At seventy-five years old, Titan Gray no longer feared death in any grand or theatrical sense. He had faced death often enough to know it wasn’t great at disguises. Death had worn the silver mask of Doctor Calamity. Death was muttering about him under its breath when he faced the poisoned breath of the Gaslight Choir. And Death had almost claimed him in the ruins of an old observatory while three reporters, two rescue crews, and a very emotional sheriff assumed he was finished.
    Death, at least in his experience, had always come for him boldly in an open and honest manner.
    His mattress did not.
    His mattress was a low and treacherous thing, bought on recommendation from a physical therapist who used words like support and alignment with the cheerful cruelty of a woman who had never been punched through a water tower by a man who had skin that was infused with genetically enhanced spider silk.
    Every evening, the mattress accepted Titan Gray’s body with apparent kindness. Every morning, it released him with reluctance bordering on malice.
    At 6:17 a.m., the alarm began to chime.
    Titan Gray opened one eye.
    The ceiling looked back at him. Plain white. Unimpressed. It had seen the whole decline and kept its opinion to itself.
    “Phase One,” he said.
    His voice was rough, as if gravel had spent the night nesting in his throat.
    He moved his left foot six inches toward the edge of the bed. Forty-five years ago when he was in his prime, he had kicked a collapsing bridge support back into place while hovering seventy feet above a raging river. Now his foot moved with the cautious diplomacy of a nation negotiating disputed territory.
    His foot reached the edge and he declared victory.
    The alarm continued.
    He stared at the clock with the cold discipline of a man assessing enemy artillery. The device sat on the nightstand, just beyond comfortable reach. He had placed it there on purpose after discovering that, if left too near his hand, he could silence it without waking and sleep until noon, thereby losing the first battle of the day before remembering there had been a war.
    “Phase Two.”
    He bent his right knee.
    He paused when something inside it clicked with the crisp, dry sound of an old lock being forced.
    In his younger days, that sound would have meant a sniper had chambered a round somewhere within three city blocks. He would have risen into the air, cape snapping behind him, eyes narrowing toward the guilty window.
    Now it meant he would be moving carefully until lunch.
    He rolled onto his side.
    This was the dangerous maneuver. It required coordination among the shoulder, spine, hip, and the portion of his dignity still willing to report for duty. He braced one hand against the mattress and began the turn. Halfway through, his lower back objected with such sincerity that he froze, suspended in an undignified diagonal.
    For several seconds, he breathed through it.
    He had learned this from a battlefield nurse in 1989, after the Iron Widow shattered three of his ribs and told him, with unnecessary satisfaction, that heroes broke just like anybody else.
    The nurse had told him to just breathe and the pain will pass.
    He breathed.
    The spasm passed.
    The alarm continued chiming its incessant beep...beep...beep, ignorant of mercy.
    Titan Gray completed the roll and lay on his side facing the nightstand. The clock displayed 6:21. Four minutes had passed since the alarm had begun. He considered that respectable under the circumstances.
    “Phase Three,” he said.
    The slippers waited on the floor.
    Once, he wore boots reinforced with kinetic plating and polished black enough to reflect lightning. Now his footwear had Velcro closures, orthotic arch support inserts, and a rubber sole advertised as slip-resistant. The slippers by his bed were plaid and plush lined.
    He extended his toes toward the nearest slipper.
    Missed.
    He extended again.
    Missed by less.
    The third attempt succeeded in touching the slipper, but only enough to push it farther away.
    Titan Gray closed his eyes.
    There had been a time when he could summon gravitational force through his hands and bend the path of falling objects away from innocent civilians. He had pushed asteroids away from imminent collision with Earth. He had hauled cars full of trapped people out of the raging waters of a flash flood.
    He took a breath and focused on the slipper.
    The curtain stirred, the clock fell from the nightstand and its alarm went silent.
    The slipper did not move.
    At last, he used the cane.
