Chapter 18 : A Letter From Dad
May 2016 — Winn's Apartment — Morning
The letter arrived on a Tuesday.
Plain white envelope. No return address. My name written in handwriting I recognized from a thousand childhood memories—careful, precise, each letter perfectly formed.
I stared at it for five minutes before opening it.
My dearest Winn,
I've been following the news from my little corner of the world. National City seems to have acquired quite the collection of heroes lately. Supergirl, of course—everyone knows about her. But there's someone else, isn't there? A figure in the shadows. Someone who deflects attacks, redirects energy, fights alongside the Kryptonian like they were made for each other.
I wonder who that could be.
The guards think I don't notice when they talk. They assume I'm too broken, too lost in my own mind, to hear their whispers. But I hear everything, son. I always have. And what I hear makes me proud.
You've become something special. Something more than the frightened boy I left behind. Part of me wants to take credit—to believe that the brilliance I see in those grainy news clips is somehow inherited. But I know that's not fair to you. Whatever you've become, you did it yourself.
I want to see you, Winn. Not to manipulate or scheme—my scheming days are over, I think. I just want to look at my son. To hear his voice. To know that despite everything I did wrong, something good came from my legacy.
Visit me. Please. Even if just once.
Your father, Winslow Schott Sr.
The paper trembled in my hands.
I read it again. Then a third time. Each pass revealed new layers—the careful word choices, the deliberate emotional hooks, the way he balanced confession with manipulation so perfectly that you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.
He knows. Or suspects enough that it doesn't matter.
My phone buzzed. Kara.
Coffee? I'm outside.
I stuffed the letter in my pocket and went to face the day.
CatCo Worldwide Media — Afternoon
"You've been weird all morning."
Kara set a fresh latte on my desk, studying my face with the intensity she usually reserved for crime scenes. We were in the break room, alone except for a maintenance guy fixing the espresso machine in the corner.
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You've reread the same email seventeen times and your jaw keeps doing that thing it does when you're stressed."
"My jaw has a thing?"
"It's a very specific thing." She sat down across from me. "Talk to me."
I pulled out the letter.
She read it in silence. Her expression shifted through several phases—confusion, recognition, concern, and finally something that looked like protective anger.
"Your father wrote this."
"Yeah."
"The Toyman."
"Yeah."
"And he knows about your powers."
"Suspects. But he's smart enough that suspicion is basically confirmation."
Kara set the letter down carefully, as if it might explode. "What are you going to do?"
"I don't know." I stared at the precise handwriting, the careful loops and curves that I remembered from birthday cards and homework help and a dozen other artifacts from a childhood that belonged to someone else. "Part of me wants to burn it. Pretend it never arrived. Go back to my life and let him rot in that cell forever."
"And the other part?"
"The other part thinks about all the questions I've never answered. Why he did what he did. Whether there's any part of him that actually regrets it. Whether I'm anything like him, deep down." I looked up at her. "What would you do?"
"I'd talk to Alex and J'onn." She reached across the table and took my hand. "They're your family too now. Whatever you decide, you shouldn't have to decide alone."
DEO Desert Facility — Evening
The conference room felt smaller than usual.
J'onn sat at the head of the table, his posture suggesting wisdom and patience. Alex stood by the window, arms crossed, clearly unhappy about the situation. Kara sat beside me, her hand still holding mine.
"The letter is sophisticated emotional manipulation," J'onn said after reading it twice. "Every sentence is designed to provoke specific responses. He uses your name repeatedly, invokes shared memories, positions himself as reformed while subtly reminding you of his capabilities."
"So I should ignore it."
"I didn't say that." J'onn set the letter down. "Manipulation and sincerity aren't mutually exclusive. He can genuinely want to see you and simultaneously be trying to control the interaction. The question is whether the potential value outweighs the risk."
"I think you should stay away," Alex said flatly. "He's dangerous. He's obsessive. And now he suspects you have powers, which makes you a target for his particular brand of genius."
"Or," Kara offered quietly, "visiting him might provide closure. Let you see who he is now, not who your memories say he was."
Three perspectives. Three valid arguments. None of them made the choice any easier.
"I need to go," I said finally. "Not for him. For me. I've spent months building a new life, becoming someone different, and the whole time his shadow has been hanging over me. The Toyman's son. The villain's legacy." I met J'onn's eyes. "If I'm going to move forward, I need to face what I came from."
"And if he tries something?"
"Then I'll deal with it." I squeezed Kara's hand. "I'm not the scared kid he remembers. Whatever happens in that prison, I can handle it."
Silence around the table.
"I'll arrange the visit," J'onn said eventually. "Maximum security protocols. DEO observers. If he so much as twitches wrong, we pull you out immediately."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet." His expression was grave. "Facing your demons is rarely as simple as it sounds. Be prepared for the possibility that this conversation changes nothing—or changes everything."
Winn's Apartment — Night
I pinned the letter to my wall, next to the training log I'd kept since October.
Six months of entries. Six months of power development, relationship building, battles fought and won. And now this—a scrawled invitation from a man who'd shaped everything I'd tried to escape.
I'm not the son he remembers.
The thought was strange. True, in a literal sense—the original Winn Schott was gone, replaced by whatever I'd become after the transmigration. But the memories were still there. The fear, the shame, the complicated love-hate that defined child-and-monster relationships.
Maybe that's why I need to go. To prove to myself that his legacy doesn't define me.
My phone buzzed. Kara.
Can't sleep. Thinking about tomorrow. You okay?
I typed back: Getting there. Thanks for being in my corner.
Always. Partners, remember?
Partners.
I put down the phone and stared at the letter one more time.
Next week, I would face Winslow Schott Sr. I would look into the eyes of the man who'd terrified my childhood and defined my fears. I would find out whether there was anything worth salvaging in that relationship—or whether the ghost I'd been running from was exactly as monstrous as I remembered.
Either way, I would finally know.
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