"Ian!" Tanya yelled, shaking his body with her free arm. The other was still locked in Mrs Eceer's grip. "We need to go back. Think of Kaylee, Ian. Think of Kaylee!"

"Can I help?" Olena called from the doorway.

The other tattoo gun clattered to the floor. Assistant had unsummoned itself. Tanya struggled to organise her thoughts well enough to work out why.

"Take this arm, hold it tight," Mrs Eceer ordered, passing Tanya's tattooing arm to Olena. Tanya was still wrestling against the restraints, despite her mind being on other things.

Tanya looked at Ian's eyes. They were still locked onto the ceiling, no expression on his face.

"Ian!" Tanya waved her hand in front of his eyes. They didn't focus.

Mrs Eceer walked around to beside her. "Oh no…"

"Not oh no! We don't need a fuckin' oh no!" Tanya hissed, surprising herself.

"Through one of my overlays, I can see a tether between you. It's similar to the wire equivalents in my wards."

Tanya rolled her eyes, voice laced with vitriol. "Mrs multiple overlays over here."

"Tanya!" Olena said, shocked.

Tanya looked over her shoulder, and for a moment, Olena morphed into Ian's wife. She was at the dining table and Lisa was bringing him tea. They looked hopeless. Ian's back ached.

Then Tanya was back in the tattoo parlour again.

"It's okay," Mrs Eceeer said. "She isn't herself."

The anger inside Tanya built. "What do you fuckin' mean—"

Mrs Eceer silenced her with a hand on her shoulder. "I need logical Tanya to listen to me, okay? She's still in there. This is like Phantom Brand. You are emotionally entwined. These emotions that are not your own. This is how Ian is feeling. This is not you."

"Oh," was all that came out.

She struggled to believe it. The emotions felt like hers.

This has happened before. I was okay.

"What did I do—what do I do?" Tanya asked.

"You and Ian are draining your attributes right now. Your Will and Concentration are getting low so we need to fix this before they fully drain."

"How will I finish it then. There's so much left." The two designs flickered before her eyes—Superdad and something more sinister.

"You're using your Will and Concentration to stop rather than start," Mrs Eceer said. "Once you continue, they should drain far far slower."

"How do I get the design back. He can't have this one—it's made of so much bad shit."

Tanya looked into Mrs Eceer's eyes, and for the first time, she didn't look confident. "I'm not sure, Tanya. The only people who know what it's like in there are you, Assistant, and Ian."

Assistant.

Tanya reached into her mind, ignoring the flashing of images pouring over from her connection with Ian.

She could sense that Assistant had pulled itself back in on purpose. It must have been just as hard for it to stop as her.

Wishing so much that she could speak to Assistant, Tanya relented. There was no way to communicate with Assistant without summoning it again and the drain becoming even faster.

She was so angry. There was no fucking reason for this to go wrong. This entire thing was so hopeless.

For a moment, Tanya was back at that dining table with the bills and spreadsheets. The cup of tea was empty now.

A think string of awareness separated Tanya from wholly feeling like Ian.

She clutched onto it, trying to remember that she had no reason to be angry.

If I can work this out, the opportunities will be endless. I need to keep growin'.

Tanya relaxed her jaw and tried to slow her breathing. She had no clue how the Attributes worked alongside other bodily mechanisms, but she swore that the moment of mindfulness made the wave of emotion being held back by her Will just a little bit calmer.

She didn't have long to think, so she started to brainstorm.

The obvious option was doing the new tattoo. She didn't even need to finish that thought to know it wasn't the right one.

The other obvious choice was trying to create the old tattoo even through the new memory. Even the thought of it exhausted her. She couldn't work against her process like that—she didn't have the Will to finish it unless she massively lowered her scope, and even then, she doubted it would work very well at all.

Tanya supposed she could also try to turn off the Ability altogether, but she wasn't certain that it would be classified as succeeding the Errand for Ian. She also wasn't sure how she'd do that, or even how these half-completed tattoos would react to Tanya's powers.

