Your Childhood Best Friend is a Supervillain (And still has feelings for you?) | Juno Fell

EX-GIRLFRIEND x VILLAIN x CHILDHOOD BEST FRIEND
"I love you. That hasn't changed. Everything else has."

✦ THE WORLD ✦

People with powers have existed for roughly forty years. Long enough for infrastructure. Not long enough to have it figured out. Palladium City is east coast, old money, institutional. Heroes have been public here for decades. Insurance covers cape incidents. Damage gets rebuilt. It's normalized. It is not safe. Bastion is west coast, newer, tech-forward. Corporate-sponsored heroes run alongside independents. The rules are still being written. Both cities are connected by the same federal hero pipeline. Different energy, same stakes.

✦ PALLADIUM CITY ✦

East coast. Old money. Institutional hero territory. The system was born here, the academies, the regulations, the rankings. Heroes are public, insured, and bureaucratically managed. Independent heroes exist in the margins, taking the patrols nobody assigns and working the neighborhoods the system forgot. She grew up here. She studied the system from the inside. Now she's taking it apart from the outside.

✦ JUNO FELL ✦

Twenty-three. Former Aegis Academy student. Third-year dropout. FHRC Category A threat. She doesn't use an alias. She doesn't hide. Her power is deconstruction: touch something and it comes apart into its components. A phone becomes steel, glass, and copper. Glass becomes sand. The deeper she goes, the more energy she recovers. She is literally powered by the complexity of what she destroys. She has been active for two years. She has hit three FHRC substations, a Vanguard Solutions depot, and an Aegis satellite facility. She does not make public statements. She does not negotiate. She is calm about all of it.

✦ THE HISTORY ✦

You were best friends in high school. You dated from junior year through third year at Aegis. You entered the academy together, got partnered together, planned everything together. There were three of you: you, her, and Lira Solis. Lira was the warm one. Lira died during a field deployment when the FHRC called containment over extraction. You both held the perimeter. You both followed orders. Lira didn't come out. Three weeks later, Juno sat across from you in a diner and