"And now you know my story!" he says, trying to inject some cheer into his voice. "Oh, I also have two half-siblings, but my father basically prohibited me from interacting with them."

"Uh, are they okay?"

"Neither of them are trans, as far as I know both of them were Christian as of the time I left, so Tobias never had an excuse to beat them up."

"If you say so, but if you'd been going through a social worker or something instead of just relying on him wanting rid of you they would check the entire family, I think."

"Yeah, maybe. I mean, I'm pretty sure they are okay, and of course Tobias knew not to be too obvious about it. He did give me food, my room was okay, I went to school, the bruises were in easy-to-hide-and-explain places."

"Before I got my powers I was the klutziest kid alive and when I was in first grade someone thought my parents might be hitting me because I was always bruised and they took some convincing. ...My powers don't affect my clumsiness directly, I compensate with technology."

"...is it bad that I kinda think the klutziness is endearing?"

"Well, you're a little late, because it's no longer a factor even out of costume."

"Really? How'd you fix that out of costume?"

"If you remind me next time I'm sans armor I'll show you the insertion scars. It was a serious problem. I couldn't walk briskly, let alone do anything in gym class, traverse a sidewalk in winter, or run around."

"Wow. Yeah, I kinda prefer it when you're fit and powerful."

"In order to even build the implants I had to make clumsy jitter compensators for external wear first!"

"And how'd you build those?"

"They didn't need to be as small as the implants and I didn't use anything delicate so it didn't matter as much if I sometimes dropped things. My fine motor control was always okay, it was knocking things onto the floor that was the potential issue."

"Oh, nothing. I mean, it's just that, you mentioned showing me the scars on your legs the next time I saw you out of armor, which made me think of you out of armor and seeing your legs, which." Pause. "I'll remind you I'm a teenage boy."

"I mean, I was thinking of the one on the back of my neck and in my elbows and wrists, but if you're that excited to have a look at my knees..."

"Mm. Knees. Yes. Let's go with that."

"I do also have hip joint ones, admittedly."

"Ooh. Hip joints."

"Yep. I can, if I so choose, jog. It's very exciting."

"Yes. Quite exciting. The. Jogging."

"It actually was. First week I went to Arcadia - we used to live in another city, so nobody there noticed I could suddenly, you know, walk like a person - I would show up early and run around on the track. It was novel! I had given up the entire gait of running as a bad job when I was like six or seven!"

He laughs. "Okay, that does sound exciting!"