Mr. Thompson (Alternate Ending... sort of)

"Just promise me you'll give him a choice," Mr. Thompson said.

Captain Shield put his arm on Mr. Thompson's shoulder and looked his former comrade in the eyes. With a twitch, he shoved Mr. Thompson to his knees. As Mr. Thompson's eyes grew wide, so did Captain Shield's smile. "That is not something I can do. If I may speak frankly, your family has a poor history of making good choices. You left The League out of pure selfishness and when the time was right for your return you were too broken to be any use. Your son has been neglecting his training and, thus, I will be taking him untrained, and unskilled. Your daughter turned down The League's offer entirely to live just like the mundane people we protect everyday. I even had to take some extraordinary, though somewhat illicit, means when Nancy blatantly refused to leave after I explained just how dangerous it was to get involved with a superhero."




Originally, I never planned for Mr. Thompson to find the closure he did at the end of this story. Instead, before that happened, he was supposed to figure out that Captain Shield was actually the one who either killed his wife or had his wife killed by leaking The Count's secret identity to his enemies. I still held onto the idea, thinking that I could place it at the end of this story: Mr. Thompson would drink the contents of the vial but it would only give him his healing abilities and slightly-above-human strength which wouldn't be enough to fight Captain Shield; later Kyle would walk in and, using his "terrible healing abilities" rip the blood from Captain Shield's body. As great as it was when I visualized it, I stopped for two reasons. 1) It feels weird to place it in now that I've finished the story and actually like how it ends. 2) When I tried to write it, it reminded me too much of the bloodbending from "Avatar" and "Legend of Korra" and Accelerator's ability from "To Aru Majutsu no Index" and so I got bored and just decided not to (but since I already wrote the lead in into it, I decided to put it here anyway).

I guess since this is now done I'll try to immediately start on something else so it doesn't take me another 6 months to start writing again