    The cane leaned against the nightstand, a walnut shaft with a silver head shaped like an eagle. It was a gift from the city council who had no gift committee capable of restraint. He hooked the first slipper with the tip of the cane and dragged it close. The second slipper was secured after a brief skirmish with the dust ruffle.
    At 6:28 a.m., Titan Gray sat upright with his slippered feet on the floor.
    The room swayed. Not dramatically. It merely shifted a little to remind him that inner ear function was a privilege, not a constitutional right.
    He remained still until the dizziness passed.
    He looked at a framed photograph that hung on the bedroom wall. It was a photograph of him from forty years earlier. Titan Gray standing in the center of a ruined street, cape torn, jaw set, one hand raised toward a burning sky. Behind him, citizens fleeing toward safety.
    He paused to look at the photo. The eyes were the same, though hidden now behind reading glasses. The cape he was wearing in the photo was stored in a cedar chest because moths, unlike supervillains, had no respect for symbolism nor any municipal gratitude.
    Phase Four was standing.
    This required rocking forward once, then twice, then a third time with conviction. He placed both hands on the cane, leaned forward, and summoned not the strength of his youth, but the stubbornness that had made his youth everyone else’s problem.
    His knees complained and his hip made a noise he chose to ignore.
    With an audible grunt, he stood.
    For one bright second, he was vertical.
    The old thrill came to him then. Not flight. Not power. Not the roaring applause of a rescued crowd. Something smaller and sharper. The astonishment of having risen when staying down would have been easier.
    He shuffled toward the bathroom.
    The mirror above the sink received him without kindness. White hair leaned in several directions. His undershirt had twisted during the night. A pillow crease ran down one cheek like a battle scar inflicted by upholstery.
    He brushed his teeth, washed his face, and placed both hands on the sink while waiting for his body to decide whether it intended to remain cooperative. It did, but only conditionally.
    By 6:49, he reached the kitchen.
    This, he considered, was the true victory. The kitchen meant coffee. Being able to make coffee meant he had not yet become a cautionary tale discovered by a wellness check.
    While the coffee brewed, he looked through the window at the waking city. A siren cried somewhere beyond the rooftops. Once, that sound would have pulled him into motion. His blood would have answered before his mind did. He would have been through the door, into the sky, toward danger, toward purpose.
    Now he stood in slippers, waiting for the coffee to finish brewing, his powers reduced to occasional possibility of moving small objects by accident if sufficiently irritated.
    The siren faded.
    Others would answer it. Younger bodies. Quicker hands. Brighter costumes. That was right. That was necessary.
    He dropped two slices of bread into the toaster.
    The toaster lever resisted.
    He narrowed his eyes. “Don’t start with me.”
    The lever went down.
    The coffee finished its brew cycle and he poured himself a cup and waited until the toast popped up.
    He buttered it carefully. His fingers were not as steady as they had been, but they still knew how to do useful work. He carried the cup and the plate to the table, lowered himself into the chair, and sat without falling the last two inches.
    Another victory.
    Sunlight entered the kitchen in a pale rectangle and lay across the floor. Dust floated through it like tiny, undecided planets.
    Titan Gray lifted his coffee.
    His hand shook slightly.
    Inside this old house, the mattress waited for him. Tomorrow, it would again try to keep him. His knees would conduct their little rebellion, and his back would issue its threats.
    He took a bite of toast.
    It was dry and slightly burned, but he could accept that now.
    He smiled.
    Once this world needed him to hold up bridges and stop falling towers. Now it required him to keep going without turning the ordinary circle of life into a grievance.
    His life now required a different kind of heroism... and now he knew that.
    Still, it was hard to explain to people who still believed courage always arrived with a cape in motion. Truth is that sometimes courage is slower. Less photogenic.
    Today, he had overcome the mattress, the slippers, the knee, the mirror, the toaster, and the long humiliation of needing time for what once required no thought at all.
    And he had made it to breakfast.
    Titan Gray raised his cup toward the empty kitchen.
    “Another day saved,” he said.
    Then he drank his coffee before it got cold.