an interesting conversation with my parents."
"I can imagine," he said, his laughter subsiding but the amusement still shining in his eyes. He looked at her with a new kind of respect. "That's incredible, Yuls. Seriously. Leaving a safe path, a planned future, for something you really wanted… That's scarier than facing down a supervillain. Trust me, I've done both."
"They called it 'a very expensive phase of academic indecision'," she replied, but the warmth of his compliment spread through her chest. No one had ever understood that decision the way he seemed to.
"They were wrong," Jack said, his tone now serious. "They saw someone abandoning a plan, but you were choosing a better one. Yours." He paused. "The pasta's ready."
Dinner was… easy. Much easier than Yuls had anticipated. They sat at the dining table with the city's countless lights spreading out beneath them. They talked about everything and nothing. About the classic rock bands he had on vinyl, about how ridiculously complicated the tax system was. For the first time in a long time, Yuls didn't have to simplify her thoughts or measure her enthusiasm. When she mentioned the mathematical beauty of Maxwell's equations, he didn't roll his eyes; he asked her what they meant.
"So how did it happen?" Yuls asked, setting down her fork. "The change. From lawyer to… this."
Jack leaned back in his chair, swirling the wine in his glass. The version he told her was polished, a story he had clearly told before, or at least, told himself.
"A bad day," he began. "A case I shouldn't have lost. An innocent guy went to jail because the other side had better lawyers and more money. I realized I wasn't fighting for justice. I was playing a game with rigged rules."
"And then?"
"Then I got angry. Very angry. I walked out of the courthouse and got into my car, and every streetlight in the parking lot started to flicker and burst. One by one. I thought it was a power grid surge." He paused, his gaze lost in the memory. "It wasn't."
"That was the first time?" she asked quietly.
"The first time I couldn't ignore it. At first, it was small stuff. Lightbulbs in my apartment would burn out when I got frustrated. The car radio would change stations on its own. But that day… that day was different. I melted the engine of my car without touching it, just because I was furious."
Yuls listened, completely absorbed. This wasn't a comic book origin story; it was a confession from someone who had woken up one day with a destructive ability he didn't understand.
"I had to leave," Jack continued, his voice a murmur. "I couldn't risk hurting someone. I sold everything, bought a cabin in the middle of nowhere in the Rocky Mountains, and just… disappeared. For five years."
"Five years alone?" The idea seemed suffocating to her.
"Alone. Learning how to breathe without being afraid of setting the forest on fire. Learning how to feel something without the world around me reacting. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. And the loneliest." He looked at her directly, and for a moment, Yuls saw the crack in the confident facade. She saw a man who knew the true meaning of isolation. "But it taught me who I was underneath all this power. You have an advantage, Yuls. You're smarter than me. You understand the science behind it. You won't need five years in a forest. With you analyzing the theory and me teaching you the practice… you're going to be incredible. And it won't take long."
The unwavering faith in his voice was more intoxicating than the wine. It was an antidote to years of self-doubt and feeling like a freak.
"Are you ready for your first real lesson?" he asked, the predatory smile returning to his face.
They got up from the table, and he led her to a glass door that opened onto the rooftop terrace. The night air was cool. A small infinity pool reflected the stars and city lights, and the space was dotted with exotic trees in large planters.
"Okay," Jack said, positioning himself in the center of the open space. "The problem yesterday at the construction site wasn't a lack of power. The sun was pumping you full of energy, more than you knew what to do with. The problem was here." He tapped his temple.
"In my head?" Yuls asked, crossing her arms.
"You think too much. You try to solve your powers like they're a problem on a test. You calculate variables, theorize outcomes, second-guess yourself. But power doesn't work that way. It doesn't care about logic. It responds to intent. To pure, raw will. You have to stop thinking and start feeling."
"Sounds good in theory, but how am I supposed to do that?"
"You already did. Yesterday," he insisted. "Right before I got there. When that pipe was about to crush the baby carriage. There were no calculations. No physics. You just reacted. You need to get back to that place."
Yuls closed her eyes. She tried to find that feeling. She tried to feel gravity, the energy around her. She felt nothing but the breeze on her skin. "I don't feel anything."
Jack sighed. It wasn't a sigh of impatience, but of understanding. "Alright. Plan B, then."
He walked over to a small outdoor bar in a corner of the terrace. He picked up a glass decanter, a heavy, ornate piece filled with an amber liquid that shimmered under the moonlight.