That thought reminded her of Maria, and all the air was pulled out of her lungs.

She hadn't finished Maria's last tattoo either.

The negative emotions took control, and Tanya fell back into the memory.

Ian's wife was massaging her temples. "Do you think your dad could help any more. Just this month?"

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Ian's back ached from leaning over the table for so long. Over the last few weeks, he'd become used to this feeling and the constant presence of bags under his eyes that he hoped his daughter wouldn't notice.

He relaxed back against the wooden chair. It creaked. "I don't think so. He's helping my sister with the baby, and their boiler is on its last legs. They can't have it broken with a newborn right before winter."

He felt completely hollow, as if all the life had been pulled out of him.

Lisa shuffled her chair closer. "Baby, I know we didn't want to think like this, but maybe it's time to think of downsizing."

Ian groaned. "To what? A one bed?"

"We did it when Kaylee was born," she said, but it was clear she was reaching. "Or maybe we could move further out. Outside London, we could get a two-bed for this rent easily."

"But my degree…" Ian said. A lump formed in his throat.

Lisa folded first. A tear dripped down her cheek. She tilted her head up and they locked eyes.

"Oh, baby," Ian said. His chair screeched across the floor as he stood, pulling his wife into his arms.

The moment they embraced, Lisa sobbed. "I'm s-sorry. I know we said this would work. That it would j-just be hard for a few years first."

The shoulder of Ian's tshirt grew wetter and wetter.

"It'll be okay. There are other ways into electronics," Ian said, but he wasn't sure whether he was right or not.

She pulled away, wiping the underneath of her eyes with her thumbs. The mascara smudged around her lashes like coal dust. "I'm being so silly. T-these were your dreams and you're comforting me."

Ian interlocked his fingers with hers. "Our dreams."

Tanya pulled herself back out.

The anger in the background of her head had made way for love and sadness. The grief was immense—pushing down on her chest until she wondered if she was still breathing.

She knew Ian had succeeded somehow. He designed circuit boards before the apocalypse, and Tanya recognised the view out of the window. Ian still lived in that same flat. The thought did little to comfort her. Ian wasn't here in the present; he was back there, and therefore, so was she.

All she could do was accept it.

Accept it.

The thought hit Tanya like a brick.

Grief and anger would always be a part of this memory.

In retrospect, even Superdad was part of this feeling. She could recall his life as if it were her own. Ian had been too busy studying to make Superdad before this moment. Tanya remembered the days before this, how Ian's concern that they'd lose the flat and he'd have to leave his studies made way for more and more time with his daughter. Superdad was the culmination of that.

Tanya had to keep tattooing, but she wouldn't let this part of the memory change the entire design. It would get its own small section.

"You can let me go," Tanya said aloud. She realised she'd stopped struggling against Olena's grip a while ago.

"You sure?" Olena asked, voice wavering.

Tanya took a deep breath and looked over her shoulder at Olena. The willpower it took was excruciating—everything was pulling her into the design—but Olena needed to see her certainty.

"Certain," Tanya said, and she meant it.

Olena nodded and let go.

"Can you help me flip him over?" Tanya asked.

Mrs Eceer and Olena didn't question it, gently turning him and keeping the towel in place over his behind.

Any one of them likely could have carried him alone, but this was smoother and more controlled. Tanya liked it that way.

Returning to Ian's back, Tanya steadied the tattoo gun and began to tattoo.

The Overlay had changed the entire design, but she focused on just his back, pulling up a stool and leaning over. She was more meticulous than she had been earlier, back when it was a frenzy of getting through the tattoo in time.

Having this section on his back felt right. Even now, she was mostly present in the parlour, but she could feel the phantom ache down Ian's own back. Night after night, he'd spent hunched over their slightly too low dining table after Kaylee had gone to bed. It was a bit pretentious, but she liked the symbolism too. She remembered this moment from the memory where he'd leaned over to comfort Kaylee about her crown. Tanya remembered the way the raindrops felt seeping into the cardboard.

