by Drew Hayes
He stirred, rolling over and blinking the groggy remainders of sleep from his eyes.
“Hey,” he said, his voice rougher than normal. “How long was I out?”
“You’ve been sleeping for around five hours,” Camille replied.
“Feels like I just nodded off.” He sat up in bed and took a long stretch. “You weren’t here the whole time, were you?”
“Of course not,” she lied. “All the healers have been taking turns keeping an eye on you. It looks like we weren’t needed.”
“Doesn’t seem so,” Vince agreed. “Sorry you guys wasted the time watching me.”
She gave him a small smile. “Vince, people with my kind of ability are always happier when we don’t have to use it. It means no one had to suffer in the first place.”
“Never thought about it like that.” He finished his stretching and pulled off the covers. The uniform he’d been wearing was wrinkled nearly beyond recognition. Thankfully they’d taken the jacket off him before putting his body in bed. That was, by far, the hardest part to iron.
“How are you feeling?”
“Still a little tired, but overall I think I’m fine,” Vince informed her.
“I didn’t mean physically.”
“I know.” He looked away from her, his eyes wandering to a clock slowly ticking and tocking from its perch on the wall. “I think I’m going to need some time to really make peace with everything. I mean, Rich’s dream thing helped me get past the worst of it, but it’s still a lot to deal with. At least it’s not all bad.”
“It’s not?”
“My father is alive,” he said, turning back and giving her a wide grin. Vince had no talent in hiding his feelings, or perhaps his talent was simply that he felt no compulsion to do so. Although the worry and uncertainty were still evident on his face, so was the unequivocal joy he was feeling at that realization. “I might get to see him again, to talk to him. I admit, it’s not exactly a perfect situation, but it’s still more than I ever really could have hoped for.”
“You know this is going to make things harder on you, right? The fact that you were raised by him would have been a big deal even if he were still dead. Him being alive compounds that times ten.”
“I know. Dean Blaine and I had a chat about it earlier,” he said. “Still, if my choices were this situation or my father turning out to not have been Globe but still being dead, I’d be sitting in this infirmary bed after a literal meltdown every time. Just knowing he’s alive makes it worth it, no matter how much trouble or pain is going to come along with it. Think that’s crazy?”
“Not at all,” Camille said. She understood exactly how he felt.
168.
Chad tried to ignore the steady repetition of knuckles against his dorm room door. He’d been doing well for half an hour, but it was plain the person on the other side wasn’t giving up. He could have turned himself deaf, but then he might have missed a call from his mother. She would have been at work all day, and she wasn’t one to watch the news, but it was inevitable that she would see what happened, that He was still alive. Chad could ignore a lot of things with impunity, today especially. The call she would surely make to him was not one of those things.
Giving up, he walked over to the door and pulled it open. Shane and Angela stood on the other side. A quick glance at the light bruising on their hands told him they’d been trading off turns knocking on the door. It spoke volumes that these two siblings had been able to work together with such efficiency and manage to not dissolve into bickering. Chad said nothing; he simply walked back to his bed and sat down. Angela plopped down in his desk chair, while Shane seemed to prefer standing. The door swung shut and silence regained its sovereign rule, which proved to be a brief respite.
“How you doing there, Slugger?” Angela asked, spinning slowly in the chair as it made circles.
“Slugger?” Shane’s voice was exasperated, but not surprised.
“You think I should have gone with Sport, or Ace?”
“I think you should, maybe just this once, show a situation the respect that it’s due.”
“Ohh, you mean be boring and gentle and tiptoe around the fact that the guy who iced Chad’s dad just showed up alive on the news. Or maybe you think I should ice-skate over the fact that he has a kid in class with you two.”
“For God’s sake, Angela. Do you have any bit of sensitivity in you?”
“Only in spots I am damned sure not going to talk about with my brother in the room. If you want to get scarce, I might be willing to do some divulging with Chad.”
There was a snort of sound that interrupted them, a noise more foreign to Shane than Angela. It took him a moment to realize that Chad had allowed a small laugh to escape from his solemn face.
“There we go, I knew you were alive in there after all,” Angela said, bringing her spinning chair to a careful halt. “See, that’s the problem with you, Shane. You go into a serious situation and want to make it more serious. Friends lighten shit up.”
“Right, hinting that you’d bang my friend if I left is clearly what every psychologist in America would recommend doing in this situation.”
“This situation? You say that like this has happens three times a month. I think we’ve officially set sail in uncharted waters.”
“Green Genes.” This one came from Chad, and managed to quiet the siblings’ sniping immediately. “Happened twenty-seven years ago. A Hero known as Green Genes lost control during a battle and accidently killed another Hero called The Chairman. Rather than face charges, he faked his own death in order to undertake a covert mission infiltrating a gang of criminal Supers. Five years later he returned from the dead. The Chairman had two children that had to find out the man who killed their father was still alive. So, not entirely uncharted waters.”
“Why in the hell have we not taken you to do trivia night at one of the bars around here?” Angela asked.