"See this?" he said, weighing it in his hand. "This is two-hundred-year-old cognac. It was a gift from a foreign dignitary whose life I saved. It's worth more than my first apartment and probably your car. It is, in my opinion, one of the few perfect things humanity has ever managed to create."
Yuls stared at him, not understanding. "And?"
"And I'm going to throw it off the edge," he said, his smile turning into a savage grin.
Yuls's eyes flew wide open. "No! Wait, you're insane!"
"There it is! That's the attitude!" he yelled, and before she could move, he launched the decanter in a perfect arc into the Metroville night.
Everything slowed down. Yuls saw the decanter spinning, the city lights refracting into a thousand colors through the cut glass as it fell. Her brain raced, trying to calculate trajectories, velocities, the gravitational force she'd need to counteract it. But there was no time. No time to think.
No!
It wasn't a thought. It was a visceral scream, a command that erupted from the deepest part of her being. She lunged toward the edge of the terrace, her hand outstretched, not toward the physical decanter, but toward the idea of it, the concept of stopping it. She felt that spark inside her, the same one she'd felt at the construction site, but this time she didn't just pull on it. She became it. For a split second, the complex web of gravitational forces holding the city together wasn't a theory in a textbook; it was an extension of her own will.
And she pulled. With everything she had.
The decanter stopped dead. Twenty stories above the street below, it just hung there, suspended in the air, motionless.
"I… I did it," Yuls whispered, her breath coming in ragged gasps. The effort was monumental. She felt an incredible tension, as if every muscle in her body was about to snap.
"Hell yes, you did!" Jack exclaimed, his voice ringing with genuine, vibrant pride. He rushed to her side, his eyes bright with excitement. "Now bring it back! Don't let go! Gently!"
Yuls nodded, not daring to speak. She focused, not thinking about the physics, but on the feeling of wanting the decanter to return. She pulled gently, and the object began to ascend with a weightless elegance, until it landed in her outstretched hand with surprising softness. It was cold, and it vibrated with a strange energy, a residue of her own power.
The moment her fingers closed around the glass, the strength left her. Her knees gave out and she collapsed onto the terrace floor, exhausted but with a smile of pure, incredible euphoria on her face. Jack knelt beside her in an instant, his face lit with joy.
"I knew you could do it!" he said, his voice an excited, rough whisper. "Did you feel it? Right at the last second. The moment you stopped hesitating and just acted."
"I felt it," she answered, still trying to catch her breath. "I felt… like I could touch everything. The city, the air… everything."
He helped her up, his hand steady on her back as her legs still trembled. "That, Yuls. That's the feeling. That's where your power lives. Not in your brain, but in your gut. You have to learn to get there without me having to throw expensive things off my roof."
They stood in silence for a moment, the adrenaline fading, leaving a profound sense of accomplishment in its wake. Yuls held the decanter like a trophy.
"Every hero needs a name," Jack said quietly, his gaze lost in the sea of city lights. "Something to tell the world who they are. Something to remind themselves of what they can become."
"I've never thought about it," Yuls admitted. "I was too busy trying not to accidentally levitate my fork in restaurants."
Jack smiled, a genuine, warm smile. "You've spent your whole life looking at the stars, studying how the universe works. You know what apogee is, right? The astronomical term."
"Of course," she replied instantly, her physicist mode activating out of habit. "It's the point in an object's orbit, like a satellite or the Moon, where it's farthest from the central body. Its highest point above the Earth."
"Exactly," Jack said, turning to look at her directly. His gaze was serious, intense. "Your highest point. What you just did, that moment you broke your limits and touched something incredible… that was your first apogee. But it won't be your last. It'll be the first of many."
He let the words settle in the cool night air between them.
"You're brilliant, you have incredible power, and you're new to this world," he continued, his voice soft but certain. "How about… Apogee?"
Yuls tested the word. Apogee. It sounded like science, like power, like elegance. It held the idea of reaching heights, of limitless potential. It wasn't an aggressive or violent name. It was… perfect. It was her.
She looked at Jack, and the smile she gave him was radiant, charged with all the euphoria of the moment.
"I love it."
"I knew you would," he said, his own smile mirroring hers. He put a hand on her shoulder, a firm, comradely gesture. "Welcome to the team, Apogee. Our work is just getting started."