She let the raindrops integrate their way into the design, tattooing the gradients of the soggy cardboard it was creating. When the design overlay told her that a section over his lower back was hanging off with duct tape, she let it. The full superdad logo back here was smudged, looking like an inky splodge and then the word 'dad' with the rounded side of the first 'd' almost merging with the puddle beside it.

Bit by bit, the back piece came together, as Tanya experienced the rest of Ian's night and the way he stumbled into the next day, bleary-eyed and heavy.

His day was a haze of classes he wasn't sure he'd get to continue, and his part-time job as a cashier.

Tanya moved onto his pauldrons, making them out of the thick 24 box egg cartons he was stacking, adding an assortment of fruit labels to the sides. There were so many of them that he seemed to always manage to collect a few that fell off onto his ugly red uniform somewhere.

Then came the first moment where things changed.

Ian walked into the back room, yawning for the fourth time and leaning against the wall out of the eyeline of his bossy manager. It was more of a warehouse than anything, with huge doors to let the trucks drive in for unloading and an obscene number of big shelves.

He looked at the clock. Not much longer now. If he could sneak in some more shelf restocking now rather than after closing, maybe he could even make it home for tea.

He yawned again, stretching. His hand landed on the recycling bin beside him. It was a giant tip of a recycling bin, orange and with a liftable lid.

Ian's lips curved into a smile and he lifted the lid to peek in.

He'd hit the jackpot.

"What are you doing?" his manager snapped from behind him.

Ian dropped the lid. "Nothing."

She narrowed his eyes at him, but just walked back out. The door swung closed behind her.

Ian thought of Kaylee and stuck his tongue out at the closed door. It actually made him feel quite a bit better.

He spent the rest of that shift working out how he'd raid the recycling bin before he left. There's no way his manager would let him. She's what Kaylee would call 'allergic to fun'. He wasn't sure what her reasoning would be for it yet, but he knew he'd have to do it without her seeing.

His imagination was filled with epic James Bond style rolls into the shadows and throwing the smaller pieces of cardboard to distract anyone who got too close to spotting him. The reality was far more anticlimactic. He simply slipped in when his manager was lecturing a new employee and staggered out with as much cardboard as he could carry.

The moment Kaylee saw his haul, all of the exhaustion faded away. Superdad and Daughtergirl went on missions all around the world until bedtime, and this time there was no rain, so they simply stowed their newly recreated costumes into the cupboard until tomorrow.

It was by far the largest tattoo Tanya had done in one sitting, but with her superhuman Attributes and Ian in this strange far away daze, she just kept going.

Assistant came out when Ian and Kaylee started playing again, continuing where it had stopped with the leg guard. Tanya welcomed the help.

Every so often, Mrs Eceer would pass her some cereal-bar style snack or a bottle of water with a straw. She took multiple 30-minute naps, but only after her Will had recharged enough to let her pull herself away for long enough.

Her Attributes levelled multiple times during the stint. It was minor, but she appreciated the way each boost made it easier to continue.

Mrs Eceer and Olena came and went. Sometimes Mrs Eceer would lean over, making adjustments to her Sharpie wards. Sometimes Olena would ask questions about the design, and Tanya would try to explain through the daze of Ian's memories. But mostly they both just watched and did their own thing in the parlour.

Tanya couldn't even estimate how long had passed. But at some point, the needles slowed, then stopped, and the silence felt louder than the buzzing had ever been. She sat back, flexing her hands. The armour was complete.

Tanya didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Ian's eyes fluttered shut, and he fell into a deep, snoring sleep. His skin glowed all over in a fierce blast of light as he completed the Errand.

Tanya instinctively closed her eyes, but she could still see the red of her eyelids from how bright it was. By the time she opened them, he was barely illuminating anymore, like one of the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling of Kaylee's bedroom.

"Ian," Tanya whispered, one hand on his shoulder. "We did it."

She covered the tattoos with ointment and Saran Wrap through aching limbs, then she sat on the chair in the corner Mrs Eceer had brought in, meaning to just close her eyes for a moment. Instead, sleep welcomed her.

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