“What happened to Green Genes?” Shane added, working in vain to try and keep his sister focused on the issue at hand.
“He died in the line of duty three years after coming back from his fake death. No foul play was suspected.”
“Here’s a better question: what happened to The Chairman’s kids?” Angela tossed out.
“Neither of them were Super, so they went about their lives normally. There are reports that Green Genes visited the family frequently, helping out in whatever ways he could. He spent the rest of his life trying to make up for what he’d taken away from them. By all accounts it was as cordial a relationship as you can have with a parent’s killer. When he died, they even went to his funeral.”
“I think we have a very different situation then,” Shane observed.
Chad shrugged, his face still largely impassive. “The man who killed my father is alive. I don’t expect he’ll be stopping by to beg my forgiveness, but then again, I didn’t expect to see him on the news today either. I don’t know how to go forward from here. I know I want to meet him, to fight him, probably even to kill him. More than anything, I want to ask him why.” Chad’s voice did not crack on the word why, nor did any moisture appear in his eyes, which only demonstrated the true extent of his power over bodily control.
“Maybe one day you’ll get the chance,” Shane said.
“True. Or we could go beat up his kid and see if he knows anything,” Angela suggested.
“If Vince knew his father was Globe, or that he was alive, then he is an actor of such spectacular talent that we would never be able to glean any truth from him,” Chad replied. “I don’t bear him any ill will in all of this. In a strange way, I suspect he and I are going through a lot of the same feelings.”
Angela opened her mouth, no doubt with some sarcastic barb or inappropriate quip; however, she was interrupted by a crisp knock on Chad’s door. She and Shane exchanged glances of confusion. Chad was their friend, but the rest of his social circle was somewhat limited. They knew Roy had stopped by to help last time, but
it seemed more likely he’d be with his own people, looking after Vince. Shane walked over, gave a quick glance through the peephole, and pulled open the door.
“Thank you, Mr. DeSoto,” Dean Blaine said stiffly. “Chad, I was wondering if I could have a word with you?”
“Sure,” Chad replied, not looking at the door.
The dean stood still for a moment, then turned his gaze toward Angela and Shane. He said nothing, but the message could not have been clearer.
“We’ll swing by tomorrow for breakfast,” Shane said, heading toward the door.
“Or any time tonight if you need to talk. Or spar, I know how you love to spar. Just call me. Any time. I mean it.” The genuine concern and lack of lightness in Angela’s voice stunned everyone in the room. It was one of the secrets she knew well: if you gave very few things weight then the ones you did were all the more powerful.
Dean Blaine shut the door behind the DeSotos then turned to Chad. “I’ve gotten an old friend to teleport us to your house whenever you’re ready. She’s aware of the news and is waiting for us. You’re excused from the next week of classes, but I’m afraid it’s not in my power to get you out of the final match.”
“That’s fine,” Chad said, his voice still calm and detached. “Thank you. When do we leave?”
“As soon as you feel composed enough to go.”
“Composed?” Even as he said it, Chad noticed the sudden rush of thickness to his voice and the way the room had grown blurry. People often forget that emotions come with, and often from, chemical shifts in the brain. Unless he was caught by surprise, Chad’s ability allowed him to keep such things under constant control. With Dean Blaine in the room, that control had been suspended, and now Chad was subject to all the things he’d been working so very hard not to feel.
Chad placed his face in his hands as the last shreds of his composure dissolved in a torrent of tears.
169.
It was Tuesday when Nick slid into a seat adjacent to Vince, both of them currently in the boys’ lounge of Melbrook. Vince was studying for his last final exam, or at least he had been before Nick arrived. The sophomores had been blessed with more free time than expected, their duties at the carnival had been absorbed by the juniors and seniors. Officially this was because the committee meeting had been interrupted before tasks could be assigned. The actual reason could be speculated on, but since Dean Blaine was immune to both telepathic probing and idle dissemination of information, speculation was all it would remain.
“Working hard, or hardly working?”
Vince closed his book. Whatever Nick wanted, it was likely going to require Vince’s full attention. “Just trying to squeeze in as much as I can.”
“You never learn, do you? Cramming doesn’t... screw it, a fight for another time. I wanted to see how you were holding up.”
“Better than I would have thought myself capable of. Honestly, with the stress of finals and the impending match, I haven’t had much time to think about the Globe incident.”
“That’s great, but that’s actually not what I’m talking about.”
Vince’s brow furrowed. That was all pretty much anyone had asked him about since it happened. It hadn’t occurred to him Nick might be concerned about something else.
“Don’t give me that look. You’re obviously fine with the Globe being your father issue, otherwise you’d be holed up in your room, crazier than a shithouse rat. That’s not the sort of thing you can fake your way through.”
“I guess?”
“You guess right.” Nick leaned forward and plucked the book from Vince’s hand. “What you can carry under the surface as it eats at you is the same problem we’ve been fighting against since day one: your fear of your own power.”
“I thought I’d been making progress.”
“Tremendous strides. But what no one seems to have talked about yet was your fiery freak-out before Rich put you under. That shouldn’t bother you; I daresay nearly anyone in your situation would have lost some form of control. You being you, I’m betting it’s been slithering around in the back of your mind, making you wonder if you’ve really gained as much control as you think you need.”
“Oh.” Vince studied his hands intently. No one had mentioned that incident save for his discussion with Dean Blaine. He’d hoped, well, he didn’t know what he’d hoped. Maybe that he could pretend it didn’t happen. “Yeah, it scared me. I could have really hurt someone. It’s just lucky that Rick stopped me.”
“I don’t blame you for being a little scared,” Nick said, opening the book and leafing through it. Whether his eyes were on the pages or not, only the sunglasses knew. “All of us have that little phobia ticking away somewhere inside of us. Wondering if we’ll go back, if this has all just been a sweet teasing taste of a life we can never have. You and I, we have a greater fear than the others. If we suddenly revert, it might not just be ourselves that suffer.”
“This isn’t really making me feel better,” Vince said.
“I’m just saying you don’t have to be ashamed of having that fear. What should shame you is if you let it hold you down. Mastering your ability is the best defense you have against losing control of it.”
“You realize I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen you use your power, right?” Vince pointed out.
“You can count on one hand the number of times I’ve told you I used my power,” Nick corrected. He gently jiggled the sunglasses stretched across his face. “These bad boys aren’t just for making me look cool. Of course, they do that pretty well too. None of which is the point of this discussion. I just want to make sure you aren’t backsliding into the Vince who shows up carrying the energy equivalent of a lighter. We’ve got days until we’ll be facing who knows what, and I’m counting on you being in fighting form.”
“I’m not going to let you down,” Vince said. Despite the flighty body language he’d displayed during the talk, Nick recognized a familiar resilience in his voice. Years ago he would have mistaken it for Vince trying to convince himself that he would be able to follow through. After all they’d been through, Nick now knew it was the sound of his friend when things got serious. He liked that tone; it meant the realms of possibility were about to dramatically shift.
“Good. Our team is counting on you.” Nick set the book back in Vince’s hands, then began to rise from his seat.
“It’s me, isn’t it?”
Nick froze in mid-air, his long arms still pressing against the chair as he propelled himself upward. Slowly he lowered back into the warm and waiting cushions below his posterior. He debated lying, or trying to cover with misdirection, but neither of those would likely succeed. Vince was easily led and deceived most of the time; when he found the truth, however, there was no separating him from it.
“Yeah. It’s you. It’s been you ever since your secret got out at Camille’s birthday party. There were people who wanted you gone, and that was when the whole thing was a crazy rumor.”
Vince nodded; clearly this meshed with whatever had already been in his head. “Why didn’t you just tell me? Why pretend it was about protecting the others?”
“Firstly, protecting the others wasn’t pretend. This is an elimination game, don’t ever forget that. Just because you were in the crosshairs didn’t mean a poor showing wouldn’t push some of us out the door along with you. As to why I emphasized that part, well, I mean, come on. You have to have noticed this about yourself by now. You never fight as hard as when you’re protecting other people.”
“Everyone is like that,” Vince said. “We all fight hardest when others are on the line.”
Nick opened his mouth with a smart-ass reply then glanced in his friend’s eyes. They were teeming with a sentiment of honest belief. The stupid kid really thought the rest of the world functioned like he did. He didn’t understand that most people looked out for themselves first and most vehemently then gave consideration to the rest of the world. Sure, a reasonable percentage m
ight go to the walls for their family, but it didn’t match the raw animal savagery they would use when fighting for their own life. Nick had seen it time after countless time. People looked out for themselves. Well... most people.
“Then why are you surprised that I emphasized it?” Nick said at last. There was no need to try and rupture Vince’s pretty image of the world, not that Nick was certain he could even if he tried. “You know people work that way, so obviously that’s why I would have used it to motivate you.”
“It does make sense, when you put it like that,” Vince replied. He reopened his book, flipping through the pages until he returned to his spot. “You don’t have to worry. I have no intention of letting anyone on this team get kicked out. Myself included.”
“Now that’s what I like to hear,” Nick said, patting his friend on the shoulder and leaving him to his studies.
170.
“Good morning to you all,” Dean Blaine greeted, his strong voice rebounding off the gym’s walls and crashing into the twenty-seven students clustered before him. Gathered around them were their six professors, standing at strategic points as though they were anticipating a sudden stampede toward the exit. It had happened before.
“Today is the final team match of your sophomore year, and it will also serve as the examination for entrance into the junior class. Of those gathered today, at best only twenty will be returning. I encourage you to do your best, for the sake of yourself and those who share a team number with you. After today teams will cease to exist; however, I hope you will all remember this experience, and understand the importance of trusting, depending on, and working with other Supers. It is our greatest advantage over the criminal element, and one we should utilize at every opportunity. Captains, raise your hands!”